In effort to contribute something to the internet community more substantial than my musings on music, people in the environment, and a laundry list of “what I did today”, I have decided to undertake ( perhaps ) a series of writings about living with the technology-minded partner. Today I will write on what I have come to call “twitch mode”: what it is, how it affects relationships, and how you and your partner can handle its presence.

Your guy can’t focus on you, your attention is distracted after a day hard at work, everything feels too slow, after juggling chainsaws all day you feel like you’re can’t be involved at home? This entry may help you.

Note: This was originally drafted in early January 2007, but is only now surfacing here.

(more…)

First things first, there is nothing manlier than the name Cormac McCarthy.

I think if it were that name stitched into a leather belt…

versus

…a Ford F150 with a poker table in the bed around which cowboys were drinking a case of Black Label while arguing over football while getting straightrazor shaved by strippers while puffing on Cuban stogies

…I think the name on the belt may have an edge.

If you have a last name that can bear that manly weight, then I beg you, give us more Cormac-en.

About The Road, it’s an unsentimental and very realistic portrayal about life after a global firestorm. Was it nuclear, asteroid, alien? No one knows, but the earth is now covered with a fine layer of ash which stirs ideograms of desolation into forgotten western landscapes.

A father, who has only bitter memories of a wife that seems to belong to another time, is taking his son down an interstate highway, pushing a shopping cart that carries the only tools that will help them survive.

Unlike Mad Max ( which actually presupposes an astonishingly developed model of civilization ) where Good and Evil face in pitched battle for the right to control the what-comes-next, “The Road” gives no such meaning to the apocalyptic landscape. There is the father, his son, their cart, their plastic tarp and the unending narration of their few miles gained each day.

They’re headed South from North where it’s just gotten too cold. I believe their path to be somewhere in Nevada through Northern California on into the Big Sur region. Along the way there are the inevitable highwaymen ( “road rats” ), rapists, shuffling dead, and agonizing hunger and thirst.

Yet the boy, who never knew anything of the world before, merely trudges on: curious, scared, sick, and gaunt.

The book features no chapter headings and no real sense of time. On this road there is no history of meaning, no future of value, and the present day is a routine in survival and walking.

I was stunned by the bare prose, verging on blank verse poetry.

The layout was also great and thoroughly assisted in the portrayal of the post-apocalyptic, vast, nothingness. With wide margins and ample line spacing the spartan presentation adds to the void and empty prose.

Picture is worth a thousand words:

Invariably I found myself asking what I would do in such a situation. I’ve always been a bit more into eschatology than people should be. When I was still a regular attendant of church services and the preachers were spouting nonsense I usually found myself reading those grim bits of insanity in the last chapter of the Bible. I suppose my Gnostic interests found their root there - in the symbology and transformational hidden content.

Where would one start? It seems that nothing grows? How would one catalyze an agricultural existence? It appears that all the wildlife perished in the great firestorm?

How would you begin? In light of that weight, how would you continue? Would you fight for botulized tins of old food, eat bark and hope not to get murdered in your sleep by roving brigands? What sort of world is that to live, is that truly a life? And what, pray tell, would help you go on?

It’s all very fine, heavy existential work that, as all questions of this sort do, touch on those fine works by Kierkergaard. In all, it was a fine book.

Hello my dear readership.

Yesterday Lauren and I woke up late and had brunch at La Madeline in Westlake Village. It had been years since I had eaten at one of these fine provençal-style French cooking establishments so, upon rising later in the morning, it seemed like the perfect brunch spot.

I had forgotten what a nice establishment it ( they ) are. The wood has that well-sanded French farmhouse feel, the chairs are simple, yet sturdy, and the cuisine prefers grainy breads and farmhouse produce. We found a solid oak table near the multi-paned glass windows and enjoyed our meal in the ænemic winter’s morning light.

I looked up the movie times at the Regal Arbor Cinema at Great Hills Trail ( where we tend to see most of the movies we go see ) and noticed that the amazing Helen Mirren was executing another demonstration of her excellent gift for playing royal, british, women, named Elizabeth. Her presentation of the hard and vulnerable, bossy yet irresolute, royal yet crude in Elizabeth II made me a big fan, and the reviews for The Queen were nothing short of glowing.

In addition to her awards honors, Mirren was recently named the sexiest woman over sixty by The Daily Record.

