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December 31, 2004

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Wes Anderson and his films have been variously described as "quirky," "idiosyncratic," "precious," and as filled with "terminal whimsy." In his earlier films, especially The Royal Tennenbaums, I've enjoyed Anderson's playful style, his meticuolous attention to set design. Many critics have noted that Anderson's films function more as giant "doll houses" more than carefully plotted narratives, an observation that is perhaps most evident in the arrested development of the Tennenbaum mansion and the Max's set models in Rushmore. Further, as David Edelstein points out, in many of Anderson's films, "there's a tension between the person and the persona," whether the flawed "family of geniuses" in the Tennenbaums or the aspiring crime geniuses in Bottle Rocket.

His latest film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (IMDB), indulges many of these tendencies. In fact, Zissou, in my reading, seems even more whimsical and less carefully paced than many of Anderson's earlier films. Zissou focuses on the ocean explorer Steve Zissou (Murray), a Jacques Cousteau figure whose films are receiving less attention (and popularity) as their narratives lose any suspense and romance. The film opens at an Italian debut of one of his latest films (in a familar Anderson trope of showing a film or play audience), and it's clear that the audience is bored by the film, their questions polite rather than curious. But when Zissou's closest friend and assistant is killed by a "jaguar shark," he vows revenge, plotting to pursue the shark and kill it a la Captain Ahab. At the screening, Zissou meets Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), a Kentucky pilot who claims to be his son. This claim is never confirmed, but the two lonely people attempt to connect, with Zissou inviting Ned to join his crew.

Like other Anderson films, the tension between person and persona is played out narratively and through set design. Zissou's pretensions as an undersea explorer are conveyed as much by his red sea cap, his ship's flag, and his blue uniform. In one of the film's best shots, the camera glides from room to room in the ship, revealing much about how Zissou (and the rest of the film's characters) wish to see themselves. But once the film established this tension, I was never quite sure how it wanted to address it. There are several moments in which the film seems to want to parody the documentary form, to convey the ways in which "reality" in a documentary is constructed, but Anderson seems to abandon that question towards the end of the film.

Visually, Anderson's films continue to fascinate, and the "undersea adventure" parody gives Anderson's vivid visual imagination room to play. He still offers characters who confront the difficult realization that they may not be able to live up to their celebrity image. Like The Royal Tennenbaums, especially, Zissou seems to exist in a temporally muddled alternate reality, with characters appearing slightly out of place. In Tennenbuams, this approach is clear. Anderson explicitly masked all references to contemporary New York City, using actors' bodies to block out shots that would normally include the Statue of Liberty (for example).

In Zissou, the bright reds and garish yellows of Zissou's uniform and the fan club insignia ring that Ned dutifully wears make the film appear to take place in a slightly different present than our own. This sense of an "alternate present" is conveyed in part musically, with the crew member (Seu George) who sings David Bowie songs in Portguese. I'm not quite sure how to bring these observations together into a fully coherent reading. Like Roger Ebert, I'm finding it difficult to "recommend" the film, but I'm not sure that's the point of writing about a film, anyway. I do think that Anderson's narrative becomes muddled towards the end, but the film seems more interesting to me this morning than it did last night.

Posted by chuck at 11:45 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

December 30, 2004

Bloggers at the MLA

I just returned from the MLA conference in Philadelphia, where I met up with several other academic bloggers. Scott Jaschik, of Inside Higher Ed, was there and wrote an article about our little get together.

I'm pretty exhasuted from the trip, but it was wonderful to catch up with several old friends I hadn't seen in a while and to meet lots of other cool people.

Posted by chuck at 8:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 25, 2004

Ocean's Twelve

About ten years ago my family started an annual tradition in which we go to see a movie on Chritsmas afternoon. I'm not really sure why my sister was so eager to start this tradition, but, then again, I'm not going to complain about going to see a movie. The only difficulty is finding a movie that will keep me interested without offending my mother and sister, who are both very religious (my father prefers to sleep off his turkey buzz at home). This year, for the first time in several years, I genuinely enjoyed our Christmas selection.

Ocean's Twelve (IMDB) is a genuinely entertaining film, a nice follow-up to the Vegas caper film, Ocean's Eleven. Most (if not all) of Danny Ocean's crew is back for the sequel, living on their earnings from the first film's casino heist (about $19 million per person). Danny (George Clooney) and Tess (Julia Roberts) have settled into something resembling a domestic routine. They've bought a suburban home, and Tess is squabbling with painters over paint colors when she sees Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), victim of the first heist, approaching the door. He wants the money back. With interest.

Danny and Tess get the crew back together in Europe, reasoning that their crew wouldn't be able to pull any more jobs in the States. But that's just an excuse, I think, for director Steven Soderbergh to spend several months in Europe with some of his favorite actors. I won't say anything about the capers themselves because that's part of the fun of watching the film (as Roger Ebert notes in a solid review of the film).

What I enjoyed most about the film, however, was what seemed like Soderbergh's sheer joy in making this kind of film. More than most directors, Soderbergh has a terrific pop sensibility, and he uses it well in this film. Ebert's review cryptically mentions two "cameos," but there's a third one featuring Topher Grace (of That 70s Show) playing himself as an out-of-control actor who has destroyed a hotel room while partying. The camera is playful throughout the film with one long pan shot revealing the massive amount of alcohol consumed by Grace and his friends. This scene, relatively early in the film, clues us in that the film is very much about celebrity, and more broadly about performance.

