Sweeney Todd

*Spoilers*

Could someone pretty please explain the end of this film to me, because I've watched it several times (the end), and I still can't follow what happens. It looks like to me like...

Anthony brings Joanna to Barber Shop (in disguise as boy) and tells her to wait. She hides in box. Alan Rickman comes to shop looking for Joanna and Todd kills him and dumps him in the chute. Box opens and Todd doesn't recognize Joanna and offers to shave him/her, but hears scream. He tells "Joanna" to wait there and goes down to basement where Mrs. Lovett is finishing off Rickman, but there sees (what looks to me like) dead Joanna and so throws Mrs. Lovett into the fire. Or is the other dead figure in the basement Anthony? And who killed him? (Mrs. Lovett?)

Little help?

Evolutionary Ponderings of Characters in Literature

With the recent release of a major film challenging Darwinian evolutionary though (no, I haven't seen it), there's been a lot of buzz on all sides about the question of how (or whether) one's belief's about how life began effect how we act.

I think we tend to see in people's behavior's confirmation of our assumptions about possible connections between belief systems and living. That's why this quote about Clare, from George MacDonald's A Rough Shaking caught my attention:

If we have come up from the animals to be what we are, Clare must have been a dog of a good, faithful breed, for he did right now as if by some ancient instinct.(158)

One could argue that the use of the conditional here does not indicate that MacDonald did, in fact, believe in trans-species evolution. What strikes me as interesting, though, is his narrative lack of concern about the question. The nature of animals is a reoccuring theme in this particular novel, and it shows how MacDonald was capable of very flexible theological thought because, I think he only really held fast to two axioms as far as I can tell: God exists and He is good.

Perhaps this passage struck me more in tone than content, since I just finished talking about Gosse's excerpt on evolution in the Victorian literature section of the Norton. Gosse says of his father's confrontation with evolutionary thought that there was a kind of "agony" in being confront with two, incompatible truths. MacDonald never seems to have this sort of existential agony (what if I'm wrong? what if there is no God and I cease to exist at death?) and yet he doesn't seem to avoid it through a philosophical retreat to dogmatism. He seems to avoid it through, well not belief,exactly, through knowledge.

Here's a rough transcription of an exchange between Violet and Dr. Cukrowicz in Suddenly Last Summer:

Sebastian saw the face of God.

I’d like to hear about that.

One long ago summer, sitting right here in this garden, Sebastian said to me, “Mother, listen to this.” He read to me Herman Melville’s description of the Encantadas, the Gallapagos Islands. He read me that inscription and said we had to go there. And so we did go there, that summer, on a chartered boat a [----] schooner looking as close as possible to the sort of boat Melville would have sailed on. We saw the encantadas. But on the Encantadas, we saw something that Melville hadn’t written about. We saw the great sea turtles crawl up out of the sea for their annual egg laying. Once a year, the female of the sea turtles crawls up out of the equiatorial sea onto the blazing sand beach of a volcanic island to dig a pit in the sand and deposit her eggs there. It’s a [--] and dreadful thing the depositing of the eggs in the sand pits, and when it’s finished, the exhausted female turtle crawls back to the sea half dead. She never sees her offspring. But we did. Sebastian knew exactly when the sea turtle eggs would be hatched, and we returned in time for it.

You went back?

In time to witness the hatching of the sea turtles and their desperate flight to the sea. A narrow beach. The color of caviar was all in motion. The sky was in motion, too, full of flesh-eating birds, and the noise of the birds, their horrible, savage cries, as they circled over the narrow, black beach of the Encantadas, while the new-hatched sea turtles scrambled out of their sand pits and started their race to the sea.

Race to the sea?

To escape the flesh-eating birds that made the sky almost as black as the beach. And I said, “Sebastian…no…no…it’s not like that” but he made me look. He made me see that terrible sight.

What was not like that?

Life. I say no! No! That’s not true! But he said it, yes. He said, “Look Violet. Look. There on the shore.” And I looked and saw the sand and all alive, all alive, as the new-hatched sea turtles made their dash to the sea while the birds hovered and swooped to attack, and hovered and swooped to attack. They were diving down on the sea turtles, turning them over to expose their soft, undersides. Tearing their undersides open, and rending and eating their flesh. Sebastian guessed that possibly only a hundredth of one percent of their number would escape to the sea.

