Ketchup

Zeitoun, Dave Eggers (2009). Eggers tells the story of a remarkable family in a very easy-going and simple voice.

Animal Kingdom, David Michôd (2010). Stark, crisp, finally melodramatic.

Restrepo, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington (2010). They should show this as a curtain-raiser before every war movie. War isn't hell, or glory, or dramatic; it's tedious, confusing, and random.

The Town, Ben Affleck (2010). I've never much cared for Affleck, but this is twice now that he's turned in some really fine work as a director.

Howl, Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman (2010). Wow, totally unwatchable! I made it up to the part where they're on drugs and everything turns into an undersea cartoon or something.

Exit Through the Gift Shop, Banksy (2010). Sly and fun.

Friday Night Lights (2006-). Has there ever been a more emotionally manipulative show? This thing constantly makes me cry, even though there are precious few characters I really have any sympathy with. It's weird.

The Larry Sanders Show (1992-1998). I got weirdly hooked on this for a while there. Shandling is on the one hand hard to watch and on the other I can't turn away.

Four Lions, Chris Morris (2010). This seemed like a bad idea. I had to check. It was.

The Next Three Days, Paul Haggis (2010). This was tight and gripping. Haggis knows what he's doing.

The American, Anton Corbjin (2010). Lifeless.

The Social Network, David Fincher (2010). Eh.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick (1964). Every other year or so.

Marwencol, Jeff Malmberg (2010). Very nicely done.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct, Jean-Francois Richet (2008).

Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, Jean-Francois Richet (2008).

The French are so easily seduced by even the most caricatured image of the outlaw. Richet thinks he's showing us Mesrine's pathos but all that really comes across is how much he worships the man. Still, this is super entertaining and great to look at.

The Way Back, Peter Weir (2010). Almost absurdly epic. Absolutely worth the afternoon.

Colonel Chabert, Honore de Balzac (1832). Superb.

Salt, Phillip Noyce (2010). I can't remember anything about this now.

Cold Souls, Sophie Barthes (2009). Anything with Paul Giamatti is worth a look, in this case only barely.

The Tourist, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (2010). 

The Green Hornet, Michel Gondry (2011).

Two incoherent and atrocious payday films from relatively interesting directors. It's almost like they're trying to be as contemptuous of you for watching this dreck as they can be.

Fair Game, Doug Liman (2010). This is the dramatization of the Plame affair and one of the best films I've seen about the Bush administration's post-9/11 rush to judgment. Naomi Watts and Sean Penn are both terrific. Highly recommended. 

Even the Rain, Icíar Bollaín (2010). Nice conceit, nice try, but it turns out a muddle.

Etc. etc. etc.

Point Blank, John Boorman (1967)

This is a very strange movie which absolutely could not be made today, a French New Wave film made by an Englishman in California. Its narrative head games, its druggy swings from hysteria to Weltschmerz, its boredom with both sex and violence, and above all its conviction that no amount of revolutionary individualism can put a dent in the fortress of capitalist hegemony all work together to provide a devastating critique of the sixties even as "the sixties" was in the deepest throes of its self-regard. Watching this, you'd guess it had been made in 1974, not 1967. It rivals Didion's White Album in its prescience. There are lots of moments you might use to mark the end of the dream of the sixties: Kent State, My Lai, the assassinations of King and Kennedy in 1968, etc. Add to the list the moment in Point Blank when the girl at the psychedelic dance club goes around behind the screen and discovers the bad guy Lee Marvin's beaten to a pulp. He's buried under a pile of film! And the girl's screams of horror harmonize with the soul singer's screams of ecstacy.

La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard (1967)

So very tiresome to experience, yet you're so glad it exists. And it looks so beautiful. I'd be happy to have almost any frame of this film hanging framed on my wall.

Le Doulos, Jean-Pierre Melville (1962)

Bernard Tavernier says Melville wanted more than anything to be the French William Wyler, which makes a great deal of sense, but of course that could never happen, because Melville, however much he admired and even imitated the great bread and butter Hollywood directors like Wyler, had a talon d'Achille: he was the Frenchest Frenchman ever. That's what makes these gangster pictures of his so weird. All the Hollywood noir tropes are in place--dive bars, brassy molls, trench coats, double crosses, stool pigeons, big cars, cigarettes--but the-- what, soul? core? mien? there's probably a French word for it--of the characters is completely different than that of the characters in an American noir. They all come across as incredibly vulnerable, sensitive artistes playing the roles of tough guys. I mean really, Belmondo? Robert Mitchum could eat him in one bite. (Remember too that this is made in 1962, by which time noir was already being parodied and deconstructed in Hollywood.) Anyway, I'm not complaining that this is a failed noir, since I don't think it was intended to be a noir at all. It's a kind of pseudo-nouvelle vague take on noir, maybe. A very curious picture.