Later in the film, Linus (Matt Damon in "sincere and intense" mode) has a conversation with Rusty (Brad Pitt), telling him that he's "ready for a bigger role." He's talking about their upcoming heists, but he might as well be talking about the film itself, about the role that stardom plays in dictating who gets the most screen time. There's also the question of celebrity among thieves, with Danny and his crew competing with European rivals regarding who is more famous. I won't reveal the film's other cameos, other than to say that they fit the film's treatment of celebrity perfectly.

Posted by chuck at 9:39 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 23, 2004

Centripetal-Centrifugal

Just a quick bookmark post: Collin has a nice round-up of a discussion of "centripetal" versus "centrifugal" blogging. He notes that Clancy's use of blogging in the classroom emphasizes the goal of creating "a close community ethos in the classroom," while Collin expresses less interest in community building, emphasizing the goal of "having students looking outward." For now, I just want to store this set of links so that I can return to it after MLA when I'll be doing the bulk of my planning for srping semester.

Note: Clancy's post provides a great overview of some of the instructional basics that many of my students have struggled with in the past. In the spring, I'd like to spend more time getting new bloggers up to speed, so this may be a good way to start.

Posted by chuck at 1:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

MLA Blogger MeetUp

I've been spending the last few days preparing for MLA hence the relative blog silence recently, but just wanted to mention again G's suggestion that academic bloggers get together at the MLA. By the way, do we have a time and place staked out yet?

Things may be quiet around here until after MLA, so if I don't post any more messages, I'll wish everyone a happy holiday, including those of you who celebrate Festivus. And, like G, I'll encourage you to check out Vic Chesnutt's "White Christmas."

Posted by chuck at 1:36 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 20, 2004

Spectacle, Surveillance, Control

My original plan of a documentary media-themed freshman composition course didn't work out this semester. Because the course is supposed to introduce students to literature/literary studies, my documentary emphasis didn't quite fit. So, instead, I've decided to teach a very loosely related theme, "Spectacle, Surveillance, Control," using Debord, Foucault, and Deleuze as reference points for each of these themes. I taught a section of Foucault's Discipline and Punish together with Deleuze's "Postscript on Control Societies" at Tech a few years ago, and the discussion of both essays turned out to be fairly productive (thanks to Anne for the link). I'm planning to use excerpts from The Society of the Spectacle for Debord, but that's still somewhat up in the air.

I think that one of the major benefits of this type of approach will be that it will portray the means by which academic argument can proceed. Foucault responds to Debord. Deleuze responds to Foucault. At the same time, we can "test" their approaches on a range of contemporary phenomena. Inspired by Ryan, I'll likely start the semester with the unit on spectacle, by focusing on the inauguration and protests as forms of spectacle (and given last year's controversy, the Super Bowl halftime show might be interesting to watch, too). Later in the semester, I've heard that Georgia Tech is planning a symposium on Freedom Tower, so that might be a useful moment to revisit those questions.

I will also require students to read Douglas Coupland's Miss Wyoming and William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. The latter, especially, can introduce students to questions about control societies quite nicely. Plus, I think both novels would be fun to teach. I've been trying to think of some good short stories/films for teaching alongside of Foucault. I think Bentham's Panopticon is such a powerful image that it stands on its own, so I'm more intrigued by the ways in which Foucault talks about disciplinarity. If you have any suggestions, I'd appreciate them. I have thought about teaching Cube, but that doesn't quite seem to fit what I'd like to do in terms of surveillance and disciplinarity. One other possibility (again, for control societies) would be Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World, another film I've long wanted to teach.

Posted by chuck at 5:29 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Random Monday Afternoon Film Notes

Just some quick notes on a couple of New York Times film articles. First, in "Revisiting Rwanda's Horrors With an Ex-National Security Adviser," John Darnton writes about watching the upcoming Terry George film, Hotel Rwanda (IMDB), with Clinton administration national securtiy advisor, Anthony Lake, who provides an overview of the Rwanda genocide crisis, and offers a fairly chilling reflection on how the UN failed the Tutsis and moderate Hutus (it's estimated that extremist Hutus murdered over 800,000 people). Also noteworthy: Darnton interviews Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero and hotel clerk whose story the film depicts. But what I find most compelling about Lake's viewing of the film is his observation that the current situations in Sudan and eastern Congo are echoes of what happened in Rwanda, and while the film almost certainly began production long before the crises in Sudan and Congo became public knowledge, Hotel Rwanda looks to have the potential to spark discussion about the US and UN response to what's happening.

The Times also has an interesting article about the disappointing domestic box office for 2004, citing estimates that cinema attendance declined a little over 2% this year. The article features the usual hand-wringing about bloated budgets for bad scripts (Troy, Catwoman, Hidalgo), with one critic noting that if it weren't for Mel Gibson and Michael Moore, 2004 might have been a very bad year at the box office, though I think their effect on ticket sales is probably slightly overrated.

Finally, while watching On the Waterfront, I saw a preview for Rodney Eavns' Brother to Brother, which looks fairly promising (IMDB), a feature film about the Harlem Renaissance (check out Manohla Dargis's generally positive review). Also caught a preview for the re-release of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and I can't wait to see the film (the preview itself was worth the cost of my movie ticket).

As I mentioned earlier, I had mixed feelings about watching Waterfront, but it is a very pretty film with its black-and-white cinematography. The lighting transforms Brando's Terry Milloy into a virtual saint for testifying against the corrupt crime boss, Johnny Friendly (a great performance by the underrated Lee J. Cobb). But it's hard to shake my ambivalence about Kazan's politics. Still very glad I was able to catch it on the big screen.

Posted by chuck at 2:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Question for my Firefox Readers

Still tweaking because some Firefox readers noted that the new look was still difficult to read. I've changed to a solid white background for the entire blog to see if that solves the problem. If the background isn't solid white, let me know.