Nature is not created in the image of man’s compassion.

Nature is cruel. Sebastian knew it all along, he was born knowing it. But not I. I said, no, ‘those are only birds, turtles, not us.’ I didn’t know then it was us, that we are all of us cracked by this devouring creation. I couldn’t, wouldn’t face the horror of the truth. Even that last day in the Encantadas, when Sebastian left me, and spent the whole blazing equatorial day in the crow’s nest of the schooner watching that thing on the beach until it was too dark to see. And when he came down the rigging, he said, “Well now I’ve seen Him” and he meant God.

Do you believe he saw God?

He saw the whole thing there, that day on the beach. But I was like you. I said, “no.” I refused to believe. Until suddenly, last summer, I learned that my son was right. That what he had shown me in the Encantadas was the horrible, the inescapable truth.

The character(s) in Williams's play do not seem to be arguing that evolution leads to man acting brutally or nihilistically. It does seem to suggest that cruelty--the strong preying on the weak--is the operating principle witnesses in the evolutionary process of the survival of the fittest.

Is this offensive? Ideological? A slight on atheists who don't believe in God? It's funny (strange) to me that MacDonald, a Christian, basically says that MacDonald, in holding on to a conviction of God's operation and intention in the development of man and the universe is more charitable towards the (possible) effects of evolution than is Williams (or his character anyway). There is a hopelessness in Violet's speech that is 20th century, to be sure, and one that is consistent with a mother grieving for her son. But I'm not sure it's all just surface grief speaking and that there is not some intentional comment about the pointlessness of human existence in a (solely) Darwinian universe.

Funny, Violet opines early in the film. A child who loses a parent is an orphan. A woman who loses a husband is a widow. And a parent who loses a child is..."nothing." The surface meaning is, of course, that we have no word in our language for that. I wonder, though, with the evolutionary motif running throughout the film, if there isn't a claim there that we only exist through our offspring (the whole film is about Violet trying to preserve the existence of Sebastian as she wants him by trying to get Elizabeth Taylor's character lobotomized) that one might wonder if what she is saying is that the end of the (family) line is the end of the (existence) line.

Which Jane Austen Character am I?

Well, duh....no surprise here...just ask my delicate and perplexing matter....

Survey saaaaaaays:

Mr. Knightley.

Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema

I'm happy to report that I've received an offer to place this anthology under contract with an academic publisher.

I will post more details as I get them and once the contract is signed.

Here is a link to the table of contents.

So I guess I can not shop at Circuit City now...

Long time readers of this blog know that I like to pick on Blockbuster from time to time.

Well, actually, not "like to" but I do it.

So when I heard the yellow and blue was buying Circuit City I thought maybe they were doing a turnaround from getting kicked in the face by Netflix.

Alas, no such luck. Every time I give Blockbuster another chance, it finds new and creative ways to screw up.

Case in point, I had one or two items available on Blockbuster that were not available on Netflix, so I re-signed up for their smallest mail plan: $3.99 for two movies a month. Fair enough. Blockbuster then sends me an offer. If I will "upgrade" to the next highest plan--$8.99 for one out at a time, unlimited, and two free rentals in store--they will give me one month free. Quick math check says that's an additional 99 cents over two months for which I get 4 free rentals (2 a month) in the store.

Only problem is when I turned in my first envelope for a free rental they said I had already used up my allotment. How could this be, since I just re-upped and this was the first trade in? No matter, the computer is always right. So I left the store without There Will Be Blood (which I still haven't seen but I suppose I'll get at Redbox next Monday).

Okay, so I'm out $5 or two rentals...not a huge hit, but enough to remind me why I stopped dealing with Blockbuster in the first place. Fool me once, shame on them. Fool me for the umpteenth time and I learn my lesson.

Oh, and as a side note, some of you may know that Blockbuster makes a big deal out of refusing to stock NC-17 films but will stock unrated foreign films or made for cable soft porn like Red Shoes Diaries. I was surprised then to see Ang Lee's Lust, Caution on the shelves. I was more surprised to see the studio had apparently caved to pressure and released an expurgated version of the film to that it could get into Blockbuster stores. Funnier still was the advertising banner on the DVD: "The 'R' rated version NOT seen in theaters!" Ah, yes, normally we get the promise in a Director's Cut of all the stuff you couldn't see in the theater (in an "UNRATED" director's cut). Here we get the "selling point" that the film is new because they took out all the stuff you COULD see in the theater. Bizarre.

