“Bandits of Orgosolo”

Posted on December 3, 2012 by Fabrizio del Wrongo

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

20100616180617banditi_a_orgosolo

I enjoyed this late Neorealist film directed by Vittorio De Seta. (What a name for an Italian filmmaker to be cursed with!) It deals with the attempts of a Sardinian shepherd to evade the law after he’s wrongly accused of stealing some pigs. Hiding out in the countryside, he’s forced to balance his desire to save his skin with his duties towards his flock and his younger brother; both parties follow him across the landscape, forever complicating the elaborate game of hide and seek he’s playing with the police. It’s no exaggeration to say that the movie does for sheep what “The Bicycle Thief” did for bikes, meaning that it uses them to demonstrate just how transitory economic well-being can be. As the shepherd’s prospects grow worse, the landscape grows more forbidding, yet it retains a ferocious, unsentimentalized beauty. At times the images seem lit from within, as in a Baroque treatment of the flight into Egypt (there are many night scenes). In its rugged visual poetry and its cool but empathic portrayal of a hardscrabble people, it bears comparison with the best works of Robert Flaherty, “Man of Aran” in particular, as well as to the Taviani brothers’ “Padre Padrone.”

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

“Damsels in Distress”

Posted on December 2, 2012 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

damsels-in-distress03Like Fabrizio, I recently watched Whit Stillman’s latest mocking eulogy for WASP culture and enjoyed it quite a bit. In the DVD commentary Stillman says the budget and shooting style was like his first film Metropolitan and this movie feels like a continuation of that one. That is, a closed-off fantasy world of dim yet hyper-articulate upper-class East Coast white people who speak in epigrams. Stillman likens the movie to an Archie comic, but I doubt Archie ever used anal sex as a plot point, not even in the oblique way Stillman refers to it here.

At the risk of embarrassing myself, I think one of the reason I love Stillman’s films so much is because they shaped my idea of New York City. Scorsese’s low-life Italians, Woody Allen’s neurotic Jews, and Stillman’s silly WASPs each inhabited a different yet idealized version of the city that I fell for.

This is the first movie I’ve seen starring indie darling Greta Gerwig and I thought she was terrific. A graduate of Barnard, she betrayed no difficulty delivering Stillman’s stylized dialogue, even though during the commentary she says, “I felt like I was swimming with cats.”

DID1

Related

Posted in Movies, Personal reflections, Travel | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Whazza Conservative?

Posted on December 1, 2012 by Fenster

Fenster writes:

As the geneticist/journalist Matt Ridley begins his review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new book Antifragile:

You don’t need a physics degree to ride a bicycle. Nor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb realized one day, do traders need to understand the mathematical theorems of options trading to trade options. Instead traders discover “heuristics,” or rules of thumb, by trial and error. These are then formalized by academics into theorems and taught to new generations of traders, who become slaves to theory, ignore their own common sense and end by blowing up the system.

Just so, no?  I mean, it has the ring of truth about it, at least for a hidebound evolution-answers-all-even-if-I-am-not-myself-a-scientist guy like me.  It seems reasonable to me that our capabilities to discern and measure patterns inevitably gives rise to a reification of those explanations, putting of them at the top of some hierarchy, as though they come first in some Platonic sense, with the world to follow.  As Ridley goes on to remark, discovery is a trial and error process (though, to be fair, a process in which theoretical insights play a key part in the iteration of trial and error).

Is this relevant to the discussion on this site about whether America has a conservative tradition? Maybe.  At the least, I think it is wise to start by recognizing that Conservative Traditions or Theories of Conservatism need to be taken off any unnecessary pedestals.  The political ideas/ideals don’t come first.  Better, perhaps, to start by looking at what actually happened in America and go from there.

Paleo linked to an article by Patrick Deneen from Front Porch Republic, a kind of paleo-con publication (and here I thought Paleo Retiree named himself in honor of his eating habits).

