“Get On Up”

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Fabrizio del Wrongo

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

Get On Up New Poster

“Get On Up,” the recent biopic about funk legend James Brown, tries to break all the rules. In this sense it’s a bit like Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There,” which treated the life of Bob Dylan as a medley of styles, attitudes, and costumes. Like “I’m Not There,” “Get On Up,” doesn’t have a clean narrative through-line, but it’s free of that graduate-thesis tone — that brittleness — that can make sitting through a Haynes movie feel like being in school. Director Tate Taylor and writers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth are out to nail Brown as an idea. Their movie is a sort of essay on the artist as a prick and egomaniac — one whose talent and drive were such that the world couldn’t help but slip into his groove.

I suppose it’s trite to describe the movie’s rhythms in musical terms, but that’s what I think Taylor and editor Michael McCusker are going for: The tempo is offbeat, and the manner in which the cutting slides us into and out of different time periods can feel a bit like syncopation. That’s not to say the approach is always successful: there are moments when the picture’s cleverness is apparent more in concept than in execution. But even at these moments I was willing to go with it, perhaps because I’ve seen enough biopics to be wary (and weary) of their conventions. The standard  elements of the genre are present in “Get On Up,” but they’ve been filliped, curlicued, truncated. We see that Brown gets involved in drugs, womanizes, and beats his wife — yet we’re denied the narrative effects we expect to flow from the introduction of these elements. At one point we see that Brown’s son has contracted impetigo, but it’s never followed up on; it’s not even explained. Does it need to be? We understand that Brown is an unsatisfactory father. And when the boy later dies in a car crash, our minds fill in the pieces that are missing from the story. That disease, introduced in so unexpected a manner, stays with you in a way a standard scene of neglect would not.

Many have complained about the unconventionality of the movie’s structure. For these folks the narrative beats of the biopic are like the Stations of the Cross: their fulfillment is an end in itself. They want to see the scene in which Brown suffers for doing drugs, in which the battered wife has her say, in which someone chastises JB for mismanaging his money or not being there for his kids. They want these scenes not because they bring them closer to the subject, but because they involve them in a ritualized drama that allows them to feel that the subject has been brought closer to them. Taylor and the Butterworths have, for the most part, dispensed with all that. Instead they’ve given us a movie that keys us into the various facets of ambition and talent — many of them thorny, even unpleasant — and asks us to reckon with them. The points the picture makes are disbursed; they aren’t organized in a linear, one-thing-follows-another fashion. It might help to view “Get On Up” as a scattergraph rather than as a biography. In some ways it’s closer to “Tyson” than it is to “Ray.”

The movie does overdo a couple of ideas. I grew tired of the callbacks to the actor who plays the juvenile Brown; they’re inserted into the picture whenever the filmmakers want us to remember the singer’s roots as a pauper and an orphan. There’s a sort of desperation in this, a sense that Taylor is worried you’ll fall out of sympathy with his subject. It’s hard to blame him: he is, after all, making a commercial movie. Yet it’s deadening because it contradicts the fast-and-loose bravado of the surrounding material. I had similar feelings about some of the scenes between Brown and his friend and bandmate Bobby Byrd. Byrd, who is played by the beatific Nelsan Ellis, is saddled with the Joseph Cotten role from “Citizen Kane,” and his nobility gradually becomes a bore. Fortunately, the character is redeemed somewhat by the wonderful last sequence, which has Brown plaintively serenade his wayward friend with a moving a capella version of “Try Me.” It’s one of the more affecting evocations of male friendship in recent movies.

It makes sense that Brown would make peace through song: The movie’s theme, expressed through its style as well as in words by a producer character while attempting to describe the appeal of Brown’s grunts and squeals, is that surface details are capable of conveying a deeper resonance, a fuller meaning. And the timbre of Brown’s voice in that sequence says all that’s worth saying about his feelings for Byrd. What is the meaning of James Brown? I think it’s to the movie’s credit that it doesn’t present you with one — you have to glean it from the details. It’s in the keyed-up dazzle of the editing and the sizzle of DP Stephen Goldblatt’s period images, many of which have the closeness and heat of vintage concert photographs. It’s in the screenplay’s pugnacious refusal to apologize, explain, or make excuses. And it’s in the sinewy performance of Chadwick Boseman, who portrays Brown as a man challenging the world to keep pace with his talent.

