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Blowhard, Esq. writes: Back here, Paleo Retiree wondered if pop culture wasn’t getting a little too coarse. Here’s the latest example: I’ll bet these are just rebranded baby wipes, too. Here’s the press release for the campaign from the advertising … Continue reading
Fenster writes:
You can forget a lot about a film in 35+ years, and I forgot a good deal about Claude Sautet’s Mado, which I saw when it came out in 1976 and only saw again recently.
In fact, I had forgotten most of the plot and even the title, which made it hard to track down when I wanted to see it again from time to time over the years. I remembered a nuanced performance by Michel Piccoli and that the plot revolved around real estate development, the details of which were provided in luxurious detail unusual in film. That was striking.
I lost track of it until IMDB made it easier to identify films. The increased availability of otherwise obscure offerings brought it to my DVD player last week, where I was able to compare notes with my selective and shoddy memory.
The two aspects of the film that I recalled vividly remained striking. Piccoli’s performance is nuanced, and really interesting. And the film portrays aspects of business, finance and real estate development in a lot more detail than is normally the case, where they are typically treated superficially and as the occasion for hot action of one sort or another. Here, the details are afforded real respect.
But real estate development? 1976? Oddly, I suspect I was especially fascinated by that world in 1976. As I wrote at 2Blowhards some time ago:
Generationally speaking, while my dad’s formative years were molded by depression and war, mine were molded by two bookends separated by less than a decade: the cultural shifts of the late 1960s (made manifest most clearly by Woodstock) and the return-to-reality shocks of the mid-1970s. The latter was made manifest in my life via a series of awakenings that reminded me that, irrespective of many deeply satisfying Aquarian yearnings, the world-as-it-is is also important. And that world consists of many seemingly prosaic things, like municipal water systems and debt burdens. Thus it was that I was greatly influenced by everything from Polanski’s Chinatown to Caro’s The Power Broker in an end-of-an-era kind of way.
Mado was, I think, a similar slap in the face–a preview, if you will, of what adult life, and my life, might shape up to be like. Indeed, while I was never a real estate developer I did spend a number of years doing bond financings, so the preview element of the film was for me quite real.
And there are aspects to the film that mirror my 1976 perspective, and touch directly on the issue of young/old, business/pleasure, work/play and conventional/unconventional.
So with that, here’s the plot, including spoilers.
Léotard (Piccoli) is the head of a real estate development firm competing to do business on large projects in the Paris area. He is separated from his struggling and substance abusing wife and has taken up with a beautiful young woman named Mado (Ottavia Piccolo) , whom he pays for sex and companionship.
I don’t call Mado a prostitute since she would bridle at the term and I would like to stay on her good side. Rather, she’s something between a prostitute and a sixties/seventies free spirit, doing what she feels OK about doing.
Léotard is smitten and would like nothing better than to wean Mado of her other paying customers, some of whom don’t even pay, with the result that he is suspicious that she may actually be more attached to other men than she is to him, and it is starting to drive him quietly crazy.
Mado and Léotard are at the centers of two interrelated groups: a team of older, male real estate types working with Léotard and a group of younger men and women in their twenties who give off faintly countercultural vibes. The latter group doesn’t seem too concerned about work, though the old crowd and young crowd often inexplicably hang out together.
Now, the French they did anarchist and they did situationist, but they never really did hippie, so it would be unfair to call the youngsters that. But they have those tendencies in French form, and are even making a move to “get back to the land”, setting up an unresolved and unremarked-upon tension with their elders over respect for the land.
Léotard finds that the financial misdealings of a business associate have put his firm in serious jeopardy. The trail leads to another big developer, Lépidon, whose success as a developer comes from his corrupt political connections. Lépidon’s intention was to bring financial ruin for his own gain, and he appears to have succeeded.
Léotard hatches a scheme involving Mado. With Mado’s help, Léotard enlists the help of Manecca, of one of her “real” lovers. Manecca is another shady developer, but he’s got the goods on a politician tied to Lépidon. Léotard, who is jealous of Manecca and fancies himself a cut above, nonetheless uses his information to blackmail the politician in cahoots with Lépidon, in the process securing the rights to Lépidon’s project for a pittance. Lépidon is angry.
