Genre Movie Themes, Adult Fantasies

Posted on August 19, 2012 by Fabrizio del Wrongo

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

Have you ever noticed how many genre movies of the late ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s featured specially-composed pop songs? It’s one of my fave aspects of that era in movies. I’m not sure exactly where the trend began, but it’s worth pointing out that many westerns in the ’50s had theme songs. (Here’s one of my favorite examples.) Maybe it derives from that. Or maybe it developed out of the use of theme songs in conjunction with television series. In any event, the Bond series really took it to the next level, each of them opening with a lush pop song played over a decadent montage seemingly geared to mimic the all-too-infrequently-had experience of flipping through a high-end men’s magazine while tripping on peyote.

One of the things I like about the examples I’ve featured below is how unashamedly cheesy they are. They’re loungey, trashy, silly, sexy, fun — like Xavier Cugat tunes set to images. They cue the listener to put aside his rationality for 90 minutes and enjoy some far-out sights and ideas, to indulge in a corny pop fantasy, to not take himself too seriously.

Hey, doesn’t judicious indulgence of this kind seem like a key quality of that whole era? It was a time when adults were still adults, when men often wore suits whenever they left the house, but it was also an era in which the culture provided a variety of rituals and outlets specifically designed to cater to adult fantasy. Tiki bars, “Playboy,” cocktail parties, Bond movies — all fantasy outlets of a very adult (if self-consciously silly) kind. Unfortunately, that sort of sexy-silly sophistication seems to have been drained out of the culture. These days we can’t even appreciate the Bond films as fantasy — as a comic book escape geared towards grown-ups — without wringing our hands and worrying about the sociopolitical implications of Bond’s actions. (The new Bond films aren’t bad, exactly, just sort of joyless. Judi Dench is in them. Need I say more?)

We still have adult fantasies, of course. They often seem patterned on either frat house crassness or quasi-political empowerment schemes. Men seem to partake more frequently of the former, women of the latter. Oh, and there’s the superhero thing too. But let’s not even get into that. I’m in a bad enough mood as it is.

Anyhoo, I’m way off track. Here are some of my fave silly movie themes. If anyone is aware of additional examples, please post ’em in the comments.

The theme song to the 1958 “The Blob” was composed by the great Burt Bacharach, who was a master of the silly-sophisticated thing.

This Danish production was based on the same source as Tarkovsky’s arthouse snoozeathon “Solaris.” Talk about strange bedfellows! I have no idea who that is singing, but the song was composed by the wonderfully named Teepee Mitchell.

This isn’t a theme song, but I’m including it anyway because Arch Hall, Jr. is my hero. “There’s coyotes around the camp!”

Bruno Nicolai composed and Nancy Cuomo performed this Bondesque number from 1966. The title surely comes from “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” a John Barry tune that was intended for “Thunderball,” released in 1965, but then never used. Of course, Pauline Kael later used it as the title of her second collection of movie reviews.

One of my fave title sequences. The rest of the movie doesn’t quite live up to it. The song is by Bob Crewe and Charles Fox.

The greatest man-returns-home-after-a-hard-day’s-work sequence ever put on film. Song composed by The Man himself, Ennio Morricone.

“You’ll believe it when you find…something screaming ‘cross your mind!” This acid rock gem was composed by Richard Delvy.

Posted in Movies, Music, Personal reflections, Sex, The Good Life | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Bicycles and Berlin

Posted on August 18, 2012 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

Where most things go, I’m a pluralist. As Vedanta maintains: one goal, many paths. And my pluralism extends to transportation policy. Let’s not let any one or two forms of transport dominate, let’s have them all: trams, cars, blimps, planes, bicycles, trains, scooters, mini-buses …

America gives itself over to cars and planes ‘way too completely, IMHO. In my preferred version of the country, whenever do-able and sensible we’d always and everywhere enjoy walkways, bicycle lanes, center medians given over to trolleycars, etc — and our places and roadways would be designed from the outset to take all these forms of getting-around into account. As it is, we prioritize the car while — every now and then, and always reluctantly — remembering to make a few concessions to pedestrians and bicyclists.