Posted by chuck at 12:29 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

December 19, 2004

Blogging and Privacy in the Times

George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen has an article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine that explores the ways in which blogs are redefining the boundaries between public and private. For most bloggers, this type of story is probably old news, especially given the infamous Washingtonienne "scandal" and other lesser-known stories about bloggers losing jobs or relationships because of their blogs, but I think the article does raise some valuable legal and ethical questions about the ways in which blogs blur that boundary.

A similar thread of discussion has been floating around this corner of the academic blogosphere, with G. and profgrrrl weighing in. Like profgrrrl, Rosen notes in passing that "although men and women blog in roughly equal numbers, personal bloggers are more likely to be women than men." I won't revisit all of the points that have been raised on this topic, but it's worth noting that Rosen addresses the gender disparity in terms of how it plays out in the discussion of the personal.

I think that what I find more interesting is the way in which Rosen treats blogs as personal documentaries, using some of the same formulas that were used to analyze popular webcams such as the now defunct Jennicam.org. Specifically, he describes Justin Hall's links.net as kind of a "gonzo documentary" (Justin also has a blog about his studies at USC where he is a student in the interactive media division of their film school). I'm not quite sure what I find unsatisfying about Rosen's characeterization of blogs as "documentaries." It may be that in Rosen's description, these "documentary" blogs still seem to have a voyeuristic quality, as if blogs were meant merely to be read or seen, like a low-budget reality TV show, while I see blogs as far more interactive.

But I think there's also an unstated assumption about (and fear of) the process of "recording," one that seems connected to the unruly audiences who read (and write) blogs. When Rosen discusses law blogs (or blawgs), he acknowledges some discomfort at what his students might be writing about his public performance as a teacher. He reflects that "now that I know that students may be reporting my after-class comments without my knowledge, I'm more likely to be circumspect in private conversations." While some version of privacy may be lost here, I do think we're seeing the emergence of a new form of cultural literacy that while redefining the boundary between public may also become more acutely aware of the role of language and communication in daily life, with Rosen, echoing former FCC chief Reid Hundt in acknowledging that blogs make "controlling audiences" impossible. Of course, "controlling audiences" has never been as simple as Rosen implies here, although I would agree that blogs make the multiplicity of audiences far more evident than before.

Not sure I have a conclusion here, but I'm intrigued by this discussion of privacy, especially as it pertains to the question of documentary and "reality TV."

Posted by chuck at 10:29 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Maybe I've Been Asleep for a While...

...but when did Amazon start tracking blogs? It's weird to see a screenshot of my old template, but it's also interesting to see their "recommendations," i.e., people who visit my website might also enjoy Liz Lawley, Unfogged, Culture Cat, and Arts and Letters Daily. At least I'm in good company.

Posted by chuck at 2:24 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Closer

Mel has been scooping me big-time when it comes to film reviews, but I finally got a chance to see Mike Nichols' Closer (IMDB) tonight. Like Mel, I thought the film was beautifully photographed, with the London settings very effectively capturing the mood of the film, and Damien Rice's melancholic music, which plays during both the opening and closing credits, fits the film's mature treatment of love perfectly. And, like Mel, I found the casting choices interesting and effective, especially Julia Roberts playing against type as a relatively unglamorous photographer who is usually wearing, as Mel puts it, "some great men's trousers."

Closer focuses on four characters, Dan (Jude Law), an obituarist and sometimes novelist, and Alice (Natalie Portman), a stripper; and Anna (Roberts), a photographer, and Larry (Clive Owen), a dermatologist. The film opens with Dan meeting Alice for the first time, in a near fantasy sequence, with the two of them gradually approaching each other on the sidewalk, Alice's "Lola Red" hair shining in the sun. Lola, an American, forgets London's traffic rules, steps in foront of a car, and sustains a minor injury. Dan takes her to the hospital. Later, Dan inadvertently plays Cupid for Anna and Larry by posing in a sex chatroom as "Anna" and seducing Larry, arranging a meeting in an aquarium. When Anna happens to be there, she figures out the joke, but begins to date (and eventually marries) Larry.

The film is based on a play (Patrick Marber adapted his own play), and there are only six speaking parts in the entire film. While the characters are fascinating, articulate, and complicated, I experienced this tight focus as claustrophobic. The film's narrative is also fairly elliptical, often skipping several years to move to the next pertinent moment. I realize this is part of the point of the film, but for whatever reason, I found these temporal ellipses a bit frustrating, especially when Dan reveals to Alice that he's been having an affair with Anna for over a year. I think the problem for me is that the film doesn't convey that duration very effectively. I didn't sense (from my experience of the film) that Dan and Alice had even been together for a year, so the betrayal didn't really register like it could have (A.O. Scott has a much more generous reading of the temporal gaps than I do).

Even with that (minor) gripe, I relished the articulate screenplay. All of the characters are clearly articulate, using their dialogue in a variety of ways: to deceive, to wound, to challenge. Dan, posing as Anna, tricks Larry in a sex chatroom. Alice questions whether or not Anna's photographs of working class pain are truly "honest" or whether they are simply comfort narratives for bourgeois art consumers. Alice is stripper, someone who might seem to reveal everything, but when she sees Larry at the club, Larry has what seems to be a profound moment of emotional self-revelation. And, of course, we learn at the end of the film that perhaps the most surprising deception has been comitted by Alice herself.

I'm not quite sure what to do with the film's treatment of authenticity, or perhaps, more precisely, honesty. But I think that's one of the great strengths of the film. It doesn't offer easy answers about romance, sex, or love. It's far from a predictable film, which is very much in its favor. In ways, Closer seems to fit nicely alongside the more critically-acclaimed Sideways and Before Sunset as a film that treats adult relationships in a serious, thought-provoking way.