Post-script. When canceling my service, I was required to fill out a check list explaining my reason(s) for canceling. It ended with a "pretty please won't you tell us your main reason for canceling" so I wrote an explanation of the problems I had with customer service, opportunities I had given them to resolve the issue, and what it would take for me to remain a customer (simple, honor your agreement and provide the services you said you would). Laughably, the website did not accept my cancellation. Instead I got an error message that I had exceed the '255 character" maximum field allotment for my reason for canceling.

Yeah, guess they really do want to hear from their customers on how they can improve.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)

My review of "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" is now available at Christian Spotlight on Entertainment.

The film opens this Friday, but I was able to get a ticket to an advance showing in Raleigh last week. Worth watching if you liked Knocked Up. (And no, the screenin wasn't specific to crtics nor obtained through the publication venue, so spare me the finger wagging about embargoes and blackout dates, please.)

The Mismeasure of Mentors

The April edition of "The Matthew's House Project" is up, and it includes a short essay from me about Robert Fritz's eulogy of Karlheinz Stockhausen, using Francis Schaeffer to teach Western Civ, and the one area in which Christians and Darwinists are actually pretty similar.

It's all connected by...well, here, go read it yourself.

Another Film Board

Some people may know that awhile ago I was banned from a certain film discussion board (that focuses on the arts and faith).

There was always some part of me that thought, "I wonder what would happen if..." and when I realized that the board software (Invision) was actually free, I thought, well, I'll just make a discussion board and see what happens.

Some people like to discuss film but don't like leaving comments at other people's blogs.

So, if you feel like talking about film, here's a link to Another Film Board.

Worst case scenario, I look stupid and nobody ever posts there; best case scenario I get some cool conversations about film.

At the Death House Door (2008)

Jeffrey Overstreet has graciously provided space at Looking Closer for my review of the new documentary by the makers of Hoop Dreams and Stevie. The film centers mostly around the story of Carroll Pickett, a chaplain who witnessed ninety-five executions during his tenure.

Link to the review.

August Rush

I won't say that August Rush is the worst movie I've seen in the last year (at least), not because it isn't but only because I'm too tired having torn apart Dan in Real Life to have the energy to expound on all the bad choices made by the film's makers. (Excepting, perhaps Robin Williams's sideburns; I'm hard pressed to decide if his costuming was meant to overtly reference Brokeback Mountain and Midnight Cowboy and thus make implicit the character's gay-menace subtext or whether, given the film is essentially a reinvention of Oliver Twist, it is only supposed to get us as far away as possible from Fagin's Jewish identity and the implicit Jew-menace subtext.)

I will say that I can't think of a film since A Thin Red Line that drags on longer after you know what is going to happen. (I actually caught myself straining for glimpses of George Clooney in the Central Park crowd until I realized I, not August, was having a flashback.) I'm not sure whether or not to blame that on the writing, directing, or editing. I want to say the latter, as the film is perpetually building to montage moments over song-track serenades only to abruptly come to a screeching halt in order to start another. I guess this is meant to build tension (as opposed to merely make the film longer), but instead it just builds sluggishness. We're told repeatedly that these characters are desperately searching for each other, but they sort of slog through the film with a slothful confidence that if they wait long enough the movie they know they are in will end and they have no responsibility (beyond turning to the next page of the script) for moving their story along.

Freddie Highmore has a quiet intelligence and (miraculously for this film) the sense to avoid mugging (mostly) for the camera that allows him to escape from a sentimental shlockfest with his dignity intact. (Stack him up against Haley Joel Osment in Pay It Forward, and you'll see the difference between being in a bad movie versus being of one.) Terence Howard glides around the periphery of the action, and I'm uncertain whether he is supposed to be invoking his cop character in The Brave One or one of the angels in Wings of Desire. Certainly the sadness that Howard conveys (primarily through his low voice) plays against our cultural stereotypes of the big, angry black male and hence makes his characters memorable and seem a lot more varied than they really are. That's not a knock on him as an actor, though. The truth is that his performance, like Highmore's (and, really, I would even argue Williams's, though I don't like it) evidence an actor who knows (either deep down or straight up) that there's just nothing to his character in the script and it's up to him to make him real through performance choice and character mannerisms. While I always appreciate a professional giving it a go rather than phoning it in, in this case (ironically, since the subject is music) the independent choices the actors make for the characters clash, and so each seems to be inhabiting a different movie. (I started to say a "different world," but, again, these characters don't live in a world, they are characters who know they are characters in a movie rather than characters who think they are people in a world.)

