March 29, 2007
still standing/where you stand?
Everybody likes to quote Stein on Pound:
Met Ezra Pound. Didn't like him. Found him to be the village explainer. Very useful if you happen to be a village; if not, not.
Most everyone, when offering said quotation, seems to believe they thusly (or already) stand with Stein against village explainers.
Good comedy.
March 27, 2007
shooter
The keywords for this film's imdb entry seem about right: Assassination / Marksman / Falsely Accused / Based On Novel / Military Veteran. Of course, they can't begin to get at the two most basic questions: when will Mark convert his supporting-cast eccentricity — and he really is the most riveting sideman in Hollywood — into lead role charisma, if ever? (Not here, though he's litely charming enough even when being "heroic").
And also, who was the production genius who failed to buy Lil Wayne's song "Shooter" for the opening credits or middle montage or closing credits, surely one of the most embarrassing gaffes/absent presences in recent cinema? (Probably Mike Flicker, though Producer Eric Howsam probably deserves some blame as well — but honestly, shouldn't Marky Mark have insisted? Shouldn't it have been in his deal? If we were doing choreographed high-drama sniper shit in a liberal revenge fantasy, and if we were former rappers who had found our true calling but were still true to the game, we would have a seventh attorney who was in charge of exactly those kinds of things.)
11) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
10) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
9) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
8) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
7) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
6) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
5) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
4) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)
March 26, 2007
avenue montaigne
Since 1964, Claude Brasseur has appeared in about 100 films; he has played Mussolini, Maupassant, and an inspector (in the movie Dancing Machine). Sugarhigh! has seen exactly none of these films that passed between the slight roundelay of Avenue Montaigne and the slight serie noir crime film Band of Outsiders, 42 years earlier. In the former, he plays a one-time cabbie who has climbed to the top of society and now, near death, is selling of his world-class art collection. In the latter he plays a casual criminal who comes to a bad end. One of these might be the best movie ever made.
All movies are in the present, the always-unfolding present; seeing Brasseur enter the scene here, it is as if no time at all has passed since he departed the field outside the house of Odile's aunt. But it is stark to see a face age four decades without a sequence, or a slow dissolve; as shocking a jump-cut as anything Godard could have contrived.
10) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
9) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
8) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
7) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
6) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
5) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
4) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)
March 16, 2007
and now the weather
...and now the weather takes on the feeling of any commodity: how each pleasure, grams of sun on skin, the unexpectedly luxurious afternoon in what was once late winter, becomes rifted with guilt and disgust at this human history, our doings, which have contrived at such expense such sensual delight.
March 11, 2007
the host
The Host makes one wish to know much more about contemporary and recent Korean history; one has the sense the film is ludicrously, incoherently canny about its own symbolic stakes, which lurk just under the surface — like the film's monster itself — in this case underneath the surface of the conveniently superficial symbolic tradition of the Asian monster mash-up exemplified by Godzilla.
But to some extent, the urge to read the film in such a manner should be resisted. Monster movies offer this too easily and often too neatly. This film is a thicket of signs, an excess of signs; it would be an insult to its hurlyburly to make it tell some particular story, to make the repressed be SARS or avian flu, foreign military presence or toxicity, the rise of the Asian Tigers or the drama of disunification. None of these will do, though all may linger about. This sense of excess culminates in the monster's death: like Rasputin, it dies poisoned, shot, stabbed and burnt.
Moreover, the film has real force outside the realm of the symbolic, not just in its formal capacity to jolt some adrenaline out of the audience but within its story. The scene in which the bereft family members silently imagine feeding treats to Hyun-seo (whom the monster has taken) in their family foodstand/bunker, is brief, unremarked, untelegraphed, and, as the freshmen are wont to say, heart-rendering.
Moreover, the national dramas are sometimes closer to the literal than the symbolic. Much to say, surely, about Hyun-seo's dopey father, with his backstory of malnutrition and his drill to the brain; same for Park Nam-joo, the half-formed hunt-goddess with her national medal in archery. But the wittiest story belongs to the young uncle Park Nam-il, handsome in his University suit; at some point, desolate over Hyun-seo, over their own inability to help her, over his family's pressing incompetence, he breaks down into a bitter monologue about how he went to University and "sacrificed for democracy" (apparently connected facts), and now he can't even get a job.