Update (2:09 AM): Two things. First, I'm not sure what this says about me, but everyone has been talking about the film's heavy use of profanity. To be honest, I didn't really notice. I just thought that's how people speak. Second, some of those same people have been comparing Closer to Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, but I don't think that's really representative of what Nichols and Marber are doing in this film. Where the characters in LaBute's films seem downright immoral, sinners who will eventually find themselves in the hands of an angry G-d, the characters in Closer seem a bit more complicated, less doomed to hell and instead merely deluded.

Posted by chuck at 12:26 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

December 18, 2004

More Tweaking

Titus helped me with some tweaking to fix the appearance of my blog in Firefox, and now, I'm hoping that everything is wokring properly around here (everything still looks cool in IE). If you see any glitches or problems, be sure to let know.

Posted by chuck at 1:25 AM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

December 17, 2004

The Background is Owned

Brian Flemming explains a new problem confronting documentary filmmakers: "the background is owned." Christopher Sims started shooting a documentary film, "An Army, One by One," about Army recruiting in 2002, but cannot show the film without being sued because much of his footage includes corporate logos in the background. These logos are, Brian notes, "incidental." They just happen to be in the background when Sims was filming, but as Flemming notes, "A corporation can (and often will) sue simply because you caught a trademark or copyrighted media product in the background of a shot." Of course, on another level, these images are far from incidental, in that any film that presents an uncomfortable argument can be silenced in our spectacular culture. Guess I won't be making that documentary about NASCAR dads any time soon.

As Brian notes, this practice has dangerous implications in terms of who is allowed to speak, who is allowed access to the public sphere:

If you're a media corporation, and one of your primary goals is control, it's a great trick. Clutter every part of our lives with logos, advertisements, video, music and other media--and then demand veto power when someone tries to document the world. Because you own it. At its most extreme, this scheme would require everyone who ever made anything about the world around them to get permission to share their work.
You can see Chistopher Sims' film here.

Posted by chuck at 8:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Words, Images, and Penguins

Here are a few of the articles I've been reading and flash movies I've been watching over the last few days. First, GreenCine Daily has been linking up a storm, with all of the end-of-the-year "Ten Best" lists coming out. Among other good reads, Nathan Kosub of Stop Smiling Magazine nominates Richard Linklater's Before Sunset as the best film of the year, and I'm not sure I disagree.

In other news, a commenter in Filmbrain's entry on long takes mentions David Bordwell's Film Quarterly article, "Intensified continuity: visual style in contemporary American film." In the article, Bordwell asks whether the average shot length in Hollywood films has decreased dramatically in recent years. Surprising factoid: Bordwell discovered that Dark City is "the fastest-cut Hollywood film" he found, at an average shot length of a mere 1.8 seconds.

Also from GreenCine: Hal Hartley, one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers, is debuting his new DV feature, The Girl from Monday, at Sundance and will hit DVD very soon after. I haven't had a chance to watch his newly released collection of short films, but my video store has a copy, and I've seen a few clips, and the collection looks very cool.

Ed Rampell of Alternet uses the re-release of On the Waterfront, which I'll be seeing tomorrow night or Sunday, to remind audiences of "the film's proper historical context: as a case study in Red Scare propaganda." I haven't seen the film in a few years, and while I'm aware of Kazan's testimony before before the House Un-American Activities Committee, in which he named eight people who had been members of the Communist Party, I'm still curious to see the film again. Rampell's basic thesis--that Kazan likely made Waterfront in order to justify his decision to inform--seems about right to me, so I'll be watching this film through a variety of lenses.

Finally, Weez pointed me to a Flash animation starring my favorite species of animal, penguins: When Penguins Attack: The Post-Modern Version.

Posted by chuck at 7:51 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

New Year, New Appearance

Like G at "Thanks for Not Being a Zombie", I'm upgrading and changing the appearance of the blog. I'm still not quite satisfied, but you're witnessing the basic new look for the chutry experiment for 2005. I've been using the black (or chracoal) background for such a long time that I'm still adjusting to the new appearance. There are some line-spacing problems that I need to tweak, but otherwise I'm relatively happy with the new look (mostly a default template from Moveable Type). I'm finding the width of the sidebar to be a little narrow, but that could be a problem with my monitor and browser only. Let me know if anything needs to be fixed.

I'm hoping that the white background will make it easier for me to use (or at least understand) the blog as a space for working through some of my academic research and that it will simply make my blog easier to read. I've been relatively focused on wrapping up the semester and preparing for MLA interviews, so haven't had time to write as much as I would like here. Like many of us, I'm also still reeling a little from the election, and while I've attempted to write several blog entries about the election, moral values, or complaints to the FCC about the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics, but the entries don't seem to be doing what I want them to. In part, I'm trying to rethink my own understanding of the relationship between politics and popular culture, and I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with the language I've been using to describe that relationship.

Posted by chuck at 6:31 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Pardon the Dust

Working on some more template and stylesheet changes, including the transition to using TypeKey for comments. If the blog looks messy today (Friday), that's why. That's all for now.

Update: Weird. The changes seem to have corrected themselves automatically, at least for now.

Update 2: More experimentation: I've noticed that in the paragraph after a block quotation, the line spacing changes.

So here is a blockquotation.

And here is some text below the block quotation, just to see what happens. By the way, if anyone knows a fix for this problem, I'd appreciate it. Oh, and I'm working on matching the fonts, too.