That said, man-o-man do I often dislike the way American bicyclists carry on. (Can it be said that there’s an American culture of bicycling? If there is, I don’t like it very much.) They race around at top speed. They charge the wrong way down one-way streets. They ignore stoplights and stop signs. They’re reckless and uncooperative in completely unnecessary ways.

Outta my way, pedestrian.

This isn’t a trivial matter. I know a couple of people who got knocked over by bikes traveling at speed. In one case, the bicyclist ran a red light right into a pedestrian crosswalk and hit a 68 year-old woman. In the other, the bicyclist was going the wrong way on a one-way street and slammed into an unsuspecting younger woman. These were gruesome and painful accidents involving trips to the emergency room and weeks of tedious and painful recovery. A man on a metal device traveling at 20 mph makes quite an impact — and can wreak a lot of havoc — on an unsuspecting body that’s looking the other way.

Reckless and thoughtless bikers are a threat even to automobile drivers. I’m the world’s most unhurried, considerate and careful driver, yet the other day I found myself swearing amidst a small mess of screeching and honking cars. It turned out that the tangle had been caused by a couple of bicyclists who’d run a red light. As you might expect, the two women bicyclists emerged from the mess, smiled at the rest of us, and waved sweetly, as though expecting us to find them oh-so-eco and oh-so-retro-charming.

And don’t get me started about how ridiculous most people look dressed up in bike-racing gear. I’m OK with the fact that there are a few dead-serious biker-athletes out there. But most people in bicycling outfits are offenses against any conceivable kind of good taste. Americans, eh? Always racing around, always looking for a reason to dress up like superheroes and sports stars. BTW, when did grownup Americans start dressing up like sports heroes anyway? Men didn’t generally do that when I was a kid.

I can semi-understand why American bicyclists carry on like hotshots, militants, badboys and protestors. We’ve so over-emphasized getting around by car that people who prefer biking feel persecuted. Isn’t one person on a bike as valuable as one person in a car? Why aren’t bikers’ needs being attended-to as lavishly as those of drivers? Besides, if most automobile drivers are inconsiderate towards bicyclists, why shouldn’t most bicyclists act inconsiderately towards automobile drivers? (Me, I’d argue that most drivers hardly give bicyclists any thought at all.) It’s clear where the power is, and it isn’t with the bicyclists. And of course I’m sympathetic to the general argument that America ought to treat its bicycles and bicyclists more thoughtfully and generously.

All that said, the situation isn’t pleasing. There’s too much asshole behavior coming from our bicycling culture.

It doesn’t have to be that way. When my wife and I visited Berlin a year ago, we were delighted by the way the city incorporates multiple forms of transportation into its fabric. Berlin — a big, spread-out city made up of numerous smaller city-centers — is heaven for walkers. Buses and trams/subways are well-run; cabs are easy to hail … And there are bike lanes everywhere. Drivers and pedestrians both know to expect bicyclists, and they know how to take them into account too. Granted, my wife and I nearly got knocked over a couple of times during our first days in Berlin. But it was entirely our fault — we hadn’t grasped the rules yet. We learned quickly, though. We adapted, and we soon came to relish the dancing interplay in the city between bikes, walkers and cars.

A Berlin bike lane at twlight.

One nice and striking thing about bicyclists in Berlin: the modest and sensible way most of them go about their bicycling. In ten days there, we didn’t spot more than a half a dozen bicyclists doing hotshot things, let alone wearing absurd stretch clothes. Few of them were racing around; they seemed to favor eccentric old bikes; and they weren’t about to change from their everyday attire into flashy training clothes just to get on their bikes and pedal a distance. 99% of the bikers we saw, in other words, were everyday people using sensible bikes to get someplace-or-other. They waited at stoplights, they respected pedestrians when it was appropriate. You might almost mistake them for grownups.

