WARNING: INSIPID WONKTACULAR PENNSYLVANIA POLICY DISCUSSION FOLLOWS
A great thing about my legal experience to date has been the opportunity to work with school districts and educators. Education is something I've been interested in for a while, and it's fascinating to see how the social ideal of an educated populace plays out as political turf at every level. I'd like to do some extended writing about ideas and issues with relevance to education generally and No Child Left Behind specifically. Timeliness, though, compels me to write now (or never) about the fate of Pennsylvania's Act 72. Obviously, anything I say here is mine alone, and not the opinion of my firm or any of our school district clients.
It's not often there's a political issue at the Commonwealth level that's this fascinating as a scrum between divided interests and actual ideas. This one's got it all.
In the early morning hours of an evening last summer a bill introduced on the state legislative floor having nothing to do with either slots casinos or school district funding morphed into one that deals with both. Act 72 has nuances that will be discussed later, but the short version is that it asks school districts to decide whether they want a piece of the slot machine pie to reduce property taxes. If they say no now, they say no forever. If they say yes, an average of $322 annually of property tax relief may fall to each homeowner. The catch, though, is that to opt in, a district has to agree to levy an additional .1% personal income tax/EIT, and the district must agree to submit any future budgetary tax increases exceeding the COLA increase to public referendum. What say ye, Dr. Faustus?
The current standings show that out of 501 total school districts, we've got 318 opting out of the slots money and 96 opting in to the slots money. (That's shorthand, of course. The opt-decision is about a good bit more than just slots money.) I've been projecting the numbers the last few days, and am consistently coming up with 380 to 384 eventual "no" votes. That might be an understatement, though, because I'm assuming a constant stream of no-to-yes, when reality is that some will take Geddy Lee's option and choose not to decide, thereby making a choice (read: no). What I'm wondering is: what's the magic number that makes it politically untenable to cram it down the districts' throats? Will 375 out of 501 declining do it? Would 400, or 80%, do it? Or is there no number that would dissuade a determined man and his army of (one-armed) bandits?
Thus far, 77% of Pennsylvania's school districts have decided to play Moe Green to Ed Rendell's Michael. Stay tuned to see whether by midsummer there's pinkish blood flowing freely from their eyes.
UPDATE: Final tally was 111 districts opting in, 387 opting out. Just shy of 80%.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Sunday, May 22, 2005
L'ENFANT WINS AT CANNES
Oh, and in other news, the film I've been blabbing about, L'Enfant, won the top prize-- the Palme d'Or --at the Cannes Film Festival. That's awesome.
Derivation L. Intestine
I got an e-mail at work from long-time correspondent sylvia.hawkes@talk21.com. The subject is The Whore Lived Like a German. The message is just a link to some article in a German publication. I'm not clicking on it. Everybody in the office received it. It's the latest in a string of enticements coming from the Bavarian Spam Network.
On any given work day, I'll get three or four or ten messages from such innovative constructions as Spoiling H. Dorothy, Malt J. Silliness, Blindfolds K. Grandstander, the gentleman whose name heads this entry or the even more unfortunately-named Cialis Viagra. Just this past Friday, Rigoberto Velasquez asks me "Does your girl like surprises?" Oh, does she ever, Bert.
There might not be any more obvious target of jokes than e-mail spam, but there are also some interesting things worth noting. Lots of people in business and service providing love the way in which e-mail allows for instantaneous, round-the-clock carrying on of the day's work. It's cheap and efficient communication. Advertising firms love that, too. And so whereas telephone cold-calls were never efficient or cheap enough to seriously damage business efficiency, and mass mail solicitations were too expensive, with e-mail the perfect vehicle for the Ad That Never Sleeps has been born.
I love the way in which the spam has evolved into more and more realistic-looking messages. The info tech guys dodge with a program that filters out certain subject line words, the ad guys parry with misspelled words. We've got a guy whose job includes dividing the electronic wheat from the chaff, and still I get these invitations to surprise my girl. I love it. And that there are firms out there whose m.o. is simply devising new and better ways to trick people into opening their messages-- it's amazing and by far my favorite development of the New Economy.
On any given work day, I'll get three or four or ten messages from such innovative constructions as Spoiling H. Dorothy, Malt J. Silliness, Blindfolds K. Grandstander, the gentleman whose name heads this entry or the even more unfortunately-named Cialis Viagra. Just this past Friday, Rigoberto Velasquez asks me "Does your girl like surprises?" Oh, does she ever, Bert.
There might not be any more obvious target of jokes than e-mail spam, but there are also some interesting things worth noting. Lots of people in business and service providing love the way in which e-mail allows for instantaneous, round-the-clock carrying on of the day's work. It's cheap and efficient communication. Advertising firms love that, too. And so whereas telephone cold-calls were never efficient or cheap enough to seriously damage business efficiency, and mass mail solicitations were too expensive, with e-mail the perfect vehicle for the Ad That Never Sleeps has been born.