Update 3: It appears to be switching to double spacing after lists, too. I'd noticed this when I would preview an entry, but it never showed up before on my actual blog, just when I previewed it. Really weird.

Update 4: Testing out some other minor changes to see if I can fix the blockquote problem.

Posted by chuck at 11:59 AM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

December 16, 2004

End Humpty-Dumpty

Enclosures is a blog that "collects ephemera found between the pages of secondhand books." The blog's only a few weeks old, but the most interesting find so far is the scrawled note, "End Humpty-Dumpty," found inside a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (via Greg Gilpatrick).

Posted by chuck at 12:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 14, 2004

Special Issue on Blogging

A friend emailed me a call for papers for a special issue on blogging from the online journal, Reconstruction. I'm not sure whether I'll have time to submit anything, but it's certainly a topic I find interesting. More importantly, I know that many of my readers have some very interesting things to say about blogging, so go take a look at the CFP and submit something.

Posted by chuck at 12:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

MLA 2004: Blogger Meetup

The MLA conference will take place in Philadelphia from December 27-30. G. at "Not being a Zombie" suggests that academic bloggers who will be attending the conference get together at some point. I think this is a cool idea, so I'll certainly be there. If you're interested, contact G (you could also contact me, but it might be easier to have one primary contact person instead of several).

Please also consider putting a notice on your blog.

Posted by chuck at 12:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 13, 2004

Classroom Blogging Revisited

A few weeks ago, I mentioned Austin Lingerfelt's paper on blogging in the classroom. The paper is done now, and it looks really interesting. I've learned quite a bit from Austin's paper and participating in an interview with him about my use of blogging in the classroom, specifically in terms of how the student "discussion blogs" functioned in relationship to interaction within the classroom.

I generally think Autsin's right to note that "the key issue then is one of choice," and that allowing students to write about topics of their choice may make for more engaged writers. In my Rhetoric and Democracy course this semester, I tried just that approach, with some limited success (students were allowed to write about election-related topics that were important to them), but when I allowed students the freedom to find what they wanted to read (and therefore relaxed required due dates for blog entries), many of them procrastinated and didn't complete the blog assignment until the final week of class. Now, to some extent that may be an implicit commentary on the material, with students who weren't interested in reading about the election putting off writing about it as long as possible. Or it could be a matter of tweaking the assignment to keep students more consistently on topic in order to integrate blog assignments more effectively into the daily life of the classroom. At the very least, Austin's essay has encouraged me to rethink the ways in which I've used blogging in the classroom in the past and how I'll use it in the future.

Posted by chuck at 5:21 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Documentary Film Panel

Now that I'm done calculating grades, I've been looking ahead to future projects, including the film panel I will be organizing at next year's SAMLA conference here in Atlanta. It will probably come as no surprise that I've decided to focus the panel around the theme of documentary cinema (and don't worry, I'm not a stickler for medium specificity; reality TV qualifies here). I'll post the specifics later, but I sent off a rough version of the call for papers to the SAMLA office just a few minutes ago.

While organizing the panel, I had the good fortune of stumbling across Chris's post, "In the Year of the Documentary," which I read as a very useful analysis of the renewed prominence of the genre. At some point, I'd like to untangle Chris's claim that the documentary reniassance might in some way be tied to a "return of totality," but for now, I'll start with a link. Chris is right that it's easy to generalize and make sweeping claims about the new popularity of the documentary (I'm sure similar pronouncements greeted the appearance of The Thin Blue Line and Roger and Me within a year of each other in 1988-89), but I think there's something worth investigating in this contemporary return to the real, no matter how fabricated that real actually is.

Speaking of documentary, does anyone else find it sad that this version of The Thin Blue Line has been released on DVD, while this version sits sadly on the shelf waiting to be released?

Posted by chuck at 2:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

JFK Reloaded's Theory of History

Via Ian of Water Cooler Games, an interview with Kirk Ewing, one of the developers of the online game, JFK Reloaded (also see Ian's original post on the game). What I find interesting about the interview is Ewing's description of JFK Reloaded as a "docu-game." I haven't had a chance to play the game yet, but the use of the game narrative to show how the JFK assassination could have turned out differently seems like an interesting use of the medium.

Ewing also describes the game as an attempt to place viewers back in Dealey Plaza in order to disprove the conspiracy theories and witness the assassination of John Kennedy for themselves. Ewing's comment reminds me of an oft-quoted remark by filmmaker D. W. Griffith, who spoke optimisitically of cinema's ability to represent the past:

Imagine a public library of the near future. There will be long rows of boxes or pillars, properly classified and indexed, of course. At each box a push button and before each box a seat. Suppose you wish to "read up" on a certain episode in Napoleon’s life. Instead of consulting all the authorities, wading laboriously through a host of books, and ending bewildered, without a clear idea of exactly what did happen, and confused at every point by conflicting opinions about what did happen, you will merely seat yourself at a properly adjusted window, in a scientifically prepared room, press the button and actually see what happened.

There will be no opinions expressed. You will merely be present at the making of history. All the work of writing, revising, collating, and reproducing will have been carefully attended to by a corps of recognized experts, and you will have received a vivid and complete expression.

Of course, Griffith's view of an objective representation of history has been widely discredited. But, it seems to me that the game might be doing something else, despite Ewing's assertions that he wanted to debunk the JFK assassination conspiarcy theories, such as the one furthered by Oliver Stone's 1991 film. Although Ewing claims that the game shows "everything is as it was," the mere fact of being able to slow down, rewind, and stop time (much less to witness the assassination from a variety of viewpoints) immediately changes our reading of the event, and to my mind, conveys the very difficulty, if not impossibility, of knowing what happened in Dealey Plaza in 1963. But, due to my own interests in time-travel cinema, I'm intrigued by Ewing's descritpion of JFK Reloaded as "way to travel through time and re-visit one of the most debated and important moments in history, using technology that we love and understand."

