Prince of the City, Sidney Lumet (1981)

Lumet is a hero, of course, if (at 167 minutes) a little insistent. What we have here is a set of tropes that have become extremely familiar: the bad cop decides to inform on the other bad cops, but doesn't really become good, quite. Good performances all around, but nothing extraordinary.

Ketchup

These endless summer days I ingest culture faster than I can process it. In addition to a lot of material about PTSD, which I'm reading for a writing project, this is what's been passing in front of my eyeballs. 

White Material, Claire Denis (2009). Denis goes back to Africa. Isabelle Hupert makes me nervous. The politics here are a mess, totally confused. A good example of how sloppy thinking likes to masquerade as ambiguity. But it's Claire Denis, so of course we must still love it.

Somewhere, Sofia Coppola (2010). Just letting the camera keep running on a lifeless scene doesn't make it Cassavetes. This is a deeply boring movie.

Another Year, Mike Leigh (2010). Another heartbreaker from Mike Leigh. It's not really a story so much as it is a kind of temporal vitrine, in which are displayed a half-dozen fully-realized characters, interacting with each other and trying to be alive.

True Grit, Joel and Ethan Coen (2010). Lacks the Coen whimsy of Fargo, etc. and also the Coen fatedness of No Country for Old Men. Fine, but neither here nor there.

F for Fake, Orson Welles (1973). Sloppy, self-indulgent, self-important, gimmicky, dull. And that's coming from someone who's genuinely interested in and who has great patience for this theme. Poor old fucker.

American Experience: Stonewall Uprising, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner (2010). Nice doc. Lots of fascinating footage of Village life in the 60's.

The Fighter, David O. Russell (2010). Stolid family drama, worth seeing. Has the kind of genuineness and moral seriousness of purpose you rarely see at the multiplex these days. It's about a hundred times less interesting than, say, Raging Bull, but I think contemporary audiences are so incredibly grateful when they're not pandered to, they wind up thinking something like this is art for the ages.

Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Jonathan Shay (1994). Perfect idea, poorly executed with slack, repetitive prose and a lot of unnecessary self-dealing.

Speed the Plow, David Mamet (1988). Dialogue perfection. Perfect dramatic efficiency.

Still Life: A Documentary, Emily Mann (1982). Really lively, allusive, slippery drama about the collision of eros and thanatos in the post-war life of a Vietnam veteran.

Lethal Warriors, David Philipps (2010). Philipps didn't ask for this job; he was a sports writer in Colorado Springs when the "Band of Brothers" started coming back from Iraq and killing each other and others. Philipps does an admirable job of stepping up and becoming a real reporter, covering some of the saddest stories of the war. Good, thorough, clear reporting. See also the Frontline episode, The Wounded Platoon.

Louie, Louis C.K. (2010-). Makes Seinfeld look like Happy Days.

The Passenger, Michelangelo Antonioni (1975). Oh, it's horribly pretentious and aimless and even sometimes irresponsible, but it's also of course gorgeous and dizzying poetry. I had to go get my camera to take pictures of it. Then I had to spend an hour planning a trip to Andalusia. 

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (1924). Been clambering up this Alp since May. Certainly skimmed some of the later Settembrini discourses, but I genuinely enjoyed almost all of these 700 pages. Took extensive notes elsewhere. This is utterly worth your time. Read it while you're young. What's it about? It's about a young man who decides -- the verb is too strong -- to absent himself from history.

Port of Shadows, Marcel Carné (1938). Oh, France. Merci pour Michèle Morgan.

The Killing Fields, Roland Joffé (1984)

Wrapping up "journalist as hero/antihero" week. Joffé's achievement here is easy to underestimate; there are so many ways this could have turned into a disaster, and he avoids them all. The journalist is a hero, and we get that, but he's also a dangerously narcissistic asshole, and we get that too. His colleague Dith Pran is also a complex character, both ambitious and naive, and his character here is also fully three-dimensional. On top of all that, we get here a very detailed and comprehensive history lesson without ever feeling like we're in a classroom -- also a remarkable achievement. Real questions about journalistic ethics, taken seriously, plus a lively and accurate dramatization of one of the 20th century's most despicable crimes. There are worse ways to spend a couple hours.