I didn’t love Boseman’s performance as much as many others did. There are moments when you can see him trying to summon Brown’s gnomic brand of braggadocio and not quite succeeding. There are even moments when I thought I detected terror in his eyes as, probably, he delved deep for something and then realized he hadn’t quite found the right vein. This usually happens when the screenplay has him address the camera directly — a problematic device, though it pays off in a couple of instances. Still: Was there a tougher role in movies in 2014? Playing James Brown while avoiding caricature is no mean feat. And in a physical sense at least Boseman is all one could hope for. He maps out in sweat and persistence an image that does justice to the hardest working man in show business.

Posted in Movies, Music, Performers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Art Du Jour

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

slayride

A pulp cover by Victor Kalin. More here and here.

Click on the image to enlarge.

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Depth of Field in “Kiss Me Deadly”

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

kmdcover

A while back I watched KISS ME DEADLY and was struck by the excellent composition by director Robert Aldrich and cameraman Ernest Lazlo, in particular the way they were able to draw your eye through the frame. Check out some of these examples.

Posted in Art, Movies | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

A Wide and Spacious Field

Posted on February 8, 2015 by Fabrizio del Wrongo

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

don-quixote-153

The canon and his servants were surprised anew when they heard Don Quixote’s strange story, and when it was finished he said, “To tell the truth, senor curate, I for my part consider what they call books of chivalry to be mischievous to the State; and though, led by idle and false taste, I have read the beginnings of almost all that have been printed, I never could manage to read any one of them from beginning to end; for it seems to me they are all more or less the same thing; and one has nothing more in it than another; this no more than that. And in my opinion this sort of writing and composition is of the same species as the fables they call the Milesian, nonsensical tales that aim solely at giving amusement and not instruction, exactly the opposite of the apologue fables which amuse and instruct at the same time. And though it may be the chief object of such books to amuse, I do not know how they can succeed, when they are so full of such monstrous nonsense. For the enjoyment the mind feels must come from the beauty and harmony which it perceives or contemplates in the things that the eye or the imagination brings before it; and nothing that has any ugliness or disproportion about it can give any pleasure. What beauty, then, or what proportion of the parts to the whole, or of the whole to the parts, can there be in a book or fable where a lad of sixteen cuts down a giant as tall as a tower and makes two halves of him as if he was an almond cake? And when they want to give us a picture of a battle, after having told us that there are a million of combatants on the side of the enemy, let the hero of the book be opposed to them, and we have perforce to believe, whether we like it or not, that the said knight wins the victory by the single might of his strong arm. And then, what shall we say of the facility with which a born queen or empress will give herself over into the arms of some unknown wandering knight? What mind, that is not wholly barbarous and uncultured, can find pleasure in reading of how a great tower full of knights sails away across the sea like a ship with a fair wind, and will be to-night in Lombardy and to-morrow morning in the land of Prester John of the Indies, or some other that Ptolemy never described nor Marco Polo saw? And if, in answer to this, I am told that the authors of books of the kind write them as fiction, and therefore are not bound to regard niceties of truth, I would reply that fiction is all the better the more it looks like truth, and gives the more pleasure the more probability and possibility there is about it. Plots in fiction should be wedded to the understanding of the reader, and be constructed in such a way that, reconciling impossibilities, smoothing over difficulties, keeping the mind on the alert, they may surprise, interest, divert, and entertain, so that wonder and delight joined may keep pace one with the other; all which he will fail to effect who shuns verisimilitude and truth to nature, wherein lies the perfection of writing. I have never yet seen any book of chivalry that puts together a connected plot complete in all its numbers, so that the middle agrees with the beginning, and the end with the beginning and middle; on the contrary, they construct them with such a multitude of members that it seems as though they meant to produce a chimera or monster rather than a well-proportioned figure. And besides all this they are harsh in their style, incredible in their achievements, licentious in their amours, uncouth in their courtly speeches, prolix in their battles, silly in their arguments, absurd in their travels, and, in short, wanting in everything like intelligent art; for which reason they deserve to be banished from the Christian commonwealth as a worthless breed.”