A typical Berlin bicycle

Were they able to do this — to play a confident yet modest part in the to-and-fro-ing of city life — at least partly because they themselves are treated with respect? In NYC it’s quite common for drivers and pedestrians to swear at bicycles, as though they really shouldn’t be allowed. Given the way some of the bikers conduct themselves, some of the swearing-at-’em strikes me as totally understandable. If bicyclists want to be part of the transportation-system of the city, then they should be held accountable to the rules everyone has to follow. Still: Many people are just really antagonistic to bikes. The bicyclists return the warmth, of course. In Berlin, by contrast, the presence of tons of people on bicycles is just an accepted fact of daily life. And taking bikes into account is just a part of life-as-it-is.

I suppose that it’s also possible that Berlin bicyclists conduct themselves as they do largely because they’re Berliners — ie., German, ie., orderly. But for the purposes of this blogposting I’m not going to go there. I prefer to think that Berlin and its bicyclists are showing the rest of us something of what a city can be like if its planners take a many-layered approach to transportation. Yay, pluralism.

FWIW: I like bikes myself, and if I lived in something like a college town I’d probably be out on one almost every day. As it is, I split most of my time these days between a huge city where biking strikes me as suicidal and a ‘burb where biking is kind of pointless — it’s not as though you can bike out to do the day’s shopping — except as exercise. And for exercise I’d rather walk, or do yoga or qigong.

Are y’all out there on bikes very often? If so, what’s it like? If not, why not?

Posted in Personal reflections, Politics and Economics, The Good Life, Travel | Tagged , , | 14 Comments

A Fauxdoc Called “Lake Mungo”

Posted on August 18, 2012 by Fabrizio del Wrongo

Image

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

A few days ago I blogged about the Norwegian film “Troll Hunter,” a combo of faux documentary and horror spoof that I thought was pretty amusing. I enjoy the faux documentary format in general; I think it speaks to the mercurial, recursive qualities of contemporary culture, and it seems that many young filmmakers are interested in playing around with its possibilities. (They take to it as naturally as they do irony or jittery handheld camerawork.) The format is especially common on television, where outfits like History and Animal Planet routinely air programs which strain wild ideas, stories, and theories through carefully-constructed sieves of objectivity. Sometimes the sciency feel of these shows is so persuasive, their employment of computer-generated imagery so precise, that audiences are happy to buy into the reality of what they’re watching. (Here’s one extreme example.) Hey, maybe this trend has something interesting to tell us about how we’ve come to view our relationship to the truth, to media, and to entertainment. But as much as I love to speculate about such things, that’s probably a blog post in and of itself. Here I want to focus on one fauxdoc in particular, an Australian one called “Lake Mungo,” which struck me as especially sharp and well-composed.

Written and directed by Joel Anderson, “Lake Mungo” is a ghost story that uses the faux documentary framework to explore how the contemporary mediascape informs our relationship with the past. The narrative concerns a family that has recently lost a daughter, Alice, in a drowning incident. While on its surface the event does not seem mysterious, the tone of the film preps us for something ominous, and since a documentary is supposedly being made about the incident we know there’s a kicker lurking somewhere in the story. (It’s a good example of a movie’s format being employed to satisfy genre expectations: our familiarity with the conventions of documentary helps to generate the movie’s atmosphere of dread.)

A mystery does gradually emerge, but it’s centered on Alice the person rather than on her death. First evoked in words by interviewees, then in still photos, audio tape, and finally in grainy home video, Alice’s presence informs the movie in the way that Laura Palmer’s did “Twin Peaks.” (It was only after writing this piece, while looking at IMDb, that I learned that Alice’s last name is Palmer. So the reference is explicit.) Like the townspeople in the David Lynch series, the characters in “Lake Mungo” are attempting to cope with the void left by a loved one’s disappearance. But they’re also attempting to reconcile their personal and mechanical images of Alice with the fact of her existence, to resolve (and quarantine) the idea of her in their minds. The faux documentary format is here once again vital in that it highlights the gulf between reality and fiction by adding a layer of supposed objectivity. The interviewees are assumed to have known Alice as a genuine corporeal presence, whereas for those in the movie audience she’s approachable only through the rabbit hole of media. For us, she remains as grainy and unprovable as the dead body in “Blow Up,” a movie Anderson references liberally.