In the last act, the film looks to resolve several tensions: Mado and Léotard (love), Lépidor and Léotard (war) and the old/young thing (culture).
The young/old dichotomy resolves itself, after a fashion, when both groups pile into three small French cars, six to a car, and visit the countryside, where the development is to be located and also where the young crowd has acquired a farm that it intends to bring back.
So here we have two different responses by the urban crowd to the thinning out of the pastoral countryside: build or bring back. Interestingly, Sautet seems not to take a position, and is happy letting his ragtag group of eighteen drive around, Keystone Kops style, in three small cars investigating the countryside’s potential for redevelopment and/or renewal.
Indeed, this strange voyage provides the backdrop for the last act of the film, and for the resolutions of the other tensions. It is an oddly compelling ending.
We see Lépidor realizing that he’s been had, and sending his tough henchmen out to do damage to someone. At the same time we are tracing the voyage of the eighteen through the countryside, like the crowd of mimes in Blow Up. They drive through a punishing rainstorm and crash a lively party at a village tavern. They leave the party half-drunk with the rain coming down and quickly get lost. After several wrong terms in the rain and the dark they eventually all get stuck in deep mud in (wouldn’t you know) a construction site. The mood is still light but you begin to feel its potential to quickly turn dark, ominous.
Movie conventions are weighty things, and so you are primed as a viewer at this point to start dreading . . . the bad guy’s henchmen on the prowl, the gang of eighteen stuck in the mud, in the middle of a construction site, in a blinding rainstorm at night. It’s all very Hitchcockian, and you can’t help but think the plot will bring violence to Léotard’s happy crowd.
But no. Lépidor’s henchmen do away with Manecca, reasoning that he was the leak, and appear to leave it at that. Meanwhile, back at the construction site, the crowd is making lemons of lemonade. It’s nostalgie de la boue all the way, with the older real estate crowd and the young hipsters reveling in the rain and the mud, in the kind of Bacchanal you might expect from the erotic but still ever-composed French.
Morning comes as well as a tractor to save the day, and the celebrants begin to dry out in both senses of the term. But the news also arrives of Manecca’s death. Mado, already in emotional retreat from Léotard, retreats further. But this time, and for now, Léotard seems to let go his obsession.
So the film resolves itself relative to its business side via Léotard’s tainted victory. And the personal drama is resolved as Léotard finally lets go of Mado, returning to his wife and helping her to seek treatment.
There is a lot going on in the movie, a fair amount of which is under the surface. The unusual business detail underscores the factual, the prosaic, the no-nonsense. But that sits in nice contrast with the affairs of the heart and of culture that the film explores.
Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:
Many of the reviews featured on Rotten Tomatoes brand “Taken 2” with words like “sloppy” and “lazy.” I thought it was about as lean and mean and intelligent as the other recent action movies from Chez Besson. While it’s not as well shaped or as shockingly reactionary as the first “Taken,” released back in 2008, it’s refreshingly sleek and no-nonsense, and it’s pretty darn satisfying as a piece of action movie craftsmanship. Director Olivier Megaton (“Transporter 3,” “Columbiana”) continues to refine his incisive action style, which works by forcing your brain to fill in the chunks that are missing between his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shots of elbows, fists, and fenders (he’s a bit like a cubist William Friedkin). A set piece which cross-cuts between the predicaments of Liam Neeson’s beefy ex-spy, his wife, and his daughter, and which ends with a clever melding of new technology (cell phones, GPS) and old (triangulation, smoke signals), is particularly satisfying: it’s like a souped-up reworking of a finale from some old two-reeler. The screenplay perhaps errs by having Neeson rescue his daughter with half an hour left in the movie, but that’s a relatively minor quibble.