Charade, Stanley Donen (1963)

Nice chemistry, some charming scenes, fun travelogue of Paris, but it's no Roman Holiday. It's Grant's third to last movie, and he seems a little tired.

Army of Shadows, Jean-Pierre Melville (1969)

Melville's chilly formalism has turned me off in the past, but it works quite brilliantly in this account of a French resistance cell's wartime activities. There are scenes of great drama, action, daring, cunning, etc., but they're all conveyed with stony austerity, so the effect isn't one of excitement but of grim duty and honor. I should have thought of this before, but Melville's style recalls not so much that of the American noir directors with whom he's said to have been obsessed, but rather the Japanese pictorialists like Ozu or Mizoguchi, who like Melville are always conscious of the relationships between every figure in the frame.

A particularly tragic, and I imagine sadly accurate aspect of the story is how focused the resistance fighters must need be on the potential for one of their own to betray them. An early scene where a miserable, terrified turncoat must be executed speaks elegantly to the deadly and ironic pathos of the resistance fighter who finds himself having to harm one of his own in order to strike at his enemy.

Analog Africa

These people have released five CDs, of which I own the most recent four, each of which is absolutely exquisite. You have never heard such sublimely funky grooves in your life. The Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou makes James Brown sound like Lawrence Welk.

The first CD is labeled "#3," because Analog Africa's first two releases came in the form of mp3 mixes. Both are available for free download on their blog, and also through the Paris DJs podcast.

Paris DJs is where I discovered Analog Africa, and it is itself an incredible resource. Their weekly free podcast features all sorts of never-made-it-off-vinyl-onto-disc deliciousness from all over the world. There are nearly 200 mixes to download, and they're all free!

Here's a direct link to the second Analog Africa mix: http://analogafrica.cybsys.net/mp3/AnalogAfricaSelectionVol.2.mp3

The Cincinnati Kid, Norman Jewison (1965)

Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Tuesday Weld, Rip Torn, Karl Malden, Cab Calloway, and Ann-Margret. Playing poker. In New Orleans. Music by Lalo Schifrin. Title song sung by Ray Charles. And cock fighting! What more could you possibly want from a movie! Well, OK, less cockfighting.

Machine Gun McCain, Giuliano Montaldo (1969)

A strange, stylish, maudit mob picture from the assistant director on Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers. (That's saying something, by the way, since secondary scenes in that movie are perhaps the most brilliant ones.) The picture feels like it could be a Cassavetes; things move either in brisk shorthand or in emotional wrenched and wretched slow burns. Incredible cast includes Cassavetes, Britt Ekland, Gena Rowlands, and Peter Falk; how that happened I have no idea. Another "but for the grace of TCM" reason to have cable.

Topaz, Alfred Hitchcock (1969)

I've avoided this for years because everyone says it's awful but finally you gotta pay respect to the fat man so that I did and it's awful. Hitch at his worst both cinematically and politically.

The Bad Sleep Well, Akira Kurosawa (1960)

Wow! How have I never seen this? An epic picture, nonchalantly loitering on the filmography between The Hidden Fortress (1958) and Yoyimbo (1961). The plot's far too convoluted to recount at this hour, but the picture has everything you could ask for: social commentary (on Japan's pervasive culture of graft), a near-Shakespearean web of family dramas and mistaken identities, and countless passages exemplifying the Kurosawa's superb cinematographical skills. The man's compositions are as exquisite as Giotto's; I don't think anyone frames shots as well as he does, except maybe Renoir.

Ketchup

All blogging energy still going to Harriet at the Poetry Foundation, but here's what's up on the home front.

Drunken Angel, Akira Kurosowa (1948). Beautifully shot but plodding story of an alcoholic doctor (not unlike Graham Greene's whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory) determined to treat a self-destructive mobster with TB in postwar Tokyo. A kind of allegory of Japan trying to muck out its stalls. There's a bubbling miasma right in the middle of the neighborhood just to remind us of where and when we are.

I Live in Fear, Akira Kurosowa (1955). Patriarch of a large family in the smelting business becomes so obsessed with his fear of nuclear weapons he insists on selling everything and moving to Brazil. The family doesn't want to go, also doesn't want to disrespect papa. A lot of long anguished silences ensue. Still, it got to me; Mifune's absolutely terrific as the terrified and terrifying protagonist.