Throughout “Lake Mungo” Anderson mixes tones, styles, and chunks of narrative with the skill of a collagist. The sitcom banality of the documentary family contrasts perfectly with the nudginess of the digital “found” footage, and each seemingly disparate piece of the puzzle neatly informs the others. It’s an admirably fluid piece of work, and it gives full expression to the movie’s themes of experience, image, and memory. By the time we finally see and hear Alice speak, in a video recorded, fittingly, by a professional psychic, it’s as though a specter has materialized — and it’s doubly revelatory because we suddenly recognize the deftness of Anderson’s technique. (The trick recalls the moment in Chris Marker’s “La Jetee” when the wakening girl is brought to “life,” Galatea-like, by the gradual quickening of still images.)

It’s terribly trite to call “Lake Mungo” a ghost story for the twenty-first century, but I think that’s what Anderson has achieved here. Aren’t we all haunted by the hodgepodge of media left in our wakes? People walk out, even die out, of our lives, but then there they are five years later, staring out at us from Facebook or Youtube or Flickr. How do we manage to live in the present when our past is all around us, when the natural process of forgetting — of organically reformatting our brains — has been rendered impossible by ghosts in the form of recorded sound and images? Like no other movie I can think of “Lake Mungo” gets at this dilemma, and it does so from a variety of angles, with Anderson continually tweaking the material to generate new shades of meaning.

Near the end of the movie Alice’s mother begins to realize that her inability to comprehend her daughter’s ghost is a proxy for her failure to understand the girl while she was living. And at that point you realize the movie’s a sort of tragedy — that it’s about the impossibility of ever really knowing another person; that it’s saying that all of our perceptions are mere representations. The final shot shows the truncated family smiling happily in a photograph. They’ve just moved out of their old house, which is visible in the background. The camera zooms in on a window; it’s seeking something. It’s debatable whether the face of Alice is recognizable, but there’s a version of her back there somewhere, and it’s unreachable.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Please, let’s end the political French kissing – the children are watching!

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Sir Barken Hyena

Sir Barken Hyena writes:

Sorry if you’ve just eaten, but here’s the latest sign of encroaching political dementia from America’s finest heartland city, Chicago. It’s a plaque commemorating the first kiss between our Leader and his Lady. If this shines a light into the minds of the clerisy these days, and the defense of this utter shite on the intertubes leads me to think it does, then we can only admire the glee with which they are throwing themselves over the cliff into total silliness.

What next? A plaque to mark the spot where they buried Malia’s placenta?

.

http://news.investors.com/article/622556/201208170904/barack-and-michelle-obama-first-date-was-eating-ice-cream.htm?ven=rss

Posted in Architecture, Art, Humor, Personal reflections, Politics and Economics | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Quote of the Day

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

“The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that one can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems outside philosophy….Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted outside philosophy and they die if these roots decay….These roots are easily forgotten by philosophers who ‘study’ philosophy instead of being forced into philosophy by the pressure of nonphilosophical problems.” — Karl Popper

Posted in Philosophy and Religion | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Joe Dante

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Sax von Stroheim

Sax von Stroheim writes:

I enjoyed reading this recent interview with Joe Dante (the auteur of Piranha, Gremlins, and the great, under-appreciated William Castle tribute Matinee, among other worthy movies) in the Chicago Reader (part 1, part 2). Dante is another one of those filmmakers who, like Dan O’Bannon, came up in the late-1970s or early-1980s and tried to bring a MAD Magazine-like sense of irreverence to big budget Hollywood moviemaking. Dante did the interview to promote a Chicago screening of  his first film, The Movie Orgy: a mash-up of commercials, trailers, and 1950s sci-fi movies, so that — like a schlock Intolerance — Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Speed Crazy, Tarantula, Beginning of the End, and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers all seem to reach their climax at the same time, in the same B-movie world.

