the chutry experiment

« October 2005 | Main | December 2005 »

November 30, 2005

Dead Men Voting

Via Atrios, more on the Joe Dante-directed episode of Masters of Horror from the Village Voice. Best line goes to Dante himself at the film's premiere in Turin: "This is a horror story because most of the characters are Republicans."

Posted by chuck at 11:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 28, 2005

Downloading for Dollars

You've probably noticed that I've been doing some writing about the new video iPod lately. After David's comment to the latter entry, I've become intrigued by the video iPod less as a viewing technology and more as a means of distribution. Now I know that the video iPod will be used for watching movies, but the 2.5" screen limits the number of locations (on the subway, waiting for an airplane or in a doctor's office) where watching will be pleasurable. Instead, the video iPod is more valuable as an incredibly cheap means of distribution, allowing studios to dodge many of the expensive costs of producing DVDs, as this "Downloading for Dollars" article by Edward Jay Epstein argues. I've been writing about this topic often lately, so just didn't want to lose the link.

Posted by chuck at 4:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Die Hard in Baghdad

I've written fairly often here about Hollywood film representations of war, arguing (following David Robb's argument in Operation Hollywood) that because Hollywood studios depend on the military for equipment and expert advice, they rarely make explicitly anti-war (or, more precisely anti-military films). But, via TBogg, I see that the same tired arguments are being made about "Liberal Hollywood's" opposition to the war.

TBogg offers a link to the news from the folks at Pajamas Media that Bruce Willis is planning "a pro-war feature film about United States involvement in Iraq." The PJs Media folks add that "Willis is bucking a nearly unbroken skein of Tinseltown anti-war films that goes back to such Vietnam era favorites as Coming Home and Platoon."

The PJs Media folks must have forgotten Saving Private Ryan, the made-for-TV series, Band of Brothers, Mel Gibson's We Were Soldiers, the Rambo movies, or even Willis' own Hart's War and Tears of the Sun. And certainly the Top Gun genre is pro-military, even if the Tom Cruise grin-fest is not exactly a war film. I understand their forgetting, however, as I've tried to forget many of these films myself. The point here isn't to suggest that Hollywod is "pro-war," but to argue that studios are more interested in profits than politics. If the film gets made--and I wouldn't be surprised either way--it will be because the film's proposed budget seems like a good economic risk.

They also speculate that Willis' project might never be produced despite his status as a "bankable star." I'm tempted to make some smart comments about the folks at PJs Media calling Bruce Willis a "bankable star," especially given the grosses of Hostage, The Whole Ten Yards and Tears of the Sun, to name three of Willis's recent films. But I'll let Willis' recent box office speak for itself.

Posted by chuck at 3:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Masters of Horror

Other people have already been talking about the Friday December 2, episode of Showtime's Masters of Horror series, Homecoming, directed by Joe Dante (Gremlins), but I figured I'd mention it anyway.

In Homecoming, the country is gripped by terror when it is learned that zombies have stolen the presidential election. According to one of the IMDB reviewers (no permalink to the review, unfortunately), it sounds like the episode's "sharp" political satire works pretty well. Yet another reason I should have cable.

Update: The entire series looks pretty interesting, with a who's who list of prominent horror directors (Dario Argento, Tobe Hooper, John McNaughton, and others).

Posted by chuck at 10:56 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 26, 2005

Media and History Course

In the spring, I'll be teaching 3 sections of CUA's Media and History course. The stated goal of the course is to "explore mediation in and across time," with the hope of introducing students to questions about the transitions and interactions among media and culture. In the past, the course hasn't been taught as a comprehensive survey of media history (teaching several thousand years' worth of media in fifteen weeks would be rather difficult). Instead the emphasis is on using past media transitions to make sense of contemporary transitions, which I think is a good idea. So far, I have the basic scaffolding for the course set up, including the books I'll require my students to read:

• Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880, which I believe will riase some interesting questions about 19th Century print culture here in the US.
• Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America. Still one of the strongest and most accessible cultural histories of the cinema. I'll probably supplement his book with more recent accounts of waning studio profits and new distribution technologies (these discussions of film are obviously quite timely).
• Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. In part, this is an excuse to spend some more time with another cool book, but discussions about the social role of radio also now seem timely with the emergence of podcasts, internet radio, and other modes of broadcasting (or narrowcasting as the case may be).
• Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media. I'll likely use the "haunted media" theme as a framing device for the course and insert Sconce's chapters on telegraphy, telephone, radio, etc, throughout the semester.

I'll certainly supplement these books with some relevant historical essays (too tired to list them right now) and required encounters with relevant texts (Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, possibly the Bela Lugosi film, Murder by Television, and others). I'm thinking out loud over here, so any suggestions or observations would be welcome.

Posted by chuck at 10:58 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Shaping Brands

I'll be teaching a selection from Naomi Klein's No Logo in my junior seminar this week, and while I was re-reading the chapter tonight, I came across a detail that always send me reeling: Jean-Luc Godard, notoriously critical of all things Hollywood, once directed a Nike commercial for European TV. I've done a quick Google search and haven't had any luck finding the ad, but I did find another interesting Frontline episode on corporate branding called The Persuaders. Of primary interest, an interview with Andy Spade, a creative consultant for Song Airlines, who discusses the cinematic influences on Song's TV ads (Godard and Truffaut, but also Wes Anderson, among others). It's no longer surprising, of course, that even work by the most anti-corporate mediamakers can be appropriated for commercial purposes, but The Persuaders does look like it might be a useful resource for a media studies class.

So, if anyone knows where I might be able to find the Godard Nike ad, I'd be curious to see it.

Posted by chuck at 10:08 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

November 25, 2005

Theory is Dead

Via the Filmmaker Magazine Blog, a New York Times Magazine interview with the French philosopher the Wachowski brothers made safe for America, Jean Baudrillard, conducted by Deborah Solomon.

The interview is pretty disappointing, in part because the interviewer moves away from Baudrillard's arguments about the war as "simulation" too quickly, but the playful photograph of Baudrillard is worth a look. Also interesting: Baudrillard's stated preference for American fiction (Roth, Capote, etc) over French novelists.

Posted by chuck at 11:22 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 24, 2005

Washington Jewish Film Festival

I just received an email alerting me about the upcoming Washington Jewish Film Festival, which runs from December 1-11. Based on the schedule, it looks like a fairly eclectic collection of films produced both in the US and abroad and the festival includes documentaries as well as feature films. Also included: the tele-film version of Budd Schulberg's scathing Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, which until 2004 was belived to have been lost.

Posted by chuck at 11:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Media Humor and Movie Suggestions

Some media humor from The Onion. Thanks to Lost Remote for the tip (like them, I don't want to spoil the joke).

Movie suggestions: If, as Professor B suggests, Thanksgiving is movie time, what movies will you be seeing? I never quite got around to reviewing it, but The Squid and the Whale was entertaining. It reminded me a lot of The Royal Tennenbaums in its treatment of divorce and family.

I'm still trying to decide what I'll see tonight. So far, I've been resisting Capote and Walk the Line, but I keep hearing good buzz. Any suggestions?

Posted by chuck at 12:12 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

November 23, 2005

The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah

Chris Hansen's The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah (official website) is a mock documentary that follows Brian (Dustin Olson), a balding thirtysomething who believes that he is a messiah. Not the messiah, Brian persistently reminds the unseen documentary filmmaker (played by the director), but a regionally-selected messiah for a "100-mile radius," Brian estimates. Brian's delusions of grandeur are supported by his younger brother, Aaron, who admires his older brother, and his sister, Miriam, who recognizes Brian's problems but seeks to prevent him from harming himself. The film is structured around a brief interlude in Brian's "career" as he arranges to announce himself and his "higher purpose" to the public at his town's civic center.

The mockumentary follows Brian first as he explains why he's a messiah and later as he seeks to raise money to rent the civic center and to pay for t-shirts with a humorously garbled message designed to promote his appearance. Brian's attempts to raise money include a baptism service that he sets up at a nearby swimming hole/beach, with Brian debating with his younger brother about how much he should charge for a baptism. Later, when Brian and his siblings go door-to-door to raise money, they find themselves in the home of someone (played by Arrested Development's Tony Hale) who needs a messiah's services to drive out unwanted--and apparently invisible--guests, producing a remarkably comedic scene in which Brian is forced to confrot someone else with similar delusions.

