Biutiful, Alejandro González Iñárritu (2010)

A dignified drama, directed with grace and acted with integrity, but doesn't it kind of tip over the edge into bummer-porn at some point? I am not afraid of depressing movies, but this one's relentless hectoring of its hero brought me to the point of wishing he'd fight back by having at least one good thing happen to him, maybe finding a few coins in a gutter or something?

I Am Love, Luca Guadagnino (2009)

I suppose opera is an early form of the music video, right? Similarly, this is a sort of music video for some lovely pre-existing John Adams pieces, and if you're a fan of his carefully nailed-down chaos, you may be the sort who will enjoy this. As in opera and music videos, plot here runs a distant second in importance to mood and tone. While we are tempted at times to read the story here as an indictment of the inbred and isolated bourgeoisie, any such avenue of thought very quickly runs into trouble, as visual style trumps substance over and over again. I'd go so far as to say that Guadagnino makes Antonioni's La Notte look like a Marxist tract.

Thus not exactly my cup of prosecco, but I can't claim not to have enjoyed it. It's an exact replica of what we used to call "art-house" pictures, and you don't see too many of them any more.

Ketchup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The American, Anton Corbjin (2010). Lifeless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tourist, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (2010). 

The Green Hornet, Michel Gondry (2011).

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

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

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

Etc. etc. etc.

Stone, John Curran (2010)

Good example of how interesting movies can slip under the radar with mediocre reviews because they're too quiet, too slow. Anyone capable of sitting through late Paul Schrader and taking it seriously will find this more than satisfying. The only false note is that DeNiro's supposedly an Episcopalian. Bullshit. He's a stone cold Calvinist.

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.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Niels Arden Oplev (2009)

"All the idealizations of the female from the earliest days of courtly love have been in fact devices to deprive her of freedom and self-determination." -- Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel

This movie is repulsive. It's hard to know where to start. How about this: Does that woman over there look like a "girl" to you? Me neither. But it's important to call her a girl, since she represents the ideal of feminine innocence, sullied by masculine perversion, but strong enough to exact revenge when the man she loves is in danger. Like Lara Croft, Nikita, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, etc. etc. etc., Lisbeth Salander is both a totally vulnerable innocent child and a self-contained, self-sufficient, heartless killing machine. She provides everything men want, but asks for nothing in return. (Perhaps the most emblematic sequence here is the one where Salander uses Blomkvist as a human dildo to get herself off. He is of course delighted, but he's even more delighted the next morning, when he gears up for playful post-coital banter, and then realizes that Salander won't require that of him.) The men around Salander decide when, where, and under what circumstances to flip her switch, depending on their needs. (Maggie Cheung's Irma Vep is a rare and useful instance: a self-conscious version of this madonna/murderer type).

Oh, there's so much more. For example: The mindless assignment of every possible outlandish and unlikely depravity to the family of capitalists has the effect of cloaking rather than revealing the actual evils the family business likely perpetrates. The Nazi/rapist/murderer/monster is here defeated, but the conglomerate not only chugs merrily along, it gains a scion which will help ensure its continued existence.

Ugh, it's making me tired to think about. Would someone else please write the term paper on this? I'd recommend starting with the horrific rape/reverse-rape sequence, and Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman.

Anyone thinking right now that I need to lighten up, it's just a movie, should ask themselves this simple question: What would happen to this story if the journalist was a 45 year old woman and the hacker a 25 year old "boy"? For starters, it would never have seen the light of day. Why do you suppose that is?

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert (1857), translated by Lydia Davis (2010)

We are, of course, on paper, thrilled that the scary-smart, MacArthur-certified, uber-cool Lydia Davis has translated the novel that made modern literature possible. What do we do with the fact that her version sounds so stilted? I read this alongside my fusty old Lowell Bair. There are certainly moments where I prefer Davis to Bair, but there are more where I prefer Bair to Davis, usually because Davis's syntax is more convoluted or because she uses more exotic diction, likely with the intention of keeping her vocabulary closer to its nearest French cognates. (I'm not willing to make the effort to dish up a bunch of examples here, unless my faithful readers demand them.) Also, this is minor, but Davis's pages and pages of notes are weird.

I've had a love/hate relationship with this novel for a long time. Insofar as it represents the ascendancy of style over substance, I loathe it. Insofar as it demonstrates that human relationships fundamentally consist of nothing but the collision of one's own self-delusions with those of another, I find it irresistibly perfect. I can't think of another book I hate so much and admire so completely. (I can, oddly, think of plenty that I love but don't particularly admire.)

The Day of the Jackal, Fred Zinnemann (1973)

Just doing my homework in anticipation of Olivier Assayas's upcoming Carlos, to which I'm looking forward despite myself. This is a very straightforward procedural and nothing to write home about. Its potentially explosive political implications are assiduously suppressed in favor of the cops and robbers storyline. The fun lies almost entirely in getting to see all these delicious shots of 60's Europe.

Point Blank, John Boorman (1967)

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

Winter's Bone, Debra Granik (2010)

The plot here is melodramatic and overcooked, but the performances, setting, and tone are so refreshing I don't care. When feature films venture into the heart of the heart of the country, they usually leave any capacity for subtlety back home in their lofts or bungalows, but here you actually feel a degree of sympathy for, and an acknowledgment of the complexity of rural poverty. The protagonist's dilemma--her vanished father has put the family home up as part of the bond he's skipped on--isn't fawned over in the usual Hollywood manner (ooh, look at the poor white trash and their terrible problems!); it's instead simply used as the MacGuffin that gives Granik license to meditate upon and marinate in a culture we rarely see represented onscreen except in the form of cartoons. The movie hits the box office money shot force the moment to its crisis panic button with a sledgehammer in its final passages--which is too bad, because it really wants to be more open-ended than that--but not even chainsawing a cadaver can spoil the tonic of carefully skinning a squirrel in the snow not for fun but from hunger.

The Runaways, Floria Sigismondi (2010)

The Runaways are complicated. There's the uplifting narrative of five strong young women who wanted to rock, took on the condescending sexist music business, had a great time, and hit it big. There's the depressing narrative of extremely young and naive girls being manipulated, drugged, and exploited by the condescending and sexist music business, which profited mightily. Then someone will inevitably pipe up and say, "It's all about the music, man!" The music was indeed awesome, but it is not all about that. Sigismondi, in her first full-length, does a great if sometimes uneven job of embracing both the joy and the ugliness in this story. She also wrote the script, which is itself pretty darn good. This is far from a perfect movie--it indulges in too many cliches, for starters--but when you think about how easily it could have been so much worse, you begin to recognize its achievements.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Kirby Dick (2006)

Just what I needed: More corporate/puritanical cultural manipulation to be pissed off about. Dick is an annoying person and is overly fond of ginning up gotcha moments, but here, as in Outrage, his basic premise and his, well, outrage, are well founded. The MPAA rating system effectively controls what does and does not appear on the country's movie screens, and it's run as a homophobic misogynist pro-war star chamber.

I feel sad. I think I'm going to go to bed.

Any Other City, Life Without Buildings (2001)

Hooked fast by this all week. Altered Images meets Patti Smith?

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974)

Completely satisfying emotionally as a love story, yet at the same time so critically astringent, there's no way you could call it a melodrama. A lonely widowed German charwoman of a certain age and a Moroccan guest worker fall in love. The forces of hatred, fear, and misunderstanding besiege them from both outside and from within. Love wins, but not until Fassbinder's made it clear that, as Wittgenstein put it, "love is not a feeling; love is put to the test." Utterly convincing, fascinating to look at. This was of course inspired by Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, but does that look like Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson there, eating dinner together? No, it does not. Everyone in Fassbinder's movie looks like a human being, which is part of what makes this picture so affecting.

The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds (2009)

There's not a whole lot to this novel--it's short, and feels even shorter--but what's here is admirably written and often delightful. In 1837, the rural poet John Clare--once celebrated, now forgotten by the literary powers that be--ends up in an asylum run by a spendthrift renaissance man "doctor" as inept as an inventor as he is primitive as a psychiatrist. Another of the doctor's patients is the brother of Alfred Tennyson, who's come to the neighborhood to be near his troubled sib. Nothing particularly surprising happens: The doctor's daughter falls for Tennyson, Clare hangs out with Roma in the forest, the doctor schemes and goes broke, other patients at the asylum are troubled by their various demons, etc. Still, Foulds--also a poet--writes with clarity and grace, and there's more than enough here to please and amuse you on two or three plane rides, depending on their length.

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.)

A Streetcar Named Desire, Elia Kazan (1951)

This movie's become such a touchstone, I think many people, myself included, assume they've seen it even if they haven't. If I have seen this before, it was prior to my taking up residence in the South, and also, in some respects, prior to my ascension/descension to adulthood. It is, as you know even if you haven't seen it, a hugely histrionic and overheated movie, but it's also fully genuine and fascinatingly weird. I hit this on a whim and am a bit flustered now; I'm afraid of what my dreams will bring tonight.

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.

Mavis, Mavis (2010)

Track is "Puzzles and Riddles," from the eponymous Mavis on the indispensable !K7.

Defiance, Edward Zwick (2008)

This is a movie of the story of the Bielski partisans. It's not a great movie, but it's a great story. You can't eat popcorn while you watch Shoah, but you can eat popcorn while you watch this. I feel kind of sick to my stomach saying that. I don't like Holocaust movies, generally speaking, since I don't like texts that purport to represent the un-representable. But this isn't really a Holocaust movie. That said, I didn't really like it, either.

La Chinoise, Jean-Luc Godard (1967)

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

Spartan, David Mamet (2004)

Val Kilmer is a modern-day Spartan, a special forces / CIA / Secret Service type (we're not sure which) whose job is to execute the orders of his superiors, not question them or think them over. But when confronted with irrefutable evidence that his superiors are using him for evil rather than good, he faces a choice. An elegant problem play from Mamet, coated in a thin veneer of action-movie candy so as to sell tickets. Does that last make Mamet something of a reverse aesthetic Spartan? True to his art until marketplace exigencies require him to crank up the special effects machines? Not really, because I think he actually enjoys the shootouts for their own sake. With a very nice turn by the always-excellent William H. Macy, whose parents long had no idea, I'm sure, that they were put on earth expressly to provide David Mamet with his ideal actor.

By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño (2000)

Marvelous. A playful and morbid treatise on how political, religious, and literary institutions corrupt and compromise the individual. The passages where the protagonist is summoned to lead Pinochet and his generals in a seminar on Marxism are sublime.

This is my second Bolaño. I'm starting with the early small ones before getting to the later big ones everyone professes to love. So far I'm delighted; he reminds me by turns of many of my favorites like Sebald and Bernhard, but is utterly distinctive.

City Island, Raymond De Felitta (2009)

"Quirky" "indie" comedies are usually so tiresome, but thanks to some brisk writing and energetic performances, this was really pretty charming!

A Prophet, Jacques Audiard (2009)

Oh, I don't think so. First, in terms of style, everything annoying about contemporary French cinema is in full effect. Turgid symbolism, gratuitous passages of stylized shooting, plink plonk dramatique piano music and vapid ironic pop music . . . ugh. Audiard seems determined that the very celluloid should emote constantly. Second, what exactly is the story here? We French used to have these bad guys, the Corsicans. They were nasty and violent but at least they spoke something close to French, and they looked French, and acted French, and went to the same churches as the French. Now look what's displaced them: Arabs. Dirty stinking double-crossing Arabs. The Corsicans took them in and showed them the ropes, and the Arabs turned around and hung their benefactors with same. Méfiez-vous, peuple de France! The Arabs are learning to read, and the next thing you know they'll be driving BMW's! Double ugh. This movie's prophetic all right, and the prophesy is racism and paranoia.

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.

Ketchup

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

The Baader Meinhof Complex, Uli Edel (2008)

Vague revolutionary sentiment in late 60's America begat the bloody praxis of the Weather Underground in the early 70's; similar sentiments in the FRG in the late 60's begat the Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader Meinhof gang. (Are there even any old pinkos still breathing and capable of a withering critique of that gross oversimplification right there? I had a geriatric Trotskyist neighbor in Madison fifteen years ago who could have spent an entire pot of bad coffee parsing the ideological differences between John Jacobs and Ulrike Meinhof, but he's got to have gone to his atheist reward by now.) These were the days when students not only protested, but also wrote long tortured Gramsci-inspired treatises and read them to each other to get fired up to rob banks and blow up police stations. The RAF lasted a lot longer than the Weathermen did, harrying German officialdom throughout the 70's and into the 80's. Anyway, here's a movie about them, and it's really good. It's long -- 150 minutes -- which is a good thing, because it needs room to do both the exciting part, where the beautiful young people fuck and drink and howl against injustice, and the enervating part, where everyone goes gray and mad and to jail. I don't know enough of the history to say how strictly educational the movie is, in a documentary sense, but it definitely conveys a strong and believable sense of the zeitgeist.

GasLand, Josh Fox (2010)

So we've all heard that one solution to the energy and global warming crises is to turn from petroleum to alternative fuels, like for instance natural gas. Natural gas! It's awesome! It's clean and cheap and plentiful and domestic! Well, guess what. Big corporations are drilling down into shale formations all over the country, and blasting toxic fluid down the holes to free up the gas so they can suck it out for you. This is causing widespread pollution of groundwater reservoirs, to such an extent that this guy in this picture here is able to set his tap water on fire.

You can find out all about it here. http://gaslandthemovie.com/

It's a terrible situation but, the formalist must take note, a very fine movie. Fox is personally involved in the problem -- a gas company wants to drill on his own property in upstate New York -- and acts not as a narrator of the film but as a character in it, to great effect. An extremely engaging and effective piece of agitprop.

Crude, Joe Berlinger (2009)

One of those movies that's interesting for reasons other than the ones the filmmakers wanted it to be interesting for. From 1964 to 1974, Texaco (now owned by Chevron) drilled for oil in Ecuador's rain forest. After 1974, Ecuador's state-owned oil development company continued to drill. Now the area is an environmental catastrophe. Local peoples filed a class action suit against Chevron in 1993, and now, 17 years later, the court case creeps imperceptibly forward. That's the story, and it's an important one. The film's another matter. It reminds me of a homely kid desperate to be popular as it lurches from one overweening attempt at pathos after another. It is relentlessly spotty when it comes to facts, and relentlessly bombastic when it comes to Poignant Tableaux. It looks to me like the filmmakers, in their understandable eagerness to get this story told and to move viewers to sympathy, if not action, have sacrificed reportage for spectacle. It is, as I say, understandable, but it's also unfortunate.