The Making of a Chef, Mark Ruhlman (1999). Ruhlman goes to the CIA and writes about what it takes to make it. Lively and engaged journalism, great fun if you're the kind of person who enjoys debates over how dark a roux should be used in the making of brown sauce, which I am.

House of Games, David Mamet (1987). I've probably seen this ten times and it's still really. really. good. It seemed kind of antique when it first came out, and has aged beautifully. The big red convertible seemed Twin Peaksish before there even was a Twin Peaks.

The Spies of Warsaw, Alan Furst (2008). One of my many guilty pleasures. Read more than half of this on a day of LGA delays while listening to Radian on the iPod. Was almost happy!

The Dark Side, Jane Mayer (2008). Probably the most significant and comprehensive account of Richard Cheney's efforts to secure unlimited and incontrovertible power for the executive branch, and the inevitable results. The accounts of Jack Goldsmith, Dexter Filkins, Seymour Hersh, Phillipe Sands, and others are certainly also worth reading, but this one is the one to read if you're only going to read one, in my opinion.

Beacons of Ancestorship, Tortoise (2009). Yuck! Way too noisy. Sounds like high school students covering Can songs. Had to listen to Millions Now Living ten times before I was able to forgive the lads for this betrayal of my love.

Dying City, Christopher Shinn (2008). This rather lightweight play, which uses the device of identical twins to investigate certain dualities to be found in human nature, was, amazingly, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Weak.

A lot of drama in current rotation. Bert Brecht (esp. Galileo). Georg Büchner (I hesitate to mention this name, since I am loving this book so much I don't even want anyone else to know about it. Do you ever get that way about a book? It's a weird feeling.) Mark Ravenhill (wildly overrated). Suzan-Lori Parks (fantastic, esp. Venus, but all of it is terrific). Genet, Lorca, Peter Weiss. On deck: Edna Walsh, von Kleist, Wolfgang Borchert.

TV worth watching: Smith. You can only watch this if you have DirecTV, and there are only seven episodes. CBS produced and then killed it in 2006-2007. It's very good; Ray Liotta's character has a lot in common with DeNiro's in Mann's Heat.

TV which might be worth watching; I can't really tell: Weeds. I find this show very disconcerting, but completely addictive. It's so weird. What does it even mean? Cheech & Chong + Three's Company + Good Fellas. Or something like that. I suspect if I lived in California, it would just seem like a reality show. As it is, I'm bewildered but fascinated.

La jetée, Chris Marker (1962)

Either I was insufferably pretentious as an undergraduate or I'm now the ultimate bourgeois philistine, because this sure did ensorcel me then, and it sure did bore me just now.

Mutiny on the Bounty, Lewis Milestone (1962)

Recent researches have roused my curiosity concerning situations where people are required by conscience to make decisions which are certain to result in personal difficulty. Unfortunately, this movie turns out to be not so much about that as it is about Marlon Brando smooching Tahitian girls.

Ice Station Zebra, John Sturges (1968)

Every time I think I've seen every submarine movie ever, I find another. I have a thing for sub movies, for reasons I'd prefer not to analyze. Sub movies fall into three broad categories: World War II (Das Boot, The Enemy Below), Cold War (K19: The Widowmaker, The Hunt for Red October), and Adventure/Other (20000 Leagues Under the Sea, Fantastic Voyage).

There are subcategories. I will spare you.

This is a pretty good Cold War sub movie, by a very good director, John Sturges, who made The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven, thus assuring himself a place on the Parnassus for movie directors. (Whatever that may be. San Gorgonio? That would be my nomination, anyway.)

Cold War sub movies have a problem: You can't rely on shooting and explosions for the excitement, as you can in WWII sub movies, because once Russians and Americans start shooting at each other, it was believed not so long ago, the whole world would explode, prematurely ending the movie. So instead you have to rely on psychology (anxiety, guilt, suspicion, and monomania in particular), accidents, radiation, and technology fetishism. Ice Station Zebra has it all. The movie's a little slow and not particularly inventive, and Ernest Borgnine is annoying (do you know that guy's over ninety and still working? enough!), but there are some nice moments.

Ketchup

Getting ready to teach course on terrorism and torture in June. Cheery summer reading/viewing:

Hany Abu-Hassad, Paradise Now
Albert Camus, The Just Assassins
J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
Don DeLillo, Falling Man
Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden
Paul Haggis, In the Valley of Elah
Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony
Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Here's hoping my students have strong stomachs.