The mockumentary format allows Brian to talk at some length about why he believes that he's a messiah (he describes "miracles" that he performs; he introduces us to his collection of Jesus figurines) and also allows Hansen to play with the conventions of the documentary (and now the mockumentary) genre, with the film recalling the Michael McKean/Christopher Guest collaborations (Best in Show, This is Spinal Tap), Tim Robbins' Bob Roberts, and most explicitly, for me at least, Chris Smith's American Movie. The film plays with documentary tropes (including the use of vocal distortion and shadows to protect a character's "anonymity," and the documentarian's occasional abuse of his poisition of knowledge with regards to his subjects. In Hansen's film, the mockumentary approach works best when staging the drama between the three siblings, particularly when Brian's sister, Miriam glances at the camera, indicting the filmmaker for his complicity in sustaining Brian's delusions. In this regard, the film's title seems especially resonant: what role are these characters serving in encouraging Brian in his delusions?

The film also reminds me, to some extent, of religious satires such as Saved, although Hansen's film is significantly less inhospitable towards people who are religious (in an interview, Hansen compares it more readily to Life of Brian). But the comedy--and the film's critique--derives primarily from Brian's capacity for believing himself to be a messiah without delivering any of the good works or displaying any of the generosity that one might expect out of him. This is best illustrated in a scene in which Brian is so caught up in his own attempts to locate his "higher purpose" that he is oblivious for several days to the fact that his sister has left home (update: these family dynamics might also recall Napoleon Dynamite, with which Hansen's film has some afinity).

The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah was only recently completed and does not yet have distribution (in fact seeing the film this early in the game seems to be one of the perks of having a film blog). The film is currently making the rounds at film festivals, and I hope it receives the much wider audience that it deserves.

Posted by chuck at 11:44 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 22, 2005

Mobile Video

Here are a few more links for one of my current writing projects thanks to the prolific bloggers at Lost Remote. First, they mention that network and studio executives are upset by TiVo's decision to allow subscribers to download TV shows from their TiVos to their PCs and from there to portable devices such as the new iPods. It's not hard to guess that the reason the networks are upset is that they are cooking up plans to sell their content on demand (see also PaidContent). Cory at Lost Remote also mentions the new company TVMyPod,whihc will sell you a new video iPod preloaded with your choice of DVDs (again, also see PaidContent).

Since the primary use for iPod video has been television, mobile cinema didn't feel like the right term to describe this emergent phenomeon. Still sorting through ideas here, but I didn't want to lose the links. Just out of curiosity, have any of my readers experimented with the new iPod video. If so, I'd enjoy hearing about it (what you watched, where you watched it, etc).

Update: Here's another take on the new screen culture, "Couch Potatoes Arise," from The Age. And from the Northwetsern University student newspaper, the university's School of Communication is offering podcasts and videocasts that among other things, will be used to give prospective students a sense of what life is like at the University.

Update 2: Here's an interesting article on the quickly booming market of iPod pornography. As with most new media technologies, debates revolve around children gaining increasing access to pornographic material, but the more interesting question in this short article is the degree to which the video iPod seems to complicate sites of public and private viewing. Here's a similar article reprinted from the Washington Post.

I've also been planning to link to this article, originally in the LA Times, on the decline and apparently imminent fall of the studio system (Malcolm Gladwell's term, "tipping point," is even being thrown around, so I think it's pretty serious).

Update 3: Here's another Washington Post article (originally from PC World). I've been trying to find promotional photopgraphs of the video iPod, or more specifically, someone watching the video iPod, and this is one of the few that I've seen so far. Not a big deal, but something I'm vaguely curious about.

Even better, here's a typically snobbish op-ed from George Will on iPods.

Posted by chuck at 2:04 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

November 21, 2005

Mobile Cinema

Just a quick entry to track some articles on what might be described as "mobile cinema," although cinema seems like an inadequate term to describe the range of mobile video products including Apple's iPod video, the forthcoming TiVo To Go, and Fox's plans to offer movies online via Movielink. My thinking about this new mobile cinema is still brewing, but hopefully I'll have something to say about it over the next few days.

Posted by chuck at 8:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 20, 2005

Cinema's Dyin'...Who's Got the Will?

I'm sorting through some ideas on a couple of writing projects today, and many of the essays, articles, and interviews I've been reading keep repeating the same narrative: cinema is dead. Or maybe dying. For the most part, I've seen this narrative as one narrative among many for describing what's happening right now in the world of making, distributing, and consuming moving images, but the popularity of this narrative certainly begs the question: Why do so many people insist that cinema is dead (or dying)? And, a slightly different question, what are the desires involved in witnessing the death of cinema?

I have several examples in mind here, both academic and popular. A good place to start would be Jon Lewis's provocatively titled collection, It's the End of Cinema as We Know It, which linked 1990s millenial culture with a cinema industry in a state of transition (the birth of digital technologies, the "globalization" of Hollywood, etc), but it would also make sense to include Edward Jay Epstein's The Big Picture, which seeks to document the transformation of the major studios.

But this imagined "death of cinema" seems to have a much longer history. Jean-Luc Godard is famous for pronouncing the death of cinema, at the end of his 1967 film, Weekend ("Fin de Cinéma"). And, of course, Pillow Book and Prospero's Books director Peter Greenaway has joined those who wish to declare cinema dead (thanks to Matthew Clayfield's BraintrustDV essay for the link). Godard and Greenaway's claims are, of course, provocative, equally polemical and playful, at least in my reading.

Greenaway's comments, however, do point towards one of the key signs of cinema's imminent demise: the potential for interactivity offered by the remote control, essentially locating this so-called death of cinema in new modes of image consumption. To some extent, I find his arguments enticing, especially given the degree to which video-on-demand, iPod video, and other technologies multiply the locations where we can watch moving pictures (film now seems to be an imprecise term) and the degree to which spectators believe themselves to be in control over the viewing experience, and this is one question that I'm still working through. In a BraintrustDV interview with filmmaker Caveh Zehedi, the interviewee describes the experience of downloading one of Zahedi's films and watching it in a coffeehouse (the comment is about halfway through the interview). There is clearly something new going on here ("private" viewing in a public space, etc), but it seems hasty to read such practices as signalling the obsolescence of seeing movies in theaters (note: Nick's recent comments about "the vanishing screen" might also be relvant here). In fact, despite the ease of making digital films, distribution often remains a major hurdle, as this New York Times article illustrates (more on this article later).

This question is also informed by new modes of production. I've been spending a lot of time this afternoon reading essays on BraintrustDV, so I'll just point out cinematographer Russ Alsobrook's "Back to the Future" essay as one example illustrating this rhetoric as it appears in conversations about filming (recording?) with digital cameras. Here, of course, the reverse (negative?) image of the death of cinema appears in the guise of a "digital revolution" (a similar--and interesting--version of this narrative also appears in this essay by Keith Griffiths).

I don't have any conclusions here, but the persistence of this death-of-cinema narrative is striking. Epstein's efforts to link this story to economic interests are an obvious place to start. Obviously convenience and portability are major selling factors, at least in terms of marketing the death of cinema, but why are so many of us so willing to declare, along with Godard, "Fin de Cinéma?"

Posted by chuck at 6:23 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

The New Progressivism

Via Kevin Drum: a panel discussion hosted by the Center for American Progress about their upcoming issue on "The New Progressivism." Details below the fold.

Who: An All-Star lineup!

Kevin Drum, Editor, Political Animal blog
Paul Glastris, Editor in Chief, The Washington Monthly
Robert Gordon, Senior VP for Economic Policy, Center for American Progress
Karen Kornbluh, Policy Director, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)

Moderated by: E.J. Dionne, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution; Columnist, Washington Post

Where: Center for American Progress, 1333 H Street NW, 10th Floor, Washington DC. The nearest Metro is the Blue/Orange Line to McPherson Square or the Red Line to Metro Center. Click here for a map and directions.

When: Monday, November 21, 2:30-4:00 pm.

