This week I'm taking off, but I'll post again next Friday as usual. In the meantime, may I suggest The Self-Styled Siren, if you haven't already heard of her?
There are lots of good writers out there on a variety of subjects, but so few are actually consistently good or ballsy enough to write a blog in the third person and pull it off. And you actually learn about movies by reading her blog. I could go on, but you should probably just read it.
photo by Nick Jones Everybody under cc
Greg Olear, writing for The Weeklings, makes a good argument that Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, is gay. I'm a sucker for unlikely theories about books and movies, but even more so when they rely on a close reading of the evidence. Also, since Baz Luhrmann's movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby is finally coming out this week, Olear's argument has gotten me thinking about the fundamental differences between the art of film and the art of writing.
Before I get to that, I'll have to convey to you the gist of Olear's argument, especially the way he uses Nick's point of view to make it. A big chunk of Olear's evidence comes from the way Carraway describes each of the other five major characters in the novel. Part of the argument comes from how Nick casts a pretty detached eye on the women, even though they are all supposed to be desirable in their own way. As an example, there is a passage where Nick describes Jordan Baker (a golfer), the woman he gets involved with: "She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet." Olear summarizes it this way: "Other than the word small-breasted — which de-emphasizes the golfer's feminine attributes — this could be a description of a man."
Blockbuster season approaches, and despite some moderately good intentions, I will probably go to many of them this summer. Tom Cruise's Oblivion? Already seen it and already vaguely regret having seen it.
Not all blockbusters are as bad as people make out to be, even if most of them are; it's easy to make fun of the somewhat absurd conceits they use. Although it's tempting to think of Christopher Nolan's Inception as "that movie about dreams," there's enough going on to make the movie worth thinking about.
For starters, the "movies about dreams" characterization misses the point, since the dreams are not what make the film compelling. Inception in its plot and many of its methods is really a classic heist, the genre that inspired Nolan. Cobb, played by a very sleek Leonardo DiCaprio, is leading his team on that job that occurs with surprising frequency in heist films: the one that is supposed to be impossible. The twist is that Cobb's group specializes in dream infiltration, but the obvious philosophical questions — like, is reality actually any more valid than a dream? — are not the best reason to watch the movie.
I caught Upstream Color a couple of weeks ago. It's the latest movie by the writer/director/actor Shane Carruth, whose previous film was Primer, from 2004.
For the first hour or so, Primer is comprehensible: It's about time travel, yes, and it often seems like Carruth is purposely confusing you, yes, but still, you can keep its logic straight, depending on how much mental RAM you have and, of course, depending on how much you actually care. I watched it for the second time over the weekend and found that it wasn't until very near the end of the first hour that things got confusing.
But "confusing" doesn't really do justice to the subsequent disorientation. Primer gets utterly mind-boggling, and quickly, to the point that within 10 minutes you're not even sure the film is logical, but you can't prove it because it's so hard to figure out what's happening.
I avoid talking about current events in writing. It's hard to be original.
But this isn't about being original: This is a necessary thank you. I live 100 feet from the border between Somerville and Cambridge, Mass., and I live about five blocks from Norfolk St., where one or both of the Tsarnaev brothers lived, apparently. In other words, it happened in my backyard.
photo by Ruben Baston under cc
I have a lot to be thankful for, and I don't think of the thanks as being to any vague concept of universal goodwill shining down on us, but to the police officers, FBI agents, firefighters, and the thousands that put their lives in danger. It's easy to forget that the people who perform manhunts and get shot at are not an undifferentiated mass of people in blue uniforms and suits, but thousands of individuals who would like to continue existing on Earth as much as I do, but do jobs that threaten to end that. I try to remember it.
So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
I'm sure a lot of people saw the trailer for Immortals and dismissed it as a sword-and-sandals deal that would be about the joy of spearing your enemy and not much else, but this one is significantly more artistically ambitious than the average Conan movie. I like that Immortals takes risks, even when it results in costumes like this, which I think of as "Edgy Raccoon Mario":
It's easy to take shots at this movie, but actually the willingness to embrace unique visuals pays off in some beautiful moments. The single best part from this perspective is probably the climatic battle between Zeus's cohort of gods and their nemeses, the Titans. (Titans, like all creepy things, stoop a lot for reasons that are unclear.) It begins when Zeus and the other four Olympian gods arrive on earth by dropping in as clouds of gold dust — very heavy gold dust, apparently, because they come in at a fast rate — and they materialize upon hitting the ground. Each landing makes a sound like a metal door being clanged shut, as if they were iron statues dropped to earth, and the camera even shudders a little bit, as if being shaken by the impact. It's a great effect.
I've seen three films by Jean Renoir at this point, and I'd rather not say it, but to tell the truth I don't get why he's revered among directors.
The first two that I saw were the ones he's best known for, Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, and I didn't dislike them so much as I didn't understand why I needed to watch them. I'll use a painfully vague term on the condition that I promise I won't get in the habit: Both movies seemed a bit unfocused to me.
And so it is with this most recent film of his that I've just seen, Boudu Saved From Drowning, from 1932. Boudu is homeless and living in Paris. After losing his dog, he wanders a bit, seeming not particularly to have any emotion about the loss. And then, wandering across a bridge, he walks to the railing and jumps off into the water. With a telescope, a Monsieur Lestingois sees this and rushes from his nearby bookstore to jump in the river and save Boudu. After a kind of CPR that looks suspiciously like forcing the victim to do calisthenics, Lestingois succeeds in reviving the tramp, and now the bourgeois bookseller feels compelled to look after him. Boudu effectively becomes an unwilling member of the household, joining the aging Lestingois, his wife, and their maid — who is also the older man's mistress.
