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 Rack, Arnold Laven (1956)

One of the saddest movies you'll ever see. It has the awkwardness and claustrophobia of a funeral from the very first frame. Paul Newman spends two years in a North Korean prison camp. When he gets home, he's charged with collaborating with the enemy. It becomes clear that if he did provide aid and comfort to his captors, he did it to protect his comrades and/or because he'd been driven insane by torture. The tragic logic of the prosecution is eerily reminiscent of so many contemporary stories. Why was Muhammad Ismail Agha, fourteen, sent to Guantanamo? Because he's a terrorist. How do you know he's a terrorist? Because he was sent to Guantanamo.

The Messenger, Oren Moverman (2009)

This is not a perfect movie. There are a few flabby passages, and a few overly determined scenes. There are some fatal--though not necessarily obvious--inconsistencies in the script. The first-time director sometimes seems unsure of where to put the camera and where to point it. But the imperfections serve to accentuate what a truly superb work this really is. The cast--Samantha Morton in particular, closely followed by Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson--is absolutely fantastic. (Samantha Morton, I have to stress this, is amazing. I can't remember the last time I saw a performance this good.) The script takes serious issues seriously without pandering to us or trying to edify us. The mise-en-scène perfectly captures the comfortable banality of contemporary American spaces--TV rooms, bars, malls, kitchens, cars, etc. And best of all, above all, the movie never hurries to make connections or draw conclusions. Silence is permitted, digression is permitted, reflection is permitted, and so genuine thought is possible.

Given the complexity of the subject matter and Moverman's lack of experience, it's all the more amazing that this turned out so well. It could have so easily been a disaster. I see that Moverman is at work on a Kurt Cobain picture. Another project with long odds, for sure, but seeing this makes me think he might be able to pull it off. God knows Van Sant didn't.

A slightly bizarre afterthought: This reminded me of nothing so much as the sublime You Can Count on Me, another of the very few movies I can think of which seems to depict actual human relationships rather than cartoon versions of same. Screen those two as a double bill and you'll be walking around with your guts turned inside out for a week.

Brothers, Jim Sheridan (2009)

Bad news: After fifteen minutes, my clip-on cliche monitor badge was already white-hot, so I had to turn this off and send it back to Netflix unwatched.

Good news: If I can just get up the gumption to write the heimkehrer I'm planning, it can't possibly be this bad.

Let's take a moment here to lament the tanking of Jim Sheridan, whose first picture, My Left Foot, was so terrific, but whose subsequent outings have gotten progressively worse.

Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood (2008)

A mismatched-buddy picture ala Beverly Hills Cop, a crusty-mentor picture ala Finding Forrester, an urban revenge fantasy ala Taxi Driver, a man-damaged-by-war-learns-to-be-human-again picture like so many of the movies I've been watching lately, a can't-we-all-just-get-along overcoming-racism-through-food picture I can't think of another example of right now . . . In short, a lot of things, but no one thing in particular. Oh, I forgot the nagging priest making a case for Catholicism. An awkward and manic-depressive movie, now ebullient and now morose. Oh, I forgot how terrible the writing is. (Eastwood to mirror: "I have more in common with these gooks than with my own family." As if the movie hadn't already pounded us over the head with that information a hundred times in a hundred ways already.) Politically speaking, I can't make heads or tails of it. For starters, Eastwood's character is supposed to be this huge racist, but in one strange scene he makes pretty clear that all his slurs are just "how men talk to each other," that the racism is just an act. OK, he might not be racist, but the movie sure is, even -- especially -- at the moments when it thinks its being most enlightened, as in the portrayal of the Hmong protagonists as helpless and naive. The only Hispanics and African Americans on offer in the picture are gangbangers. It's like Eastwood threw all these ingredients into the pot and hoped they'd make a meal, but really it's just an inedible mess.

The Men Who Stare at Goats, Grant Heslov (2009)

Nice premise goes totally off the rails into complete incomprehensibility.

Flight Without End, Joseph Roth (1929)

David Le Vay's translation of this minor Roth novel tries very hard to make the book unlikeable but fails; Roth's piercing analysis of inter-war European mores cuts through Le Vay's fug. (I hasten to say too that every Roth novel is a major novel in my book; this one's "minor" only insofar as its smaller and less ambitious than his masterpieces.)

Franz Tunda, of the Austrian aspiring classes, goes off to fight, is captured in 1916, spends his war a prisoner in Russia, escapes and hides out in the taiga, learns a year after the fact that the war has ended, and begins to make his way home. Trouble is, things have rather changed in the world. He finds himself swept up in the Russian revolutionary bureaucracy, then wanders like a ghost through the new European realities on offer in Austria, Germany, and France. Trenchant commentaries abound on any number of subjects, from the banality of the new induststrialists to the pretentiousness of the avant-garde. Here's Tunda in Paris. He's broke, and has asked the wealthy President of a cultural organization to help him out; here he reflects on his reluctant benefactor. I've tried to ameliorate the translation as best I can.

Tunda walked through the serene streets with a great emptiness in his heart, feeling like a released convict on his first walk to freedom. He knew that the President could not help him, even if he gave him the chance to eat and buy a suit, just as a convict isn't freed when dismissed from prison, just as it doesn't make an orphan happy to find a place in an orphanage. He was not at home in the world. Where did he belong? In the mass graves.

The blue light was burning on the grave of the Unknown Soldier. The garlands withered. A young Englishman stood there, a soft, gray hat in his hands. He had set out from the Café de la Paix to see the tomb. An old father thought of his son. Between him and the young Englishman was the grave. Deep below were the bones of the unknown soldier. The old man and the boy exchanged a glance above the grave. It was a tacit agreement between them. A pact not to mourn the dead soldier together, but together to forget him entirely.

Tunda had passed this monument several times already. There were always tourists with their traveling hats in the their hands, and nothing hurt him more than their salute. It was like those pious globetrotters, who if they come to a famous church during a service, kneel at the altar out of habit with their guidebooks in hand, so as not to seem impious. Their devotion is a blasphemy and a ransom for their conscience. The blue flame burned not to honor the dead soldiers, but to reassure the survivors. Nothing was more cruel than the blissfully ignorant devotion of a surviving father at the grave of his son, whom he had sacrificed without knowing it. Tunda sometimes felt as if he himself lay there in the ground, as if we all lay there, all those of use who set out from home and were killed and buried, or who came back but never came home. For it doesn't really matter whether we're buried or alive and well. We're strangers in this world, we come from the realm of shadows.

Does that seem turgid to you? I think it's awesome. It seems to me that what Sebald did for post WWII Europe, Roth did for Post WWI Europe. Namely, showed his readers how eager they were to forget the past, and how the past persists regardless.

One other note of interest here: I'm adding this novel's narrator to my list of what I'm calling, for lack of a better term, "authors as distant first-person narrators." The story here is actually told by one Joseph Roth, who claims to have met Tunda once. Yet Roth is nowhere to be found in the novel. It seems like I'm coming across a lot of this lately in novels I really like. Other examples are Bolaño's Distant Star, all of Sebald, Pamuk's Snow . . . I know there are others I'm forgetting at the moment. I think some Bernhard novels fit this description. What's the effect/use of this techinque?

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.

Jerichow, Christian Petzold (2008)

Meat-and-potatoes Postman-Always-Rings-Twice melodrama only German, which means instead of gaudy patter and Lana Turner you get a lot of long silences and an emaciated junkie. This would have been completely boring in every single solitary way were it not for the decision to make the cuckold Turkish and the wife and handsome stranger über-Aryan, thus requiring the viewer to spend 93 minutes trying to decide whether this is somehow a political allegory. I'm pretty sure it's not, but kudos to Petzold for bamboozling me into working that hard to figure out how and why not.

Stray Dog, Akira Kurosawa (1949)

Ostensibly a procedural about a rookie cop (Mifune, so young I didn't recognize him at first!) whose gun is stolen, the movie's as much or more about Japan's effort to regain its self-respect. Terrific, near-genius cinematography; the camera itself behaves like an investigator. Featuring many wonderful sequences, including one at a baseball game and another at a cabaret on an unbearably hot summer night. The chorus girls run off stage and into their dressing room, where they all collapse on the floor, fanning themselves. Really top notch Kurosawa; I'm surprised I've never seen this before.

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?

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Nunnally Johnson (1956)

Watch this, read this, figure out some way we might learn something someday. Thanks.

Seriously, though. This movie's hugely melodramatic. But it's also absolutely serious. I found it quite affecting.