I liked that Deneen was on to this problem of putting theory first.  As he seems to suggest, people end up turning complex historical lineages into rough and ready Big Ideas, then swinging them around like clubs.  I take my Conservative club and bang you on the head before you can hit me with your Liberal club.  Meanwhile, what do we mean by these clubs?  As Deneen points out, much of what we think of as the conservative tradition in America comes from a kind of liberal tradition, meaning that the conservative-liberal fight is really just a form of cousin’s war.  As he puts it, most of the tenets of conservatism in America, like the parallel tenets of liberalism, presuppose the primacy of the individual, going back to Locke, Hobbes and the rest.  The only tenet of conservatism that is in tension with the dominant theme of individualism is support for family and tradition–i.e., a recognition that we are not really the masters of our own fate, but, like it or not, part of a more deeply woven fabric.  Under this view, it is an inescapable part of political philosophy to accept that fate, and that fabric, and deal with it.  Can’t be wished away with dreams of autonomy.

Alas, Deneen concludes “a true conservatism has few friends in today’s America” except, perhaps, on his front porch.   Sounds about right.

But might Deneen’s analysis be sharpened a bit by adopting a little more scouring a la Ridley and Taleb?  Deneen does spend most of his energy discussing intellectual traditions as though they lead events around on a neat little dog leash.  But what if we give a little more weight to the events themselves?  Might that possibly illuminate a bit more of the predicament Deneen is concerned about?

Here’s one possible path in that direction: Rogers Smith’s Beyond Tocqueville.  The abstract:

Analysts of American politics since Tocqueville have seen the nation as a paradigmatic “liberal democratic” society, shaped most by the comparatively free and equal conditions and the Enlightenment ideals said to have prevailed at its founding. These accounts must be severely revised to recognize the inegalitarian ideologies and institutions of ascriptive hierarchy that defined the political status of racial and ethnic minorities and women through most of U.S. history. A study of the period 1870-1920 illustrates that American political culture is better understood as the often conflictual and contradictory product of multiple political traditions, than as the expression of hegemonic liberal or democratic political traditions.

In other words, we have had a more bustling and lively set of energies in a “true” conservative direction than we may often realize.  It has been, though, a true reactionary tradition, and it has tended to lose most of the fights.  In consequence, it has vanished for conservatives.  For liberals, it exists mostly in the form of of grimm bedtime stories.  White people will lynch again given half a chance.  The country is forever racist.  The church and its allies will stop you from your right to reproductive freedom.

Me, I am from Massachusetts, and I don’t see much reactionary behavior in the vicinity, and thus I have been prone to laugh at my fellow blue-staters’ obsessions.  But Smith’s analysis–and it is worth a read, as a decent scholarly work–reminds me that liberal bedtime stories have a mooring in the truth, in actual history.

So I think we have had a conservative tradition in the country.  OK, it hasn’t been highfalutin’ and may have substituted Father Coughlin for Edmund Burke.  But if Deneen wants to know why no “real” conservatism, Smith may help him with his answer.

Posted in Politics and Economics | 6 Comments

Joss Whedon’s Disney’s “Marvel’s The Avengers”

Posted on December 1, 2012 by Sax von Stroheim

Sax von Stroheim writes:

I finally caught up with the year’s biggest hit. I’m a longtime reader of super-hero comics, and while the Avengers comics by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, et al. aren’t my favorites from Marvel’s Silver Age, I do like them quite a bit.

Here’s what I liked:

1)   There’s a very Marvel comics-style moment where Hawkeye – the world’s greatest archer – shoots some kind of super, high tech arrow at a computer so that it plugs directly into its USB port to give him access to it. It’s goofy, but I smiled because it’s exactly the type of thing that would happen in an Avengers comic.

hawkeye1

Hawkeye, as drawn by the great Don Heck

2)   There’s a very Joss Whedon-style moment near the end, where the bad guy, Thor’s evil step-brother Loki, is starting to deliver a pompous, gloating, villainous monologue to the Hulk, and the Hulk cuts him off by grabbing his leg and swinging him repeatedly into the floor. It reminded me of the great moment in “The Train Job” episode of Firefly, where a bad guy is threatening to take revenge, and Mal (the Han Solo-like leader of our heroes) kicks him into a spaceship’s engine intake, killing him instantly. In both cases, Whedon gets a laugh by tweaking our genre expectations of what a hero usually does when confronted by a raving villain (i.e., listens to him rather than doing something sensible).

3)   After he’s told that he can’t compete with Thor and Loki because “they’re gods”, Chris Evans as Captain America delivers the movie’s best line: “There’s only one God, and I’m pretty sure He doesn’t dress like that.” Evans plays it completely straight, here and throughout the movie, never condescending to Cap’s old-fashioned idealism.

I don't know, Cap: who BUT a god would dare to dress this way?