Please note that we're still working out some of the glitches of moving to MT 3.1ish, so if you leave a comment and it doesn't show up right away, it has been sent to me for approval. But, don't worry, I won't delete any comments unless I regard them as blog spam.

Posted by chuck at 1:34 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

December 12, 2004

Ch-ch-ch-changes

As you can see, I'm making some changes to the design of the blog. I've been wanting to change the white letter-on-charcoal background for a while, and the Herder upgrade to MT 3.1 is giving me a good excuse to do just that. Please excuse the dust.

Update: Unsatisfied with the changes, so I'll maintain the normal template for now. Plus, I really should be working on other things right now.

Update 2: Just finished calculating grades, so I had some time to make some quick changes. For now, I've just decided to switch from a charcoal background to a solid black one. Let me know if you see any part of the background that's not showing up as black. Hopefully over the holidays I can make some more substantial changes.

Posted by chuck at 7:36 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 11, 2004

Overlooked Films

The cinetrix has linked to a list of the "Top 100 Overlooked Films of the 1990s" compiled by the Online Film Critics Society. While I've seen many of the films on the list, and have at least vaguely heard of all the others, I'm somewhat surprised and dismayed to see that only a small number of the films listed are from Europe (and most of those are from Great Britain or Ireland). None are from Africa. Overlooking an entire continent would seem to defy the spirit of the list.

Inspired by this "film review" website, with its list of "Movies I Almost Saw," the cinetrix lists a few of the "overlooked" films that she hasn't seen. I won't try to count all of the films on the list that I haven't seen simply because I'm too lazy, but like the cinetrix (and at the risk of losing my street cred), I'll disclose a few of the films on the list that I haven't seen:

In other news, the "Overlooked" list comes from a website called Lists of Bests, which seems to offer the same service as all consuming, except it allows you to compile lists of films and music, too. So, now that we've tackled the "Overlooked" list, isn't it time to move on to the Bad Cinema Society's "100 Worst Films of the 20th Century" list?

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Counting Words

I'm grading my students' group blog projects today, and one of the expectations is that all blog entries should meet a certain minimum word length. In the past, I've usually opened Word and copied and pasted text there to run a word count. Now, after a quick Google search, my grading has been completely transformed. The javascript at this website makes counting words faster and easier than ever before.

Of course, word count isn't the only factor in determining my students' grades for their group blog projects, which means I've been grading most of the day, and I continue to find it difficult to grade online work, not simply because I'm still thinking about evaluative criteria for online writing (I certainly allow for a greater degree of informality, for example), but also because the rest of the Internet is only a click away, making it easy to get distracted. I noticed that last year at this time, I found it somewhat difficult to stay on task while grading student blog projects. I'd imagine that this sense of distraction may be more acute this time of year due to the fact that I'm on the job market (sorry I can't be more specific here about how the job search is going), but I'm still convinced that I need a better method for evaluating online work. Any suggestions?

Posted by chuck at 5:34 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Undertow

David Gordon Green's magnificent new film, Undertow (IMDB), opens with a high school boy and girl quietly and awkwardly communicating their passion for each other. The scene reminded me a lot of the opening sequence of Green's previous film, All the Real Girls, which also was set in a rural southern landscape of abandoned factories and warehouses, verdant forests, mom-and-pop restaurants, and collections of broken down things. Roger Ebert describes Green's approach well: "We see not the thriving parts of cities, but the desolate places they have forgotten. His central characters are usually adolescents, vibrating with sexual feelings but unsure how to express them."

But, unlike his previous film, Green's Undertow takes a surprisingly violent turn when the boy, Chris Munn (played by Jamie Bell who previously starred in Billy Elliot), throws a rock through his girlfriend's window, arousing the attention of her father who runs out the front door, shotguns firing into the air. Chris sprints away, running through the woods, through neighbors' yards, culminating in one of the more painful imges I've seen in some time, with Chris leaping barefoot onto a nail sticking up through a board (the stigmata allusion is there, but fairly understated). Even with the nail in his foot, Chris continues to try to run. It's the only response he seems to know.

After the chase, we see Chris in the police station, waiting for his father to pick him up. Chris has been in trouble before, but it's clear that the film sympathizes with him. His father, John (Dermot Mulroney), has become a hermit after his wife died, isolating himself and his two sons from the rest of the community. John also burdens Chris with most of the farm's chores, deeming the younger son, Tim (Devon Alan), too weak and fragile to work. Tim's fragility is somewhat self-imposed. For reasons that are never explained (other than reference to an "anxiety disorder"), Tim constantly eats objects that are harmful or poisonous--green paint, mud, small metal objects--leaving his stomach tied up in knots. The film's main plot opens when John's ex-con brother, Deel (Josh Lucas), enters this fragile family situation seeking a collection of gold coins that John and Deel's father managed to steal from a museum. The coins are valuable, and it becomes clear that Deel is angling to find the collection, first by preying on the psychologies of the sons, then by actual violence.

Because Chris has a history of petty crime, he feels he cannot turn to the police, and so he and Tim run, attempting to escape from the increasingly violent Deel, and it's worth noting here that Lucas's performance keeps Deel from becoming a one-dimensional monster. Chris and Tim spend most of the rest of the film running and hiding, living temporarily in abandoned piles of junk or among a group of teen runaways in the ruins of a brick warehouse along a river. But while the film has all of the genre characteristics of a thriller, Green's characteristic style, which I previously described as "red clay realism," still comes through. Throughout the chase, we still witness moments of contemplation and reflection, with characters who speak awkwardly, but poetically, about their circumstances (Philp Glass's low-key score adds to this sense of contemplation).