One of the commercials featured in The Movie Orgy

The version I’ve seen lasted about four-and-a-half hour (earlier cuts ran up to seven hours) and sitting through it is an amazing, consciousness-altering experience that I recommend to anyone who has a chance to see it. It isn’t on DVD, but Dante has been screening it around the country over the last few years.

Getting back to the interview, though, I liked what Dante had to say about the difference between practical special effects and CGI:

Those [Gremlins] movies were both defined by the limitations of the technology at the time. There are things we would have loved to have [the Gremlins] do that we couldn’t have them do. By the time of the second movie, the technology had improved to the point where we could show Gizmo’s whole body—so we could have him walking and dancing—and we had a Gremlin who could talk. Those developments opened the door for a lot of new jokes.

I think the reason why there hasn’t been a third [Gremlins movie] is that now, with the advent of CGI, there’s really no structure to what you can do. Anything’s possible. But if anything’s possible, then everything’s possible.

Well, when I say I liked this, I have to admit, I liked it because it fits with what I’ve been saying for years: the charm and appeal of a lot of old-fashioned movie magic doesn’t have to do with perfecting an illusion, but rather with taking delight in the kind of ingenuity necessary for someone like Ray Harryhausen to bring his army of skeletons to life. There’s a hand-made, artisinal quality to Harryhausen’s creatures, Rick Baker’s make-up effects, and the Gremlins in Gremlins that seems to be missing from CGI effects. My guess is that the programming process ends up smoothing out all the rough edges, but it’s the rough edges that give those effects a sense of liveliness.

Filmmakers like Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam were at their best when they were working with a physical medium. Their art wasn’t simply an unbridled expression of their imagination, but, rather, it was in the collision of their imagination with the real world — in how they managed to shape material (props, sets, prosthetics, and puppets) into a vision of a fantastic world. CGI took away what seems to me (and to Dante) to have been an important stage in the process: unhindered by any physical restraints, the fantasy worlds of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and Terry Gilliam’s Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus have no weight to them at all (see also: most of the action sequences in the fourth Indiana Jones movie).

The best uses of CGI seem to come when filmmakers adopt a set of rules to guide them in their choices. Dante’s Small Soldiers is a good example: in that movie, the CGI effects are all quite modest and restricted to making it seem like the eponymous action figures (and their enemies) have come to life.

Two of the Small Soldiers

Small Soldiers is one of the Dante movies currently available on Netflix Instant. I don’t think it’s quite as strong a film as the Gremlins movies — the lengthy action sequence that ends the movie is accomplished but wearying — but it has several great moments and it  does a good job of making fun of standard Hollywood action movie jingoism. I also recommend Runaway Daughters:

Paul Rudd (doing Paul Newman) and Julie Bowen in Runaway Daughters

It’s a made-for-Showtime quasi-remake of the 1956 AIP flick, that takes a bit of inspiration from Speed Crazy, one of the centerpieces of The Movie Orgy.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , | 9 Comments

Why Don’t Professors Teach Appreciative Thinking?

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

Ask a professor the purpose of college and you are likely to get in response, “to learn how to think” or, more specifically, “to learn critical thinking.” Indeed, this was what I was told at my undergrad orientation. All of use eager students were herded into a room to learn about the wonderful programs, facilities, and opportunities at the university. But, as fun as all that other stuff may be, the main purpose of everything was to teach us to think critically.

So what is critical thinking? How is it done? I was never required to take a class in critical thinking in college, nor as part of my transfer prerequisites at the community college I attended. Unlike the scientific method or legal analysis, there seems to be no commonly accepted method of critical analysis. How can that be given that virtually any major university’s mission statement includes the teaching of critical thinking as a major, if not the major, goal?

But while I may not have learned any formal method, I surely learned one informally. The purpose of critical thinking was to uncover biases, assumptions, and flaws in the work being studied. Ah! Well, OK, I’m good at that — we’re all pretty good at that here, right? So even if we didn’t learn a formal method of critical analysis (perhaps because one doesn’t really exist), that’s not to say the university didn’t fulfill its mission.