For reasons I cannot fathom (perhaps because the film made me think of a parent searching for a child) the last paragraph and the distinction between characters who are people versus who know they are in a film made me think of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's 1996 masterpiece La Promesse. In it, Jeremie Renier as Igor spends a considerable amount of time trying to find a child. The contrast between these two films is a master illustration in the difference between plot as a bunch of stuff that happens and plot as the framework through which character is revealed and developed.

Dan in Real Life: I'm not done yet....

Hey, I achieved another life goal this weekend by finally getting a shout out in Jason Morehead's Opuszine!

I very much like and respect Jason's take on film (we together sat through Geoffrey Wright's MacBeth at the Toronto Film Festival one year and he helped articulate some of the reasons I didn't care for it despite Lady MacBeth giving her "out damn spot" speech in the nude), so I was pleased that he had the same exasperated response to Dan in Real Life that I did.

Now, I made the (possible) mistake of posting a comment at Jason's blog, and the next thing I know all the rant juices are flowing again, and I kept thinking of more and more things about the film I didn't like.

I already mentioned in a footnote the (I can only assume meant to be taken as) playful "teasing" of Mitch early in the film in which a family member says that if he messes up the relationship with Marie they will dump him and keep her.

Since Marie, with Dan's help, is the one who messes up the relationship and the family doesn't dump her (or Dan), I can only assume that this earlier scene was less a call for applying an expected standard of decency in all relationships as a condition of family acceptance and more just an expression of personal preference--they actually just like her more than Mitch.

This, in turn, got me thinking about Marie's character. I've mostly just been ranting about Dan and the film's inability to reconcile what he does with what it wants you to feel about him. I thought, too, as the final credits rolled over the wedding and we see the family beaming at the now happy couple, of Ann Landers's old rubes that when a man marries his mistress he creates a vacancy for that position and that if she cheats with you she'll cheat on you. Mitch and Marie aren't married, of course, but there is a corollary here somewhere--Dan and Marie's relationship is (half-)baked in the cauldron of lies and deception, and we are supposed to take it on spec that the resulting pastry that is the ensuing marriage will be one of love, trust, and mutual respect? Forget "love," she doesn't even respect Mitch enough as a person to tell him the truth when she dumps him...one more example of the film's curious motif that lying to people is the highest form of love because the truth sometimes hurts and therefore trying to prevent hurt is the same as loving.

Just as the film changes the foundation of Dan's dilemma from attraction to love as a means of glossing over and trying to justify what the audience might otherwise recognize as some pretty shabby behavior, so too it must try to figure out a way to make Marie a character who can string Mitch along, dump him with no explanation, immediately start dating his brother, and yet not come across as a completely heartless bitch.

The first step in doing so, is, of course, casting the radiant and lovely Juliette Binoche, who is so lovely and has so much good will wrapped up in her actor's persona, that we are just inclined to think of anyone she is playing as a good person. You, know, it's Dan in Real Life's equivalent of the U.S. Government hiring Tom Hanks in The Simpsons Movie to cash in on some of his credibility. There is a weird sort of twisted irony of Binoche in this role. She may be best known for her role in Krzystof Kieslowski's masterpiece, Blue, about a woman trying to emerge from the deadening weight of grief after the death of her husband (and daughter). If I thought the maker's of Dan in Real Life were cleverer, I might almost take this as a tip of the hat to their influences, much like the cameo roles for veteran actors in remakes or Branagh's inclusion of Judi Dench and John Geilgud as Hecuba and Priam in Hamlet.