Tim Orr, who was also the cinematographer for All the Real Girls and George Washington, again lovingly captures the junk, dirt, and detritus, but also the light, of the rural south. In my review of Girls, I read this sense of atmosphere and Green's contemplative narrative style as "nostalgic" for an earlier mode of cinematic production, but rather than seeing the films as nostalgic, I now see Green (along with Orr) developing a distinct cinematic aesthetic, one that I can now only vaguely describe as "contemplative," although that terms seems imprecise (Cynthia Fuchs' description of the narrative as a "series of impressions" might come closer). The characters in the film are, in many different ways, contemplative, but the film itself is also contemplative, at least in my reading. As many people (including Mel) have noted, Green tends to shy away from conventional narrative, though Undertow comes closer to the narrative expectations than his other films (Ebert's comparison with Terrence Malick makes a lot of sense in this regard), and it's within these unconventional moments that I see Green's films allowing space for thought, for contemplation.

Posted by chuck at 12:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 10, 2004

Reactions to Control Room

This is just a placeholder entry to point to a Reuters article on the audience response to Jehane Noujaim's Control Room at the Dubai Film Festival. Apparently, the film hasn't been released widely to Arab audiences, and the film (not surprisingly) provoked strong reactions, many of which I wouldn't have expected. Okay, I wasn't surprised that Arab audiences would jeer Rumsfeld and Bush, but some people in the audience reported that the film made them feel powerless:

One Lebanese man who lives in Canada said he found it painful to watch the one-and-a-half hour movie.

"I did not like the film. It made me feel sad," Gabriel Bakhazi said at a post-movie seminar. "I didn't see anything to laugh at. Your film made me feel more angry and powerless."

Thanks to indireWIRE for the link.

Posted by chuck at 10:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 8, 2004

What do Male Bloggers Want?

In an attempt to find distractions from grading, I've been reading blogs more often than usual, and while reading, I found that George linked to my birthday entry (among several others) in answer to profgrrrrl's question about why female bloggers tend to write about more personal topics while male bloggers write about professional topics.

I'm inclined to agree with George that male bloggers do write about personal stuff quite often (as his collection of links indicates), but the question I'd want to ask is how one makes a distinction between "the professional" and "the personal" in the first place (or what we're talking about when we use these words). For example, is my entry on High School Reunion personal or professional? The entry discusses my TV viewing habits and my ambivalence about my high school experience, but it's also "professional," in that my attention to the show grows out of my interest in documentary and in celebrity. My blog entries are usually fairly spontaneous, and I don't revise them very often. My entries usually reflect what's attracting my attention Right Now (and as my blog probably indicates, I can have a relatively short attention span). In fact, I tend to think that my blog actually points to the impossibility (or extreme difficulty) of this distinction, at least in my own experience. I could be completely wrong about this perception; after all, I don't believe that I'm necessarily the most qualified reader of my own blog.

Update: I just noticed that profgrrrl has updated her entry to define more clearly what she means by "personal." I'm still not sure that I can completely distinguish between "personal" and "professional," but in terms of her second definition ("Personal as in intimate. Really revealling some private thoughts or emotions or saying things that you wouldn't say around the water cooler"), that stuff probably won't show up in my blog anytime soon, especially with my name clearly listed on the blog.

In a way, I think all of these questions come back to what blogs are, and what they are doing, a topic that Collin has addressed fairly recently. Blogs combine "the expressive and argumentative in ways that we're still coming to grips with," and perhaps more relevant to this particular discussion, they combine the "personal" and "public" (or professional) in ways that might still be difficult to articulate, at least for me.

Posted by chuck at 3:37 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Blog of Note

I'm still procrastinating on all the grading I have to do this morning, afternoon, and evening, but just wanted to identify a new blog that I came across this morning on Technorati. Jonathan Goodwin, a colleague of mine at Georgia Tech, has started a blog.

In other news, David Gordon Green's newest film, Undertow, hits Atlanta theaters (or, more precisely, an Atlanta theater) on Friday, so I'm looking forward to that. So does Wes Anderson's latest film.

Posted by chuck at 11:15 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 7, 2004

Birthday 2004

In completely unrelated news, Wednesday is my birthday. Not surprisingly, birthdays leave me feeling reflective, and it was for me interesting to go back and look at where I was last year at this time. Unlike last year, I haven't really been thinking about my birthday (in fact, I almost forgot the exact day). I've been way too busy with conferences, articles, grading, and end-of-the-semester parties. But blogs have the strange effect of formalizing the process of reflection, at least for me.

Jenny discusses this sense of reflection in a post from several months ago in which she discusses "the state of being almost-30" (inspired by Clancy's post on the same topic). I'm a little older than "almost-30," but their observation that they aren't the person they imagined they would be at that age resonates with me. I never would have imagined that my life would still feel this unsettled, that I'd be single at 34, that I'd be a college professor teaching film studies and freshman composition. But there's something incredibly satisfying about that (at least for me). I've become a much different person than I ever would have expected, but I much prefer the life I have than the one I'd planned for myself. To some extent, this satisfaction might entail a rejection of the person I could have become, the other possible lives I could have led.

I'm on the job market this year, and the fact that I could be living in a completely different place is pretty exciting to me. Even though I sometimes worry about where I'll be next year and whether I'll finally be able to make a serious dent in my credit card debt or finally be able buy a car built in the last decade, on another level, I realize that my future is very much open, and that's pretty exciting to me right now.