The curate listened to him attentively and felt that he was a man of sound understanding, and that there was good reason in what he said; so he told him that, being of the same opinion himself, and bearing a grudge to books of chivalry, he had burned all Don Quixote’s, which were many; and gave him an account of the scrutiny he had made of them, and of those he had condemned to the flames and those he had spared, with which the canon was not a little amused, adding that though he had said so much in condemnation of these books, still he found one good thing in them, and that was the opportunity they afforded to a gifted intellect for displaying itself; for they presented a wide and spacious field over which the pen might range freely, describing shipwrecks, tempests, combats, battles, portraying a valiant captain with all the qualifications requisite to make one, showing him sagacious in foreseeing the wiles of the enemy, eloquent in speech to encourage or restrain his soldiers, ripe in counsel, rapid in resolve, as bold in biding his time as in pressing the attack; now picturing some sad tragic incident, now some joyful and unexpected event; here a beauteous lady, virtuous, wise, and modest; there a Christian knight, brave and gentle; here a lawless, barbarous braggart; there a courteous prince, gallant and gracious; setting forth the devotion and loyalty of vassals, the greatness and generosity of nobles. “Or again,” said he, “the author may show himself to be an astronomer, or a skilled cosmographer, or musician, or one versed in affairs of state, and sometimes he will have a chance of coming forward as a magician if he likes. He can set forth the craftiness of Ulysses, the piety of Aeneas, the valour of Achilles, the misfortunes of Hector, the treachery of Sinon, the friendship of Euryalus, the generosity of Alexander, the boldness of Caesar, the clemency and truth of Trajan, the fidelity of Zopyrus, the wisdom of Cato, and in short all the faculties that serve to make an illustrious man perfect, now uniting them in one individual, again distributing them among many; and if this be done with charm of style and ingenious invention, aiming at the truth as much as possible, he will assuredly weave a web of bright and varied threads that, when finished, will display such perfection and beauty that it will attain the worthiest object any writing can seek, which, as I said before, is to give instruction and pleasure combined; for the unrestricted range of these books enables the author to show his powers, epic, lyric, tragic, or comic, and all the moods the sweet and winning arts of poesy and oratory are capable of; for the epic may be written in prose just as well as in verse.”

– Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, as translated by John Ormsby

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Systemic Justice at Harvard Law

Posted on February 8, 2015 by Fenster

Fenster writes:

Harvard Law is starting something new, which it calls a Systemic Justice project.  Here is a write-up from the Boston Globe.

What is it?  That’s emerging.  “None of us really knows what ‘systemic justice’ is—yet you’re all here,” says Professor Jon Hanson to a full class.

The class Hanson teaches

is part of a new Systemic Justice Project at Harvard, led by Hanson and recent law school graduate Jacob Lipton. They’re also leading a course called the Justice Lab, a kind of think tank that will ask students to analyze systemic problems in society and propose legal solutions. Both classes go beyond legal doctrine to show how history, psychology, and economics explain the causes of injustice. A conference in April will bring students and experts together to discuss their findings.

It is a little too soon to evaluate this. Hanson acknowledges no one knows yet what systemic justice means. And a review of the Systemic Justice blog does suggest that the program is in its infancy–there’s not a lot there. That may suggest the impetus is at least partly market-based: as Hanson acknowledges, students are showing up even though they also don’t know exactly what “it” is. What is not to be doubted, though, is that the current generation of students is highly interested in the kinds of things the project is up to: food policy, racial justice, etc., and Harvard seems out to provide “it” to them.

The program tilts left, for sure, but not as dramatically as, say, Critical Justice Theory. As it is, Systemic Justice feels middle-class, a kind of Critical Justice Lite, nodding toward systems of power but less willing to use the CJT’s hard left confrontational lingo of race, class and gender oppression. Harvard students will like it!

So it will probably be popular.  Is it a good idea?