I don’t know: who BUT a god would dare to dress this way?

4)   Tom Hiddleston as Loki was good. He nails the Stan Lee-style faux Shakespeare dialogue.

5)   ScarJo:

...look at her...

…look at her…

Here’s what I didn’t like:

1)   The visual effects are poorly integrated, both with the “live action” and with other visual effects. Michael Barrier joked that the movie could be called The Battle of the Visual Effects Houses, and I agree. I never had the sense of a coherent aesthetic vision behind any of the CGI. This leads to several problems:

a)    The seams are showing all over the action sequences. It’s very noticeable every time we go from effect to effect, so the spaces all feel needlessly chopped up.

b)   There’s a very apparent change from actor to videogame avatar every time one of the heroes does something heroic. CGI-Captain America doesn’t move anything at all like Chris Evans as Captain America. That was a problem I had with the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, too, but I was kind of surprised that after ten years they haven’t gotten the technology to the point where it looks any better.

c)    Relatedly, every time Robert Downey Jr. speaks as Iron Man (i.e., when it’s not him on screen, but just a CGI’d suit of armor), he sounds like he’s phoning in voice-over work on a videogame.

d)   More on videogames: I guess if you don’t play videogames, you might not notice and be bothered by the way these movies feel like videogames. A friend described the alien army in the movie’s climactic battle sequence as “a bunch of video game extras”, and, well, they are. I felt something similar while watching “Prometheus” earlier this year: all these people were raving about Sir Ridley’s sense of design and all that, but the movie just seemed like it had been cobbled together with bits and pieces from HALO and Dead Space. To be fair, those games were deeply influenced by the original “Alien” movies, but still…

2)   Putting a drippy fan-service character – Agent Coulson – at what’s supposed to be the “emotional center” of the movie. In case you aren’t familiar with the term, a “fan-service character” is common archetype in contemporary super-hero comics. He (or very, very rarely she) is supposed to stand in for all the comic book fans of the world. He usually parrots, in the world of the comic, the same kind of feelings that the fans have towards their favorite characters. Sometimes, in the comics, this works, and I’d be happy to provide examples if anyone actually cares. Most of the time, though, it comes across as one of the more masturbatory things in an already ridiculously masturbatory genre, as it does here. The problem is always that the love/admiration the fan-service character has for the super-heroes isn’t based on anything in the comic book, or, in this case, the movie, itself, but on the feelings the writers are presuming we already have for the characters.

A nerdy white guy: just like me!!!

It’s a way to use our pre-existing feelings of nostalgia for these characters as a replacement for having to write scenes that express any kind of honest, emotional connection between them. Actually, I didn’t just “not like” this aspect of the movie: I outright hated it. I agree with Michael Barrier that it’s a sign of the movie’s emptiness that Coulson is at its center: it turns the movie into a game of fill-in-the-blank.

3)   Samuel L. Jackson. He just seemed to not give a shit. Which, normally, a guy getting paid to walk around in a big CGI spectacle, not giving a shit? Normally, I think that’s fine. Sometimes, I think it’s kind of admirable! But Jackson threw a Twitter fit when A.O. Scott gave the movie a mixed review, and if you’re going to throw a fit about a movie you’ve made, at least try to throw it for a movie that it looks like you gave a shit about when making it.

4)   Oh yeah: out of the billions that this movie made, virtually none of it went to any of the guys who actually created these characters and these stories in the first place.

Hail to the King!

Hail to the King!

To sum up: though I had a few laughs along the way, “Marvel’s The Avengers” really demonstrates how the Marvel Movie Method works: take some charismatic, funny actors and blend them in with some shitty CGI and indifferently directed action sequences. Since audiences will happily drink this stuff up, I guess I don’t blame them for not bothering to make better movies. Still, that philosophy just seems to add insult to injury, considering it reveals just how little they really comprehend and/or care about the artistic legacy of Jack Kirby (and others) that is, unfortunately, under their stewardship.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Question Lady Question

Posted on November 29, 2012 by Question Lady

The Question Lady writes:

When is it OK for somebody to use their iPhone (or any phone) when they’re out with other people?