“The Queen” is an excellent exploration the psychology of the royals and into just what an eventful time the British were having in the summer of 1997. The movie opens with Tony Blair coming in upon a popular, modernizing mandate to throw off the shackles of Tory ideology. The Queen shows the mastery of this traditional role, though she was rather displeased with the result, she knew how to graciously put the young man into his place ( “Winston Churchill once sat in that chair…” and “You’re my Nth prime minister”“, etc.”)

Yet while on holiday at Balmoral ( stunning scenery! ), the events of the summer of 1997 unfolded with the death of the ex-princess, Diana, in Paris. As the public sorrow grows their yearning for a statement from the queen grows. Blair tries to navigate the distance between a modern public raised on the Oprah culture of tears and public pain displays ( which, I must agree, has gotten a bit much, hasn’t it? ) and the more stately British “stiff upper lip” society which requested its queen to show resolve, hardness, and stability.

The miscalculation of this change in attitude is masterfully displayed by directory Stephen Frears who offers an exceedingly even-handed demonstration of the complex rules of protocol to which her position is still bound. With her consort Philip asserting the old guard of protocol, and Blair trying to help keep the royals modern and connected to their public, the queen ultimately adapts to the new reality.

Mirren is one of the best actresses from below her nose to her chin. With her slight pout and crinkled mouth she conveys the spirit if not the actual facial mannerisms of Elizabeth II.

The movie made my audience laugh out loud in several spots because of the decisions that make sense in royal-land. One interesting exchange results around the informing of The Queen that the flowers being lain by mourners are blocking the entrance for the changing of the guard. The Queen, not looking up from her reading material, says “Yes, yes, have them cleared away.” Attempting to save her from her PR gaffe the secretary suggest that it “might be better if the guard were to use the North entrance.” The Queen looks up and, without a hint of the gaffe she’d been saved from says, “Oh yes, yes, quite so.”

There are some great tongue in cheek jokes as well. Waxing humiliated ( yet always queenly ), to Mister Blair that her public had come to ‘hate’ her ( 1 in 4 in favor of abolishing the monarchy ), she remarked to the the-wildly-popular Blair that one day the public would turn on him, faster than he could have expected. Blair seems to absorb this truth, and the queen, with her track record of experience, was absolutely right. The support of the Bush war seems to have run the Lyndon Johnson treatment on his record of stunning public works.

After the movie we headed over to the car wash and cleaned the buggy before heading home. Later that night we watched The Constant Gardner. As always Rachel Weisz was beautiful, Ralph Fiennes was handsome, the corporations were evil, the wretched poor of Africa were wretched and poor, and people of noble intentions were crushed under the wretched love of money and Klashnikovs of a tribally-oriented which keeps Africa a wasteland of misery ruled by kleptocratic strongmen.

I had to give much thumbs up to Weisz for letting herself be filmed without makeup in facial close-ups. After the first ahem intimate afternoon between our protagonists, in softly lit tones against white pillows Fiennes’ character is talking sweetly to her and we see Rachel’s face: ill made up, kinda cross-eyed from the proximity, crooked-teeth, everything. It’s probably the most real scene of intimacy I’ve ever seen presented on film. I applaud her daring as an actress for this.

Further, in the African scenes she’s not made-made up, slightly sweaty, in ugly T-shirts, etc. She’s wearing what you’d wear if you were in malarial heat and had been walking through squalor. And on top of that she lets herself be filmed nude and pregnant ( for she was so with director Darren Aronofsky’s child at the time of filming ). All in all, in our beauty-obsessed film culture she was very daring and very, very real.

The movie, as I alluded to in the summation, is a real downer.

Oh Friday night we visited The Hyde Park Bar and Grill in Westgate not, uh, in Hyde Park. Apparently they’re expanding their empire. It was an excellent meal. Chicken, salad, and excellent fries were shared by we two. It was also surprising when I saw The League’s brother, Steanso, come meandering in with a small horde. I gave him a brief shout of hello and Lauren and I introduced ourselves on our way out. It’s strange seeing people you know in town. All those years in the valley I can’t remember coming across people I knew just by accident. Life there is broken my friends.

I had another idea in my previous post, but didn’t want to muddle up that round of bitching with this point. You’ll need to read the previous post to probably get where I’m coming from in this post.