That depends on direction.  It is completely true, as advocates argue, that the law is inherently political.  But what of it?  Even if it is political, there are reasons society has seen fit to emphasize its instrumental qualities in the practice of it.  It’s kind of like the Separation of Powers doctrine.  Human nature wants to fuse executive, political and judging instincts all the time, and human nature ensures that a lot of that fusing is inevitable.  But that’s why we have the doctrine in the first place: to remind us to keep some sort of boundaries in place.  Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, and it is up to us to make for the good fences that make for good neighbors.

So too with the practice of law.  We need the illusion that law is instrumental.  Otherwise people–including attorneys!–would be too prone to conclude that law x has no weight due to the injustice and bias present at its creation.

Does that mean no one should question the law and that all must be blind to its political character?  Of course not.  The intersection of politics and the law — including the question of power and justice — is an important issue and fair game from an academic point of view.  And in fact courses of study dealing with such things are quite common in departments of political science and schools of public policy.  In fact, a quick perusal of the Harvard Systemic Justice website suggests that the curriculum there would not be out of place in a school of public policy, albeit a school with a distinct left bias.

So if Harvard intends to examine the connections between law and policy the better to inform the many lawyers who will graduate and not practice law per se, more power to ’em.  But beware the morph from a policy emphasis to a taking of sides in a political process.  There, a lawyer has no special claim on the truth by virtue of a legal education.  Stand in line with the rest of us in trying to influence the political process.

The article approvingly quotes the dour pessimist Holmes, who wrote in 1897 that “for the rational study of law the blackletter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics.”  Just so.  But Holmes is speaking of the need on the part of the law to go beyond an expressive function and understand actual effects.  I do not think he meant that lawyers ought to be part of an advanced cadre, one that is happy to hijack the normal political process in the name of some superior version of justice made possible by a legal education.

Posted in Education, Law | 6 Comments

Notes on “The Conquerors”

Posted on February 7, 2015 by Fabrizio del Wrongo

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

conquerors

Howard Estabrook came up with the story for this 1932 RKO production, and it plays a bit like the Estabrook-scripted “Cimmarron” of the previous year, though it’s been divested of the epic trappings that made the earlier picture an award winner. Like most Wellman-directed movies of the era, it’s both ambitious and lean: Few filmmakers are capable of presenting such large chunks of characterization with Wellman’s seat-of-the-pants speed and looseness. The movie seems to wind down and regenerate every ten minutes, yet it’s verve and momentum hold it together — they give it a shape in your mind.

It’s of the look-how-far-we’ve-come genre that was popular with ’30s audiences, a large portion of which had been born in the 19th century and witnessed the advent of movies, the automobile, and the modern city. To these folks recent history must have seemed like a sort of movie, incredible yet real, and seeing their experiences concretized on screen must have been a communal act of affirmation. Pictures of this ilk — “Cimmarron” and Borzage’s “Secrets” are two others — aren’t nostalgic, exactly; they’re more concerned with recording, with getting it all down before it’s forgotten. And they’re too enamored of progress to be romantic about the past.

“Progress” would do as the motto of “The Conquerors.” The family at its center is always moving, both spiritually and physically: the rudimentary plot details their trek from New York to the Midwest, their founding of a banking empire, and their negotiation — not always successful — of historical cataclysms like the First World War. Taken as a whole the story isn’t particularly interesting, and it sounds some banal notes, especially when its characters stoop to delivering speeches about the value of keeping your chin up and sticking to it. But individual vignettes are exciting. Some favorite moments: a gasp-inducing shot of robbers being hanged on a single branch, their twitching legs intercut with the hooves of the horses used to hoist them; a montage of ankles and footwear that traces the maturation of a young woman; and a terrific backwards track showing a crowd — seemingly the whole town — suddenly surging forward like a wave upon recognizing a child’s imperilment. Some of the more interesting sequences, including, presumably, the effects-heavy ones encapsulating the cyclical booms and busts of the American financial markets, are the work of Slavko Vorkapich, the father of the eye-popping Hollywood montage. (Vorkapich is credited with “transitional effects.” The movie is about 30% transitions.)

Considering the wide-ranging nature of the picture, the cast is fairly limited. Comic support players Guy Kibbee and Edna May Oliver register most strongly, and they’re enjoyable even when Wellman allows them to overdo their shticks. I suspect the director enjoyed their verve more than he did star Richard Dix’s stalwart brand of gallantry.

Related

  • “The Conquerors” is available on DVD as part of Warner’s burn-on-demand Archive Collection.
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Movie Still Du Jour

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

gun-crazy

John Dall and Peggy Cummins in Joseph Lewis’s GUN CRAZY (1950).

Click on the image to enlarge.

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Linkage

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Fenster

Fenster writes:

  • I take the bus a lot since I have a weekly commute between New York and Boston.  The train is to be preferred and there’s the whole romance of the rails thing I know.  But dang as I wrote before the bus is efficient and cheap.  Maybe this neglected medium is the future, too, or more closely part of it than the railroad.
  • The first time I heard Diana Krall I fell for her sultry rendition of Garden in the Rain.  Evocative.  Erotic.  Erocative!  Now I dunno.  Her new album Wallflower is a look back to her favorites from the sixties and seventies.  And there are some interesting song choices there (I’m Not in Love, Alone Again Naturally).  But honestly it all kind of runs together.  In fact, here’s a 1’14” promo pastiche medley.  The short mash-up is rather nice . . . and all you really need.
  • The only real difference between me and this guy is that he is severely symptomatic.
  • It’s not enough that the posh have the money.  Now they are effing up the arts, culture and the city.
  • Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series of novels is finally getting some serious film/video treatment.  I am looking forward to this Amazon series.  From the first few minutes it looks like Titus Welliver might make a fine Bosch though for me the part is forever Len Cariou’s given how well Cariou read a number of the books on CD.  It will be interesting to see if the series can avoid the normal boom-bang-boom tripe and give Harry the no-nonsense treatment he deserves.
  • What do these 5 criteria describe?  1. “There must be a distinct class of affective stimuli…” 2. “There should be transduction mechanisms including receptors to change the chemical code of the stimuli to electrical signal…” 3. “There must be neurotransmission of the electrical signal to processing regions of the brain.” 4.  “There must be physiological effects after activation of . . . . cells.” 5. “There should be perceptual independence from other (similar) qualities…”   (tick, tick, tick . . . )  It’s whether something qualifies as a “taste”.  Fat appears to have made the cut.
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Architecture Du Jour

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

moscowbolshoi

Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow.

Click on the image to enlarge.

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Is It Time to Bring Back the Guilty or Shameful Pleasure?

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

guilty-pleasure

Over at BoingBoing Mark Dery suggests that it’s time to get back in touch with our guilt and shame when it comes to certain things:

Guilty pleasures are all about cognitive dissonance. When I say Thomas Harris novels like Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon are one of my guilty pleasures, it’s not because I’m a holdover from a bygone era when People Like Us believed “in some kind of universal taste” or because I’m a closet snob who’s secretly “most comfortable in the elite precincts of high art”; it’s because I’m genuinely ambivalent about Harris. I want to nuance my affection, locate it somewhere on the grayscale spectrum between the black-or-white binaries of love and loathing.

My knee-jerk reaction upon hearing the phrase “guilty pleasure” is to be one of those people who says, “No no, one shouldn’t feel guilt about any pleasure,” but Dery is making me reassess my position because I think contemporary fanboy culture could use a healthy dose of ambivalence and cognitive dissonance.

As Fabrizio has observed in conversations I’ve had with him, and as Kevin Smith also points out in his interview with Bret Easton Ellis, is dispiriting how many fanboys turn art into a proxy for sports or politics. A movie or album is either The Greatest Thing Ever or a Piece of Shit. There’s no in-between — it’s like they’re rooting for a favorite presidential candidate or against a hated rival team. Sure, I get the appeal of loyal tribalism and don’t at all dismiss it, but isn’t one of the great things about art the fact that it defies such easy on-or-off categorization? You’d think so but I come across so many people today for whom nuance just doesn’t compute. Movie critic Matt Zoller Seitz has complained about the same thing. He once tweeted: <<[Banjo twang] “Gather ’round, y’all! I’m a-gonna tell ya a story ’bout a thing people used to know how to read: a ‘mixed review.'”>>

Related

Posted in Books Publishing and Writing, Movies | Tagged , , | 2 Comments