Posted in Personal reflections | 9 Comments

Animal Hoarding and Disability

Posted on November 29, 2012 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working my way through an Animal Planet “animal hoarders” show on the tube. (Actually on Netflix Instant — haven’t had a cable subscription in years. Why bother with one? The Question Lady and I don’t care about sports; we graze for news online; and we do whatever TV watching we do these days via Roku.) The show is nothing special so far as movie/TV-making goes — it’s standard contempo reality-doc stuff. But I’ve gotten fascinated by it anyway, and for a variety of reasons.

One of them is the sociology factor. Most of the hoarders — and the baffled-and-unhappy friends and family members — that the show focuses on are white working-class (or poorer) people.  I was amazed by …

  • … how many of the people onscreen wear tattoos and piercings — parents as well as kids.
  • … how many come from families with multiple divorces.
  • … how many are really fat — and not just fat but misshapen-fat.
  • … how many of them smoke.
  • … how many are taking buckets of pills and other prescription medicines.
  • (A convenient trigger for one of my favorite current rants, namely: Hey, America, we could solve a big part of our medical-costs crisis if you just lost some weight, got some basic exercise, quit the cancer sticks, gave up most of your pills, and acted your age.)
  • … how quickly they burn up their youths. Good lord, by 50 they look 75.

Also: how few of them have what you might think of as productive jobs. For many of them disability seems to be their main, if not only, source of income. Co-blogger Glynn Marshes points me to this informative article about how rapidly use of disability has been growing in the last decade. Fact Du Jour:

From 1980 to 2002 there was no change in the percentage of the workforce claiming disability, yet the “disability participation rate” has embarked on a 4.5 percent ascent each year for the last decade.  There is now 1 person collecting disability for every 12 in the workforce.

I’ve also been fascinated by the show as a study in forms of delusion. The hoarders — who typically have little money and not much space but are caring for 30 to as many as 200 animals — clearly see themselves as reasonable people. Some of them are instantly-identifiable as cracked, but many of them appear to be — if you were to run into them away from their animals — sane. It definitely has me wondering about how many of the rational-seeming people I deal with day-to-day are, in their private lives, complete loons.

What the show mainly has me musing about, though, is the distance between the kind of lives these people lead and the world I inhabit. They don’t eat the kind of food I eat — often, they don’t even have sitdown mealtimes together. They don’t think the same thoughts I do, or consume the same kind of mental fodder. Their life-expectations and their behavior-patterns go off in directions that are completely alien to me. Often while watching the show I find myself thinking, “Wow, has the gap between middle-class-and-above people and working-class-and-below people ever been greater, or more dramatic, than it is now?”

Although many of the people who appear on the show are clearly bright and/or perceptive and/or sweet, the life they’re leading has “Idiocracy” written all over it. They don’t feel like co-citizens to me so much as members of a different (if related) species. Which I don’t intend, believe it or not, as a putdown. I find it impossible not to feel for them (OK, many of them), and for their plight.

Have you gotten fascinated by any reality-doc TV shows recently?

Posted in Animals, Demographics, Personal reflections, Politics and Economics, Television | Tagged , , | 18 Comments

Listing Movies: Vintage Martial Arts

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Fabrizio del Wrongo

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

Do you like movie lists as much as I do? They seem to me to be a great way to explore movie history — perhaps even the only way. A fledgling movie buff could do a lot worse than starting with the results of the recent “Sight & Sound” poll, or Roger Ebert’s list of “Great Movies,” or Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1000 essential movies, or even this nice little book, and then using them to develop a working knowledge of cinema history, one viewing experience at a time. In fact, if you don’t do something like this, and then develop your tastes further by exploring your own peculiar interests, you’ve pretty much consigned yourself to whatever’s being promoted as a “classic,” and that’s no fun at all, especially considering some of the turds that have come to be regarded as classics. And it can often be pretty daunting tackling an unfamiliar genre or tradition without first acquiring some kind of starting point or syllabus. Continue reading →

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

Reading List on Sci-Tech and Ethics

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Fenster

Fenster writes:

What ethical assumptions will need to be written into the programs for driverless cars, and who will make the decisions?

Is it moral to print a gun?

Is the return of eugenics in some form inevitable?

Posted in Philosophy and Religion, Science, Technology | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

Did you REALLY think Greece was on the road to recovery?

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Epaminondas

epiminondas writes:

Well, more fool you.

Posted in Politics and Economics | 3 Comments

Linkathon

Posted on November 27, 2012 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

Posted in Art, Linkathons, Sex | Tagged , | 11 Comments