I said:

Pirates I led us to ask the great spiritual questions of all time, and Pirates II distracted us from finding those answers. I, for one, am angry about it. The fact that both of the movies are being made simultaneously indicates to me that these most important questions will be ignored - and so I’m not expecting much for the second film.

I think that the Pirates franchise ran afoul of their own success much in the way Lucas did with “Star Wars”. You made a good story, on a risk, that was decidedly expensive, and then, to your great surprise you made a metric screwtonne of money. A sufficient amount of money such that you could draw out your story. How to do so?

In my previous post I assert that the obvious questions for the second installment are:

• How has Elizabeth grown more free. The Kierkergaardian or Nietzschean questions follow: in light of this absolute freedom, is she scared by it, is she frightened? How does the isolation of being ahead of her time weigh her down? If pushed into a moment of using her absolute freedom to damn / forgive, can she bear the weight of absolute agency?)
• How has Will grown to accept the moral ambiguity of who his father was? Will he believe his life must follow a deterministic model: who is father is, is who he was? Has will become a true pirate? It’s an opportunity to become a Jack Sparrow, or a British captain - or shall he synthesize something new out of those roles (verily, be an American, in essence)
• Jack’s existence is not to evolve, but to be surprised by the evolution. The cosmic trickster finding an amusing side-effect of his alchemy, he has changed by being the alchemist. Where are these subtle and sly changes (Depp surely has the chops to pull them off, and did in Pirates 1)

In Pirates II directory Gore Verbenski, probably under a lot of pressure by those creative black holes in suits at Disney ( they bought Pixar for a reason, folks ), replaced answering the cosmic questions of life with spectacle. Is there a lesson to be learned from the “Star Wars” sophomore outing?

Yes.

Someone who did the right under similar strains was Irvin Kershner, who masterfully directed “Empire Strikes Back”.

The questions were:

• How will Luke grow with the Force now that he’s been used / has used it. What is the nature of this force?
• Han isn’t entirely out for himself, despite what we thought, what’s his motivation on that?
• Who gets the girl: Will or Jacker, Han or Luke (planned out all three story arcs my ass, George)
• What did Chewy say?

Kershner answers these, or gives the characters room to decant and to mull. We voyage with Luke to Degobah (“I can’t believe it! And that is why you fail.” Goddam, that scene makes me almost weepy sometimes. Oh master Yoda! How I loved you before you were a jumping booger with a lightsaber! ), we learn of Jabba and the bounty, we uh, see Luke make out with his sister, etc. Our love of the character grows as their exploration ( thankfully Luke and Leia’s exploration was capped at second base ) of themselves grows like our exploration of ourselves.

And, much like “Pirates II”, “Empire” was in the middle and ended with a “…To be Continued.” When I finished watching Pirates II, the gentleman next to me asked “Did I just get a f$$CK!NG To be Continued?”. While I was in the single digit years when “Empire” came back and can’t quite remember popular response, the coda ending and the promise of more character development and the promise of a new day gave us great hope for “Empire“‘s successor.

Kershner kept the storyteller’s part of the bargain: He helped us know our friends the heroes better, and they helped us know ourselves better. Through this trust, we were willing to wait until the continuation. Like a payment on the final loan amount due, Kershner delivered.

Verbenski has broken this trust, and now I’m not sure I’ll even care to watch the third installment at all. Incidentally, I think this fate also befell the Wachowski brothers with Matrix 2 and 3 (following the same filming pattern, is this a danger of filming sequals simultaneously?).

I’ll just be another voice joining what appears to be a chorus of voices in saying that the latest installment of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise was a gross disappointment.

I am a complete and total movie snob. It’s pretty hard to get me to go see a film, much less say that I thought it was good. Occasionally (twice) I have been proven mistaken: “Anchorman” and “Pirates: Blah Blah Black Pearl”.

The movie disappoints on multiple levels, but let’s go with my primary concern, the storytelling angle. Isn’t this really the reason we go to the movies, to be amused by a good yarn (as a Neil Stephenson character would say)?

There were some compelling character points established in the first film.

