My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski, Werner Herzog (1999)

Well, you have to have a serious predisposition for these two madmen to find any pleasure in this, and if you do have the predisposition, you've probably already seen this. It's somewhat about the relationship between two quite thoroughly co-dependent collaborators, but it's also a "making-of" documentary about Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, which is a lot of fun for nuts like me.

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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.

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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.

Ghostwritten, David Mitchell (1999)

I enjoyed this, but it's uneven. Like Robert Altman and (sometimes) Jim Jarmusch, Mitchell likes to get one narrative rolling, then leave it behind and start an apparently unrelated one, only to show you, further on, that the first and second are actually parts of a whole. Then he introduces a third, fourth, and so on, each time providing a little jolt of pleasure when you recognize how each fits into the whole scheme. That's fun, but here a lot of the connections seem arbitrary to me -- maybe I'm missing something? That's entirely possible -- and some of the sections are a little formulaic, which is my nice way of saying boring. The author of the wonderful Cloud Atlas is hereby forgiven this early ho-hummer. (I haven't read the new one everyone was chattering about a couple months ago.)

Homicide, David Mamet (1991)

People who rent this thinking it's going to be a police procedural must sure get annoyed. Mamet's first film, the indispensable House of Games, established his interest in the confidence game. His second, Things Change, was about the tensions between loyalty to one's self, one's friends, and one's tribe. Both of those themes are present here, plus a new emphasis, on race, that has of course persisted as one of Mamet's preoccupations.

All three of Mamet's first movies employ Verfremdungseffekts to such extremes that they risk complete collapse. Here, the gun battles are absurd (Mamet could have saved some money by just putting up a title card saying "Gun Battle"); the dialogue, as is traditional in Mamet, is by turns histrionic and a stuttery mess; and many of the situations seem to be transpiring not in this world but in a world of archetypes and metaphors. I adore it. It occurs to me that it kind of feels like Paul Auster's New York Trilogy.

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Sometimes the rate of my consumption of culture outpaces my capacity to reflect upon it. Here's what's passed through my head of late:

The Wire, David Simon et. al. (2002-2008). I believe this displaces The Sopranos as the best television I've ever seen. If you've seen it you already know what I'm talking about; if you haven't seen it, you should. There were of course some passages that were more successful than others--I for one found the invented serial killer idea too clever by half--but on the whole this is a masterpiece. I was very sorry when I ran out of episodes, but then I realized that this story is of course far from over; all you need to do is read the Sun paper now and then and imagine the episode Simon would have wrought from the day's news. Here, this one took me about forty seconds to start scripting in my head.

Just Before Dark, Jim Harrison (1999). What a pleasure to read Harrison's collected nonfiction about Leelanau by a lake just northeast of Muskegon on a July afternoon.

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, Joan Didion (2006). What a pleasure to read Didion's collected nonfiction in the air over California's central valley. Old and new favorites. Too bad this edition's pages are so thin.

The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil (1930-1942). Oh my stars. I'm only on page 500 or so of the some 1200, and I'm going to have to put this away now that school's started, but I feel like it's OK not to read this straight through, and I also, frankly, feel like I've mostly gotten what's on offer here, namely deliciously incisive diagnoses of a grand society striding confidently toward the edge of a cliff. I can't think of any other novel that so decisively nails the 20th century's disastrous obsession with progress. "With a little attention, one can probably always detect in the latest Future signs of the coming Old Times. The new ideas will then be a mere thirty years older but contented and with a little extra fat on their bones, or past their prime, much as one glimpses alongside a girl's shining features the extinguished face of the mother; or they have had no success, and are down to skin and bones, shrunken to a reform proposed by some old fool who is called the Great So-and-so by his fifty admirers." Paging Ross Perot.

The Ghost Writer, Roman Polankski (2010). Whew, Polanski's just oozing decadence these days. This is supposedly a thriller about a CIA plot to, you know, take control of everything, but Roman can barely be bothered to flesh out any of the absurd plot points; he's too busy setting up beautifully lit shots of fog and sad adulterers. Beautiful photography, but not really a movie. The amazing house on the beach at Sylt receives more attention from the director than do any of his stars.