RSVP: Click here to RSVP or call 202-741-6246

Posted by chuck at 12:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 19, 2005

Adapting Graphic Novels

Earlier this week, Girish asked for your favorite literary adpatations and your reasons for liking them. Like Girish, I'm not a fan of films that slavishly imitate the book's narrative, realizing in pictorial form what I've already read. Instead, I prefer films that borrow creatively from a written source, including those that offer compelling reinterpretations of the prior material. In that regard, Kubrick's take on The Shining is compelling in part because of its departure from King's novel. Altman's Short Cuts, one of my favorite adaptations, fascinates because of its clever weaving of Raymond Carver's stories as well as Altman's inspired decision to move the stories from the Pacific Northwest to Los Angeles.

Adaptations of graphic novels complicate this question to some extent. In Marc's comment to my previous entry, he notes the "deceptively sophisticated negotiation of gap filling strategies and linkings" required by the best graphic novels. I think that many filmic adaptations of graphic novels end up falling flat because they underestimate this sophistication by merely adding motion to the graphic novel's images, sometimes treating images from the novels as nothing more than rough storyboards. So here's my question: what are your favorite adaptations of graphic novels? Or better, least favorite adaptations? And why?

Posted by chuck at 10:44 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

Comics into Film

Just a quick pointer to an interesting Green Cine interview with Maus author Art Spiegelman. Among other points of interest, Spiegelman makes the argument that comic artists invented cross-cutting years before D.W. Griffith picked up a movie camera. Spiegelman also revisits his decision not to make a film version of his Maus comics. Best line:

In the beginning, when it happened, I remember there was one person who got my home number and kept bugging me. And she would say, "Well, if you were going to do it..." I said that I wasn't going to make a movie, but then she would insist, and say, "But if you were going to do it, how do you see it, how could we do it?" And at that point, because this was a relatively early technological moment, I said, "OK, let's do it, but let's use real mice."

Posted by chuck at 2:37 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Rove's War Trailer

The cool folks at Take Back the Media have put together a documentary called Rove's War that traces Rove's role in building the case for war in Iraq. So far, they're promoting the film with an extended (12-minute) trailer that provides a nice sense of what the film will be doing.

The most powerful segment of the trailer--in my reading at least--cuts between George Bush giving the talk to the press corps in which he pretends to be looking underneath the podium for WMD ("No WMD here. I know they're around here somewhere!") and yearbook-style photos of a small number of the soldiers who have died so far in Iraq. My DVD budget is a little tight right now, but if anyone gets a chance to see it, I'd love to hear a review.

Thanks to Crooks and Liars for the tip.

Posted by chuck at 11:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 18, 2005

Uninspired

Badger mentions the American Film Institute's latest list, 100 Years...100 Cheers: America's Most Inspiring Movies (pdf). So far, more than 300 films have been nominated, and 1,500 industry types will vote on the films that have "inspired them."

Badger's predictions about the final list sound about right. Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg will make about seven appearances each. We'll have lots of sports teams triumphing over great odds, heroic teachers and lawyers saving the day, rags-to-riches stories, dozens of individuals beating evil corporations and/or faceless bureaucracies, and heterosexual couplings galore (with Philadelphia the notable exception here because of the Tom Hanks Factor).

Posted by chuck at 1:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Anthem

I'm leading a discussion that involves this MCI advertisement. More later.

Update: I'm also talking about this IBM advertisement.

Update 2: Just a quick explanation of this entry. In my senior seminar, I was teaching a section of Lisa Nakamura's Cybertypes, in which she discusses the utopian imagery of the MCI "Anthem" advertisement and the Microsoft "Where Do You Want to Go Today?" advertisements and came across this useful resource, Representations of Global Capital, by Robert Goldman, Stephen Papson, and Noah Kersey. The site stores a number of corporate TV advertisements that depict a world shaped by global capitalism.

Posted by chuck at 8:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 17, 2005

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price

I caught Robert Greenwald's latest documentary, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price last night at the DC Drinking Liberally screening in a bar near Dupont Circle, and while I praised the film's tireless promoters earlier simply for shifting the conversation about Wal-Mart, the documentary itself was surprisingly powerful. Many of the documentary's arguments may be familiar regarding Wal-Mart's harmful effects on locally-owned businesses, its poor hourly wages and benefits packages, its intense anti-union efforts, and its use of overseas labor. I'll admit that I was surprised about a few things, including the company's surprising stinginess when it comes to supporting charities. But what I found most valuable about the film was its ability to put a human face on all of Wal-Mart's harmful business practices.

The film is framed by video footage of a shareholders meeting in which Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott repeats talking points about the beneficial effects of Wal-Mart, which would include obscene profits at the expense of their underpaid employees. Scott's cheerleading is then undercut by various examples of the harmful effects of Wal-Mart. Some of the more vivid examples include a local business owner in Ohio forced to close his store after 41 years in business. In another instance, we are introduced to a Chinese woman who works in one of the factories where Wal-Mart goods are manufactured. The woman explains that even if she and her boyfriend choose not to live in the factory's dorm, they still have rent deducted from their tiny wages. Other images include an African-American woman who suspects that she was passed over for management because of her gender and race. The attention to these last two personal experiences alone makes Wal-Mart a remarkably feminist film.

But this awareness of Wal-Mart's effect on the everyday lives of its employees and members of the community doesn't stop there. To my mind, one of the major strengths of this film was its ability to capture people in their everyday lives. When we meet the family whose business has been forced to close (I forget their names), the grandmother is portrayed working in the home, ironing clothes. Another female anti-Wal-Mart activist is shown preparing dinner while she talks to the camera. A union organizer working for a Wal-Mart auto repair center is shown making calls and trying to convince others to join. The effect--to my mind--is powerful. We glimpse these employees in their homes and get a very clear sense of who they are. The fact that the women, in particular, are engaged in domestic labor when they get home form work conveys some sense of how hard they are working (note: Ty Burr liked the film for similar reasons).

But, like Andrew O'Hehir, I felt the most powerful moments are the ones in which Greenwald's camera enters the dreary factory in which we meet several workers who earn roughly 30-40 cents an hour to produce the cheap goods sold at Wal-Mart. O'Hehir compares these images to the righteous anger of Chapter 4 in Marx's Capital, and I think that's an apt comparison. As O'Hehir's comments imply, scenes like these can have the effect of shaking one's complacency as a consumer. But O'Hehir's review blurs some of Greenwald's most important critiques, particularly when he asks, "Am I really willing to buy a shirt at a price that would pay the person who made it a decent wage?" Prices matter here, of course, but Greenwald's villain is not the consumer but the concentration of wealth at the top of the corporation. And, in fact, we already pay higher prices for these goods through hidden costs such as tax breaks used to lure Wal-Marts into communities.

While the film raises some serious charges against Wal-Mart, often using some powerful emotional images, it manages to balance that with some playful humor, whether the satirical commercials used to promote the film or in one well-timed break in tension, a clip from The Daily Show. The fim itself ends on an optomistic note, featuring two local communities that fought Wal-Mart and won, often through word-of-mouth campaigns that grew from a few people in a small room in the back of a church to several hundred people marching on the streets. Although O'Hehir faults the film for making Wal-Mart the bad guy in the current stage of global capitalism, I think he underestimates the film and its audience, and his critique, in fact, produces a sense of resignation. Instead of concluding that Wal-Mart is the only villain, the film offers a recipe for thinking about power imbalance in other situations as well. Part of the power of taking on Wal-Mart, however, is that they are the most potent symbol of these abuses. And while the not-in-my-backyard politics can only achieve so much, if enough people keep Wal-Mart out of their backyards, then Wal-Mart and even its competitors will be forced to do better.

Plus, anything that makes Bill O'Reilly this upset has to be good, right?

Technorati tags: walmart, walmartmovie, greenwald, movies, documentary.

Posted by chuck at 10:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 16, 2005

Lazy Wednesday Links

I'm heading out to the Wal-Mart movie screening in a few hours (I'll write a review as soon as I possibly can) and while I should be doing other things, I found a few more links I'd like to preserve. First, via a Technorati tag search, I came across a cool film and media studies blog by John Schott, Ratchet Up.

Second, Eric Alterman has a pointer to Rebecca A. Goetz's CHE article on academic blogging and explains that acadmic blogs are valuable because they raise "questions for scholar and layman alike about important questions that relate to both simultaneously. There are many of these and it’d be a shame to lose them." While you're in the neighborhood, check out Rebecca's blog.