• What will nascent feminist Elizabeth make of herself in these early Georgian times?
• What will Will, slightly more in touch with the ambiguous spectrum of right / wrong, piracy / heroism make of himself?
• What sort of pickles will Depp’s (Captain!) Jack Sparrow get himself into ( and how many people will he let hang / not let hang in his place to get back out? )

Around these questions there were some great scenes:

• The “Black Pearl represents freedom” dialog between Jack and Elizabeth on the rum-runners’ island
• The “you can accept your father was a good man and a pirate” or not dialog between Jack and Will
• By acting as the existential interlocutor in these scenarios, how is the interlocutor changed (multiple scenes)

So we should expect to see some writing advance these characters.

• How has Elizabeth grown more free. The Kierkergaardian or Nietzschean questions follow: in light of this absolute freedom, is she scared by it, is she frightened? How does the isolation of being ahead of her time weigh her down? If pushed into a moment of using her absolute freedom to damn / forgive, can she bear the weight of absolute agency?)
• How has Will grown to accept the moral ambiguity of who his father was? Will he believe his life must follow a deterministic model: who his father is, is who he was? Has will become a true pirate? It’s an opportunity to become a Jack Sparrow, or a British captain - or shall he synthesize something new out of those roles (verily, be an American, in essence)
• Jack’s existence is not to evolve, but to be surprised by the evolution. The cosmic trickster finding an amusing side-effect of his alchemy, he has changed by being the alchemist. Where are these subtle and sly changes (Depp surely has the chops to pull them off, and did in Pirates 1)

At the end of Pirates II, Elizabeth is, uh, still tempestuous and daring ( no growth ), Will is a slightly more sly Boy Scout with French Cuffs ( no real growth ), and Jack is still Jack, but…well…no change.

So all of the great personal development threads were given short shrift. So, what were they supplanted with?

Spectacle

• Here’s Redcoat marines securing a beachhead
• Here’s writs of arrest for Our Heroes
• Here’s the Black Pearl
• Here’s a long side-track about some cannibals
• Here’s Davey Jones ( Bill Nighy doesn’t bring quite the relish that Geoffry Rush brought to Barbossa, but still, may have been my favorite character)
• Here’s Jones’ submersible ship The Flying Dutchman in all its crustacean glory

In fact, there’s pretty much a 3-ring circus (Port Royal, The Dutchman, and the Pearl) that scenes are cut between over and over again, but with no real coherent thread or purpose. In fact the movie is an exhausting 2 hours and 24 minutes of spectacle not storytelling and you can’t count on those slack-asses in Hollywood to be able to discern the difference between those two.

In fact the most entertaining characters are two characters formerly in the employ of the undead Captain Barbossa, Ragetti and Pintel. The former you’ll recall as “the guy who has a wooden eye that was used to slapstick effect.” Much like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” we find them meta-narrating the questions the audience might have.

Question asked: “What’s in Davey Jones’ chest?” Ragetti answered: “The dichotomy of good and evil?”

This made that philosophy degree-holder in me howl.

And its that same degree-holder that was forced, sadly, to think upon Baudrillard who made the point that as the masses begin to see the play of images and spectacle as the basis for all experience, they lose the relationship they had to the narrative of which they as audience and of which the spectacles were once part.

I think that what Baudrillard feared for the world has definitely happened in this movie, spectacles are meant to be part of a narrative, not to be the narrative itself.

Just as a quick point, let me hit you up with some big images.

• A beautiful house burns
• A beautiful girl receives notice her husband is dead
• A girl under threat of rape and robbery kills an errant soldier
• Atlanta burns
• Thousands of soldiers are dead / dying / diseased
• A child dies riding horseback
• A beautiful woman is left by her handsome husband

Spectacles to be sure, but do they have any meaning outside of “The tragic and tepestuous existence of Scarlett O’Hara”? No. This is something that directors and producers of yesteryear understood: spectacle can only be used to serve to pit the characters against big challenges that will help them grow. In each of those moments below, what do we learn about Scarlett?

The Illiad is not Teukros’ arrow flying wide of Hector, the sulking of Akhilles, Odysseyus’ reluctance (good instinct, big O) to leave; it’s the pursuit of the face that launched a thousand ships, the pursuit of Helen!

Ben-Hur is not the chariot scene, it’s that bad-ass who mastered that spectacle’s search for meaning now that all sensory experience is dulled, and his meeting of God the Son.

The Ten Commandments is not the parting of the Red Sea, it’s the bitter cat and mouse established by Yul Brenner and Charleton Heston. It’s the beautiful and solemn counterweight of Brenner placing his dead son in the impotent arms of Anubis.