There's a fine line between honoring and exploiting, though. (The Simpsons Movie is making that very point with the Hanks example.) If this film is thinking about Binoche's association with Blue at all, its invocation of it is more base, akin to the rising tendency of writers and directors to point to shared cultural reference points as shorthand for communicating what they are going for rather than actually trying to invoke a message, idea, or theme in their own work. One can do this through casting (part of what makes Bob Saget so darn funny in Entourage is our immediate association of him with Full House; part of what makes Keith Carradine so right for Kill Bill is the immediate association with Kung Fu), as well as musical cues, or visual "homages" that invoke previous cinematic reference points. When done well, or decently, this can be a way of fleshing out an otherwise minor character and enriching a film. When it becomes a substitute for character development, it becomes a lazy crutch for bad writing.¹

The closest thing Marie is given to an explanation of her feelings (other than, hey, I just like this other guy better) comes in an exchange with Dan in which she talks about reading his book. Mitch has apparently stolen some lines or approaches from Dan's advice column--nuggets like "I'll forgive you your past if you forgive me mine"--and in a foolish act of unforgivable deception has tried to apply advice from a relationship advice column to his relationship. Marie complains that all Mitch's "best lines" are, in fact, Dan's and that she didn't realize in falling in love with Mitch (who applied the advice) she was actually falling in love with Dan (who gave the advice).

This exchange, like the aforementioned shower scene screams out for a deconstructive reading, in part because (like many scenes or works that cry out for deconstruction) it makes no sense if taken at face value. Here is a woman who, we are supposed to believe, is too embarrassed to be found talking to a guy in a bathroom while she washes her face and so she will subject herself to the greater embarrassment of stripping and getting in the shower with him. Here is a woman who apparently detests lies and dishonesty so much that she is outraged that a boyfriend will apply advice from a relationship column without providing a verbal, in-text MLA citation about where it came from. Yet the same woman who is outraged not at being lied to but not being told the whole truth will turn around and refuse to be honest with him about her own actions. This makes about as much sense to me as a teacher failing a student for plagiarism on the grounds that he argued in an essay that people ought to love their neighbors as themselves without thinking to mention that someone else said it first but then turns around and plagiarizes large parts of the student's essay for her own dissertation.

Marie's rationalization here (it has to be a rationalization, she can't be serious) would seem to imply, if taken seriously, that words are a greater sign of love than actions. Perhaps if the film had cast Gwyneth Paltrow instead of Binoche, we might instinctively think of Shakespeare in Love and suspect that Marie is a poetic, Romantic sort of the type who has a highly idealized view of love and falls in love with the man because he is the source of the words, but then that would work better if Dan were a poet rather than an advice columnist and if it were the words themselves, rather than the sentiment behind them, that were beautiful. As it is now, I kept flashing forward to a moment thirty years in the future after Marie has enjoyed a few decades of Dan's sincere love and devotion, where she is wandering through another, different book store and stumbles across a Bible that has fallen open to Ephesians 5:25: "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her."

In my mind, I see Marie immediately and tearfully filing for divorce. "All those years," she sobs, "I thought I was falling in love with you...only to find out that I'm really in love with St. Paul."

***************************************
¹One could argue, I suppose, that Binoche's presences is meant to evoke not Blue but The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and were I to find out that the original choice to play Dan was not Steve Carrel but Daniel Day-Lewis, I would have to rethink my contention that we are meant to take the Dan-Marie relationship as true love and not merely the desperate attempts of two lonely and co-dependent people feeding their addiction to love and lust as a narcotic used to dull their existential pain.

Netflix "Recommendations"

I hate to pile on Netflix since, on the whole, they do a lot of things right. I would like to note by way of preface, though, that my profile says that I have rated 2874 movies at that site under their urging that if I rate more movies, they can fine tune my recommendations.

So I think it's a little disingenuous of them to parse what was no doubt a paid banner promotion as a recommendation:

"If you enjoyed:

Drawn Together, Season 1
Escape to Grizzly Mountain

We think you'll enjoy:

Futurama: Bender's Big Score."



Hey, thanks for that head's up, guys.

I'm pretty sure if YOU enjoyed The Harlem Globetrotters Visit Gilligan's Island and From Justin 2 Kelly, you will probably like Hanna Barbara Presents: A Lawrence of Arabia Christmas.

I'm running off to update my queue right now.

That Was Then...

...this, as the saying so rightly points out, is now.

I recently blogged about the passing of my former drama teacher, Joan Bedinger. The combination of her passing and the greetings from some people I haven't heard from in ages (Alan Eisenberg's got a very interesting and educational blog about resources for thinking about and dealing with bullying here) put me in a bit of a nostalgic mood and I went rooting around the attic today to find my box of scrapbook stuff from high-school and earlier.