Salvador, Oliver Stone (1986)

What an annoying movie. I'm glad Stone wanted to draw attention to the crimes committed by the (American-enabled) Salvadoran right wing death squads, but the James Woods character is so irritating, and Stone is so concerned with his redemption or lack thereof, that the historical quickly sinks beneath the mire of the personal. A pity.

Ketchup

The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro (1995). Limpid prose kept me reading all 9000 pages, but there's not much there there.

Youth in Revolt, Miguel Arteta (2009).
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Edgar Wright (2010).
Cleverish enough, I guess. I like this Michael Cera fine, but why can't the protagonist in these things ever be a girl?

Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham (2005). Cunningham's a lovely writer sentence by sentence. The concept seemed too high-concept for me at first, but I grew into it and wound up enjoying this a great deal.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg (2010). One of the last great showbiz workaholics.

The Decalogue, Krzysztof Kieślowski (1988). If you've seen it, you know. If you haven't, you should.

Style Wars, Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant (1983). Terrific, fascinating documentary about the rise of graffiti and hip hop culture. Amazing to see NYC in the early 80's and realize how much time has gone by. Provided me with at least one long-sought source for a sample I'd wondered about: "You only specialize in one thing, you can't call yourself the all-out king."

Foul Play, Colin Higgins (1978). Second only to Seems Like Old Times on my list of Hawn/Chase childhood favorites. One of those 70's flicks that's simultaneously total fluff and highly clever.

The Informers, Juan Gabriel Vasquez (2004). There was no reason not to like this, but for some reason I couldn't engage with it.

Spies of the Balkans, Alan Furst (2010)
The Arms Maker of Berlin, Dan Fesperman (2009)
WWII espionage fiction: My annual holiday indulgence. A return to form for Furst, who seemed to me to be phoning it in the last few times. I blame Fesperman for not being Furst, but that's of course unfair.

The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko (2010). This isn't perfect, but it's very good, and it gives me a lot of hope. A reasonably serious and insightful story about a family of two moms and two kids going through a crisis of confidence, written and directed by an out Lesbian. Some might say that the achievement of the movie is that it doesn't even matter that the parents are gay, that it's just a story about a family crisis. That's only about half true. The parents' Lesbianism is integral to the story, but it doesn't determine the story. To me, this seems like a tremendous achievement; the piece neither claims special status for the couple nor asserts that this couple is just like any other. The view of human sexuality on offer here is also refreshing. It ain't Foucault, but it's way more sophisticated than the permanent adolescence Hollywood usually peddles in the bedroom.

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

Missing, Costa Gavras (1982)

Costa Gavras is my hero. I yammer all the time about the ethics, pitfalls, complexities, etc. of addressing real injustice through imaginative art; this guy just steps up and does it. He makes me feel ashamed for my mincing, but he also inspires me.

This one is probably his second-best, after Z. The relationship between Spacek and Lemmon begins in deepest antipathy and slowly, subtly, turns into the strongest love imaginable; they each perform beautifully.

Meanwhile, the political analysis underway is both exacting and fully accessible, which seems to me miraculous.

The film makes me nostalgic for the days when the American government found it necessary to lie to its citizens. Now they just say, "Well of course we're torturing people, holding people in detention without charge, and supporting corrupt and inhuman dictators. What the heck did you think?"

Out of This World, Graham Swift (1988)

The family at the center of the novel is in the arms manufacturing business. The patriarch lost an arm in the Great War; his prodigal son renounces the family business and becomes a war photographer and marries a war refugee from Greece while he's covering the Nuremberg trials. This scenario gives Swift license to ruminate on war, modernity, America, Europe, England, photography in particular, and representation in general. Not a major book, but shrewd and sound. Featuring a timely and cutting analysis of the near-parodic nature of the Falklands War.

Ketchup

Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman (2008). Former IDF soldier sets about unrepressing his repressed memories of the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Waking Life plus Johnny Got His Gun, in Lebanon. Interesting to look at. I don't get why making it a cartoon is a good idea.

Miller's Crossing, Joel Coen (1990). I didn't like this bitter little movie the first time or the second.

Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator's Dark Journey through Iraq, Tony Lagouranis (2007). Useful. Complicated. Many of the ways in which this book is interesting are likely not ones of which the author himself is aware. Lagouranis believes he's written the story of his coming to consciousness and conscience during his time as an interrogator in Iraq. The book is that, but it's also -- I don't want to overstate this, because I suspect Lagouranis is an ethical and well-intentioned person, but it's true nonetheless -- an example of the very self-exculpatory style which Lagouranis deplores in his commanding officers. More accurate and more precise to say: Lagouranis's oscillations between "there's no excuse for what I've done" and "here's my excuse for what I've done" are themselves an important part of the story of the systemic failures of the Bush administration's strategy and tactics in the GWAT.

The Last Days of Haute Cuisine, Patric Kuh (2001). Poorly written but fascinating account of the rises and falls of the French ethos, California cuisine, and corporatism in the American restaurant business.

Life of Galileo, Bertolt Brecht (1947), directed by Joseph Losey for the American Film Theatre, (1974). Brilliant production starring the great Topol of Fiddler on the Roof fame. Really enjoyable and provocative.

I haven't yet seen In the Loop, or The Thick of It, upon which In the Loop is based, but I'm having a hard time either of them will surpass Harold Pinter's Party Time. I just watched a 1992 production of the play as filmed by Pinter himself. (The DVD is from 2004, and was produced by "Films for the Humanities & Sciences.) What an absolutely brilliant piece of writing. The lurches and swerves from naked aggression to high society chitchat to lyric flights of symbolic imagination to stammered disconnections of sign and signifier literally make me gasp. Just a short play -- 35 minutes -- but I'd set it next to any of Pinter's best, or anyone else's.

Septem8er Tapes, Christian Johnston (2004). Weird, irresponsible, self-satisfied, atrociously written mockumentary "about" a filmmaker who goes to Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 to "get to the bottom" of the GWAT. Deeply strange. I not only don't get the point of it, I don't even get what the filmmakers might imagine the point might be.

The Situation, Philip Haas (2006). Well intentioned ham-fisted Americans-are-bad message movie about an improbably beautiful and beatific female journalist in Iraq.

I could, but won't, and probably shouldn't, write a book about representations of the GWAT in film.

Humana Festival 2008: The Complete Plays. Why am I always so surprised that so much contemporary drama is so trite and boring? After all, so much contemporary everything else is trite and boring, why shouldn't that be true of drama, too? One good play here: Becky Shaw, by Gina Gionfriddo. A queer claustrophobic family drama. Title character is an outsider who comes into the family's orbit to simultaneously air the dirty laundry and soil a bunch more. Not really my cup of tea -- too much psychology, too much talking -- but very good at being what it is.

Lars and the Real Girl, Craig Gillespie (2007). Surprisingly sweet and affecting movie about a town that teaches a guy how to love. That sounds horrible, but it's true! I don't know how it doesn't lapse into sentimentality or broad comedy, but it doesn't.

The Forever War, Dexter Filkins (2008). Dispatches it is not, but the comparison will be made and not for no reason. Filkins was the Times' guy in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, and these are the stories that aren't right for a newspaper but need to be told nonetheless, the ironic ones, personal ones, the ones that unfold over years and the ones that are contained in a single instant. You don't read this one for policy analysis, political history, or any of that big picture stuff; this is about people trying to stay alive in war zones.

Thief, Michael Mann (1981).
Manhunter, Michael Mann (1986).
I've always enjoyed Mann's glacial style -- that's a reference to both time and attitude -- but it sure doesn't hold up well over time. The interminable Tangerine Dream riffs in Thief and the interminable brooding of William Petersen in Manhunter don't feel slick and cool, they feel like you just ate a quart of quaaludes. Also, James Caan's entire torso is covered with hair and Mann makes sure you know it, often. Also, Caan blows up The Green Mill, which is inexcusable.

Elizabeth, Shekhar Kapur (1998). Stylish pseudo-historical romp, great cast.

Network, Sidney Lumet (1976). The M*A*S*H of television. Did anyone make any movies in the 70's that weren't completely depressing in both form and content?

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.