Outside of narrative, spectacle is simply exhausting ( Baudrillard also tangentially predicts this, a fatigue of spectacle and to the extent that spectacle is existence in the modern world, a sickness of life itself ). Imagine the highlight scenes of great movies all stitched together for 2 hours and 24 minutes and you would, effectively, have the same wearying, dizzying, vertiginous, non-entertainment, soul-sapping, boredom that Pirates II delivers, une grande malaise spirituelle

Atlanta Burns, ET goes home, Jaws swallows Quint, Stay Puft trounces Manhattan, King Kong falls from the Empire State Building, the Red Sea Parts, “Luke, I’m your father”….There’s some n-th clip at which point you’d become so desensitized to swimming in a sea of celluloid spectacle that you’d simply grow bored, and then tired.

But not just tired was I at the end, I was angry; and I’ve discerned the reason.

Above I laid out some key dichotomies for these characters. The question for our heroes is THE question. THE BIG QUESTION of existence itself, and, just like the real world around us, instead of turning off the TV and writing down who we would like to be, or instead of actually talking to our partner and finding the most tender yearning parts of their heart, or instead of writing that novel, or picking up that dusty guitar, or writing that symphony, sonnet, or great program, or sitting quietly in za-zen we let ourselves get distracted by a purely nonsensical spectacle.

This movie as a successor to Pirates I has conveyed the essence of existential disappointment. Pirates II fails just the same way the High School Varsity star’s life fails as he greets people at Wal-Mart, it fails like the ballerina whose eating disorder ruined her career as she thought it would help, it fails like the 10th plastic surgeon’s visit in pursuit of the failed ideal of perfection, it fails with the bitter sadness of a thousand lives led in quiet desperation.

Pirates I led us to ask the great spiritual questions of all time, and Pirates II distracted us from finding those answers. I, for one, am angry about it. The fact that both of the movies are being made simultaneously indicates to me that these most important questions will be ignored - and so I’m not expecting much for the second film.

….save a whole lot of spectacle.

You couldn’t shut up for weeks and weeks about how USC had it in the bag. Just because the school is in the backyard of your corporate parent’s theme park, that’s no excuse to downplay the blood, sweat, and grit of my alma mater, The University of Texas.

I am so proud of those men out there, and I enjoyed paying my Chili’s tab to the USC cheering waiter with my Texas Ex charge card.

I looked into that mass of orange bodies, their hands moving to “The Eyes of Texas” in unison and I remembered the sunny days on the bleachers at Memorial Stadium, the windy ass-cold days in late October (usually the Tech game, who knows why), and how that song was the backdrop to a moment where the students and the players and all the spectators knew that somehow an “us” was being created.

Congratulations, champs!

On The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
On Brokeback Mountain
On reviewers

When researching reviews on the internets, I became aware of a particularly interesting development that I call the pure meta-review.

It seems that it is more hip to discuss movies in purely meta-film reviews, perhaps because no up-and-coming edgy writer or writer of substance or person writing as a day job until their 4 short-story novella is released wants to be so mundane as to address the actual plot (was Kael the last honest movie reviewer?).

Let’s take The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as an example. Now, in the run-up to the release of the film quite a lot of review ado was made from the question of “is this movie / is it not an secret weapon in the Christian front’s attempt to introduce all children to the Crucifixion?”

It’s an interesting question and was heavily considered by Lewis himself and his friends and associates, but many reviewers have explored this question at the expense of answering what is the most critical question a review ought answer: Should I drop the $10.00 to see the thing?

Let’s take the review by Annie Wagner in Seattle’s alterna-mag The Stranger which appeared in the Decmber 8-14 edition.

Wagner’s review can be structured as such:

1. Vacuous introduction to the movie its principal ideas, and characters (that’s fine, most reviews are like this, it’s a weakness of the form
2. LWW is Christian allegory, with points to support this view
3. Did C.S. Lewis maliciously insert Christian allegory, is this dangerous?
4. Tilda Swinton’s character was good as an evil being
5. The kid who plays peter is kinda Aryan-y and the movie is decent entertainment

Well, OK, that’s a review, but it completely failed to do what all reviews boil down to: Is the thing worth seeing? Wagner’s sole commentary, a rather throw-away line at the end of the review is that it’s “…decent entertainment - epic and scary and icily pretty. If only it were safe enough to send your freethinking children to.” In much of the media coverage on this movie the question of the allegory has overtaken the question of whether or not you should go to see it.