I love the way in which the spam has evolved into more and more realistic-looking messages. The info tech guys dodge with a program that filters out certain subject line words, the ad guys parry with misspelled words. We've got a guy whose job includes dividing the electronic wheat from the chaff, and still I get these invitations to surprise my girl. I love it. And that there are firms out there whose m.o. is simply devising new and better ways to trick people into opening their messages-- it's amazing and by far my favorite development of the New Economy.
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Inconsistent
Nine posts in four days, then nothing for a week is not how I should do this. The idea was to find a conduit for daily (or mostly-daily) writing, however unstructured. I've not gotten the beats down yet. For the eight or nine of you reading along, apologies for not offering more explosive and timely internet content.
In other news, I'm a repeat offender, and a sentimental one at that. I'll be catching a 12:10 a.m. show of Star Wars Rots. The Luke to my Anakin will be Leah, who just turned eight and has shown an iron subconscious thus far in resisting the stuff of image-induced bad dreams. To allay any justifiable child-welfare concerns one might have with regard to keeping a child of that age out on a skool nite between the hours of midnight and, probably, three o'dark, I want to make clear that I'm designating the hours of seven to eleven-thirty as quiet sleep hours. And I'm sure they'll be spent sleeping, if by "sleeping" you mean looking at her pet turtle and finding excuses to get up and ask me questions.
The approaches and processes of filmmaking are as endlessly fascinating to me as they are divergent. Some guys subject themselves to a torture chamber-style quiet room and endure long sessions of agony and hair-pulling before emerging with a story that requires ghostwriting and last-minute polishing to render it an inconsequential bore. Others...well, others see a girl pushing a stroller and the stuff of life screams out to them. From the Cannes press notes, via Doug Cummings, comes this quote from one of the Dardenne brothers on L'Enfant:
In other news, I'm a repeat offender, and a sentimental one at that. I'll be catching a 12:10 a.m. show of Star Wars Rots. The Luke to my Anakin will be Leah, who just turned eight and has shown an iron subconscious thus far in resisting the stuff of image-induced bad dreams. To allay any justifiable child-welfare concerns one might have with regard to keeping a child of that age out on a skool nite between the hours of midnight and, probably, three o'dark, I want to make clear that I'm designating the hours of seven to eleven-thirty as quiet sleep hours. And I'm sure they'll be spent sleeping, if by "sleeping" you mean looking at her pet turtle and finding excuses to get up and ask me questions.
The approaches and processes of filmmaking are as endlessly fascinating to me as they are divergent. Some guys subject themselves to a torture chamber-style quiet room and endure long sessions of agony and hair-pulling before emerging with a story that requires ghostwriting and last-minute polishing to render it an inconsequential bore. Others...well, others see a girl pushing a stroller and the stuff of life screams out to them. From the Cannes press notes, via Doug Cummings, comes this quote from one of the Dardenne brothers on L'Enfant:
This film probably dates from a day during the shooting of our previous film. We were in Seraing, on Rue du Molinay. In the morning, afternoon and evening, we saw a girl pushing a pram along, with a newborn baby asleep inside it. She didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular – just around and around with the pram. We have often thought back to this girl, her pram, the sleeping child, and the missing character: the child’s father. This absent figure would become important in our story… A love story that is also the story of a father.
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
PRIMER
I watched Primer tonight and generally enjoyed it. I was pretty knocked-out by how great the film looked.
This is one of those occasions where the Big Internet Hype is a decidedly good thing. Pre-DVD and internet, this three-year, $7,000 labor of love would have languished on video store shelves and played in midnight double-features with Aronofsky's Pi.
It's not a perfect film, and maybe not even a great one (though it's one of the best science fiction films of recent years). I'm more in the mood these days to use second viewings of films to bring myself in line with a film's rhythm and language than to unwind ambiguous plot machinations, and what's packed into the last fifteen minutes probably demands repeat viewing. Still, an assured and stylistically fantastic debut.
This is one of those occasions where the Big Internet Hype is a decidedly good thing. Pre-DVD and internet, this three-year, $7,000 labor of love would have languished on video store shelves and played in midnight double-features with Aronofsky's Pi.
It's not a perfect film, and maybe not even a great one (though it's one of the best science fiction films of recent years). I'm more in the mood these days to use second viewings of films to bring myself in line with a film's rhythm and language than to unwind ambiguous plot machinations, and what's packed into the last fifteen minutes probably demands repeat viewing. Still, an assured and stylistically fantastic debut.
STRAW DOGS, for real
Straw Dogs ends with David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman, Sphere) driving a half-witted man home during a foggy night. They're riding in Sumner's convertible, a small car fit for flying along country roads, but still big enough to hold an iron man-trap or a couple of trapped men. Sumner doesn't know it, but the man he's riding, and for whom he risked his and his wife's lives to protect, strangled a girl just a few hours before. Yet, Sumner seems to understand that killing all of the hired men who have been bothering his wife (the full extent of their bothering is also unknown to him) isn't going to restore his marriage, and while he has survived a battle for his life, it's something of a pyrrhic victory.