Posted by chuck at 11:19 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

High School Reunion

I have a few bad habits, and one of my worst habits is that I don't watch nearly enough reality TV, mostly because I don't have the opportunity to become invested in the shows' larger narratives, especially on the competitive reality shows. But for some reason, I particulalry enjoy (not sure that's the right word) the WB's High School Reunion, which just started its third season tonight. Part of my fascination is the role of these shows in the democratizing of celebrity, with "average" people becoming celebrities for fifteen minutes. In fact, I've been thinking about my "documentary" theme tonight, and Reunion might be a good show for looking at the reality TV phenomenon, rather than the more popular and competition-driven shows such as Survivor or The Apprentice (not that Reunion isn't competitive in less explicit ways).

With High School Reunion, especially, I can indulge my trainwreck fascination with other peoples' lives. I'm consistently amazed that people work out their emotional hang-ups on national television, their willingness to play out these ostensibly private conflicts in such a public format. I'm also fascinated by the way in which these shows construct narratives that seem to suggest that nothing (or very little) has happened for these people in the ten years since they graduated, that they are in some sense defined by their roles ten years earlier. I don't really identify with the charatcres on the show or their wish/desire/need to revisit that part of their past. In fact, I didn't even consider attending my tenth high school reunion and would be even less likely to return to my college's reunions.

I'm going to try to be more attentive to reality TV this semester, to see what allure these shows actually have for me (maybe there's a paper in it?). It's an ambitious goal, but I'm willing to try.

Posted by chuck at 10:08 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

December 6, 2004

Film Theory Linkfest

It's the end of the semester, and I'm still recovering from helping my sister move on Saturday. Not to mention the fact that a rodent managed to get into my apartment late last night, which made for a night of fitful sleep. So for now, here's a collection of links to film theory articles and discussions that I would like to discuss in further detail but probably won't get a chance:

I'm hoping to have more to say about these articles over the next few days, but it's not going to happen today. I did get to see The Incredibles (IMDB) the other night and really enjoyed it. I'd have a difficult time gauging whether or not children would enjoy it (I was one of the younget people attending my 9:30 downtown Atlanta screening), but I liked it a lot, especially the film's treatment of superheroes facing midlife crises--or in the case of their children, the difficulty of fitting in. Especially interesting, Bob Parr, aka, Mr. Incredible, trying to squeeze his broad shoulders and giant stomach into a tiny Office Space-style cubicle and the opening sequence in which we see Mr. Incredible and Elastagirl being interviewed on black-and-white TV shows. Hopefully I'll have more to say on The Incredibles later.

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December 2, 2004

Now That I'm Done Grading...

...I can catch up on all my important blog reading. After all, 2004 is the year of the blog (via Liliputian Lilith). Via Liz, I just learned about Bad Mother, a weblog by the novelist Ayelet Waldman, author of Daughter's Keeper and Death Gets a Time Out (which is a wonderful title, by the way). Her narratives about plumbing, parenting, and politics are certainly worth a read.

Ayelet is married to Michael Chabon, who wrote Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, two of my favorite novels of the last ten years. In fact, I had a wonderful experience teaching Kavalier & Clay in an Introduction to Literature course at the University of Illinois several years ago. Students really enjoyed the novel (many didn't want it to end), and it provoked some wonderful class discussions and student papers.

To bring things full circle, Chabon mentions that an "apocryphal epilog" to Kavalier and Clay can be found in The Bremen Museum here in Atlanta (in fact within walking distance of my office at Georgia Tech).

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December 1, 2004

Worth Mentioning

Today is World AIDS day.

See also George's entry and Chris's entry at Crooked Timber and this Hindustan Times article on the attempts of activists in Asia to stop the spread of the disease.

Posted by chuck at 11:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Back to the Future

Now that I've completed my fall tour, I'm in grading mode. I find that I grade best in relatively short bursts of 10-12 papers at a time, which means that I've had a little more time than usual to rent (and even watch!) a few videos and DVDs. For some reason, I've been primarily in the mood for films from the 1950s, specifically the films of Douglas Sirk, whose Written on the Wind and All that Heaven Allows have recently received the Criteron treatment, likely on the strength of Todd Haynes' loving re-interpretation of Sirkean melodrama in Far From Heaven. I've been wanting to revisit Sirk's films ever since watching Imitation of Life in a feminist film theory course I took at Purdue, but often found myself distracted by other things. Side note: a 1979 interview with Sirk on the All that Heaven Allows DVD, in which Sirk discusses his decision to leave Germany in the 1930s, is well worth watching.

But last night, I watched (and deeply enjoyed) Sirk's 1958 film, Tarnished Angels. an adaptation of William Faulkner's novel about barnstorming pilots, Pylon. I'm not sure quite why I enjoyed the film so much, but the airplane races (featuring Robert Stack as a daredevil pilot and Troy Donahue as one of his biggest rivals) were lots of fun, but the film really belongs to Rock Hudson's Burke Devlin, a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune who becomes drawn into the story of the World War I flying ace, Roger Burnham (Stack), and his "gypsy family," including a wife, a son, and a loyal mechanic, Jiggs. The film clearly struggles between the nomadic life that Burnham and his "family" lead and the imperative towards a "normal" life.

I also caught Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World on DVD the other night, and found it to be one of the most inventive, exciting films I've seen in a long time. In fact, I really regret missing it when it was in theaters here in Atlanta a few months ago. I'll try to write a longer review later (no promises), but Maddin's inventive mixture of styles (German Expressionism, Surrealism, with occasional bursts of bright color) was simply breathtaking.

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