Before the wrong impression be given, I’m certainly not opposed to the lengthy consideration of a movie in terms of its impact on visual arts / society / the reviewer / concepts of the soul / etc. but a review, at heart should boil down to familiarization, high- or lo-lights, and should you go see it?

I wondered if this was Wagner’s general modus operandi or was she merely joining the hordes of other reviewers that had taken this writing tack?

Her review of Brokeback Mountain (cheekily titled Bareback Mountain ( Tee-hee, I used “cheekily” - I’m clever too! ) ) follows the same. The question is: Should I see it never surfaces in the explanation of how the movie is really about 2 gay cowboys (I side with Wagner here, the producers, hedging their bets have tried to spin the story that the movie is a hetero- / homo- transcending exploration, which is bunk). Wagner spends 5 of 6 paragraphs explaining the relative gay-itude of the film and whether it was considered “gay” in the media. In the 1 paragraph that actually addresses the movie, nothing is told to me that I couldn’t have derived from the preview. I quote her paragraph in full here:

Brokeback Mountain is a film about gay cowboys - that is what it’s about - played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. The first half is a gorgeous love story in which words are kept to a minimum and the arid, exhilarating images of high-altitude scenery and exalted flirtation leave you as breathless as the heroes. When the famous pup-tent consummation (faintly damned as “tasteful”) finally occurs, their hunger for each other’s bodies is fierce and convincing. In the film’s devastating second half, the cowboys come down from the mountain, marry women, and inflict the violence of their disinterest on their families.

Anything that really tells me about the movie qua movie is stored in that single paragraph. This review essentially functions as a review of “Should you join in the dialectic on the relative signifiers of gay identity as promulgated by prominent film reviews, reviewers, and the film Brokeback Mountain.” This review, much like it’s predecessor, reads like the synopsis a TA writes for the 2006 lit-crit vade mecum.

Nevertheless, both of these movies are popularly being discussed in terms of their “place in society”, so I’m willing to cut Wagner a break, but her latest review on “Memoirs of a Geisha” is again a meta-discussion about the film, with only the most cursory treatment of: “Should I fork out the cash to see it?”

The formula is followed again:

1. Cursory and bland paragraph about the story and the characters
2. The movie is produced by Americans and acted by Chinese and this is inauthentic. [ Incidentally, Sergio Leone’s Western firms were produced by Italians and acted by a motley of Europeans - but they hit the essence of The Western on the head, surely the genus of the film doesn’t damn it, does it? ]
3. The movie, such that anything can be said for it is a rushed, incoherent, and hurried mess (actually, very similar to the last paragraph - I’ll include it here)

The okiya where the geisha live is, we learn, a mysterious place that alternates between ritual and claws-out catfights. When Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang in cornflower blue contacts) is plucked from obscurity, she attracts both men’s desire and the vicious jealousy of Hatsumomo (Gong Li), an older geisha with a penchant for off-hours hanky panky. Their rivalry shamelessly pits virgin against vamp, and its campy excess provides the film’s few pleasures (“I… will… DESTROY YOU!” has got to be one of this year’s most memorable lines). The rest of the film is a confused mess—part chick flick drowning in silk brocade, part crass appeal to male voyeurism, and all woefully insubstantial.

But should we see it? Is there any redeeming quality to it? Is there nothing worth seeing in it? Should I wait for DVD?

I think the last review must be the effects of editors short-timing it before their holiday days off.

Nevertheless my larger question stands: is it impossible to find a reviewer who, well, reviews? Not the erudite celebrating their erudition?

I’ll note, I’m not a professional reviewer, and I’m not a professional writer. I’m just another guy out there with a blog that I suspect only 5 people read - but when one’s paid function is to be a reviewer of entertainment, is it too much to expect that we’ll actually get a review of the movie? From The Stranger’s biographical blurb I know that Wagner is highly learned it literary criticism. Could it be that that academic discipline - so ravaged by fashions since the east coast went deconstructionist in the late 80’s - has dulled its graduates-turned-film-reviewers from the Romantic sturm und drang of what a film is: a visual drug designed to awake the intellect, emotions, and passions in humans? Even her comment on whether or not the gay sex in Brokeback Mountain was hot seemed, well, cursory and a bit cold. We readers are, evidently, to boil down a complex story boils down to hot gay sex?

