* It’s like The Matrix, but without guns or robots; Austenland also brings to mind this.
Category Archives: movies
Thoughts on the movie “In a World. . .”
* It’s surprisingly fun! I wouldn’t’ve guessed that a movie about voice-over artists would be compelling but this one is; half the reviews start this way and they’re right. Friends kept mentioning In a World. . . and I’m glad they did.
* In modern dating among young unattached people aggression wins: when in doubt err on the side of greater aggression. Few movies seem to emphasize this. Like Love, Actually, In a World over-relies on adolescent angst about making a move.
* I don’t see uptalk / babytalk as being as prevalent as it is in the movie. Perhaps I hang out with the wrong crowd?
* Voice itself, regardless of content, conveys tremendous information that I don’t think most people consciously consider.
* The micro-world or niche is an underrated setting for movies and sometimes books.
* Does celebrity affect / infect every field now? Does every field have groupies? Roosh may right that the future of game is fame, however niche.
* In a World. . . is unusually willing to be awkward without resolution. This is not a criticism.
Love, Actually: Make a move already
After reading a spate of essays about Love, Actually (“Loathe, Actually,” “The Six Cinematic Crimes of ‘Love Actually,’” “Love Actually Is the Least Romantic Film of All Time“) I watched the movie and realized that none of the writers nail what started bothering me halfway through. It isn’t the gender politics of the movie, which are primarily disliked for the usual reason: people in reality behave differently than writers of essays and feminists would like them to behave. It’s because the characters in Love Actually are stuck at age 15.
The movie’s plot is essentially a series of attraction deferments: someone feels attraction, often quite strongly, and then doesn’t act on it. Instead of going up and saying, “Let’s get a drink later” or “let’s see a movie,” they blush and stutter and wonder. One character says, “takes me ages to get the courage up” to even talk to the other one. That’s a real problem I had when I was, say, 15, and would respond to attraction by hiding.
Why do teenagers do this? They’re stuck in a nasty social situation: high school. They’re inexperienced idiots. That described me fairly well.* There also might be good evolutionary reasons to avoid making romantic moves unlikely to be requited: for most of human history, humans lived in relatively small bands, and making a romantic move was probably a potentially dangerous and life-changing experience. Today, it’s relatively minor, and if one person says no you just move on to the next one. Humiliation is minor and generally forgotten by everyone except the person turned down. We live in a world so different than our ancestral environment that it’s hard to remember how poorly adapted we are to modern life.
The above paragraph might be wrong—it’s a just-so story, and I’m not even sure how to test these ideas—but it is plausible. Still, most of us realize what’s effective in modern life and start doing that as we get older, rather than persisting in endless crushes. In many domains a “no” is actually better than not knowing, or a “maybe,” since a “no” means that you can go on to find someone who says “yes.” Getting to “no” has value in itself.
In life most of us realize that missed opportunities just sort of suck—so when they arise, you seize them. Instead, the characters in Love, Actually pointlessly defer them; in real life, the opposing party often comes up with a boyfriend or girlfriend in the interim. But in movie-land, it all works out, and everyone gets laid. The fellow with the hot Portuguese flatmate should’ve tried speaking the language of love while he was there.
One definition of stupidity is the failure to learn from experience. But the experiences of the characters in the movie are so limited that there isn’t enough screen time for the ups and downs more typical of romantic comedies. All the characters, regardless of their age, also seem to have very little life experiences. The 50-year-olds are mentally 16, but with wrinkles. They lack the forthrightness uncommon in teens but fairly common by… let me make up a number and say 24.
Love Actually isn’t a terrible movie—I laughed, sometimes, and frequently when the exasperated, washed-up singer had to do his hilarious bit—but I can’t see wanting to watch it again. It was also British, which meant there were more nude scenes than an equivalent American movie would have, and those are always welcome. I also get that its characters are, if not caricatures, then at least “broadly drawn.”
* Some people would argue that it still does describe me.
Thoughts on the movie Gravity
* Gravity is the best movie I’ve seen in a long time and possibly the first to really make 3-D live up to its possibilities (Avatar, discussed at the link, was okay but overrated).
* Most movies described as “thrillers” use the term to connote a serial killer or supernatural beast or government conspiracy as the generator of primal fear of death, and yet to me they aren’t all that thrilling. Most feel silly and artificial. By contrast Gravity is one of the tensest, thrilling movies I’ve seen.