Written and directed by John Hyams, “Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning” is an interesting, ballsy piece of filmmaking. It boasts a sordid, strip-clubby look, a buggy, subversive vibe, and some of the best-edited (and goriest) fight sequences in recent memory. Unfortunately, the narrative is so damn gnomic that it’s just about impossible to read any motivation into the characters. This combined with the logy mood and somnambulant pacing work to weigh the movie down; what starts out feeling novel becomes rather numbing. As near as I can tell the story concerns an army of bio-engineered killers, led by series regulars Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, who have rebelled against the government that created them (they’re steroided Tea Partiers). Scott Adkins, the British martial artist who suggests an everyman Chuck Norris, attempts to put a stop to their plans. But when it turns out that he, too, may be a fed-programmed killbot, Adkins begins to question his motives. It’s an ingenious, Chinese-box concept: a guy wakes up from his comfy suburban life to discover that he’s actually a super-potent killing machine . . . only to wake up yet again, this time to discover that he’s merely a patsy. And in some ways the movie seems intended as an “open your eyes” parable along the lines of “Total Recall,” “The Matrix,” and “Fight Club.” But its impact is dulled by its shortcomings as a narrative-emotional experience.
Paleo Retiree writes:
Another in my ongoing series of snapz of the absurd places Americans see fit to place (and tolerate) advertising.
Explanation: That’s a photo of an ad at the bottom of one of those plastic trays into which you dump your carry-on items in order to go through TSA screening before getting on an airplane. A few questions I find myself pondering:
Keep it classy, America. Why do more Americans not protest the kinds of small insults that we’re routinely subjected to?
Previously. And before that.
Paleo Retiree writes:
Fenster writes:
At the epiphenom blog, Tomas Rees takes a look at empathy and atheism. The title of the blog post is “Atheists Lack Empathy and Understanding”. The post reviews existing studies that correlate atheism and autism and goes on to focus more closely on one academic study that uses statistical methods to chart causality relative to factors such as belief in God, autism, gender, tendency to systematize and empathy. As he concludes:
. . . in the end, this is really good evidence that, at least in the kinds of religion favoured in the USA, an inability to empathise and read other peoples minds is linked to decreased belief in personal gods. But why might this be?
Well, actually it fits well with other research which finds that loneliness can increase belief in the supernatural. And it also fits with brain imaging studies that found that highly religious people who engage in personal prayer use the same parts of their brains as they would when talking to a good friend.
So it seems that an essential part of the belief in a personal God is the ability to relate to it as a personal friend. It perhaps then isn’t surprising that people whose minds don’t work that way are less likely to believe.
Interesting. It makes intuitive sense to me that the tendency to believe in a supernatural type God could well be associated with psychological or physical differences. And that autism/empathy could well be one of those axes. None of this tells you much, though, about whether any such beliefs are well founded. Who can make the more credible case about God’s existence–those with more empathy or those with less?
Whether autism is a disease or a natural expression of the genome, most people are not autistic and will therefore tend to value empathy, as well as its fruits. In turn, there may be a tendency to jump from an appreciation of empathy to support for a belief in a supernatural God.
A good deal of the discussion in the comments section relate to the title of the blog post, which is “Atheists Lack Empathy and Understanding”. Several considered this a perjorative version of the study’s actual conclusions, which don’t have to be read as uncharitable toward atheists. After all, as one commenter noted, the headline could just as easily have been “Low Empathy can Lead to Atheism”. Or even the likely Dawkins version: “Empathy a Necessary Precondition for God Delusion”.
Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:
Paleo Retiree writes:
Atypical Neutoric writes:
This will not be a book review in the classic sense, i.e. I will not pick nits or ride a hobby horse. Nor will I deliberately misunderstand the author’s position, all the easier to replace it with a straw man that I proceed to denounce out of smug superiority.
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, the most recent book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a self-described flâneur, quondam options trader and author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, is a book that bears re-reading. I finished my first read-though last weekend and am certain to return to it some time soon. What I would like to comment on here is how some of NNT’s observations can be applied in areas other than one’s portfolio of financial investments. I was pleased to discover that even before I read the book, I was, in many ways, on my way to becoming an antifragilista, if not flâneur, in my own right, especially in the areas of health, diet and exercise.