Thunderbirds Are GO, David Lane (1966)

Amazing! I had no idea! Thank you Turner Classic Movies! Cold war paranoia in marionette form! Plus really weird sexual humiliation undertones! Plus outer space nightclub dream sequence! And no one ever stands up or walks! If people need to go somewhere, like even just across the room, their chairs just sort of slide over there! What's particularly giggle-inducing is how seriously all the characters take themselves. As if they are trying to compensate for the fact that, as marionettes, they are inherently ridiculous. F.A.B.!

Hell Is For Heroes, Don Siegel (1962)

Peckinpahesque in its steely indifference to violence (though not in its stick-simple cinematography). Featuring Steve McQueen on the brink of blossom, plus Bobby Darin, James Coburn, and -- this is kind of weird -- Bob Newhart, essentially playing Bob Newhart. He even does a couple of his telephone call shticks.

Pop Music is Boring; Long Live Pop Music

All the year-end music wrap-ups seem to be suggesting that Vampire Weekend, Santogold, Adele, TV on the Radio, Coldplay, Duffy, Goldfrapp, Fleet Foxes, Kanye West, The Kills, The Ting Tings, M83, and Lil Wayne are all geniuses. I just spent some time sampling these wares on iTunes and I find it all incredibly dull because -- and here's my combination confession and complaint -- it's all so incredibly derivative. Why would I buy Fleet Foxes when I already have Buffalo Springfield, Duffy w.i.a.h. Dusty Springfield, the Ting Tings w.i.a.h. Ladytron and the Human League and Heaven 17 and a zillion other eurotrash two-hit wonders, Kanye West w.i.a.h. Gang Starr, The Kills w.i.a.h. Opal and Suicide . . . .

That's the complaint part, but here's the confession: When I was freaking out about the Smashing Pumpkins in 1991, there must have been some smug 40-year old bastard writing on his blog (which were called "alternative newspapers" back then) about how he didn't see any reason to buy Gish when his Houses of the Holy LP still played just fine.

So viva la change. I guess I'm nearing pop music tenure. I even bought the new Portishead this year, only to be irritated that it wasn't the old Portishead. Which way to that grove where the elephants lie down to die.

Ketchup

Highlights of recently consumed cultural products include

Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag (2004). Nothing particularly surprising here, but the utter sanity of the essay is a real tonic. Honest and deeply moral exploration of contemporary culture's relationship to images of pain, war, torture, and so forth. The most compelling moment, to me, is the one where Sontag demolishes the conventional wisdom that our steady diet of such images must inevitably inure us to them. She won't let us off the hook that easily. If we're going to look, she demands that we also see.

As Is, William M. Hoffman (1985). Excellent play; anyone who calls it sentimental is too cool for their own good.

Standard Operating Procedure, Philip Gourevitch (2008). Quiet, sane, systematic account of the experiences of the notorious Abu Ghraib soldiers. Gourevitch is painstakingly objective, except for a few sections where he indulges in some Sontag-like theorizing about the nature of the documentary image, and a few others where he can't help but call attention to some of the scandal's more vertigo-inducing conundrums. Among the most pointed: Sabrina Harman went to prison for photographing the corpse of Mandel al-Jamadi, but the CIA interrogator Mark Swanner, in whose custody al-Jamadi died, has never been accused of a crime.

Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman (1991). Inspiring walk along the high wire of literature above the abyss of propaganda.

The Theater and Its Double, Antonin Artaud (1938). Yum.

Baghdad ER, Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill (2006).

Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, Jon Alpert and Ellen Goosenberg Kent (2007). Some very moving stories from veterans about deadly days they lived through. Having Tony Soprano interview and offer encouragement is a little schmaltzy, though.

Complete Plays, Sarah Kane (2001). Terrifying and brilliant playwright. I don't know why I'd never heard of her. It's somehow sad when your Amazon recommendations get to know you this well.

Mad Men, Matthew Weiner (2008). This show is so sad. I love it.

Planet of the Apes, Franklin J. Schaffner (1968). Boring.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu (2007). Sorry, hate to be a spoilsport, but this is a really turgid, sloppily directed, and indifferently acted movie, and I can't help but think that all the international acclaim for it is actually somehow condescending and patronizing, like, "Oh, isn't that sweet, a Romanian who thinks he can make a movie." The film's bleakness has some power, and it's certainly a fine documentation of the insane Ceausescu regime, but it's not great cinema.

About 6000 hours of the 2008 Summer Olympics. I heart Guo Jingjing.