* The movie feels big—sublime, even.
* Few narrative works, whether movies or novels or TV shows, are genuinely about man versus nature.
* Few contemporary narrative works glorify astronauts or scientists (Contagion is an exception) or make people want to be one. Gravity is an exception. I’m amazed that it got made at all.
* One underlying message may say that we have to get off this planet or die on it or die trying. Rebirth is a potent motif in narrative art, as observed by Campbell, Frazer, and others; one could even argue that birth is a dominant motif in evolutionary biology. In Gravity it is enable by technology.
Thoughts on the movie Closed Circuit
* The movie, though still ridiculous, is less ridiculous than it would’ve been even a year or two ago. Yet it is less stupid than most movies of its type while still living up to its “thriller” designation. Most movies feel like a waste of time and this one did not.
* The language abuses Orwell described in 1946 are still alive in 2013, although in movies it’s easy to let those moments slide right by.
* I confirmed that I was not the only person disappointed by the lack of a sex scene, which was set up and then sadly unconsummated.
* Many if not most of us have secrets, and I wonder what the world will look like when the secrets of the watchers get revealed.
Thoughts on the movie Lovelace
* Much—though not all—of the material in Lovelace probably merits comedy, not drama. The scenes in which the real stars mimics porn stars with little talent for acting were funny.
* Linda has very little agency in the movie; her only real choices are to get with Chuck Traynor in the first place and, finally, to leave him. This doesn’t make her a satisfying protagonist, since she is almost always acted upon and rarely acts herself.
A happy porn star might not make for much of a movie, since such a movie would lack dramatic tension. A TV show like Entourage could provide a template on how to instill tension among a person or group that already has pretty much everything. But the dramatic tension in Lovelace feels forced. The director and screenwriter did a lot here with a little material.
* Chuck Traynor as presented is like a Nazgûl: strongest in the dark, away from other people.
* People who make bad decisions often suffer for them and suffer out of proportion of the seeming importance decision at the time. Linda’s parents appear to understand the world better than Linda does, although they are not depicted sympathetically. They know something easily forgotten today: that life is often hard and trade-offs are real.
* As noted above the movie does a lot with a small amount of material, but a small amount of material is still fundamental to the movie.
* Whenever you’re doing something socially castigated, claim it’s art, but post-Pop Art it’s also useful to remember the inverse isn’t necessarily true: just because it’s socially castigated doesn’t mean it’s art.
Thoughts on the movie Spring Breakers
* “Spring break forever” is a refrain in the movie, but spring break forever is actually hell. You need “normal” life to contextualize the party and make it special. Not every day can be a festival if a “festival” is to have any meaning. Tucker Max says in Hilarity Ensures that he “worked in Cancun, Mexico for six full weeks during my second year at Duke Law School” and by the end he says “Cancun beat me, like it eventually beats everyone.”
* A lot of the people in the theater were laughing, and so was I, because the absurdity of the movie. Is this a New York cynicism thing? Would the theater have been laughing in Oklahoma or Kansas? It was hard to tell if most of the movie was supposed to be funny.
* I don’t grok in fullness the spring break ideal, because to the extent I want to drink, take drugs, and hook up with random girls, I can do so at home, and it’s triply easy in college. That being said, I understand intellectually that for many people the distance and otherness of spring break lets them decide that “normal” rules don’t apply. . . but if they don’t apply there, why not just decide they don’t apply at home, either? Is this a lack of imagination?
* Young, attractive women very rarely commit armed robberies, as they do at the beginning of Spring Breakers to fund the trip, because armed robberies are not worth doing: from what I’ve read, the going rate for reasonably young, attractive hookers is about $200 – $250 per hour. The characters could have made more money with way less risk with a couple hours and Craigslist. But the armed robbery functions as a symbolic stepping outside of normal boundaries for them. Still, selling sex makes more sense than robbing banks.
* The movie conveys altered states effectively: the jump cuts, the voiceovers, the visual and audio not matching: for the first 50 or so minutes it’s mesmerizing, like some drugs.
* It’s axiomatic that people who do stupid, dangerous things often die. It’s possible to do things that are stupid but not dangerous, like most reality TV, or things that are dangerous but not stupid, like be an astronaut or test pilot, but the convergence of those two is uniquely irritating.