Finally, I've been out of the loop for the last few days (job market stuff, film screenings, research, the usual), so I completely forgot about the third installment of the Teaching Carnival, hosted by Scrivener. Worth noting: the rebirth of Palimpsest as a wiki.

Posted by chuck at 1:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

I Am a Sex Addict (2005)

I had the good luck of seeing Caveh Zahedi's poignant autobiographical documentary, I Am a Sex Addict, (Zahedi's official site, but also check out the caveh experiment) last night at the AFI Silver Theater. Darren has already written an incredible review-essay of the film, which describes many of the aspects of the film--including the play between documentary and fiction--that I found most rewarding. It's wroth noting, of course, that Zahedi's film was screened as a part of an AFI-sponsored film series on recovery from addiction, and that Zahedi frankly treats his own recovery from sexual addiction through autobiographical narrative.

As Darren points out, I Am a Sex Addict opens with Zahedi intrioducing himself to us as Caveh, on his wedding day (note: Thomas Didymus's comment on the re-shooting of that scene complicates the play between fiction and documentary even further). Throughout the film, Caveh directly addresses the camera, often breaking from character, to make a witty aside or to comment on what we're watching. As a result, Caveh disarms the viewer, creating sympathy for him as his sexual addiction deepens over the course of the film. This addiction primarily manifests itself in a desire to have sex with prostitutes, and as Darren's review notes, Zahedi's film portrays his increasingly ineffective strategies in dealing with this addiction (these straegies are scrawled one-by-one on a chalkboard, which I thought was a nice touch). Ultimately, Zahedi's two previous marraiges and other sexual relationships are harmed by his addiction . I'm finding myself wanting to repeat many of Darren's observations, but I think he's also right that Zahedi's care in establishing the right tone for this film was essential. It would have been easy for Zahedi to make his on-screen persona unlikable, particularly during one or two scenes where Caveh describes some specific fantasies to Greg Watkins (playing himself of course), his cinematographer and close fiend. But the gradual deepening of Caveh's addiction generally makes the film work.

As Darren notes, Zahedi constantly reminds the viewer that we are watching a film. He calls attention to the fact that one scene is filmed in San Francisco rather than Paris because Paris is too expensive and later films in Paris anyway. He points out the use of hair coloring to make himself look younger during certain scenes, and most importantly, we are introduced to several "behind-the-scenes" moments including one in which an actresses playing one of his girfriends expresses discomfort with doing a sex scene. I personally found myself drawn into these behind-the-scenes moments and initially wanted more of that. But after the film, when I joined Caveh and Sujewa while Sujewa interviewed Caveh, Caveh pointed out that many audience members felt they were being taken out of the film by those scenes, that our emotional identification with Caveh's story was disrupted, and I think he's right about that. But the scene with the actress is clearly necessary in that it complicates Caveh's necessarily graphic but often comical depictions of sex. This blurring takes place in other ways, too. When describing his earlier relationships, Caveh introduces his ex-girlfriend and ex-wives using home movie footage.

It's worth noting that the post-film conversation complicates my review of the film in other ways in that I feel as if I'm participating in the blurring of the lines between the real Caveh Zahedi and his on-screen persona in I Am a Sex Addict, and I'm not quite sure how that might affect my response to his film. I'm still processing what I've seen, but the film's deeply confessional nature is compelling, and in this case, it clearly serves a valuable instructive purpose in dealing so explicitly with a topic such as sexual addiction.

Posted by chuck at 10:58 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Fountain Blog

Darren Aronofsky's upcoming time-travel film, The Fountain, has a blog. It's mostly teasers, film stills, and other promotional information, but worth checking out if you're curious about the film.

Posted by chuck at 12:33 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 15, 2005

Hollywood Goes to War (Again)

I learned about the New York Times Magazine special movie issue on Hollywood and war via Alterman's discussion of Matt Bai’s backhanded compliment of Hollywood Liberals. I think Alterman's take on the article is just about right. Bai clearly seems angry that Rob Reiner and the Hollywood Liberals were, as Alterman puts it, "righter about the war than most of his colleagues in the mainstream media." It's clear that Bai wants to retain the image of Reiner and company as either politically unsophisticated or perhaps politically insincere, unwilling to "take to the streets" in support of their convictions.

Bai's evidence for suggesting that Hollywood types are unsophisticated relies on one anecdote about a Hollywood party in which Ben and Jerry's Ben Cohen describes economic poilcy using Oreo cookies. In fact, the opposition to the war among many Hollywood players is attributed to the very fact that "Hollywood was so out of touch with what seemed like reality that it was, in fact, entirely in touch with the new political ethos of Washington, where facts are elasticized in pursuit of box-office approbation." Because critically thinking about the problems with Bush's case for the war wouldn't have worked now, would it?

Perhaps more troubling are Bai's claims that Hollywood stars failed to take to the streets in protest of the war in Iraq. This July 31, 2003, Altermedia article tells a much different story, reporting that stars including Tim Robbins, Christine Lahti, Martin Sheen, and James Cromwell (to name but a few) did take to the streets (quite literally) in stating their opposition to the war in Iraq.

I didn't intend to write such a long response to Bai's article because the Magazine has published several other articles on war and cinema that are far more interesting. Tom Bissell's "Rules of Engagement" offers an intriguing critique of the current crop of war documentaries, arguing that they are sometimes too close to the action and released too quickly to give us a sense of what's going on. Bissell criticizes Control Room and Gunner Palace, among others, for not offering a long view of the war, including the history of Iraq, arguing in favor of a film like Dreams of Sparrows as an alternative to the "partial maps" that produce what he calls "journalism in a hurry."

I think it's reasonable to argue that many of these documentaries seem "hurried," and Bissell is absolutely right to fault many of these films for not offering Iraqi citizens an opportunity to have their voices heard, but I'd also like to defend the role of multiple documentaries as "partial maps" rather than expecting that any documentary will offer a complete picture of the war. In fact, these "partial maps" (a term I like quite a bit) often structure within them the impossibility of a complete understanding of the war, their inability to offer a definitive portrait of what is happening in Iraq as we continue to learn new information and to watch things unfold.

The entire NYT Magazine issue is worth checking out, and I might have more to say later, but I have some other work that is calling my name.

Posted by chuck at 1:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Gulf Coast Reconstruction

Yesterday, I mentioned the class blog, Writing Hurricane Katrina, but here's another useful resource in tracking the post-Katrina rebuilding process. Via Atrios, I came across the Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch, a new project to document and investigate teh rebuilding of the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The project is affiliated with the Institute for Southern Studies, a non-profit research center.

While you're there, check out the Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch's Voices section and their blog.

Posted by chuck at 1:04 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 14, 2005

Writing and Catastrophe

I just received a note from a former colleague, Doreen Piano, who is teaching a course in nonfiction writing at the University of New Orleans. In the class, students are using a class blog, Writing Hurricane Katrina: A Class Blog, as an attempt to "witness" the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and to provide "a public memorial" for all of those affected by the storm and its aftermath.

The students' narratives are rather compelling and provide a wide range of perspectives on the aftermath of the hurricane. In one of her entries, Doreen includes a picture (taken from Katrina: A Midcity Blog) and describes her response to the devastation of her neighborhood. This strikes me as an incredibly productive use of classroom blogging and blogging's use of chronological posts and archives, especially given the ongoing efforts to rebuild and recover from the storm.

Posted by chuck at 2:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 13, 2005

Paradise Now

In the opening scene of Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now (IMDB), Said and Khaled attempt to repair a broken-down car. Said is quieter and more serious while Khaled is more playful, but the close friends struggle to get the car running. After working on the car, Said meets Suha, the daughter of a prominent Palestinian martyr. She has come to have her car repaired, and it's clear that there is an instant attraction between Said and Suha. But soon after this initial meeting, Said and Khaled are given a much different task. They are recruited for a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, and it's a testament to Abu-Assad's thoughtful approach to this material that Said and Khaled are treated not as mosnters but as conflicted individuals who struggle with the task set before them (in this regard, Paradise Now provides a nice companion piece to The War Within).