But is critical thinking enough? Seth Roberts says no. He likens a university teaching only critical thinking to a flight school that teaches only take-offs but not landings. Critical thinking by itself is woefully insufficient, it is ignoring what is valuable and promising in a rush to point out what is imperfect. He writes:

The overemphasis — the total emphasis — on critical thinking has big and harmful consequences on graduate students. At Berkeley, in a weekly seminar called Animal Behavior Lunch, we would discuss a recent animal behavior paper. The dozen-odd graduate students could only find fault. Out of hundreds and hundreds of comments, I cannot remember a single positive one from a graduate student. Sometimes a faculty member would intervene: “Let’s not be too negative…” But week after week it kept happening. Relentless negativity caused trouble for the graduate students because every plan of their own that they thought of, they placed too much emphasis on what was wrong with it. Trying to overcome the problems, their research became too big and complicated. For example, they ran control groups before obtaining the basic effect. They had been very poorly taught — by all those professors who taught critical thinking.

Roberts advocates what he calls “appreciative thinking.” I know, I know — sounds Pollyannaish, right? He explains:

To learn appreciative thinking is to learn to appreciate, to learn to see the value of things. More or less the opposite of critical thinking.

That I had to make up a phrase shows the problem. I have complained many times about an overemphasis on critical thinking at universities. Sometimes I’d say, “Have you ever heard the term appreciative thinking? No? How many times have you heard the term critical thinking?”

When it comes to scientific papers, to teach appreciative thinking means to help students see such aspects of a paper as:

1. What can we learn from it? What new ideas does it suggest? What already-existing plausible ideas does it make more plausible or less plausible?
2. How is it an improvement over previous work? Does it use new methods? Does it use old methods in a new way? Do it show a better way to do something?
3. Did the authors show good taste in their choice of problem? Is this a problem both important and possibly solvable?
4. Are details done well? Is it well-written? Is the context of the work made clear? Are the data well-analyzed? Does it make good use of graphs? Is the discussion imaginative rather than formulaic?
5. What’s interesting or enjoyable about it?

I don’t know about you, but to me all of those questions sound just as valid, interesting, and intellectually stimulating as those asked during a critical analysis. Isn’t probing for what’s right about a given work just as important as probing for what’s wrong? If so, why isn’t it taught more?

A few other points:

  1. Perhaps the over-emphasis/exclusive emphasis on critical thinking is attributable, at least in part, to human nature. Don’t we find it much easier to tear down than to build up? Doesn’t writing a pan of a movie come much easier than writing a positive one?
  2. Maybe it’s just a function of semantic confusion. As a commenter points out in one of the above posts, “to criticize” has two meanings: to examine closely and to find fault.
  3. As another commenter points out, it may be a function of professorial status-seeking. A professor does not usually make a name for himself praising the work of others. No, you command attention by ruthlessly pointing out flaws. Because this mode of inquiry is necessary for professors to acquire their jobs, it’s the only way they know how to do business. They’re simply not equipped to teach any other method.
Posted in Education, Personal reflections | Tagged | 3 Comments

Seekers of Bad Public Art are in luck!

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Sir Barken Hyena

Sir Barken Hyena writes:

Seekers of Bad Public Art are in luck, that is, as long as you’re in the enlightened and progressive state of New Mexico (why do they need public art there at all? Aren’t the sunsets enough?). Use this nifty interactive map to locate and view all of the Bad Public Art sites in the Land of Enchantment. True, the map doesn’t claim to show you “bad” art sites, merely “public’ art, but a bit of clicking around will quiet your fears, son.

Interactive Bad Public Art Map

Bad Public Art

“Give me your tired, your hackneyed, your overconceptualized”

Posted in Art, Humor | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

What Makes for a Compelling Protagonist?

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

A while back The Question Lady asked:

Question: Do you as a reader or writer need a “likeable” protagonist? We just read a blog review of a Donald Westlake Parker novel. Now, we LOVE Westlake. But they complained that Parker’s not “likeable.” My attitude: Uh, he’s an anti-hero. And is Lady Macbeth likeable? Would you be BFF with Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca?”