Broadway Danny Rose, Woody Allen (1984)

Terrific! I'd forgotten the extent and incisiveness of the Fellini homages throughout! Actually, I think Woody may well have written this script, in which Italian-American culture looms so large, just so that he could "do" Fellini.

There was a time for Woody, there was a time, after the early comedies and before the malaise, and this was right in the shank of it. Funny, smart, nostalgic, affecting, neurotic, genuine, beautifully shot and acted.

Hey, a poll! What was the last Woody Allen movie that didn't suck? I vote Celebrity (1998), which I remember liking when it came out. I wonder if I'd still like it. Here's a list for you; let me know your vote.

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.

Joe Turner's Come and Gone, August Wilson (1984)

I know theater is literally, by definition, histrionic. Still, it's frustrating that when I go to see a Broadway play for the first time in I don't know, twenty years, and I very deliberately choose what I've been assured by reviews is a serious piece of literature, what I get is a lot of anguished howling, comedy broader than a barn door, and I'm sorry, but a fairly cheap and predictable catharsis. Also, when important things are going to happen, there are thunderstorms.

Three things saved the evening. First, simply, the material. The horrors of slavery are often represented in art and history, but we see, hear, and think a great deal less about the pathos of its aftermath, when (ostensibly) free people found that their new lives, though certainly better than the old, were defined by dislocation, uncertainty, alienation, and deracination. While the characters in the play represent these problems a little too programmatically for my taste, it's undeniable that they do represent them, and that there's value in that.

Second, the soliloquies. The play's dialogue is for the most part strictly purpose-driven: it advances the plot and/or lays out the themes. But in some of the longer speeches a genuine poetry -- earthy but ambiguous, believable but weird -- bubbles up and gives you the shivers.

Finally, just being there. Noticing when someone missed a cue. Each moment of the performance coming into existence and disappearing forever. The smell of sulfur when someone lit a match. Bodies in the seats, bodies on the stage. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed just being there.

Gorky Park, Michael Apted (1983)

Rented this because I'm writing a review of a book of criticism and thinking about the author's style I had a flashback to the creepy Professor Andreev in this movie who, in order to determine the identities of the corpses found in the titular park, sets grub worms to eating the flesh off their heads and then reconstructs their faces with clay and genius. Sure enough, there he was.

Not a great movie by any stretch, but it did interest me in this regard: The Cold War is taken as such a complete given here, causing me to realize how completely that sense of how-the-world-is, which I grew up with, has vanished. It's quite destabilizing to think about, really. It makes me wonder how I'll feel watching something like Rendition or Syriana twenty-five years from now.

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

I have four major reviews to write by May and I'm freaking out. Here's a summary of recent ingenstions before I go down the rabbit hole.

The African Queen by John Huston (1951) is dispiriting because in order to be a hero a missionary has to dump your gin into the river. I guess that counts me out.

The Dark Knight by Christopher Nolan (2008) has in it a cool motorcycle and also The Greatest Actors of the Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries. Jesus. All right, listen, seriously. This movie was very nearly free of content and the absurd circle jerk of critical admiration confuses me. I well understand and have frequently participated in the phenomenon of intellectuals-stampede-to-blockbuster-which-yields-to-cult-stud-analysis-and-also-features-explosions. But this is far from even that. It's one part Rambo four parts water. Notice that everyone who tells you it's brilliant is male and/or owns a Trans Am.

Deep Blues by Robert Palmer (1982) features some groundbreaking and fascinating elucidations of the connections between African music and the blues, some wickedly entertaining interview footage with Muddy Waters, and a whole lot of somewhat repetitive but none the less Dorito-like anecdotes about Delta and Chicago blues musicians.

Burn After Reading by the Coen Bros. (2008) is such a curious waste of time and talent. Every one of these fine actors seems to burrow down into their two-dimensional goofy/manic characters and, basically, disappear. Disappointing. Something could have been made of this, but wasn't.

Charlie Bartlett, by John Poll (2007) is in so many ways excruciatingly dull, cliched, and mawkish, BUT: 1. Robert Downey Jr. and Hope Davis are exquisite actors, 2. Kat Dennings looks a lot like an old girlfriend of mine, and 3. I love the proposition that a 100 tabs of Ritalin could turn a dull high school dance into Studio 54.