The film focuses primarily on the 24 hours before Said and Khaled are slated to go into Tel Aviv. The film shows them recording their good-byes to the families on video, and we see later a video store in Nablus that does a brisk business selling these goodbyes. We also see Said agonizing over this act, asking his best friend whether they are really going to be martyrs who will be rewarded in paradise (and, here, I think Ebert terribly underestimates the doubts that both characters have). We also see Said discuss his doubts with Suha, who is Palestinian but was born in Paris and lives in Morocco, and whose politics seem most aligned with the filmmakers. Suha condemns the suicide bombings and instead condones a response to the Occupation that emphasizes human rights.

While Desson Thomas's review places emphasis on this individual struggle and on the film's innovative use of genre, I found the film's "documentary" feel to be more compelling. As J. Hoberman notes, Paradise was filmed on location in Nablus and in Abu-Assad's hometown of Nazareth, and the traces of the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians are everywhere. We see the rubble bombed out buildings, derelict spaces used to train and equip suicide bombers, and more importantly, the wall that divides the two worlds. This division is made even more apparent when Said rides through the streets of Tel Aviv, with its vacationers walking along the beach.

I wish I'd written sooner about this film, or had more time to write about it, because I think it deserves a much wider audience (to be fair it did play to a packed crowd at the Dupont Circle theater where I saw it, so hoopefully it will play for a few more days). For now, I'll point to Cynthia Fuchs' Pop Matters review.

Posted by chuck at 10:23 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Jarhead

I'm behind on my movie reviews, so this week's reviews may be a bit rushed, but here goes. After finishing Anthony Swofford's thoughtful Gulf War I memoir, Jarhead, I was curious to see Sam Mendes' big screen adaptation (IMDB), starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, and Jamie Foxx. The film, which does convey the nervousness and frustration Swofford describes of waiting for the first Gulf War, ended up disappointing me, but I'm not quite sure I can figure out why that's the case.

I think I would have liked the film to further convey the disconnect between the Marines at war (or waiting for war) and their lives at home, both during and after the war. The section of Swofford's book that I found most compelling were those that described his conversations after the war with the men from his sniper unit. As it stands, the film only offers fleeting glimpses: the wall of shame for soldiers' cheating wives and girlfriends, a brief, awkward bar conversation with a fellow soldier desperate to be remembered as heroic. Swofford conveys the degree to which his identity is bound up with his stint in the Marines, and I'm not sure the film captures that.

More than anything here, I'm interested in challenging Stephanie Zacahrek's thesis that Jarhead is both anti-war and anti-soldier, a position that she seems to base primarily on one early scene in which we see a boot-camp instructor slam Swofford's head against a chalkboard, implying that the scene underlines the abusive treatment of soldiers (what Zacharek calls Mendes' "Miliary Bad!" approach). Such a reading ignores the more sensitive characterizations of Staff Sgt. Sykes (Foxx) who seems genuinely invested in his military career as well as in Swofford himself. In a final scene, in which many of the members of the STA unit are temporarily reuinted, it's also easy to see the comraderie and alternate family structures that the military can offer.

Jarhead is far from being anti-soldier, and Zacharek's assertion that the film contains no likable characters (or that Mendes doesn't like or care about his characters) misreads the film considerably. Whether the film is antiwar or not is another matter. I'd argue that like most post-Vietnam films, Jarhead is ambivalent. One of the final lines of the film, spoken during a stateside victory parade, "We are still in the desert," has been read as commenting on the fact that the US has been forced to return to Iraq, the line answering one soldier's earlier celebratory comment that "we will never have to come back here again." But while that comment can be read as anti-war, it can equally be read as suggesting that the government didn't let the military take out Saddam Hussein the first time.

There were a few things I liked about Jarhead: Roger Deakins' cinematography, especially during the scenes in which the sky is blackened by the oil well fires, are very effective, almost hauntingly beautiful, like a bizarre solar eclipse. Some of the musical choices, particularly the use of Public Enemy's "Fight the Power," were quite good. And the film conveys the fragmented, frustrating, desultory waiting-for-something -to-happen quite well. But in general, the film was far less interesting than I'd hoped and certainly far less interesting than Swofford's book deserved. In fact, I'm gradually becoming convinced that Sam Mendes is perhaps the most overrated Oscar-bait director working today.

Note: J. Hoberman's Village Voice review is a little more generous than mine, but unlike Hoberman, I found Jarhead far too cautious when it came to commenting on the current war. But I'm curious to get other reads on Jarhead. I still don't feel like I have a god grasp on my response to it.

Posted by chuck at 9:21 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Merchants of Cool

I'm moving into a unit on youth culture/subcultures in my junior seminar this week. I've already taught Dick Hebdige's groundbreaking work on subcultures and will be teaching Angela McRobbie's "Youth Culture and Femininity" later this week.

But because of a blip in the schedule, I'll have some extra time in class on Monday, in which I'll be showing segments of Douglas Rushkoff's fascinating Frontline documentary, Mercahnts of Cool, conveniently available online at the Frontline website, and discussing Malcolm Gladwell's essay on "coolhunting."

Posted by chuck at 8:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Guantanamobile Project

While doing an unintentionally ambiguous Google search, I came across an October 2004 article in NC State University's The Technician on "The Guantanamobile Project," a grassroots documentary project by Lisa Lynch, a filmmaker and colleague of mine at Catholic University, and Elena Razlogova, a Web programmer and media historian at the Center For History and New Media.

According to the article, Lynch and Razlogova equipped a van with laptops, wireless communications, digital projectors, and video cameras and travelled to several cities where they would show footage form Guantanamo and then ask audiences to respond to what they had seen. Lynch and Razlagova have published their project in the online journal, Vectors.

Posted by chuck at 1:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Death of Film/Decay of Cinema

For now, just a bookmark post, but while re-reading Charlie Kiel's "'American' Cinema in the 1990s and Beyond" (available in a useful collection by Jon Lewis), I came across Godfrey Cheshire's New York Press essay, "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema," one of the more interesting early essays on the replacement of film with digital projection. I'm still digesting the article, but interesting that Godfrey links the digital and the millenial.

Update: While I'm thinking about it, Matt has a link to a lecture by Richard W. Lyman Award winner John Unsworth on "New Methods for Humanities Research."

Posted by chuck at 12:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 11, 2005

Travelling Notes

A few unrelated notes on my day so far:

I didn't get a chance to watch Chain at the Hirshhorn last night (too tired, plus next week looks incredibly busy), but Sujewa attended and reports that the theater--a 500 seat auditorium--was packed (and I'm glad to know that he enjoyed the film, especially after I've been talking about it non-stop over here).

One of the dollar bills on my wallet was stamped by a contributor to the "Where's George" website. The dollar I found hasn't travelled very far (as far as I can tell, it hasn't left Maryland), but others seem to travel great distances.

Oh, and Darren's Top 5 this week is a lot of fun, "five favorite performances by actors I otherwise dislike." Darren has lraedy named several of mine, most notably Charlton Heston's surprisingly interesting perforance in Touch of Evil. Christian names five performances by Tom Cruise, an actor he otherwise dislikes (and he's right that Magnolia belongs at teh top of that list). My choice? Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love. If you think of others, add them to Darren's already good list.

Posted by chuck at 12:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 10, 2005

"A Movie about the World We All Live In"

The Washington Post has a nice Ann Hornaday article promoting tonight's screening of Jem Cohen's fascinating, contemplative film, Chain (here's my original review) at the Hirshhorn Museum at 8 PM.

As I've mentioned, Chain focuses on two characters, a Japanese businesswoman and a teenage runaway. Both women inhabit the "corporate topography" of chain hotels, shopping centers, and other generic locations, often creating an uncanny sensation that you've seen that mall or that hotel before. In the article, Cohen describes how the film very gradually evolved. While traveling, Cohen would often do city portraits but "just always faced with this corporate topography in these spaces in malls and hotels, and I finally made the decision to deal with [that phenomenon] directly rather than framing it out." In that sense, the film conveys much about how we navigate lived space, about the world we inhabit. If you're in DC and have the opportunity, I'd highly recommend the film.

I also want to highlight Cohen's reflection on the concept of indepednt cinema, an issue I've been thinking about for an essay I'm writing right now. I won't try to re-summarize this discussion, but Cohen's attempts to champion work by truly indepedent artists certainly contribute to any discussion of indie.