This, pace the sense of national duty, is of course the song of many a graduate. What's ticklishly elegant about the plot is that it will turn out — again, this goes entirely unremarked, it just happens — that Nam-il's education has fore-armed him flawlessly for the film's climax: a scene that plays out after a demonstration has forth along the river, a panoramic and nervous confrontation, all placards and puppets and colored chemical clouds.
Even those with only a passing local knowledge will know a bit of South Korea's modern history of public political manifestations; the Second Republic begins in 1960 after the violent repression of a student protest sets off the April Revolution. The tradition has not abated; a dopey 1998 article in Salon renders the local color of Pusan like this:
I opened my blinds and looked down to see 100 or so helmeted police in black storm trooper outfits and plexiglass shields charging up the street through a cloud of tear gas. Directly in their path -- forming a vague skirmish line at the front gate of Pusan National University -- a mob of masked student demonstrators hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails. The spectacle looked like a Shakespeare-in-the-park production of "Star Wars".... I didn't know it at the time, but this was part of a rather normal springtime ritual in Korea. As is the case at many Korean colleges, Pusan National University students have the option of joining political demonstration groups in the same way that they can join a reading circle or a ham-radio club. Street protests -- which are always held during the mild spring months -- have become a theatrical, somewhat listless coming-of-age ritual for young students here.
The description is not so different from that scene in The Host. In the movie (and in most realities but Salon's, where the story turns out to be about the most important thing: the status of the American's job) there do seem to be some real stakes: the crowds has come to confront not the monster but the government and its helmeted cops, taken to be using the monster (and the virus it supposedly hosts) as a sort of pretext for populace management. The tradition of student street-fighting remains current; this decade has seen a ceaseless series of local revolts against Korea's participation in the WTO and similar globalizing initiatives, protests which often unite students and farmers.
This poses the problem of cultural translation in its purest form; can an American audience, almost entirely unable to imagine the basic political life of Korea (and much of the globe), encounter the force of a movie which, while not necessarily about such things, builds itself Lego-like from these matters? Perhaps not, though a healthy beginning might involve a visit to this po'faced charmer of a website, if for nothing but a refresher on what political activity looks like elsewhere.
Indeed, one of the several punchlines in The Host that surely resonates differently here involves Nam-il's crucial contribution to the slaying of the monster. For it turns out that he has learned exactly what he needed at University: how to throw a molotov cocktail. Confronted with the hybrid, appendage-strewn beast (even its form is incoherent ,and thus seemingly unassailable) that has swallowed his niece and laid waste to local life along the river, his student skills — which until this moment have consisted largely of wearing a suit and whining — suddenly blossom into heroism. The ways in which this does not recede into the symbolic, but tells a local and current story likely to be a cipher for a US audience, may perhaps be the most striking fact of the film, written in aggressively beautiful poppies of fire on the bank's paving stones.
9) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
8) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
7) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
6) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
5) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
4) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)
March 08, 2007
news from abroad
From the Gray Goose's rehearsal of the Asian Flu:
Less than 10 years ago, the devaluation of the Thai baht on July 2, 1997, triggered a wave of currency collapses across East Asia and beyond.By December of that year, the currencies of Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines had depreciated by about 75 percent, on average. Then the ruble fell. The Russian government defaulted on its domestic debt. By the time the dust settled, Brazil had devalued the real, Turkey had devalued the lira and the Argentine peso had collapsed.
And here we thought Jean Baudrillard had devalued the real. Shoulda known. When my baby smiles at me I go to Real.
March 06, 2007
farewell to the desert of the real (1929-2007)
American newspapers, representing a certain polity in their fear of things French and intellectual, in the anxiety stored in the black boxes of "theory" and "communism" and so on, will race to reassure us that Jean Baudrillard, dead today in Paris, was first famous, second a fool, and third a philosophe. All true, alas.
He was also a critical and seminal contributor to our understanding of the late phase of a profoundly concrete commodity capitalism (under which one might find the somewhat-more-abstract categories "postmodernism" and "globalization"), most notably in The System of Objects and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, and even in the perverse but importantly provocative Mirror of Production.
Perhaps one of the important social functions of French intellectuals, in this era of U.S decline, is to provide an opportune target for the ceaseless hysteria of democratic pragmatism in its struggle to avoid confronting its own systemic failure. We have little doubt that M. Baudrillard will fulfill this obligation with as much esprit as death can muster.