Plus Super Chickan. Oh my oh my. Get you some.

History of the World: Part I, Mel Brooks (1981)

Geez, this is awful. I have lost a great deal of respect for my thirteen-year-old self, who inexplicably adored this movie. I'm not going to watch Blazing Saddles ever again; I'm terrified that it's awful too.

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.

The Seventh Continent, Michael Haneke (1989)

Oh dear. This is early Haneke, and far more ham-fisted than later works of genius like Code Unknown and Time of the Wolf, but it's still, of course, more than worth watching if you're at all a fan of Haneke's pretentious black-turtleneck existential despair.

The film's based on a true story which is pretty simple to tell in a sentence. Unremarkable bourgeois family--father, mother, daughter--one day lock themselves in their house, systematically destroy their possessions and then kill themselves. I don't feel bad giving away the ending, because the movie's not so much about the plot as it is about Haneke's formalism, the way he uses repetition and isolation to conjure first the family's banal affluence, and then their equally banal self-destruction.

This isn't as sadistic as Haneke's Funny Games, but in a way it's more terrifying. In Funny Games, the boys seem to be motivated, somehow, by something--anger, joy, whatever--and even though their motives are sick, at least they exist, which creates the possibility that their actions are somehow meaningful. Here, the family goes about their self-annihilation with the same kind of banal detachment they displayed as they lived their supposedly intolerable life. I'm reminded of Cioran's great On the Heights of Despair. The enemy of joy is detachment, not despair. The family's tragedy isn't that they destroy themselves, it's that they don't enjoy tearing their lives down any more than they enjoyed building it up.

Ponderous, pompous, and obvious, but still delicious in that bitter Austrian way.

The King of Comedy, Martin Scorsese (1982)

A drastically underrated Scorsese which should really be shown as an appetizer before every screening of Taxi Driver. Rupert Pupkin is every bit as pathetic/psychotic as Mr. Bickle, but a little less . . . I guess let's say grumpy? No, wait, I know. The King of Comedy:Los Angeles::Taxi Driver: New York. Yes, I realize that both movies are set in New York, but that's just because Scorsese was too lazy to go to Los Angeles to make this one. Psychologically, it's as L.A. as The Player, maybe even more so. Featuring the slowest burn of all time from Jerry Lewis, and the gemlike-flame genius of Sandra Bernhard as Rupert's comrade in the trenches of celebrity obsession.

Here, thanks to some random web site, is the transcript of the monologue Bernhard delivers, brilliantly, in front of a gagged and duct-tape-encased Lewis. I like thinking about it as a poem.

I feel completely
impulsive tonight.
Anything could happen.
I have so much to tell you.
I don't know
where to start.
I want to tell you
everything about myself
everything you don't know.
Do you like these glasses?
Crystal. Beautiful.
I bought them just for you.
There's something about them
the simplicity of them.
If you don't like them
if there's a doubt
in your mind
[throws wineglass over shoulder]
You know,
sometimes during the day
I'll do the simplest things.
I'll be taking a bath
and I say to myself
"I wonder if Jerry's
taking a bath right now?"
And I just hope
that you're not drowning
or something.
I get really worried about you
like something terrible
is going to happen.
I have these daydreams
like I'm with you
at the golf course
driving your cart
just driving around.
Need a putter, Jer,
you know?
Need an iron?
I don't even know
how to play golf.
I played with my parents once
my father
but, uh, but I love you.
I never told my parents
that I love them.
They never told me
that they loved me either
which was fine with me.
But I love you.
You want some wine?
No, OK
I'm not in the mood to drink
either, though.
I'm in the mood to
be alone with you.
Why don't we just
clear off the table?
I was thinking
why don't we go upstairs?
But that's so predictable.
Let's just take
everything off the table
and do it right here.
That would blow your mind.
It would blow my mind.
I've never done
anything like that.
I've never even had anybody
over for dinner, let alone
made love on the table.
I want to do that.
I just want to dance.
I want to, like,
put on some Shirelles.
I want to be black.
Wouldn't that be insane?
God, you know
who I wish was tonight?
I wish I was Tina Turner
just dancing through the room.