Posted by chuck at 11:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Politics and the Post-Vietnam War Film

In the Times, A.O. Scott reflects on two recent Gulf War dramas, the Sam Mendes film, Jarhead, and the recently-cancelled Steven Bochco TV series, Over There. In both cases, Scott faults the filmmakers for assuming a position of political neutrality, arguing that the films would be stronger if the filmmakers were more willing to take a position on our involvement in the war. While I'd certainly welcome war films that were more explicitly opposed to the war in Iraq, I'm also interested in the degree to which these films are ambivalent not only about this particular war but also about the spectacle of war in general.

Scott asserts that Jarhead, based on Anthony Swofford's powerful memoir of his service in the 1991 Gulf War, leans slightly towards the anti-war camp (I haven't seen the film yet, so I can't make that call) while Bochco's series seems more supportive of the war, which is probably a fair interpretation, but I'm particularly interested in Scott's description of the scene of the Marines watching war films, including, of course, Apocalypse Now, while waiting for the war to start (this scene also occurs in the book). Scott writes:

We see them watching "Apocalypse Now," singing along with the "Ride of the Valkyries" and whooping it up as helicopters race into battle over Vietnam. "There is talk that many Vietnam films are antiwar," Mr. Swofford writes, adding that for members of the military there is no such thing as an antiwar movie. "Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man," who sees only his own courage and power in the violent action, he says.

The war-movies-as-pornography concept proves that viewers can impose any attitude they like; it would be easy to impose political views, too. But that doesn't erase what the filmmakers built in; those Vietnam movies are antiwar just as "Jarhead" really is political.

Scott's insistence that these scenes in Apocalypse must be anti-war seems wrong to me and not merely from the point-of-view of interpretive pluralism where "viewers can impose any attitude they like." Whatever Coppola's intentions, the "Ride of the Valkyries" scene revels in the violence, with the high-angle shots from the helicopters transforming the Vietnamese people into mere objects, no matter how much we resist identifying with the camerawork. While the film might be seen as criticizing our complicity with these images of war, it does allow for that identification. This is not political neutrality but something closer to political ambivalence (a concept I'm borrowing from Frank Tomasulo).

More crucially, this ambivalence doesn't reside in the individual filmmakers but in the films themselves regardless of the filmmakers intentions. Coppola may well have intended the "Valkyries" scene to criticize our compliicty with images of war violence, but as the scene in Jarhead indicates, the scene can also work as "pornography for the military man."

I didn't intend to write such an extended response to Scott's article. I think he's right to challenge these claims of "political neutrality" and to note the degree to which Jarhead is a commentary on the current Gulf War. But to read Apocalypse Now (and many other Vietnam movies) as anti-war simplifies them considerably, especially given the current struggle to articulate a "pro-soldier, anti-war" position in many of these films.

Posted by chuck at 10:49 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Time Travel Linkfest

Just collecting some links on a slew of upcoming time-travel films. First, in their Cool Kids update, IFC blog reports that Michel Gondry, of Eternal Susnhine, fame has two time-travel projects planned. One is a comedy, Master of Space and Time, based on a Rudy Rucker novel. Here's hoping my Jack Black allergy has worn off by then. The second has an "autobiographical" element with Gondry and members of his old band meeting future versions of themselves (the IFC folks also mention future plans for Miranda July, David Gordon Green, and others).

Filmmaker Magazine has the latest on Darren (Requiem for a Dream) Aronofsky's The Fountain, including a link to an Internet teaser.

I've also stumbled into the news that Adam Sandler will be doing a little time travel in Click. According to the folks at Hollywood Rag, Sandler plays a workaholic (presumably working against type) who comes across a remote control that allows him to rewind and fast-forward to key moments in his life. But, then, things go horribly wrong. And I'm guessing that Sandler learns a lesson.

Posted by chuck at 12:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 9, 2005

Film Comedy Meme

Badger mentions (via the Little Professor and Whatever) that Rough Guides to comedy, science fiction, horror have been published. The release of the Rough Guides have inspired another meme, a list of comedies where you identify which ones you've seen, own, or have cued up on Netflix.

The list: the comedies. The meme: The ones in bold I’ve seen. The ones with asterisks I own (you may notice I don't own very many). For partial credit, I’d like to add to the meme a tilde for the ones already in my Netflix queue. The list is below the fold.

Airplane!
All About Eve
Amelie
Annie Hall
The Apartment
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Blazing Saddles
Bringing Up Baby
Broadcast News
Caddyshack
Le diner de con
Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
Duck Soup
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Four Weddings and a Funeral
The General
Ghostbusters
The Gold Rush
Good Morning Vietnam
The Graduate
Groundhog Day *
A Hard Day's Night ~
His Girl Friday
Kind Hearts and Coronets
The Lady Killers
Local Hero
Manhattan
M*A*S*H
Monty Python's Life of Brian
National Lampoon's Animal House
The Odd Couple
The Producers
Raising Arizona
Roxanne
Rushmore
Shaun of the Dead
A Shot in the Dark
Some Like it Hot
Strictly Ballroom
Sullivan's Travels
There's Something About Mary
This is Spinal Tap
To Be or Not to Be
Tootsie
Toy Story
Les vacances de M. Hulot
When Harry Met Sally...
Withnail and I

Many of the ones I haven't seen (Dodgeball, for example) I have no desire to see, and while I like Shaun of the Dead, its inclusion on this list seems rather odd. The list also includes several of my favorites (His Girl Friday, The Graduate and All About Eve). I also like Groundhog Day and Raising Arizona quite a bit. But given the amount of bold on this list, I'm almost convinced that I've seen too many movies. Almost.

Posted by chuck at 10:59 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 8, 2005

Fallujah - The Hidden Massacre

I've been waiting for more information on the troubling story that the United States might have used "chemical weapons," white phosphorus (banned by the Geneva Convention since 1980), in Fallujah. The UK Independent is reporting on an Italian documentary, Fallujah - The Hidden Massacre, that makes just such a claim. If the story is true (and some reasonable doubts have been raised), then it raises a number of questions. As Kos, from Daily Kos, asks, "What final thread of moral authority we still had is frayed beyond repair. Torture and the use of chemical weapons against civilians. How can Bush claim he is now any different than Saddam?"

Here's an article from a Russian news source that repeats much of the information from the Independent article and more information from Democracy Now. Kos also links to the Italian station's website, where some of the video evidence is available, but given the story's significance, the website is getting lots of traffic and may take a while to load.

Update: Here's Juan Cole's take. BBC Online is also covering the story.

Posted by chuck at 4:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

More DC Screens

Darren tipped me off to a screening of Caveh Zahedi's I am a Sex Addict on NOvember 15 as a part of the "Under the Influence" film series at the AFI Silver. According the UTI website, film starts at 6:30 PM, and Zahedi will be in attendance to discuss the film.

Speaking of the Silver, a new 35mm print of Bresson's Pickpocket will be showing several times this week. It's a gorgeous film, so I'm hoping to make it out this week to see the new print.

DC filmmaker and blogger Sujewa tipped me off to another blog he's running, Filmmaking for the Poor. The blog appears to address many of the questions I'm investigating right now concerning definitions of indie and alternative cinema, as well as questions about self-distribution. Many of the entries, including this discussion of assembling cheap digital editing equipment, appear to focus on the practical issues of making inexpensive films.

Posted by chuck at 1:35 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Debating the West Wing Debate

The West Wing presidential debate between Alan Alda and Jimmy Smits (do their characters' names matter?) is still genertaing some discussion, with several TV critics complaining about the blurring of boundaries between enetratinment and news. Howard Kurtz's still-addictive Media Notes points towards the CBS News blog, Public Eye, which implies that NBC may have "crossed the line" by using real-life news anchor Forrest Sawyer and by using an NBC news logo (or "bug") at the bottom right corner of the screen (imagine, a CBS blog being critical of NBC). They cite Steve Safran's Lost Remote post about the show (good discussion in the comments) as well as the New York Post's Adam Buckman.

In my original post, I acknowledged some initial confusion as I figured out what was going on. I mentally worked through the visual and verbal cues I had been given--recognizing Alda and Smits, hearing liberal Alda speak in Republican talking points, noting that it was ostensibly a "presidential" debate when no presidential elections are scheduled until 2008, etc--before placing the show in the context of the series. Instead of seeing these visual cues as blurring an already confused boundary between news and entertainment, isn't it more productive to see the episode as pointing to the ways in which "debate" in our country is already manufactured. Critics, including Beckman and Doug Elfman of the Chicago Sun-Times, complain about the "content" of the debate, but this episode merely illustrates how the conventions of the debate format are already limited.