The American Sumner and his English wife Amy have rented a farm cottage in the English countryside where Amy grew up, and he spends his days studying advanced math and prodding a crew of local laborers to finish the garage they're building for his home. Sumner's a symbol of bookish inactivity, the sort of politically-impotent armchair jockey who can easily administer a verbal punch to the chops of an ingratiating minister, but who couldn't swing a hammer to save his life. He marries a woman who isn't even remotely his intellectual equal. There are vague statements made concerning his decision to leave America (Amy accuses him of being unwilling to "take a stand") and when the hired help talk eagerly about America's race-rioting cities like they're an exotic battle front, Sumner responds like a conscientious objector. He wants to be left alone with his chalkboard, and he wants those idle hired men to finish the damn garage so they can leave him alone. When it becomes clear that they're having a laugh at his and Amy's expense (and really at their cat's expense), he eschews direct confrontation, instead engaging in an elaborate mindgame of playing along with their jovial idleness and their offer to take him hunting with the hope that he can lull them into confession. Ironically, he more than once scolds Amy for "playing games" and, more ironically, he and Amy are the butt of the joke when he goes hunting with the hired help. Puns sadly unintended.
There are references to folklore and types. One of the hired hands is a Ratcatcher, and he wears a clown's nose to play the Fool. The Ratcatcher, like the Honeydripper, is an essential but undesirable character in civilized life, and the film, like the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, plays with the idea that the catcher's skills make him uniquely valuable and dangerous. And despite being the outsider and "Yank," Sumner's got an identifiably British name that ties him to the summoners of the middle ages and the magistrates of later days. But apart from Sumner being led away from home like the children of Hamelin, it's unclear whether these references really ground the film in any fable or story tradition apart from that dark group of films made around 1970 which deal in somewhat broad social types and center around a clash between an outsider and a native culture, e.g., Deliverance, The Wicker Man, Walkabout, The Thing With Two Heads.
As a portrait of humanity, or even merely as an object to move along the plot, Amy's character is frustrating. She regards David's work dismissively. Like a spiteful child, she erases his calculations. She isn't forthright in telling him about her past relationship with one of the hired men. She claims to be repulsed by the way the men leer at her, but she doesn't seem to be telling the truth, and David wonders aloud whether she might not want to start wearing a bra if she doesn't appreciate their attention. Her ambivalence is carried to its absurd end on the day of the hunting trip when she is raped by the man she knew previously but seems to have a change of heart about the whole deal halfway through. As if to punish her for being talked into it, she's then given another rapist, at which point she decides she really does object to the whole business. To say that Amy's character is deeply problematic as a portrayal of then-prevailing female sexuality or autonomy understates the matter. I'm reluctant to give in to that jerking knee, but I don't see much way around it. Help me out, here.
But right after Amy is taken down a few pegs, there's a curious parallel development on the other side of the tracks. The village gathers for a traditional church banquet and variety show. The entire population joins in the reverie, so the shell-shocked and apparently chastened Amy sits in the same room with her rapists. The man who raped her is part of a drunken clan of men with their own daughter and sister. She's a picture of adolescent sexual self-awareness masquerading as innocence. She develops crushes on both the married intellectual Sumner and the town pariah, a half-witted giant dubiously acquitted on a sexual assault charge. Inasmuch as the men of her clan are fiercely violative of Amy's sexual dignity, they're equally rigid in protecting that of their daughter/sister, and when they get word that she has willingly left the church social hall with the sex offender, they become a lawless mob.
The ensuing siege, in which the violated Sumners hole up in their cottage and protect the mute, wounded giant from the mob outside, is an interesting contrast. Is it the struggle of the rule of law against lawlessness, or the struggle of Sumner's calculating passivity against their active bullying? Does Amy want to let the men in to save hers and David's life, or does she just want to let them in, well, herself? And isn't the whole struggle about whether there will be one sexual injustice allowed to stand or whether there will be two?
And so Straw Dogs is about debunking all those high falutin concepts about why men fight and kill and mistreat-- not for honor or pride or the sanctity of property, or at least not property in the real estate sense. The men here fight for the purpose of keeping or gaining exclusive possession over fickle female sexual attention. They may know it or they may not, but it drives them forward and compels them to risk life and limb.