And I’m certainly aware that the hippest are just pointing to Wagner’s use of “hot gay sex” as a shibboleth wherewith to winnow out people that can’t handle a gay movie being in society. That sentence really served no function but to make sure that would not be an accusation. Auto-deconstruction complete.

Furthermore I don’t know Wagner, I’m sure she’s a perfectly nice person, and I’m sure her editor is that as well, and they are certainly not the only people that have this penchant for the over-meta movie review, but perhaps they can truly revolt against being just “another voice in meta-review reviews” by actually letting us know whether or not we should see the thing?

Update

I sent the following e-mail to Ms. Wagener to see her comment.

Ms. Wagner,

As an occasional reader of The Stranger, I enjoy the movie reviews. Nevertheless in the last three reviews I don’t get the feeling that you’re giving us movie reviews, but rather meta-reviews. I believe that if you take my concern objectively and ask yourself “is this a review or a meta-analysis” you will agree with me that they all three fall into the latter category.

Now certainly a meta-review is a valuable endeavor, I like to hear about the costume production for a period piece, explore the artful use of lighting in “Collateral” or consider the social implications of a “gay” movie being in the mainstream.

Yet when looking at a recently-appeared movie review I want to know the plot, a bit of the highlights, and - most importantly - know whether to see it or stay at home.

The two should not be interwoven, or, if done so, a very specific balance must be sought. This preserved bifurcation is generally preserved in the New York Times (for example) by having insight and analysis articles separate from review articles. The function of an analysis explores a detail or background. On the other hand, a review gives the simple binary of go or stay at home.

Your Narnia review is more ” Apologists versus The movie sucks” (which it does). Brokeback is more about spinning the gay factor versus what’s covered in the movie. Geisha impugns the ability of an foreigners to make a film about Japan (and if so, what, pray tell, does that mean for Sergio Leone’s cowboy movies?). These are interesting views (the second being the most tenable), but they aren’t reviews, they’re reviews of the cultural influences underpinning the movie’s production. Doubtless such keen insight was something cultivated in your pursuit of your master’s education — but for a simple joe who’s looking to know whether i should drop ten bucks for door A or door B these “reviews” (i say “”s not no mock, but to show the misappellation of “review” to these meta-analyses) are empty.

If it is your and your editors’ intention for you to write meta-narratives, why not title them such? If “review” is beneath your dignity and aptitude, why not seize another label? If you are writing reviews (and lord knows Pauline Kael wrote great reviews), perhaps more consideration to the film am sich will help your readers make informed decisions at the box office.

Lastly, I certainly bear you, personally, no ill-will, but am concerned that every “reviewer” now feels compelled to write reviews as a lit-crit Ph.D. It is for this reason I have written the article at: http://www.nanostalgia.com/archives/2005/12/movie_reviewers.php which cites your reviews. Should you like to comment there, in response, you certainly have all the space you desire. I feel it would be unfair to publicly state these ideas without giving you notice and opportunity to explain to the larger public motivations and pressures of your position.

Regards and happy holidays,

Steven

I finished Snow Crash a while back and was very pleased with the book. One aspect I found lacking was a discussion of the Asherah virus’ ( a key plot focus ) history, operation, place within the larger evolutionary scheme of human development.

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p> I have made an attempt to qualify and describe the history and behavior of Asherah, ens, nam-shub, and the metavirus. If you’re a fan of Snow Crash, or if you’d like to reflect on some extranarrative ideas ancillary to the work, I invite you to read more at

Here

Feel free to use the comments section on this entry as a place to put in feedback. I may close it down at some point in the future to prevent comment spam (curse you!), but for the moment i’ll leave this one open.

The Bobcat works in an office where all dey he is bombarded by FoxNews’ hysterical right-wing lunacy. Cracking, he opined:

The Social Bobcat: i’m getting sick of seeing this alarmist news all day long
Steven: FoxNews: scaring you shitless so you stay at home, watching us
The Social Bobcat: Bird Flu! Are Stocks Next Target? How Will Inflation Affect The Cost of Your Ride on Charon’s Boat to Hades?