Here's a great picture I found of Joan:




It was weird going through the scrapbook, in some ways painful (high school was by no means the "best years of [my] life") but also oddly instructive. Here are a couple of random thoughts that passed through my mind:

Man, this seems like a LOOOOOONG time ago. That could be, perhaps, because it was. I was trying to think when was the last time I seriously sat down and looked at these pictures, and wondered if it had been decades. I guess that's one difference between being young and middle aged. It used to be that the only things I could measure in decades were future things. Past things were always measured in days, months, or years.

I remembered I had a letter from Joan when I graduated. It was weird to read it and think that she was now dead. An even more strange feeling came when, going through the scrapbook, I found a second letter, one she sent to me while I was at college. It said that she missed having me around and hoped she would see me when I was next in the area, that she was and had always been a poor letter writer, but that she thought of me often and looked forward with pleasure to being able to catch up with each other's lives soon.

I suppose, looking back, that there was a part of me that was paradoxically jealous of and suspicious of her friendship. Sure, the inner cynic whispered in my ear, Joan said I was unique, and special, but she probably says that to everyone. Was she my friend, I sometimes wondered, or a cult-like personality who was collecting followers who could easily be replaced?

Memory is this bizarre thing. I had sort of constructed this memory of my college years of my making the effort to go back when the school had a show, to correspond, to visit when I was in town...My recollection was that these efforts were always appreciated but seldom reciprocated. I wondered now, as I re-read the second letter if that were only a partial truth. I tried hard to think back twenty some years and see if I could really remember not just my impressions but actual events. As with any friendship that ends not through conflict and/or a particular catalyst but through gradual drifting apart, thinking about this one was, admittedly, painful, and I think I understand that some of my revisionist memories might have been simply to dull that bittersweetness by focusing on those parts of the process I was not (or did not feel) responsible for.

Of course, my perspective is not only changed now by the fact that I am older but also that I am a teacher. While there are great spiritual and psychological rewards for teaching--my students enlighten me and enrich my life (okay, maybe not all of them but many of them)--there is also a painful truth that I understand now that I didn't then: if the best teachers are the ones who are willing to teach within the context of a personal relationship, a good teacher is forever investing herself or himself into relationships, the majority of which are not permanent--in people who grow up, move away, move on (and rightly so) to the next stages of their lives.

In this sense teaching can be analogous in some ways to parenting. I found some old programs for plays I was in while in high-school, and I was reminded through the program notes of how many of my fellow students used to call Joan "mom" and how I used to roll my eyes at that practice finding it unprofessional and too "familiar." A number of my fellow students also called her "Joan," which I could never bring myself to do, either, because it felt disrespectful; it wasn't and wouldn't be right for my particular idiom (pun intended). But I realize now that this practice was not necessarily a sign of brazen disrespect for her position nor of cheeky familiarity; it was--or at least could be--one of the higher forms of respect.

I also realize now that friendship isn't a zero-sum game. It isn't as though the meaningful friendships she had with other colleagues and students somehow diminishes the importance of the friendship she had with me. Actually, in my experience, the opposite is true--philia, like agape, enlarges a person rather than diminishes her; as we give, we grow and have more to give. I think now that the friendship she received back not just from me but from others no doubt enlarged and encouraged and sustained her to be able to give to the constant new stream of people in her life. Perhaps a better, more fitting legacy for such a friend would be to focus less on trying to figure out how special or unique our friendship was but on how typical it was...to think not about how special I must have been to deserve special friendship from amongst the sea of faces but about how special she must have been to be able to befriend so many.

The final thing I think about in reviewing my scrapbook is that I like that she is smiling. I was such a serious person in high school:



Things that had happened to me growing up...early exposures to violence and death probably influenced me more than I knew and taught me to look at the world as place where bad things happened. I think that's contributed to the fact that I've always been both drawn to and judgmental of people who are capable of enjoying life. I don't just mean hedonists or epicures, and I certainly wasn't cognizant at that time that I might tend to look down on such people because I envied their ability to enjoy life and not merely because they were all superficial. (I guess I thought I was superior to them on some level...I had faced reality...they would find out soon enough things were not all strawberries and cream.) I remember I didn't take a curtain call for the play I assistant-directed my senior year. I no doubt was suspicious of the transiency of happy moments and protective of my dignity and the decorum of the situation. I didn't like how the closing nights would be mawkish and the rhetoric would be inflated. Joan didn't force the routine on me, but she did let me know (in friendship) that she thought I was being stupid. "You worked hard," she said (or words to that effect), "why not enjoy your moment?"