Usually, I hear writers say that readers don’t really want “likeable” characters, they want “relatable” ones. I think that’s true, but words like “likeable” and “relatable” are mere conclusions, right? What makes a character “relatable”? Here are a few traits that are usually good hooks for me.

1. Confidence. Characters possessed of confidence are always intriguing. People like spending time with other people who know what they’re doing, who seem to have it all figured out. This trait is usually possessed by evil characters, which is why they don’t have to be likeable for us to spend time with them.

2. Adept at their job. This is closely connected to number 1. Don Draper in Mad Men and Jimmy McNulty in The Wire on paper should not be likeable. Draper is a liar, emotionally distant, and a serial adulterer. McNulty is a selfish, self-destructive alcoholic who makes life miserable for almost everyone around him. But both are great at their jobs. Ebert said in his review of Cast Away, “I find it fascinating when a movie just watches somebody doing something. Actual work is more interesting than most plots.”

3. Funny. Funny forgives almost everything. People will put up with a lot so long as you’re funny.

4. Weaknesses. This is what makes a character relatable since we all have them. No one wants to read a story about perfect people who encounter no obstacles. There’s no conflict in that. We want to see people struggle against their weaknesses. If it’s a Hollywood movie, the weaknesses are overcome. If it’s an independent movie, people remain prisoners to them.

Going back to Holmes for a second, I was reading Kyle Freeman’s introduction to volume 1 of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. He asks, “Just what is it about Sherlock Holmes that has captivated people for so long?” His answers illustrate my rules pretty well:

  • “His intelligence, his self-assurance, his mastery of every situation, and his unerring judgment are all enormously appealing.” In other words, his confidence that springs from skill at his profession.
  • “We are also attracted by Holmes’s sense of humor…This quality goes a long way toward humanizing him, making it easier to feel affection for a character whose abilities could well make him seem more machine than human.”
  • “His eccentricities add to his appeal…Devoting his life to fighting crime, for instance, is surely unusual.” Furthermore, “Holmes’s attitude toward class distinction is also unusual for his time…His judgments about people arise from the content of their characters, not from the color of their coats of arms.”
  • “Lest he seem impossibly superior, Holmes is given some counterbalancing weaknesses.” For example, he’s sometimes wrong, can be overly critical of others, and he’s manic-depressive.
Posted in Books Publishing and Writing, Movies | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Songs That Define You

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Fenster

Fenster writes:

Here is the site Six Songs of Me.

According to an NPR article on the site:

(Musicologist Eric Clarke and others have) set up a special site (fueled by Spotify) where you can pick your most meaningful songs in six categories. They’re hoping to gather enough data, Clarke says, to “help us think more fruitfully about the ‘big questions’ that lie behind the sounds of our lives.”

The categories, in the form of questions, are:

  • What was the first song you ever bought?
  • What song always gets you dancing?
  • What song takes you back to your childhood?
  • What is your perfect love song?
  • What song would you want at your funeral?
  • Time for an encore. One last song that makes you, you.

Mine:

Bought: can’t really remember though it may have been the 45 of The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

Dancing: Devil With a Blue Dress–Mitch Ryder (guilty pleasure from the 1970s: Instant Replay by Dan Hartman).

Childhood: The Click Song by Miriam Makeba.  Mostly because while a lot of what I like goes back to childhood (Rhapsody in Blue, Sorcerer’s Apprentice) I have heard them many times since whereas I don’t think I have heard Makeba but once or twice in the last x decades and so it brings me back in a way that others do not.

Perfect Love Song:  Rainbow Sleeves by Rickie Lee Jones–Tom Waits songwriting at its emotional, even mawkish, best.

Funeral: Im Abendrot, from Strauss Four Last Songs.  (Runners up: The Power of Love–John McLaughlin and Michael Tilson Thomas or Peaches en Regalia–Frank Zappa.)

Makes you you.  Too hard to answer at the moment.  Will mull over and return in comments, prob’ly.

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