I will be teaching Daniel Boorstin's discusion of pseudo-events in my senior seminar this week, and it's intriguing to think about presidential debates as "pseudo-events," designed to allow candidates to state well-worn talking points, at least in their curent televisual incarnation. In fact, Boorstin identifies the Nixon-JFK debate as a classic example of a pseudo-event. Thus, by using an NBC news logo, the show required that I focus on other ways in which "debate" and "news" are constructed on the TV screen. Long blog entry short: I'm not troubled by the use of the NBC bug or Forrest Swayer's participation on the show. In fact, I think their presence forces us to rethink the constructions of authenticity that accompany news coverage of presiential debates in the first place.

Posted by chuck at 9:54 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

November 7, 2005

Typekey Problems

Just a quick note to say that Typekey is doing something weird to my older comments. When people who are registered for Typekey make comments on entries that are more than ten days old, the comment is approved but doesn't appear on my blog, which is just a little annoying. I've contacted the Typekey folks and hopefully they'll be able to fix the problem.

By the way, has anyone else had this problem? Or are the blogging gods singling me out?

Posted by chuck at 10:51 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

West Wing Live Debate, or Where Have You Gone, Hawkeye Pierce?

Somewhat by accident (long day of flying+flipping channels after The Simpsons), I caught the live debate episode of The West Wing, matching Jimmy Smits as Rep. Matt Santos (D-Tex.) against Alan Alda as Sen. Arnold Vinick (R-Calif.). Because I'm interested in the concept (and infrequent practice) of live television, I found teh debate somewhat compelling, if a litle trite. While it's fairly obvious that the episode was a ratings stunt, it also raised some useful questions about the methods we use to choose our leaders (of course, as Tom Shales notes, it's not terribly accurate to use the word "debate" to desrcibe what Dan Rather called "joint appearances by presidential candidates, but we knew that already).

At first, the episode's somewhat skillful use of televisual codes confused me: Why is there a press conference on Sunday night? Am I watching a celebrity roast? Why is Hawkeye pretending to be a conservative? But the "fake news" trick perfected by Orson the Magician back in the day(sixty-seven years ago last week) only lasted a few secinds, and ulike Weles' War, there was no reason to duck and cover from the debate, unless of course, you're allergic to cliches.

For the debate the candidates "agreed" to drop the standard debate rules so that they could address each other directly rather than waiting for a moderator (played here by long-ago Atlanta news anchor Forrest Sawyer) to mediate between them. Whether this changed the tone of the debate at all is open to question, but I think the episode illustrated that even with the opportunity for direct address, which both candidates frequently used, both Santos and Vinick tended to stick to relatively familiar talking points. Although I disagree politically with the folks at Blogs4God, I think they're right to note the "time capsule" effect of the episode: many of the debate topics felt strangely dated while others were terribly short on specifics. Unlike the B4G author, I don't attribute this to "Hollywood Liberalism" as much as I do a laziness in scripting questions that go beyond the standard arguments (gun control, abortion, capital punishment) we've been having for years. This is not suggest that these issues aren't important, but the questions lended themselves too easily to either-or responses and failed to address contemporary topics such as the Patriot Act and the Supreme Court nominee (what Shales inaptly calls the "politicization of Supreme Court nominating process;" why must "politicization" always be seen as a pejorative?).

Mark Daniels offers a more optomistic reading of the episode, citing its simultaneous aura of reality (the visual cues) and unreality (the direct speech used by each candidate), and while I generally found the episode unsatisfying, there is a utopian aspect of the show--and of this particular episode--that I admire. The attempt to regain genuine debate seemed to guide the episode's structure, so even if the responses felt shallow to me, the show itself certainly seemed to want to reopen "real" debate and to reject the "joint appearances" model criticized by Rather.

Links and tags: There's a soemwhat useful discussion of the episode in the comments at Crooks and Liars; westwing, westwingdebate, television, debate

Posted by chuck at 2:32 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 6, 2005

Airport Reading and the Musealization of Non-Space

Just returned a few hours ago from the SAMLA conference in Atlanta, where I chaired a panel on documentary and autobiography. While the panel deserved a much larger audience, I did enjoy both papers, and Darren's discussion of the films of Caveh Zahedi left me wanting to see more of his films (including I am a Sex Addict, which Darren reviews/analyzes here) . But SAMLA was, more than anything, about returning home to the city where I've lived most of my life, this time as a conference-goer.

Because my family still lives in Atlanta, I spent most of the weekend with them, celebrating birthdays (my parents and sister all have birthdays within two weeks of each other), buying clothes, and catching up. My sister and I are in the process of talking my father into taking an adult education class on memoir writing. My mom still works, but he's retired and has more nervous energy than anyone I've ever met. He's also a bit of a storyteller and growing up in Birmingham in the 1950s and '60s, he witnessed the effects of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement firsthand. He's feeling cautious, he claims because he's not convinced that anyone would be interested in hearing what he has to say.

But what I planned to write about was the experience of returning to Atlanta in the position of a tourist of sorts, staying in hotels and eating in restaurants that I often rushed past in my car, not really seeing the parts of the city that I knew best. Or, instead, to talk about the strangeness of seeing Hartsfield-Jackson airport's exhibit of Zimbabwean art along the moving sidewalks between baggage claim and the airport's terminals. I've been thinking about the concept of nonspace this week after a discussion in my senior seminar, and the sculptures along the sidewalks have always compelled me to slow down rather than rushing hurriedly through the airport. Of course the art is there as a means of making airport delays more tolerable, but the contrast between the hurry associated with air travel and the leisure associated with viewing art has long been jarring to me.

And more than anything, I wanted to mention the books I picked up to make the waiting and the zero time of flying more palatable. Unlike KF, I'm usually not that productive in airplanes and airports. My crowded planes made anything other than reading difficult, and the intervals between waiting and movement often make it difficult for me to concentrate. So when I fly, I'll usually pick up a novel or some other form of light (non-professional) reading. On this trip it was Russell Banks' new novel, The Darling, which I'm very much enjoying. I'm only halfway through the book, which focuses on a member of the Weather Underground forced to flee to Liberia in the early 1970s, but thus far I'm finding it a compelling read (hopefully I'll have more to say later).

There's no reason to connect these loose threads from my weekend, other than to note that strains of autobiography and memory seem to be creeping into my thoughts a lot this weekend. Plus after a weekend away from computers (my mom has a modem, but it's slow even for a 56k modem), I wanted to find some way to jump back into the conversation.

Posted by chuck at 5:32 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 3, 2005

Discouting Wal-Mart

My long-time readers will know that I have sometimes questioned the rhetorical effect of Robert Greenwald's agit-prop documentaries, such as Uncovered: The Truth about the War in Iraq and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism. I've sometimes criticized Greenwald's films for remaining too wedded to a single object of analysis (Fox News or Bush propaganda) without engaging in a broader critique: with Outfoxed, for example, a broader critique of media consolidation would have been beneficial, and with Uncovered, I would have liked a more thorough investigation of how certain concepts--such as nation and citizen--are mobilized, but my heistation regarding Greenwald's docs rested primarily on what I now believe to be a misunderstanding of public discourse on my part. In a sense, I had assumed that Greenwald's films merely provided a feel-good (feel-smart) experience for the people who attended teh house parties and that the more harmful political effect might be that the films would exacerbate the much-discussed (and over-hyped) red-blue divide (Tara McPherson has a thoughtful article on the many problems with this false construction of a red-blue divide, particulalry as it pertains to Katrina coverage).

I now want to look at Greenwald's documentaries, partciuarly his forthcoming WAL-MART doc in a new light. Specifically, I'm intrigued by the ways in which Greenwald's films provoke conversations about situations that might othrewise go relatively unchallenged or undiscussed. Certainly, Greenwald isn't the first person to talk about the harmful effects of the world's largest retailer, but if success can b measured in part by pre-release publicity, then Greenwald has already achieved something valuable with this documentary.