One has to stop and smell the flowers now and then, and, you know, if they smell good, it won't kill you to smile at the pleasure of it.

I'm smiling now, mom.

"C"+ Songs

It's my theory in teaching that the hardest papers to write out grade comments for are the "C+/B-"

My roundabout way of explanation is that people who earn "A"'s and "F"'s know it; most of the time you are documenting objective deficiencies or problems or moving from highlighting specific examples of excellence rather than giving generic or vague praise.

Writers who earn "D's" generally are just happy they didn't fail, while writers who earn "B"'s may be disappointed they didn't get an "A" but may not have had the expectation that they would.

The thing about a "C+" or "B-" is that you are saying, as an evaluator that the work is better than average. You are pointing out successful attributes of the work. Doing so inevitably leads to the question, "Well, then why wasn't the assessment higher?" So you then have to turn around and point out the weaknesses or flaws as well.

It is this requirement to point out both--strengths and weakness--that make grading such works so tricky. In other works you may just have to point out one or the other.

I have 46 "C" songs in my Ipod. (48 actually, but I only counted once for two songs by Sting for which I had two versions--from studio and live album--"Children's Crusade" and "Consider Me Gone.') In ranking them from 1 to 46, I figured the songs ranked 18-23 would be the equivalent of my C+ "C" songs. (Boy, isn't that awkward to type?)

"Corey's Coming" -- Harry Chapin.
Chapin is a story-teller, so as a whole you might like or dislike his work depending on whether or not you like ballads. Like most ballads, this one can move me when the story reaches its climax, and it is there that Chapin's lyrics get the most power via simple directness rather than bombast. ("So I said if you're a relative, he had a peaceful end/That's when she said, "My name is...Corey.../You could say I'm just a friend." On the downside, though, the chorus of this song makes no sense. ("Like I told you/when she holds you/she enfolds you/in her world.") In fact, the chorus suggests that Corey has somehow drawn John Jacob into her world rather than inspiring and sustaining him to survive in his own.

"Christians and the Pagans" -- Dar Williams
I like Dar Williams a lot, but this song lacks some of the ambiguity of Williams's better work ("Teen For God," and "I'll Miss You Till I Meet You" for example). There is a contrast in the lyrics of "CATP" but maybe not the internal conflict borne out of self-questioning and probing leading to a more mature, developed faith. Actually this is true of "Beautiful Enemy" as well, a song I love. It's like the more self-assured the speaker in the song is of the rightness of her position, the less interesting or complex the song is. While there are hints of dawning self-awareness in "Beautiful Enemy" ("I just keep getting above myself..."), "Christians and the Pagans" is a little too pat ("So the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table/Finding faith and common ground the best that they were able/
And just before the meal was served, hands were held and prayers were said?
Sending hope for peace on earth to all their gods and goddesses). It's a nice, noble sentiment, that I enjoy, but it's also a bit too mushy to be an "A."

"Celebrate the Child" -- Michael Card
Contemporary Christian Music (CCM)lacks a lot of complexity. It can be repetitive and focus on choruses that sing well in worship services. A good chorus may not be the same thing as a good song to listen to. As a whole, I like Michael Card and I find many of his songs moving and a bit less superficial than most CCM. (Going through the the "C" songs made me rediscover the song "City of Doom" which I think is a really, really interesting mix of music and lyrics.) "Celebrate the Child" is a nice song, but as with many praise songs, there isn't much emotional fluctuation in it. The sentiment is nice, but there isn't much if any variation.

"Cry on My Shoulder" -- Bonnie Raitt
I confess that I mostly just like the tone of Raitt's voice. The song itself is pretty pedestrian:

And in the world outside
It can be harsh and cold
But if you need someone
I will be here to hold you
Cry on my shoulder
I'll help you dry your eyes
Cry on my shoulder
My love
My love

"City of Dreams" -- The Talking Heads
Harry Chapin once famously said that he had a hard time getting songs on the radio because they were too long. The Talking Heads sing songs that don't play well on the radio because they may not catch your ear right off the bat and pop your socks off. They do, though, have legs. "City of Dreams" is song that I like, but it never quite spikes. It's a bit too cerebral and abstract in its lyrics to make it easy to be great, though they are lyrics that might be really interesting if you think about them. The problem, though, is that I'm judging it as a song and not as poetry:

We live in the city of dreams
We drive on the highway of fire
Should we awake
And find it gone
Remember this, our favorite town

Dan in Real Life Rant

Dan in Real Life is one of those Three's Company/sitcom style comedies in which people get themselves into bigger and bigger complications trying to cover up something that wouldn't be half the problem their secrecy was if they simply were honest and rational for any thirty second segment of the film.