The American Sumner and his English wife Amy have rented a farm cottage in the English countryside where Amy grew up, and he spends his days studying advanced math and prodding a crew of local laborers to finish the garage they're building for his home. Sumner's a symbol of bookish inactivity, the sort of politically-impotent armchair jockey who can easily administer a verbal punch to the chops of an ingratiating minister, but who couldn't swing a hammer to save his life. He marries a woman who isn't even remotely his intellectual equal. There are vague statements made concerning his decision to leave America (Amy accuses him of being unwilling to "take a stand") and when the hired help talk eagerly about America's race-rioting cities like they're an exotic battle front, Sumner responds like a conscientious objector. He wants to be left alone with his chalkboard, and he wants those idle hired men to finish the damn garage so they can leave him alone. When it becomes clear that they're having a laugh at his and Amy's expense (and really at their cat's expense), he eschews direct confrontation, instead engaging in an elaborate mindgame of playing along with their jovial idleness and their offer to take him hunting with the hope that he can lull them into confession. Ironically, he more than once scolds Amy for "playing games" and, more ironically, he and Amy are the butt of the joke when he goes hunting with the hired help. Puns sadly unintended.
There are references to folklore and types. One of the hired hands is a Ratcatcher, and he wears a clown's nose to play the Fool. The Ratcatcher, like the Honeydripper, is an essential but undesirable character in civilized life, and the film, like the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, plays with the idea that the catcher's skills make him uniquely valuable and dangerous. And despite being the outsider and "Yank," Sumner's got an identifiably British name that ties him to the summoners of the middle ages and the magistrates of later days. But apart from Sumner being led away from home like the children of Hamelin, it's unclear whether these references really ground the film in any fable or story tradition apart from that dark group of films made around 1970 which deal in somewhat broad social types and center around a clash between an outsider and a native culture, e.g., Deliverance, The Wicker Man, Walkabout, The Thing With Two Heads.
As a portrait of humanity, or even merely as an object to move along the plot, Amy's character is frustrating. She regards David's work dismissively. Like a spiteful child, she erases his calculations. She isn't forthright in telling him about her past relationship with one of the hired men. She claims to be repulsed by the way the men leer at her, but she doesn't seem to be telling the truth, and David wonders aloud whether she might not want to start wearing a bra if she doesn't appreciate their attention. Her ambivalence is carried to its absurd end on the day of the hunting trip when she is raped by the man she knew previously but seems to have a change of heart about the whole deal halfway through. As if to punish her for being talked into it, she's then given another rapist, at which point she decides she really does object to the whole business. To say that Amy's character is deeply problematic as a portrayal of then-prevailing female sexuality or autonomy understates the matter. I'm reluctant to give in to that jerking knee, but I don't see much way around it. Help me out, here.
But right after Amy is taken down a few pegs, there's a curious parallel development on the other side of the tracks. The village gathers for a traditional church banquet and variety show. The entire population joins in the reverie, so the shell-shocked and apparently chastened Amy sits in the same room with her rapists. The man who raped her is part of a drunken clan of men with their own daughter and sister. She's a picture of adolescent sexual self-awareness masquerading as innocence. She develops crushes on both the married intellectual Sumner and the town pariah, a half-witted giant dubiously acquitted on a sexual assault charge. Inasmuch as the men of her clan are fiercely violative of Amy's sexual dignity, they're equally rigid in protecting that of their daughter/sister, and when they get word that she has willingly left the church social hall with the sex offender, they become a lawless mob.
The ensuing siege, in which the violated Sumners hole up in their cottage and protect the mute, wounded giant from the mob outside, is an interesting contrast. Is it the struggle of the rule of law against lawlessness, or the struggle of Sumner's calculating passivity against their active bullying? Does Amy want to let the men in to save hers and David's life, or does she just want to let them in, well, herself? And isn't the whole struggle about whether there will be one sexual injustice allowed to stand or whether there will be two?
And so Straw Dogs is about debunking all those high falutin concepts about why men fight and kill and mistreat-- not for honor or pride or the sanctity of property, or at least not property in the real estate sense. The men here fight for the purpose of keeping or gaining exclusive possession over fickle female sexual attention. They may know it or they may not, but it drives them forward and compels them to risk life and limb.
Monday, May 9, 2005
Game tape: needed
So, Armenia's national hockey team didn't exactly make the best showing at the recent third tier int'l championships held in Mexico City. Don't take my word for it. Here's the Armenian press account:
The article actually understates the margin of defeat in the Mexico game. It was 48-0, as shown in this game summary. This result beats anything I was able to accomplish on Sega's NHL '95 with the uncontested wrap-around maneuver. You can see that the momentum conclusively turned Mexico's direction when Armenia's Tatul Jamalyan, no doubt frustrated by his team's 31-goal deficit, took his second 10 minute major penalty and received a mandatory game misconduct. It was all but over at that point.
But I suppose there's no shame in losing by thirty-five goals to the vaunted Luxemburg Flying X-Wing Offense. Still, I'm looking for confirmation that the Armenians were equipped with unbroken hockey sticks.
So anyway, before I start trolling ebay with search terms like "Armenia-Mexico hockey," does anyone have a game tape of this contest of wills?
Resounding defeats: Division 3 World Championships ended in Mexico City where Armenia’s national team played against Ireland, Mexico, Luxemburg and South Africa.
Armenia lost all their four matches conceding a total of 131 goals and scoring only 7. They lost 1-33 to South Africa, 3-20 to Ireland, 3-38 to Luxemburg and 0-40 to Mexico.
President of the Ice Hockey Federation of Armenia Karen Khachatryan told ArmeniaNow that the team had a disgraceful tournament in Mexico and added that serious changes are needed to develop this sport in Armenia.
The article actually understates the margin of defeat in the Mexico game. It was 48-0, as shown in this game summary. This result beats anything I was able to accomplish on Sega's NHL '95 with the uncontested wrap-around maneuver. You can see that the momentum conclusively turned Mexico's direction when Armenia's Tatul Jamalyan, no doubt frustrated by his team's 31-goal deficit, took his second 10 minute major penalty and received a mandatory game misconduct. It was all but over at that point.
But I suppose there's no shame in losing by thirty-five goals to the vaunted Luxemburg Flying X-Wing Offense. Still, I'm looking for confirmation that the Armenians were equipped with unbroken hockey sticks.
So anyway, before I start trolling ebay with search terms like "Armenia-Mexico hockey," does anyone have a game tape of this contest of wills?
Sunday, May 8, 2005
FANNY & ALEXANDER
I'm a sucker for well-told (in order) ghost stories, sprawling family dramas and coming-of-age stories, so there were three reasons going in for me to be predisposed to like F&A. I've seen a half-dozen or so Bergman films-- the most famous ones-- and knowing in advance of F&A's somewhat more conventional subject matter, I was curious to see how he would marry his unmistakable emotional intensity (there are no moments of respite in a Bergman film) with the stuff of relative narrative leisure. I think it's effective. Yes, it's clearly the work of an artist who is looking at the end of his career and life, and it bears some popular touches, but it still has Bergman's sensibilities and echoes of themes that run through his other work.
His portrayal of the Ekdahl family-- warm, caring, eccentric, wealthy and artistic-- is a composite of well-drawn characters, the adults moreso than the children (other than Alexander). The matriarch never sleeps. Her three sons are distinctly individual. Gustav Adolph is business-minded but warm-hearted enough that his wife and mother don't object to his using the maidstaff as his personal harem. Carl is an academic of mixed success who loathes himself and his German wife and has borrowed and spent himself near destitution. Oscar is the manager of the local theater, which he has run profitably with the help of his mother's patronage and his actor wife's performances. The characters (with the exception of Alexander and, perhaps, Emilie) don't change significantly over the course of the film. Rather, the dramatic emphasis is directed toward how the diverse members of the family complement each other in dealing with common tragedy.
As always, God and His vicars are not a source of comfort. Elsewhere in Bergman, God is cruelly silent, or a spider in a deluded vision, or an unpersuasive source of temporary comfort. Here, He's a "shit" and merely a prank with a puppet to scare a child. The search for God is never irrelevant, though, and by introducing ghosts and Ishmael's act of firestarting, there's a supernatural element undergirding the lives and events of the characters. We cannot know if God exists in this world, but the spirits of the characters loom larger than life and beyond the grave. As always, whether that brings consolation or terror depends on the spirit.
I've yet to see a clergyman in a Scandinavian film who made the faith look better, and I don't suppose, say, von Trier will be giving me one anytime soon. Edvard the Bishop is in many ways the culmination of Bergman's other pastors, beginning with his own father, but despite the fact that his first appearance telegraphs that he'll be the film's antagonist, there were a few moments when I thought his character displayed a complexity or sensitivity or self-awareness that went far beyond the stock Stern Clergyman character.
The film's extended reference to Hamlet is done effectively and poignantly. Emilie, of course, protests too much when she tells Alexander explicitly that she's not the Queen, nor the Bishop the false King. No, she's not inconstant like Gertrude, but her misjudgment regarding the Bishop's character imperils her and her family.
Still, despite his real pain and cruel mistreatment at the Bishop's hands, there's something about Alexander's predisposition to regard God as indifferent to him that's a bit untoward. There weren't many children in Alexander's day who were living as opulently as he. It's all he knows, though, and I appreciate his warm heart, his loyalty to his mother and sister and his quirky sense of humor, including that streak of Tourette's that brings the scatalogical to his mouth so readily and unexpectedly.
Of course, while the family has been restored in the end, there are still the rumblings of future conflicts, and I appreciate the way in which Bergman resists a singularly happy ending (which we might have got if the film had ended at the christening banquet). Gustav Adolph, while a benevolent and loving father, has some of the same tendencies to control those in his household that Edvard did. And the ghosts will always rattle around, for good and ill.
His portrayal of the Ekdahl family-- warm, caring, eccentric, wealthy and artistic-- is a composite of well-drawn characters, the adults moreso than the children (other than Alexander). The matriarch never sleeps. Her three sons are distinctly individual. Gustav Adolph is business-minded but warm-hearted enough that his wife and mother don't object to his using the maidstaff as his personal harem. Carl is an academic of mixed success who loathes himself and his German wife and has borrowed and spent himself near destitution. Oscar is the manager of the local theater, which he has run profitably with the help of his mother's patronage and his actor wife's performances. The characters (with the exception of Alexander and, perhaps, Emilie) don't change significantly over the course of the film. Rather, the dramatic emphasis is directed toward how the diverse members of the family complement each other in dealing with common tragedy.
As always, God and His vicars are not a source of comfort. Elsewhere in Bergman, God is cruelly silent, or a spider in a deluded vision, or an unpersuasive source of temporary comfort. Here, He's a "shit" and merely a prank with a puppet to scare a child. The search for God is never irrelevant, though, and by introducing ghosts and Ishmael's act of firestarting, there's a supernatural element undergirding the lives and events of the characters. We cannot know if God exists in this world, but the spirits of the characters loom larger than life and beyond the grave. As always, whether that brings consolation or terror depends on the spirit.
I've yet to see a clergyman in a Scandinavian film who made the faith look better, and I don't suppose, say, von Trier will be giving me one anytime soon. Edvard the Bishop is in many ways the culmination of Bergman's other pastors, beginning with his own father, but despite the fact that his first appearance telegraphs that he'll be the film's antagonist, there were a few moments when I thought his character displayed a complexity or sensitivity or self-awareness that went far beyond the stock Stern Clergyman character.
The film's extended reference to Hamlet is done effectively and poignantly. Emilie, of course, protests too much when she tells Alexander explicitly that she's not the Queen, nor the Bishop the false King. No, she's not inconstant like Gertrude, but her misjudgment regarding the Bishop's character imperils her and her family.
Still, despite his real pain and cruel mistreatment at the Bishop's hands, there's something about Alexander's predisposition to regard God as indifferent to him that's a bit untoward. There weren't many children in Alexander's day who were living as opulently as he. It's all he knows, though, and I appreciate his warm heart, his loyalty to his mother and sister and his quirky sense of humor, including that streak of Tourette's that brings the scatalogical to his mouth so readily and unexpectedly.
Of course, while the family has been restored in the end, there are still the rumblings of future conflicts, and I appreciate the way in which Bergman resists a singularly happy ending (which we might have got if the film had ended at the christening banquet). Gustav Adolph, while a benevolent and loving father, has some of the same tendencies to control those in his household that Edvard did. And the ghosts will always rattle around, for good and ill.
Weekend Viewing Notes
THE BIRDS
My (one week shy of) eight year-old really loves the Universal monster movies, but she's been asking for something scarier. She's pleading for The Ring or Night of the Living Dead. I debated between The Birds and Jaws until better judgment prevailed on me and I elected to save Bruce for another time.
Sometimes I wonder whether we overrate Hitchcock's thrillers a bit. It typically comes in the context of asking whether I'd regard his films so highly if they were made today. That's a faulty standard for a couple of reasons. First, they weren't made today, but forty or fifty years ago, when the cinematic language underlying these psychological thrill shows didn't exist. He invented it. I might as well ask whether a biplane would be appreciated in the jet age. What's more, though, they simply aren't making thrillers this rich today. Even a somewhat lesser work like The Birds has so much going on, and what my daughter doesn't get now (and what I didn't get until I was older), is how thoroughly we are putty in Hitchcock's hands. He's so good at misdirection that we scarcely realize how little a movie called The Birds is actually about birds (unless we're talking about lovebirds). How else to account for the ending being wholly satisfying despite the fact that the threat of the birds is neither explained nor dispatched with finality? The brief shot of Mitch's mother comforting Melanie, the former acting uncharacteristically nurturing and the latter uncharacteristically needing to be nurtured, is all the resolution we need. The birds are a MacGuffin.
Of course, the definitive proof that today's thrillers are generally playing in the shallow end comes when you pick up Hitchcock/Truffaut, read the ten or so pages they devote to the film, and see that every image and connection on the screen was deliberately purposeful on Hitchcock's part, and more even than you observed. And most of today's directors of thrillers, given myriads of junket opportunities to give their films subtext and meaning, have trouble filling more than a couple of paragraphs before lapsing into cliche.
If I knew a budding cinephile in his or her mid-teens, I'd buy a couple of months of Netflix and a copy of Hitchcock/Truffaut and just stand back.
UZAK (DISTANT)
What a fantastic meditation on habits. I've been thinking lately about the role habits play in our lives, how they are formed or destroyed and how we choose them or prefer them to meaningful human interaction. Ceylan's been thinking about these topics, too, and he's got this wonderful film to show for it.
Mahmet is a commercial photographer living in a well-kept and pleasantly-decorated apartment in Istanbul. His life is depicted as a routine consisting of ad photographs taken rather mechanically followed by hours spent alone in front of the television, interspersed with wordless sex with a woman and meals eaten alone. His cousin Yusuf has lost his factory job in the country and comes to stay with Mahmet while he looks for work. With some inconvenience and expressed annoyance, Mahmet adjusts his schedule to accomodate Yusuf's presence. He picks up after Yusuf and grumbles at his slovenliness. Both Mahmet and Yusuf smoke (the quintessential symbol of an unbreakable habit), but Mahmet comes to resent Yusuf's smoking and declares his own intention to quit. Ceylan's own apartment was used for Mahmet's place, and in an interview on the DVD, he explains that the character is based on his own person of a few years ago.
As the film progresses, we are dropped hints that Mahmet wasn't always this way. A conversation with his ex-wife tells us that he was once part of a family on the cusp of having children. A conversation with other photographers and samples of his work hanging on his apartment walls tell us that Mahmet once harbored photographic ambitions that exceeded advertisements for a tile factory. It becomes clear that Mahmet's insularity and fussiness are both the cause and effect of his aloneness.
Appropriate to an exploration of the distance between people and the way in which routine can kill the desire to live, the film moves quietly and slowly. It ends with the simple question posed to Mahmet: does he prefer his solitary life and his stand-ins for pleasure, or is there more satisfaction to be found in the company of his slob cousin who can't keep cigarette ashes off the rug? Of course, answering that question ham-fistedly is the stuff of artless movies.
Mahmet sits alone again on a bench, smoking Yusuf's cigarettes and staring at the seaport. The question is answered in the knowing and the asking.
My (one week shy of) eight year-old really loves the Universal monster movies, but she's been asking for something scarier. She's pleading for The Ring or Night of the Living Dead. I debated between The Birds and Jaws until better judgment prevailed on me and I elected to save Bruce for another time.
Sometimes I wonder whether we overrate Hitchcock's thrillers a bit. It typically comes in the context of asking whether I'd regard his films so highly if they were made today. That's a faulty standard for a couple of reasons. First, they weren't made today, but forty or fifty years ago, when the cinematic language underlying these psychological thrill shows didn't exist. He invented it. I might as well ask whether a biplane would be appreciated in the jet age. What's more, though, they simply aren't making thrillers this rich today. Even a somewhat lesser work like The Birds has so much going on, and what my daughter doesn't get now (and what I didn't get until I was older), is how thoroughly we are putty in Hitchcock's hands. He's so good at misdirection that we scarcely realize how little a movie called The Birds is actually about birds (unless we're talking about lovebirds). How else to account for the ending being wholly satisfying despite the fact that the threat of the birds is neither explained nor dispatched with finality? The brief shot of Mitch's mother comforting Melanie, the former acting uncharacteristically nurturing and the latter uncharacteristically needing to be nurtured, is all the resolution we need. The birds are a MacGuffin.
Of course, the definitive proof that today's thrillers are generally playing in the shallow end comes when you pick up Hitchcock/Truffaut, read the ten or so pages they devote to the film, and see that every image and connection on the screen was deliberately purposeful on Hitchcock's part, and more even than you observed. And most of today's directors of thrillers, given myriads of junket opportunities to give their films subtext and meaning, have trouble filling more than a couple of paragraphs before lapsing into cliche.
If I knew a budding cinephile in his or her mid-teens, I'd buy a couple of months of Netflix and a copy of Hitchcock/Truffaut and just stand back.
UZAK (DISTANT)
What a fantastic meditation on habits. I've been thinking lately about the role habits play in our lives, how they are formed or destroyed and how we choose them or prefer them to meaningful human interaction. Ceylan's been thinking about these topics, too, and he's got this wonderful film to show for it.
Mahmet is a commercial photographer living in a well-kept and pleasantly-decorated apartment in Istanbul. His life is depicted as a routine consisting of ad photographs taken rather mechanically followed by hours spent alone in front of the television, interspersed with wordless sex with a woman and meals eaten alone. His cousin Yusuf has lost his factory job in the country and comes to stay with Mahmet while he looks for work. With some inconvenience and expressed annoyance, Mahmet adjusts his schedule to accomodate Yusuf's presence. He picks up after Yusuf and grumbles at his slovenliness. Both Mahmet and Yusuf smoke (the quintessential symbol of an unbreakable habit), but Mahmet comes to resent Yusuf's smoking and declares his own intention to quit. Ceylan's own apartment was used for Mahmet's place, and in an interview on the DVD, he explains that the character is based on his own person of a few years ago.
As the film progresses, we are dropped hints that Mahmet wasn't always this way. A conversation with his ex-wife tells us that he was once part of a family on the cusp of having children. A conversation with other photographers and samples of his work hanging on his apartment walls tell us that Mahmet once harbored photographic ambitions that exceeded advertisements for a tile factory. It becomes clear that Mahmet's insularity and fussiness are both the cause and effect of his aloneness.
Appropriate to an exploration of the distance between people and the way in which routine can kill the desire to live, the film moves quietly and slowly. It ends with the simple question posed to Mahmet: does he prefer his solitary life and his stand-ins for pleasure, or is there more satisfaction to be found in the company of his slob cousin who can't keep cigarette ashes off the rug? Of course, answering that question ham-fistedly is the stuff of artless movies.
Mahmet sits alone again on a bench, smoking Yusuf's cigarettes and staring at the seaport. The question is answered in the knowing and the asking.
THIS SUMMER...the Terror ISN'T on the Field!
After Leah's piano lesson yesterday we drove north up the Fort Duquesne bridge, which curls around the perimeter of PNC Park. The stadium lots were roughly a quarter filled, in keeping with a typical sub-15,000 crowd of victims. But then I caught a split-second glance of the Jumbotron and saw some rock band entertaining the crowd. Sure, Springsteen played at PNC last year, but the glimpse I got told me this wasn't a superstar.
Turns out it was the Armagettin' Ready Tour.
Obvious jokes should be thrown out right away.
"Hey, don't they simulate disasters there 81 times a year?"
That's better.
So, anyway, here's your free script idea for the day, Roland Emmerich. Some bad guys figure the best time to stage their mayhem is during the disaster simulation. Who would expect it? They'd blend right in with the fake bombers. A montage of scenes in which the fake terrorists are amazed at how convincing and adept some of the others are. And then it becomes a game no longer. For One Elite Squad. And One Man.
Where's Powers Boothe these days? He knows his way to Pittsburgh.
And we are, after all, coming up on the tenth anniversary of a film that begs plaintively for a sequel. A film borne out of Karen Baldwin sitting bored in her husband's owner's box, looking out at his hundred million dollar toy skating around and wishing there was some way she could be released from the monotony. What if terrorists took over the hockey arena? And what if we could get Luc Robitaille to curse in French, and get Jean-Claude Van Damme to fight a ninja dressed in the Penguin mascot costume? Something approaching hilarity ensued.
But Darren McCord's training is not yet complete...
Turns out it was the Armagettin' Ready Tour.
Obvious jokes should be thrown out right away.
"Hey, don't they simulate disasters there 81 times a year?"
That's better.
So, anyway, here's your free script idea for the day, Roland Emmerich. Some bad guys figure the best time to stage their mayhem is during the disaster simulation. Who would expect it? They'd blend right in with the fake bombers. A montage of scenes in which the fake terrorists are amazed at how convincing and adept some of the others are. And then it becomes a game no longer. For One Elite Squad. And One Man.
Where's Powers Boothe these days? He knows his way to Pittsburgh.
And we are, after all, coming up on the tenth anniversary of a film that begs plaintively for a sequel. A film borne out of Karen Baldwin sitting bored in her husband's owner's box, looking out at his hundred million dollar toy skating around and wishing there was some way she could be released from the monotony. What if terrorists took over the hockey arena? And what if we could get Luc Robitaille to curse in French, and get Jean-Claude Van Damme to fight a ninja dressed in the Penguin mascot costume? Something approaching hilarity ensued.
But Darren McCord's training is not yet complete...
Some Estimated Times
1/1/2006: The day on which it will be OK to be a Johnny Cash fan again.
1/1/2009: The day on which it will again be poignant for a writer/intellectual to draw deeply from his childhood and/or adolescence spent with comic books.
1/1/2012: The day on which it will again be acceptable for people who are not New England residents, current or former, to be interested in/openly cheer for the Boston Red Sox.
More to follow
1/1/2009: The day on which it will again be poignant for a writer/intellectual to draw deeply from his childhood and/or adolescence spent with comic books.
1/1/2012: The day on which it will again be acceptable for people who are not New England residents, current or former, to be interested in/openly cheer for the Boston Red Sox.
More to follow
Sunday, May 1, 2005
April, 2005 by the numbers
Number of movies watched: 17
Number of Netflix rentals cycled: 13 ($19.07 divided by 13 = $1.46 per rental)
Titles and dates of movies watched:
4/29 Straw Dogs
4/28 Phone
4/25 The Woodsman
4/24 School of Rock
4/22 The Incredibles
4/21 Spanglish
4/17 Before Sunrise
Before Sunset
4/16 Meet Me in St. Louis
4/13 Contempt
Spongebob Squarepants
4/9 Twentynine Palms
4/8 La Strada
Sin City
4/6 The Circle
4/4 Slacker
4/2 Closer
Number of Netflix rentals cycled: 13 ($19.07 divided by 13 = $1.46 per rental)
Titles and dates of movies watched:
4/29 Straw Dogs
4/28 Phone
4/25 The Woodsman
4/24 School of Rock
4/22 The Incredibles
4/21 Spanglish
4/17 Before Sunrise
Before Sunset
4/16 Meet Me in St. Louis
4/13 Contempt
Spongebob Squarepants
4/9 Twentynine Palms
4/8 La Strada
Sin City
4/6 The Circle
4/4 Slacker
4/2 Closer
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