* Spring Breakers is less fun than Magic Mike but shares many points; both movies are set in Florida, and what does that say about the state?
* Related to point #3, spring break as a concept, like Vegas, fascinates me, especially from a woman’s perspective. If you’re a woman, and especially a reasonably attractive one, it isn’t hard to go out and get laid. So why bother pretending that spring break (or Vegas) is fundamentally different than any other part of your life? Some psychological / anthropological mechanism is at work here.
* The reviews that make it sound interesting are exaggerating the movie’s content; if you want porn, go watch porn, and if you want a story, watch a better movie (it’s not impossible to reconcile nudity and story—HBO does it constantly, and well, but too often movies sunder the two, which is strange given how much our early lives are devoted to stories about nudity or seeking it). Also, Tyler Cowen’s characterization is interesting, and I agree about the vitality, at least in the movie’s first half.
* Leaping from the last point, movies in general are in an interesting spot: in an age of Internet porn, there’s no particular reason other than history and path dependence for them to avoid explicit sexuality, but, on the other hand, in an age of Internet porn, showing T&A isn’t sufficient to make a movie interesting.
* I was ready to leave with about twenty minutes left, and offered to go, but she said, “Don’t you want to know what happens?” and I said, “No. Some of them are going to die, but who cares?” In the context of the movie, “Who cares?” is an important, unasked question.
Thoughts on the movie Rust and Bone
* It’s hard to watch movies about stupid, careless people making stupid, careless choices. When the obvious solution to your problem is “stop doing stupid things,” a person’s predicaments don’t generate much sympathy. It’s painful to watch unforced errors in real life and it might be even more so in fiction. The protagonist’s child is the only real victim. It’s also hard to sympathize with characters who hit children or animals.
* Rust and Bone is like watching a French version of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960 – 2010. The language is different, as is the attitude towards work and employer relations (see below), but the basic social and individual pathology is similar and cross-cultural. Dysfunction has consequences.
* This is tangential to the movie, but bad romantic choices tend to have more severe repercussions for women than for men, and for children most of all; the fantasy of this movie, however, happens when transparently bad romantic and career choices work out in a fairy-tale fashion. In the real world, sometimes the Fairy Godmother Department is on the clock, but usually the Practical Joke Department runs things. Women who try to corral uninterested players—like men who try to “save” crazy, destructive women—very seldom succeed, yet this is the default template for romance novels.
* France’s notoriously rigid labor markets are practically a character; one sub-plot involves employers sneaking cameras into retail stores to “catch” employees who aren’t hewing to the letter of laws or contracts. This makes no sense: if the employee is unhappy, they should leave; if the employer is unhappy, they should fire the employee. In France the labor market apparently doesn’t function like this, so employers resort to dirty tricks that shouldn’t be necessary in the first place.
In another scene, a truck driver moves from working to a company to being independent to working for a company again, and he describes himself as “exploited,” or joining the ranks of the exploited. He may have been joking (which would mean that I missed the subtext), but if he wasn’t, he has a foreign attitude toward employment. A lot of people today would be happy to be “exploited” via a job. Villainous managers are described as wearing “three-piece suits.”
* Another character refers to employers and employees as being on two “sides,” which is the exact opposite of the mentality startups and tech companies inculcate. Such rhetoric seems outdated, a relic of Marxism or industrial unions. Is it common in France or an artifact of this movie? If you think you can run a business better than your employer does, start your own firm (assuming you’re in a market where entrance is possible; in, say, telecoms, it isn’t).
* To the protagonists, the most important parts of life appear to be winning in zero-sum street fights and looking hot in clubs. Note that I’m not necessarily opposed to either, in isolation. No one in Rust and Bone has any ideas.
* That said, the movie was compelling, though I don’t think I’d recommend it for most people. I was rarely bored but often exasperated.
* Rust and Bone itself wasn’t stupid, although its characters often were. It was reminiscent of high-brow reality TV, but it didn’t resemble most other movies. The sex scenes were done well and arguably too brief, especially in a French movie. Until the last five minutes, Rust and Bone shares some spiritual values with Michel Houellebecq’s work.
Thoughts on the TV show “Revolution”
I watched the first two episodes and like the premise. But it’s too poorly acted and plotted / silly, though the best line definitely goes to the nerdy, bearded guy who says that the blackout “totally cornholed the laws of nature.” The world itself doesn’t make enough sense; they should read Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories,” Umberto Eco, and SF / fantasy writers on the subject of creating a world.