Among other examples, The Reeler repeats some gossip-publicity published in the New York Times about a Wal-Mart "consultant" who showed up at the film's NYC premiere armed with a camera-phone. In Salon, Andrew O'Hehir goes beyond the metroplex to review Wal-Mart, noting that Wal-Mart (the company, not the film) has been the subject of negative articles in the New York Times in five of the past seven days. Wal-Mart even has a "war room" devoted to contesting the documentary's accusations.

This recognition doesn't mean that I won't be critical of Greenwald's documentaries from time to time, but I do think it's easy to underestimate the effects of his films in shifting the discourse.

Posted by chuck at 10:50 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

More Sounds, Words, Images

I'm flying to Atlanta tomorrow afternoon for the SAMLA conference, so if you're planning to attend, send me an email (chutry[at]msn[dot]com) or drop by my panel (yes, it's scheduled for 8 AM on a Saturday, but you know you want to attend). Thursday is turning into my day to work at home, which also allows me to satisfy my theory and pop culture jones.

In the bookbag:
Judith Butler's Precarious Life, a collection of essays on post-9/11 politics. Several of the chapters should be relevant to an essay I'm writing, particularly her dicussion of "indefinite detention," the practice of holding prisoners (some people might call them "detainees") indefinitely without charging them with a crime. With yesterday's Washington Post article about secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, the so-called "black sites," Butler's arguments throughout the book continue to demonstrate their relevance.

On KEXP:
Most of these songs are a few months old, but I'm really digging Death Cab for Cutie's "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," Arcade Fire's "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)," and Matt Pond PA's "City Song."

Next to the DVD player:
I finally got my copy of the American Experience documentary, Tupperware and I'll hopefully have something to say about it when I get back from Atlanta.

Posted by chuck at 4:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Glaring Omission

How could I have forgotten my favorite comedy of the last fifteen years from my "15 in 15" list? The ending is a bit trite, but Office Space has provn to be one of my most reliable comfort films for some time and a great satire of 1990s dotcom office culture, too. Looking forward to Mike Judge's latest, Idiocracy.

Oh, and Badger's list reminds me that I should have at least mentioned Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, the film that probably sent me off on my dissertation/book project in the first place. She also mentions at least one film I'll be adding to my Netflix cue ASAP, Jafar Panahi's Dayereh.

Posted by chuck at 10:30 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 2, 2005

Multiplexes are Being Left Behind

I've been intrigued by the discussion of the most recent installment of the Left Behind film series (this one starring Louis Gossett, Jr. as the President and Gordon Currie as the Antichrist), based on Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' bestselling novels that narrate one of the competing narratives regarding the "end times" anticipated in Christian eschatology. I'm not really that interested in seeing the film, but the articles reporting on the film's distribution have attracted my curiosity. The Hartford Courant offers the basics: rather than relesing the film directly to theaters, which has often led to disappointing box office, Sony has decided to release the film directly to churches, with over 3,000 churches planning "opening night" screenings.

I'm not willing to come to any conclusions about how these screenings will function for the people who attend them. Like most church activities I'd imagine that the screenings will serve different functions for different audience memebers, and the "evangelical" or conversion function addressed in this New York Times article is only one of many functions the film will serve. In addition, while I may not share any of the film's theological underpinnings, Waxman's dismissal of the film's "unfamiliar and even strange universe" offers only a superficial gloss of why certain audiences might find these films valuable or important.

In this sense, at the risk of completely missing the mark, I want to compare these Left Behind screenings to the house party screenings for Robert Greenwald's grassroots documentaries. Obviously the films are quite different in terms of content or subject matter, but I think it's worth noting that both sets of films are making truth claims about the world, whether in documentary form or in a fictional pre-enactment of what the end times will be like. The grassroots distribution is also significant and relatively similar, of course. I do want to caution against seeing the two cinematic subcultures as precise opposites. While the Left Behind films are certainly "political" (asserting that the Antichrist will come from Russia is certainly a "political" claim), they are also doing other things.

I'm unwilling to further line the pockets of LaHaye and Jenkins, so I probably won't see these films anytime soon, if at all, but the similarities between these two modes of distribution is striking. It's certainly significant that Sony is backing the Left Behind films while Greenwald has been forced to seek financing independently, but the decision to bypass the multiplexes is an interesting one. I want to map these distribution strategies back onto Ivan Askwith's argument that consumers have been willing to pay for iTunes-style TV downloads and that this approach could produce programming independent of the constraints of advertisers' demands for strong ratings. Such independence, argues Askwith, could allow TV producers to create more innovative and rewarding programming. This third term isn't mapping quite as nealy as I would like, other than to note that all three approaches illustrate the ways in which we are finding our media in new places and that the effects of those changes still need to be mapped carefully and thoughtfully.

Posted by chuck at 9:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Still Life With Action Figure

Just noticed that GZombie has posted a photograph he took in my apartment last weekend. Bonus points for anyone who can remember the animated series that "inspired" this toy.

Posted by chuck at 12:11 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

November 1, 2005

DC Screens

Just a quick link roundup of some indie film notes, including a few upcoming screenings here in DC. First, the Hirshhorn Museum will be screening Jem Cohen's Chain. I had a chance to see Chain at the DC Underground Film Festival a few weeks ago and highly recommend seeing it. According to the Hirshhorn website, Cohen's frequent artistic collaborator, Guy Picciotto, will be in attendance.

Playing this week at the Landmark E Street Cinema will be After Innocence, a documentary about innocent men wrongfully imprisoned for decades after new evidence became available (more information here). The screening is being promoted by the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, an organization that seeks the exoneration and release of persons who have been wrongfully committed of crimes. I'll be travelling this weekend, so I won't get to see the film until later this week, but it sounds like an interesting project.

I also want to add more information about Sujewa Ekanayake's Date Number One, which I mentioned a few weeks ago in the context of my discussion of indie cinema. I'm not sure I realized it at the time, but Sujewa is a DC-based filmmaker and his blog is a great resource for keeping track of his work in distributing and promoting the film. Worth noting: On December 1, Sujewa will be giving a talk about his film at the Kensington Row Bookshop in Kensington, Maryland (yep, it's easily Metroable).

Finally, a quick reminder that screenings of Robert Greenwald's WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price will be taking place in a few short days (November 15-16). I'll be attending one of the DC Drinking Liberally screenings on Wednesday, November 16.

Technorati tags: walmart, walmartmovie, movies, documentary

Posted by chuck at 11:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Indefinite Detention

I'm currently reading Judith Butler's Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence for the paper I'll be delivering at MLA. So far, I've read only the Introduction, but the book appears to address many of the questions I want to discuss, especially in terms of the issue of the public sphere after September 11.

Butler also has a chapter titled "Indefinite Detention," which focuses on the detention of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay (the current number is around 500), many for over four years now. A number of these prisoners have never been charged with a crime, and as Butler points out, "these prisoners are not considered 'prisoners' and receive no protection from international law" (xv). It's now widely acknowledged that the US does not consider itself bound to the Geneva Convention in its treatment of the prisoners, leading Butler to argue that by this logic, "the humans who are imprisoned in Guantanamo do not count as human" (xvi).

I'm citing Butler in detail this morning because Josh White of The Washington Post is reporting on the attempted suicide of Jumah Dossari, the 36th documented attempted suicide in teh past twenty months. Dossari's suicide attempt is receiving attention because he chose to attempt suicide while his lawyer was visiting him to work on his case. The article also reports on the ongoing hunger strikes by many of the detainees.

Dossari's lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan reads his client's suicide attempt and the hunger strikes much like I do, as an attempt to reclaim some form of identity or subjecthod through control over their bodies:

Detainees "see it as the only means they have of exercising control over their lives," Colangelo-Bryan said in publicly describing the incident for the first time. "Their only means of effective protest are to harm themselves, either by hunger strike or doing something like this."

The article also lists a number of abuses that Dossari and others have reported during their incarceration in Guantanamo. A spokesperson from the prison identifies the hunger strikes and the abuse claims as tactics of a certain terrorist organization. Such a claim seeks to silence even these limited attempts at criticism. It's this second question, the limits of what can and cannot be said, that I'm planning to address in my paper. I'm working from this question as it has manifested itself in popular culture (hence my recent discussion of "independent cinema"), but the intersction of ideas between Butler's book and White's Post article seemed worth noting.

Technorati tags: Guantanamo, politics

Posted by chuck at 8:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack