SYRIANA

There's this scene in SYRIANA around the two-thirds mark. Matt Damon's character, a wunderkind energy firm analyst, is riding an elevator with a prince who is heir to an unnamed Arab oil emirate. Damon's character has achieved this unfettered access to the king-to-be through both his plucky resolve and his son's timely electrocution in the prince's pool. I can't remember whether the elevator was going up or down, but the hotel rooms cost $20,000 per night, so wherever they were going was an important place. Suddenly the elevator stops and George Clooney's character gets on. He's a little rumpled and heavily bearded in his CIA operative disguise, but he's still plainly the most charismatic man making movies in Hollywood. Clooney's guy says nothing to Damon's guy, but exchanges a few nondescript phrases with the prince. At that moment, I know. I know exactly what's going to happen next. After another moment or two of the elevator descending or ascending the fifty-story hotel, it will stop again. Then Don Cheadle will get on. He will be wearing an emerald green sequined shirt and will be speaking Mandarin. More seemingly insignificant banter will be exchanged, and by the time the elevator reaches the top or bottom, the prince will have been talked into signing over his oil holdings in exchange for nonexistent soybean fields in Illinois and the heroes will be on their way to a helipad. The CON will be ON.

It's strange. I went to see SYRIANA in the middle of making my way a couple of times through the television version of Bergman's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE. There's no real reason to discuss the two in the same paragraph, but one contrast that occurred to me is too stark not to mention. Bergman's film is a five-hour measurement of the distance between two people and an exercise in creating a complex portrait of two characters and the relationship they couldn't sustain or abandon. In SYRIANA, the only sliver that could pass for character development or detail is the part in which the ambitious lawyer is openly disdainful of his sloppy drunk father in a couple of scenes in the middle of the film, but by the end of the film he has scaled it back to mild resentment.

Perhaps SYRIANA collapses under the weight of its own heft when it decides to separate the various players and assign them various gradations of moral culpability. I suppose that's an arguably necessary device from a conventional storytelling perspective to allow the audience one or two points of entry, but it sets in motion a fairly rote resolution of all those sprawling, interconnected storylines.

For one particular character example, take George Clooney's CIA operative. At the film's beginning, he's a morally ambiguous operator selling missiles to uncertain end-users to further national interests, broadly speaking. I believe, if I understood the labrythine plot correctly, that he was set to assassinate the aforementioned prince. However, he is then provided with a moment of moral clarity which steers him away from the anti-hero path and back onto the straight and narrow role of our moral voice and conscience. His fate is sealed when he meets Christopher Plummer's oil baron character at a diner to confront him. If anything constitutes a beatification in American cinema, it is any moment in which any male lead sticks his finger in any Christopher Plummer character's face and delivers the "Don't fuck with my family" speech. From that instant, he's resolutely the hero, all the more because we're there to watch him fail.

Note, though, that two of the plot points that illustrate Clooney's character's alienation and the ideological inferiority of his opponents are rehashes. Specifically, he discovers that he's being frozen out of the Agency when we see, in real-time, his computer deny him access to information he had just been able to see. Later, while Clooney is on the ground attempting to rescue the prince, we see the high-tech assassination played out from one satellite remove away, in a control room where bureaucrats order missile strikes which show up on computer monitors. I saw two scenes nearly identical to those in a Harrison Ford Jack Ryan movie some years ago. I think it's a safe bet that Tom Clancy and Stephen Gaghan wouldn't write the same position paper on fossil fuels and our national dependence on oil from the Gulf region, but they're using the same narrative language about their character and their government, and that's telling in a way that's hardly flattering to Gaghan's film.

Sure, SYRIANA has the same narrative hallmarks that may have become mainstreamed after Gaghan's own script for TRAFFIC, and the film tries hard to ape the unabashed circa-Watergate political paranoia of films like THE CONVERSATION, THE PARALLAX VIEW and DAY OF THE CONDOR. The problem, though, is that those elements, at least insofar as they are elements of plot and style, have been themselves neutered and mainstreamed into irrelevance. As a result, any outrage or even thoughtful reflection brought about by the film lasts, whether by design or not, only as long as it takes the viewer to get up and walk from the theater out into the parking lot, unlock the car and put the key into the ignition. The film's forgotten by the time the engine is started, because you've got to get home somehow.

If you need CLE credits in March and happpen...

...to be in Pittsburgh on the 23rd, I can vouch for the high-end content of this seminar.

STEELERS: PLEASE WEAR WHITE JERSEYS IN SUPER BOWL

This humble plea (part aesthetic, part irrational, part trite-sports-poetic) is all that I want to say at the present concerning the Steelers' rampaging through the #1, #2 and #3 seeds in the AFC.

Just wear the whites.

THE NEW WORLD

I'm probably going to wait until I've seen THE NEW WORLD a few more times before saying much about it. For now, though, I'm floored by it and can't wait to see it later, someday, in all its various iterations.

FUNNY HA HA

Did FUNNY HA HA play on more than three or four screens, ever? I don't know. 95% or more of the people who will see it over the course of its life as a work of art will do so on a television with a DVD player. After they get past the Wellspring logo and the title screen with the aggressive piano music (a strange choice for a film with no music except for bits of nondescript diegetic music in restaurants and at parties), there's no studio logo or intro. No production company calling card. The movie just starts, after announcing the title, and then later just ends, followed by handwritten credits. Putting aside the fact that the same digital home video technology employed by films with actual budgets is responsible for delivering the film to me, there's something very different happening here. It's as if the film went directly from Andrew Bujalski to my DVD player, with no in-between stops to be vetted or imprimatured or test-audienced.

Yeah, I know. That's willfully naive. Plus, it ignores the couple-years-ago copyright and Wellspring's involvement (aside: finally a transfer even they couldn't mangle). There were stops and starts through the process. People had to be talked into this; it had to be invested in. Sure. But that bit-- the part where you hit play and his movie just comes on, unannounced and unclaimed-- divides the sheep from the goats. The goats will see that transition and think, "What is this? Some low budget thing a guy made in his garage?" The sheep will say, "This is fantastic." And they'll say that even if the movie doesn't strike them as great right away. The confluence of digital distribution, internet niche-creating and digital filmmaking (even if Bujalski's not working with it now) holds the promise of finding new channels of creativity. Bujalski's second feature is available for direct online purchase, and includes a handwritten note of thanks. He's gathered two mentions at slate.com in the past month, though, so he's likely to not stay anonymous much longer among the film-savvy set.

None of the above would matter if the film weren't itself quite effective. It fails conventional QC tests which ask whether a sufficient amount of something happens and whether the central character grows or changes as a result of that something. But who cares about that stuff anyway? I've heard the film referred to once or twice as SLACKER from a young woman's point-of-view, but that just suggest to me that the scarcity of films like this leaves them without convenient points of reference. FUNNY HA HA depicts a few weeks or months in the life of a young woman named Marnie who can't seem to chart a straight course in her love life or her work life. She goes through a couple of jobs which may or may not match her skills and spends time talking to friends (all of whom want to see her fixed up) and going to parties. The actress who plays Marnie was unknown to me, but I think she's one of the most recognizable people I've ever seen in a film. I could try to describe her, but it's really beside the point to do so. Describing her limits her in a way that the film doesn't. She is someone you know.

There are at least two ways in which Marnie's story is like that of the typical lead in a romantic comedy or drama. First, she resolves to improve herself in the unstated hope that different habits and qualities will make her happier. Second, she's in love with someone who wants only to be her friend and friendly with someone who is in love with her. In other words, the most commonplace story elements imaginable.

So I found myself in Hot Topic...

Last weekend we were eating at this hot dog place my dad suggests every time he's in town, and I spotted a college-aged young woman wearing an olive green DAWN OF THE DEAD t-shirt. I'm rendered immobile by booth positioning, so I suggest to Ali that she could make me very happy by finding out where the woman obtained the shirt.

And that's how I found myself pulling into the mall after covering a night meeting last week. I walk into Hot Topic for the first time in my life. I'm still wearing a suit, and if there's an equivalent in this suburban chain ripoff shop to Jack Black's character in HIGH FIDELITY, then he's sure to be making fun of me.

Oh, yeah. There they are. Stacked below the RE-ANIMATOR shirts. They've got the great zombie top-of-skull logo. I've probably wanted a DAWN OF THE DEAD t-shirt for at least twenty years, and these ones are comparatively not bad. I'm not sure exactly why I've retained this infantile desire to make myself identifiable by clothing to things I like, but there you go. Yeah, they've got the right size. I guess I'm ready to go.

For some reason I just keep standing there. Maybe I'd rather not have to pay for it. No, there's something else. Suddenly, I'm just hyperventilating with irony. I'm going to buy a DAWN OF THE DEAD t-shirt at a mall. A shopping mall. What's worse, I'm going to buy it at a store selling fake nonconformity, or at least doing so the best you can while nestled between Victoria's Secret and Mrs. Field's Cookies.

I put the shirt back and walk out of the store.

Hidden Talents

I know nothing about college basketball and find the whole thing too sprawling to follow, and thus I dutifully avoided the annual March Madness pool at my old firm. My new firm, however, runs a NFL picks pool and I just couldn't help myself. And now I have two hundred and fifty reasons to be glad I joined in the fun.

I'm aware it's not nearly as hard as working with point spreads, but I managed to guess 180 out of 256 games right, for a clip of 70.3%, on my way to the title. That's a couple of percentage points better than Gerry Dulac of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who gets paid to pick the games. Oh, wait. So do I.

In my experience, found money lives on the longest when it's put to something specific and singular. Early in my legal career I worked on a particularly contentious estate dispute. When the matter was concluded, the grateful client wanted to give me a gratuity. After the supervisory lawyers concluded it would be ethically permissible for me to accept the gift, I tried to find something that we would otherwise not have bought then. We had moved into our first house about eighteen months prior, and it made perfect sense to spend the money on a new comforter, sheets and matching curtains. I'd often look at those curtains or that comforter and think of that case and that kindness.

And so now I will contemplate my NFL prognostication prowess each time I gaze upon this, this, this, this and this.

Professor Welsh White

I've known for a little while that Professor Welsh White was fighting cancer--my friend George, the law librarian, mentioned it to me a couple of months ago--and so yesterday's news was saddening but not surprising. George's description of Professor White's demeanor during last semester was exactly as his obit writer put it: he was busy making plans for the future and speaking confidently about what things would be like once cancer was behind him.

Professor White taught me three times during law school. The first two times were Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, a couple of first-year staples that were foisted on me, course and instructor, by sectional scheduling. (He has the distinction, I think, of giving me my only non-A first year grades.) More importantly, when given the ability later on to decide where to spend my electives, I signed on to his Evidence class without hesitation. I wanted to spend more time being taught by him.

As an educational experience, the first year of law school by and large lives up to the hype that surrounds it. Or at least it did for me. Then and now, I loved it all. The standardized curriculum--the same everywhere since time immemorial (or at least the last 125 years), those bold red casebooks filled with odd and off-putting monoliths which would only "yield their kernel up slowly and painfully," the suffocating insularity of spending an academic year with the same eighty-five people and the vacillations between thrill and terror, often within the same fifty minutes: all of it. I wouldn't change much, if anything, of it.

Nearly all of my professors that first year were fantastic, but two went out of their way to make us feel unusually human. One opened her house to us on a Friday night, and Professor White encouraged us all to sign up in groups of three for lunch with him at Hemingway's Cafe, across the street from the law school. I think he picked up the check.

I had liked his class quite a bit, but he was even better in a small group. He had started out as an Assistant D.A. when Arlen Specter was Philly's D.A., but he dropped it after a few years to go into teaching. It was clearly a good move for him, as he had a personality that was better suited to academia than to private practice. Among lawyers, that sort of statement might be read reflexively as a criticism, but I couldn't mean it more complimentarily. The most intellectually circumspect and thoughtful lawyers often aren't well-suited to the sort of advocacy that characterizes modern law. Sometimes they have difficulty faking the aggression and certitude that are so essential to projecting confidence, and so at odds with the sort of detached but introspective appreciation for competing viewpoints. Professor White was a first-rate scholar, and I'll never forget how he set me at ease during that lunch. It was comforting to know that he cared enough about how we were doing to give up his lunch hour.

Professor White's Evidence class was an advanced elective, and by that point in law school part-time employment or full-time worrying about employment had turned most of us indifferent or hostile to preparing for class. Rather than making us all dread being caught in our unpreparedness, Professor White resorted to going straight down the rows to get answers to questions, which allowed the unhappy few advance notice to read the cases. On one afternoon early in the semester his queries fell on a particularly loathsome student who responded, too happily, "Pass." Professor White, politely enough, said that he'd give him a pass for that day, but he would be back to him again. The bastard replied, "Well, then I pass for that time, too." We were aghast. Professor White was on the short list of least confrontational law professors on the faculty. He never used his position or his knowledge to intimidate or for self-aggrandizement. Sure, few of us were enthusiastic about keeping up with the reading, but a certain standard of conduct had been breached under any circumstances, and all the worse because it was Professor White.

Needless to say, I was curious to see how the next class would unfold. Would the guy show up? Would Professor White go back to him? The bell rang. Class began. Professor White went right to him and the guy had blinked and read. He answered the questions. Order was restored. Nice guys finish first.

God bless you, Professor.

2006 To-Do List

1. Watch the Pittsburgh Steelers win Super Bowl XL. Whether the broadcast takes place on network television or on my own private in-head network TBA.
2. Mount a campaign via the internet and U.S. mail to browbeat the Mattel Corporation into creating a Kryzstzof Kieslowski version of their popular Scene It DVD board game. Imagine the possibilities: the group of players selects a film clip question. The DVD displays a washed-out shot of Warsaw, then follows up with, "Which Kieslowski film is this clip from?" Cut to the assembled faces of the confused.
3. See/identify 125 different birds.
4. Sit through three theatrical showings of Malick's The New World, preferably on three consecutive nights.
5. Organize a party or event commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the forging of my car and have the Town of McCandless recognize this party or event as an Official Town Party or Event. Dan Laugharn will be contacted about design of a logo.
6. Spend a week in Carolina in June or August.
7. Spend a week in Toronto in September.
8. Spend more than a week in California at some point in the year.
9. Reawaken my Spanish proficiency and transmit that to my daughters.
10. Acquire a record player.