Everyone in the show is too well-coiffed and scrubbed; people underestimate just how dirty life was before consistent running water and good plumbing. In agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies, virtually all healthy post-pubescent women are / would be continuously pregnant or breastfeeding. It’s also unlikely that enough food could be grown to support large, standing armies, like the one led by the villain with the silver pistol. Very few women would be effective in hand-to-hand or sword combat against men because of the size/strength differential. Notice how in a show and book like Game of Thrones, very few women engage in direct fighting (with the exception of Brienne of Tarth, who is uncommonly strong). Men are larger, heavier, and generally more muscular than women; the average male has about twice the overall strength of the average female. None of these issues on their own are fatal, but taken together they destroy the show’s realism.
On a technical level, a lot of the music is schlocky and sounds like TV music; good TV music shouldn’t sound that way. The actress who plays Charlie is extraordinarily bad, or she’s been thrust into a situation where she’s doing the best she can with the material she’s got.
Game of Thrones and the tedium of Season 2’s war episode, “Blackwater”
Scott Meslow writes that “In ‘Game of Thrones,’ War Changes Everyone: The stunning, episode-long Battle of Blackwater* leaves no character untouched,” and while he might be correct, the episode, like its predecessor, is surprisingly tedious. Meslow thinks that “it’s clear that each character has been forced, in the heat of battle, to confront who they really are,” but I’m not so convinced. Last night, before I read his piece, I sent an e-mail to a friend who wanted a copy; although the e-mail was hyperbolic—the episode wasn’t actually “bloody terrible,” just bloody and dull—the substance stands:
Episode 9 of “Game of Thrones” was bloody terrible. The show has many advantages over the book: most notably, the characters’ externality prevents some of Martin’s most insipid, obvious writing. The major disadvantage, however, comes in the form of large-scale battles, which are too expensive to shoot properly and not all that dramatically interesting. One can only watch so many extras hacking one another with swords (the number of unclothed lovelies one can enjoy, however, are infinite) before the murder is tiresome. A whole episode of battle preparations that could have been better presented with extra footage from Braveheart: alas.
Meslow says that “Due partially to plot structure and partially to budgetary restraints, Game of Thrones has spent very little time in the battlefield.” There’s a very good reason: most of Game of Thrones looks brilliant and subtle. They don’t show budget constraints. The battle scenes do. They had many obvious crosscuts between things that weren’t happening in the same time and place. The show’s financiers obviously didn’t have the cash for many extras or the computer-generated graphics that could replace them.
“Blackwater” reminded me of this season’s Daenerys scenes, which in turn felt like dumb Syfy channel shows—all bad actors spouting silly names and pointless gibberish. The many subtler, cleverer moments were lost, with the exception of Cersei’s tutelage of Sansa in the ways of female empowerment. (For more along those lines, try Belle de Jour’s Secret Diary of a Call Girl.)
I read through book 3 of the novels before the spiraling, increasingly silly plots lost me. The reviews of book 4 are not charitable, the plot summaries of book 5 leave me rolling my eyes. When sprawling, epic fantasy is too sprawling, it overruns the optimal exploration space for its primary characters and their fundamental dilemmas. At that point, such fantasy series merely become tedious. In Game of Thrones, it appears that, sooner or later, “White Walkers” are going to invade the south and Daenerys is going to arrive in Westeros with dragons. The White Walkers are conveniently vulnerable to fire. Dragons breathe fire. The various contenders will have to stop struggling with one another long enough to confront an external existential threat, sort of like how India and Pakistan have to realize that nuclear holocaust is not an optimal way to resolve the narcissism of minor differences. Delaying the confrontation in Westeros has its pleasures. Delay the confrontation too long, however, and boredom sets in. I’ll probably read or skim the last book, if it comes out before, say, the end of the decade.
The TV show, I have to assume, will eventually burn itself out through incoherent plot threads, much like the books.
* The allusion to Academi, the company formerly known as Xe, which was formerly known Blackwater, the mercenary company famously described in Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, is deft. Apparently the publicity was bad enough to encourage multiple name changes. I recommend that they next re-brand as Altria. Or perhaps Cayce Pollard should be hired as a consultant?
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