The Green Zone, Paul Greengrass (2010). Essentially a continuation of Greengrass's Bourne movies, in that Matt Damon takes on the entire corrupt U.S. military-industrial complex and wins. This one is purportedly set in the "real world," though, namely Baghdad's green zone. The movie is absolutely absurd, but the takeaway for the action movie crowd at the mall is that their government lied to them about Iraq, and that's a truth I'm delighted to see promulgated as widely and effectively as possible.

Who Killed the Electric Car?, Chris Paine (2006). Muddily structured but useful. I really had no idea this was going on when it was going on.

The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke (2009) does for 20c European history what Bergman's so-called "trilogy of faith" (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence) did for God. Namely, shows it to be incomprehensible and cruel, but absolutely beautiful to look at in luminous black and white. Go back and look at those Bergman films, though, and then look at this again, and see if you don't feel, as I did, how creepily clean Haneke's images are. Maybe I've been spending too much time in Lightroom, but The White Ribbon feels like a masterpiece of post-production as much as anything.

Colorado Territory, Raoul Walsh (1949). Walsh remakes High Sierra as a western, with Joel McCrea in the Bogart role. Nice enough for a Sunday afternoon, particularly if you like Virginia Mayo, which I do, but a minor Walsh by any measure. I like the hideout in the ruined village of Todos Santos.

Bad Day at Black Rock, John Sturges (1955). Sturges also directed The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and The Eagle Has Landed, among many others. Notice a theme? Manly men in conflict with other manly men. This one fits. A strange and small picture, in which Integrity (played by Spencer Tracy) squares off with Deceit (Robert Ryan) and comes out ahead. Atmospheric and nice to look at for a while, but finally the claustrophobia that Sturges is trying to engender just turns into tedium.

A Single Man, Tom Ford (2009) has its affecting moments, but is mostly, probably predictably, an exercise in style. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if the style brings pleasure. Some here does--lots of beautiful California summer light, lots of fantastic bric a brac to ogle--but someone really should have steadied Ford's hand on the post-production dials; the gimmick where he keeps making people pale when they're sad and rosy when their faith in humanity (and/or libido) is restored is tacky and emberrassing.

Band of Brothers, various authors (2001). The Pacific is way better, and do you know why? Because this is pre-9/11 triumphalism, and that is post 9/11 realism. That's oversimplifying, but really, the difference is amazing. In Band of Brothers, PTSD is represented as tough luck that befalls the weak. In The Pacific, it's clearly shown that those who appear not to have PTSD are the truly weird ones. Like I said, The Pacific's a great example of how our understanding of historical realities is shaped by our present historical circumstances. So is Band of Brothers, unfortunately.

Music in rotation: Tosca, Up Bustle & Out, Jazzanova, Cal Tjader

Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1991, 1993, 1995)

A very stolid, very British trilogy set during WWI, concerned less with the fighting itself than with its cultural, social, and psychological ramifications. I enjoyed reading this, but looking back it seems to me more like a particularly informative and well-designed museum exhibit than a work of art. I learned a lot and enjoyed myself, but I wasn't changed. I feel misanthropic saying that, because it's really very well done, but there it is.

One more grouchy but true comment. The jacket copy goes on about how these are antiwar novels. This is not true. The books feature many antiwar characters, both historical and fictitious, but the spirit of the enterprise is clearly one which values most stiff upper lips, heroism, willingness to kill, allegiance to comrades and country, and all that.

Actually, when I really get thinking about it, these books are kind of rotten. Barker presents us with a large group of vivid and sympathetic characters, all of whom are opposed to the war in one way or another, and all of whom are marked by self-doubt, moral failings, and various other weaknesses. By the end, though, all the books' heroes have sucked it up and gotten on with being soldiers, and it's pretty clear we're supposed to be proud of them.

I might feel differently again tomorrow, but just now I'm kind of thinking these are really kind of pernicious!

Venus, Suzan-Lori Parks (1996)

I only read this, I didn't see it. That's an image from a Public Theater/Yale Rep production directed by Richard Foreman.

I really loved Parks' Topdog/Underdog, but this one was a big disappointment for me. It was disappointing in an interesting way, though, namely, it's a vivid instance of the imitative fallacy: Parks makes a spectacle of Saartjie Baartman as she attempts to condemn those who made a spectacle of Saartjie Baartman. I rush to make clear that I well understand that Parks has created her spectacle out of sympathy, while Baartman's captors acted out of ignorance and cruelty. Still, this is a play which makes little to no effort to empathize with Baartman's plight; instead, she is set down on the stage, presented for our consideration, and talked about. Which is to say, she's made a spectacle of.

Elizabeth Alexander wrote a book of poems about Baartman, and Barbara Chase-Riboud wrote a novel about her, and those works, like Parks' play, also seemed to me sadly flat. I commend all three authors for trying, since this is a story which exemplifies in microcosm so many forms of repugnant injustice and prejudice--racism, sexism, and colonialism, for starters--and so, I think, is an important one to tell. But it seems that when a particular situation is so overwhelmingly blatantly obviously horrid, artworks which try to represent it often just sort of point at it and say, "Look. Look how horrid." Which of course we already know.

But does that mean Baartman--or Auschwitz, or My Lai, or Emmett Till--shouldn't be represented by artists? Certainly not! I'm just saying that artists who pick up subjects like these have set themselves up for some serious challenges, to say the least.

Diana & Nikon, Janet Malcolm (1997)

A collection of previously published exquisitely perceptive essays on photography and photographers from one of my favorite writers. Really helped me contextualize the pas de deux of photography and painting from the 19th century through the 1980's, and also brought a number of the great photographers to life for me. Criticism of the highest order in that it both fully engages its subjects and ramifies beyond them, all in prose to die for. Thanks!

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On sabbatical and taking my notes elsewhere, but here's what's been passing in front of my eyes.

Tarabas, Joseph Roth (1934). Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. A parable of eastern Europe's transition from the 19th to the 20th centuries.

The Good Soldiers, David Finkel (2009). Up close account from embedded journalist during the "surge" of 2007. Mayer and Hersh remain the most impressive political accounts of the Iraq war; this book demonstrates better than any other I've read what it's like to fight in Iraq.

In the Loop, Armando Iannucci (2009). Not as fun as I thought it was going to be; the jokes are repetitive and eventually predictable. I was fixated on the mise-en-scène, which sometimes felt like that ersatz-documentary kind of The Office vibe and other times like a cool Michael Clayton slick.

Office Space, Mike Judge (1999).
Idiocracy, Mike Judge (2006).
I was pleased to see these at last, after having realized how often they get referenced. They're pretty dumb, but fun.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Phil Lord & Chris Miller (2009). Charming cartoon about believing in yourself and not wasting food.

The Curtain, Milan Kundera (2007). A history of the novel, an argument for its importance, an education on nationalism, an intellectual memoir, and, here and there, a manual for being human. I stopped underlining because I was underlining everything.

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1880, Francis Steegmuller, ed. (1980 & 1982). Went here at Kundera's behest. Delicious, wicked, vital.

The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow (2008). Yes, good, fine, and all the more reason to love Bigelow if you didn't already, but kind of a disappointment for me, since I've been reading so much nonfiction about the war, and I chafed a bit at seeing the soldiers' experiences shaped into a narrative and invested with pathos. The terrifying thing that Finkel (vide supra) makes so clear is that just because a tour of duty elapses over linear time, that doesn't mean it's a narrative. He shows how the soldiers struggle with that fact; when they've got a month left in their tours, they're aching to have a sense of the story of the year, of progress made, crises resolved, etc., but that's not how it works. All that said, this is a terrific movie; my complaint is basically based on the fact that it's a movie, and that's really not fair.

Our Nation Unhinged: The Human Consequences of the War on Terror, Peter Jan Honigsberg (2009). Repetitive, smug, and unnecessary if you've read Philippe Sands' Torture Team. A great disappointment. Massively dull and technocratic one minute, puffed up with bombastic indignation the next. Ugh. Big regret that I got it in hardcover.

Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, Tony Hoagland (2010). My thoughts here.

Also:
The Long Meadow, Vijay Seshadri (2004). Mannerist, but I like it.
Squandermania, Don Share (2007)
Deniability, George Witte (2008)
Factory of Tears, Valzhyna Mort (2008)
National Anthem, Kevin Prufer (2008). This is a terrific book.
On Crimes and Punishments, Cesare Beccaria (1764)
War Bird, David Gewanter (2009)

Distant Star, Roberto Bolaño (1996)

It's petulant and dumb, but when suddenly everyone's talking about a particular writer, I grumpily recoil like one of those guys with crew cuts on late night infomericals telling you to cash out your 401k and put it all in precious metals. So when suddenly a couple years back Bolaño was all over the literary press I remained studiously aloof and snooty, reading my Walser in a corner and fancying myself deliciously immune to fashion.

But there's a difference between refusing to throw oneself at every new cutie NYRB/TLS sanctions and stupidly depriving yourself of fresh genuineness. So when a colleague cleaning out his office upon retirement offered me this early Bolaño novel for the reasonable price of free, I accepted it, pleased too to begin with this lesser known work instead of either of the bigger books which were so ballyhooed.

What a fool I've been. This little book is thrillingly weird. First person narrator tells of a charismatic young poet in his university writing workshop who, after Allende's fall in 1973, becomes a sort of Göring, equally obsessed with austere militarism and obscenely decadent aesthetic poses. The two sides of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle's personality come together when he performs exacting skywriting displays of poems at once nationalistic and drippily romantic, making of himself a sort of machine-age Caspar David Friedrich. As you can probably tell, I'm finding it all hard to explain; instead I keep reaching for comparisons. How's this: Bolaño traverses the landscape of Chilean literary culture the way Sebald traverses the landscape of Europe, coolly describing unremarkable evident phenomena while at the same time continually suggesting -- but lightly, lightly -- the dark rot just underneath. Other authors that spring to mind here are Pamuk and Bernhardt, in each of whom fragile artistic culture and brute historical realities collide.

I have a strong sense that one must have to read a whole passel of Bolaño in order to grok the mission as a whole, since it seems several of the books refer to one another. I'm looking forward to it! And apologizing to myself for making me wait this long.

Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk (1996)

I discussed Ginsberg's "Howl" with my class of college juniors and seniors a few weeks ago. At one point I asked them if there existed a cultural product--TV show, movie, video game, book, play, poem, whatever--which speaks to/for their generational moment as "Howl" did for Ginsberg's. Not only could they not come up with anything, they seemed not to really understand the question. One young woman said that everyone she knows has read the Harry Potter books. I said I wasn't really talking about popularity per se; rather, I was wondering whether they could think of any works which they felt embodied the spirit of what it means to be a young adult in the first decade of the 21st century. Nothing. Then one student proposed that contemporary cultural products don't really work like that anymore. There is no music everyone listens to, no movies everyone sees, no web site everyone visits. All marketing now is niche marketing. Some niches are larger and some are smaller, but none are universal. And perhaps artists have responded to that new reality by no longer trying to make "voice of my generation"-type works, since there's no sense of generational unity anyway. I was impressed and pleased with the quality and subtlety of the argument and the ensuing discussion. Then one student said, "Fight Club," and all the rest said, "Oh yeah. 'Fight Club.' 'Fight Club' is awesome."

Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama, David Mamet (1998)

"What comes from the head is perceived by the audience, the child, the electorate, as manipulative. And we may succumb to the manipulative for a moment because it makes us feel good to side with the powerful. But finally we understand we're being manipulated. And we resent it. Tragedy is a celebration not of our eventual triumph but of the truth--it is not a victory but a resignation. Much of its calmative power comes from that operation described by Shakespeare: when remedy is exhausted, so is grief."

"Drama doesn't need to affect people's behavior. There's a great and very, very effective tool that changes people's attitudes and makes them see the world in a new way. It's called a gun."

"The purpose of art is not to change but to delight. I don't think its purpose is to enlighten us. I don't think it's to change us. I don't think it's to teach us. The purpose of art is to delight us: certain men and women (no smarter than you or I) whose art can delight us have been given dispensation from going out and fetching water and carrying wood. It's no more elaborate than that."

"I don't believe reaching people is the purpose of art. In fact, I don't know what 'reaching people' means. I know what Hazlitt said: It's easy to get the mob to agree with you; all you have to do is agree with the mob."

*

"The avant-garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense. And the warm glow of fashion on the left and patriotism on the right evidence individuals' comfort in their power to elect themselves members of a group superior to reason."

*

And many more bossy but glossy little gems.

Chung King Express, Wong Kar Wai (1994)

This hasn't aged well. Feels like a student film; the completely boring narrative exists solely as an excuse for the director to try out every possible cinematographical trick he can think of. And to play a whole lot of relentlessly banal slow jazz. But OK, if he needed to do this in order to learn how to make 2046 and In the Mood for Love, that's fine by me.

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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.

Broken Arrow, John Woo (1996)

I remember Anthony Lane pointing out, when this was released, that of course the bad guy steals not one but two nuclear bombs, because this is a John Woo movie, and while the director fully intends one of those bombs to be disarmed with seconds to spare at the film's climax, he also fully intends to first blow that other sucker up.

This isn't as awesome as Woo's breakthrough The Killer or the Persona-meets-Peckinpah Face/Off, but it's still pure Woo pleasure: explosions, cheesy shopping mall music, hamfisted psychoanalysis, explosions, and innumerable unlikely coincidences. Perfection, of a kind, is what he was after.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Anthony Minghella (1999)

"I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody." -- Tom Ripley

A melodramatic movie, for sure, but it captures American anxieties of identity and ambition so well that I'm willing to claim Tom Ripley belongs in the same dim chamber of purgatory as Jay Gatsby and Daisy Miller. I like to think of the three of them sizing each other up over cocktails.

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.

Paradise, Toni Morrison (1997)

Twenty years ago this spring, as a student at Oberlin, I took a course on the novels of Toni Morrison with Dr. Gloria Watkins. (As an author she's bell hooks; as a teacher she insisted on Dr. Watkins.) Whether for good or ill I won't, and perhaps can't say, but I don't think any other course I've ever taken affected me as strongly. Morrison at that time had written five novels: The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1974), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987). The world was slow to recognize the significance of her work -- Oprah picked The Bluest Eye for her book club in 2000, thirty years after its publication -- but her rise as an author was both inexorable and perfectly matched with the zeitgeist. By the spring of 1989, an earnest young aspiring writer, with the help of a brilliant and charismatic mentor, could easily use Morrison's work as a lens to bring literally anything and everything of interest into something like focus: literary style, literary theory, historiography, sexuality, America, gender, race, the politics of authorship and the authorship of politics . . . . Truly anything and everything. Morrison was born in Lorain, down the road from Oberlin. I drove there with a friend, just to see it.

We kept journals for the class, in which we recorded not only our critical responses to the novels, but also accounts of whether or how we understood our personal lives in relationship to the ideas we perceived in the novels. Dr. Watkins, in other words, encouraged us to think not just about how we were reading the novels, but also about how the novels were reading us. I remember a few things I wrote in that journal -- things simultaneously outrageously self-flagellating and outrageously self-aggrandizing -- and cringe. (It did/not help that I was dating an African American woman at the time.) But I also remember that Dr. Watkins was incredibly, improbably generous and encouraging in her responses to my (literally) sophomoric blather. I think she could tell that my intentions were good, that I really was struggling to understand who and what I was in relationship to the culture that had birthed and determined me. And I suppose my intentions mostly were good, and hopefully not in a paving the road to hell sort of way, or at least not only that.

The experience of taking that class turned Toni Morrison into something other than just another writer for me; she was more like a planet I'd visited. In the years since, I've returned to reread the novels I read with Dr. Watkins and my classmates -- Tar Baby, believe it or not, was and remains my favorite; I love its cruel simplicity; I'm also someone who thinks Kitty is way more interesting than Anna, though, so caveat emptor -- but I've resisted reading what I persist in thinking of as the "new" novels: Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008). I didn't want to read them alone. I didn't want to be disappointed. I didn't want them to be the same as the ones I'd read, but I didn't want them to be different, either.

Then my beloved picked up a copy of Paradise at the Friends of the Library bookstore and I found myself reading it, and, with for me unusual speed, finishing it. A complex operation, since I felt like I was reading two books at once: one in my hands and one the changeling child of my memories. Amazingly, given the circumstances, I found Paradise pretty much pure pleasure. The novel satisfies in myriad ways, by being itself myriad. It's rooted in a particular historical reality and filled with vibrant living characters but, in that inimitable Morrison manner, it's also incredibly slippery. Archetypal conflicts (male/female, black/white, community/individual, sacred/secular, inside/outside, city/country, rational/occult) are set up, adumbrated, complicated, exploded, and rewritten, again and again, until it's absolutely impossible to saddle the novel with summary or force it to generate a lesson. I think it's terrific, but I'm probably not a very objective judge, but it's terrific.