Indeed, NNT would be the first agree that a person’s most tangible assets (life, health and sense of well-being) are more important and more at risk by what he calls fragility in modern life than his stock portfolio. An object or system (either living or inert) is fragile if it is harmed by volatility (shocks, bad surprises, stressors, sudden changes in routines, etc.), is robust if is not and is antifragile if shocks, bad surprises, stressors, sudden changes in routines not only do not harm it, but actually make it stronger, better, healthier and so forth. NNT’s point is that robustness is not enough.
In the area of health, increasing one’s own antifragility entails applying the via negativa (knowing what not to do) and avoiding iatrogenics, harm done by the healer, including especially side effects. While NNT uses iatrogenics by extension for harm caused by policy makers in the attempt to “do something”, literal, as opposed to metaphorical, iatrogenics touches everyone, especially those who don’t mind being called “health care consumers”. But doctors aren’t necessarily evil; they simply suffer from the same cognitive biases that their patients do, namely a preference for doing something as opposed to doing nothing (and letting nature take its course) and for adding a substance rather than removing one.
In my own life, applying the via negativa and avoiding iatrogenics have involved simplifying my diet by reducing it to simple heuristics (rules of thumb that are useful, but like fire, can be dangerous too if overapplied): a preference for foodstuffs that have been consumed without harm for millennia (meat, eggs, animal fats, wine) and avoidance of novelties (industrial vegetable oils, unfermented sugary drinks, including orange juice). But, in my view, the dietary novelty that has the greatest impact on health is the sheer ubiquity of food, rather than whether a particular item was eaten by hunter gatherers or not. To mitigate the risk of overeating that this abundance poses, I simply do not eat breakfast. Or rather, I eat breakfast at lunchtime, when I am less likely to be offered something sickeningly sweet in the cafeteria at work. This is much simpler than, say, counting calories or macronutrient blocks, and far less stressful to apply. This is what makes it robust. What makes my no-breakfast heuristic antifragile is that applying it guarantees that I do not eat the same amount each day, and that I am hungry until noon (hunger is a beneficial stressor), yet manage to eat enough on average. I am also free from dependence on the factuality of accompanying narratives (such as whether Gary Taubes is totally or just partially right about Why We Get Fat) or other attempts to turn heuristics into isms.
Blowhard, Esq. writes:
While browsing through the clearance table at my local Barnes & Noble, I came across this Michael Winterbottom movie for $2. Probably my favorite movie last year was Winterbottom’s “The Trip,” and given that two bucks is less than I pay for my morning coffee, it was a slam dunk.
“Wonderland” is a plotless slice-of-life about three lonely, working class London sisters as they deal with their various hook-ups, baby daddies, and parents over a four-day period. In its attempt to juggle various intersecting lives and relationships, it appears to be Winterbottom’s attempt at an English “Nashville” or “Short Cuts.” Coincidentally, “Wonderland” was released in 1999, the same year as Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia,” itself an homage to Altman. But as Paleo Retiree points out in his piece on Winterbottom’s “9 Songs,” whereas Anderson seems to work only in an Oscar-baiting, swing-for-the-fences, operatic mode, Winterbottom’s films are in a much more relaxed, minor key.
Well, this movie was a bit too relaxed and minor for me. Winterbottom shoots it with a grainy filmstock and dialogue that feels improvised to give it a verité feel, but the almost total lack of narrative drive made it easy to hit the fast-forward button more than a few times. That the first major conflict comes at the 48 min mark of this 1h 50min film should give you an idea of the movie’s listlessness. Roger Ebert says in his review, “While most plots march from the beginning to the end of a film, these kinds of films move in circles, suggesting that life is not a story but a process. They’re more true to life.” But, everyday life can be pretty boring, can’t it? On the other hand, I enjoyed the fact that Winterbottom showed regular London life and not a sexed-up tourist destination — while Tower Bridge, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the National Gallery all appear in the movie, they’re pushed into the background or caught out of the corner of the camera’s eye.
More:
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 