It is the type of film in which a woman will strip and get into a shower where she knows a guy is hiding because she is too embarrassed to admit he was in the bathroom talking to her while she was washing her face and too stupid to tell the person who asks to talk to her to wait for her in the other room and she'll be out in a few minutes.

It is the type of film in which characters spend days of screen time (what seems like years of our life time) lying to or avoiding honest conversations with people they love so much because they love them so much and are afraid the truth might hurt them a little bit. One of my pet peeves is movies that tell us something about characters but can't back it up by showing us what we are supposed to take the movie's word about. You know, how, say, Finding Forrester will tell us over and over that Forrester is a great writer but never show us anything he's written, or how The Saint will tell us Elizabeth Shue is a supergenenius but never show the character doing an intelligent thing.

Dan in Real Life tells us over and over again that Dan's extended family is loving and has a great relationship, but it seems to think that means they have competitive crosswords on family game night and not that they ever make particular efforts to treat others as they would be treated themselves or to try to provide for them a supporting and loving environment.

It is the type of movie where kids who are bratty the whole movie (and brattiest when dad is actually acting the most responsible as a parent) suddenly act supportive when their dad actually does something irresponsible and mean. Why do they do this? Because these characters exist in a world in which they know they are not real but are in fact characters in a movie...a movie which is 95% over and the plot needs for them to undergo a change of heart (and character) in order to have a happy ending that the writers don't know how to logically get to.

I think the part of Dan in Real Life I liked the least was Dan's resolution with his brother who first hits Dan and then interrupts Dan's attempts at apology to rush out the door and get in a car with a hotter, younger chick who was trying to pick up Dan at a bar earlier in the film. What, exactly, is the point of the scene? Turnabout is fair play? The brother landed on his feet or wasn't really that into the girl to begin with? No reading of this scene is consistent with what the character and the film has told us is true to that point about the brother's feelings for his girlfriend,¹ but, I'm hard pressed to see how any scene that tried to honestly deal with the fallout of the discovery could be resolved in 30 seconds or less so that we can get on with the happy ending.

Towards the end of the film Dan and Marie meet furtively in a bowling alley. The woman working there smiles knowingly as she watches them interact and, without being asked, turns on the romantic strobe lights. The function of this scene appears to be to have the stranger validate what the movie wants us to believe but has been unable to credibly show us--these two are obviously in love. It is so obvious anyone, even a complete stranger, could see it. The only ones who can't see it are, apparently, any adult who is living in the same house with them. The woman's recognition is a prefiguring of Dan's own recognition ("I love her"), and it is irksome how problems and conflicts are not resolved in light of that fact but dissolve in the face of it.

Like many rant-worthy things, there may be a seed of truth here, a seed that hints at a better movie that might have been. If the film were about two people gradually realizing (or even trying to hide the fact) that they are in love only to come to admit it and sadly (or defiantly, who know?) admit that love is selfish sometimes and this fact trumps whatever reasons they might give to or wrongs they might perpetrate on other people, it might have been a mature, intelligent, "real" movie.

The problem, though, is that Dan in Real Life is not about two people who spend several days trying to hide the fact that they are in love. It is a film about two people who spend several days trying to hide the fact that they just met. Furtiveness, as any good Medievalist reader might tell you, is a wonderful aphrodisiac. So you either buy the fact that Dan and Marie instantly fall in love at the book store and spend days valiantly trying to fight against that realization only to realize its no use, or you are confronted with the interpretation that they somehow fall in love through the glimpses they get of one another while pretending to not know each other. In the film's most honest moment, Dan (after watching Marie lead family jazzercise) pretty much admits that what is painful to be around her is that he finds her attractive and knows he can't pursue that attraction not that he "loves" her and knows she is dating someone else. Yet to follow that line of thought when she does become available can't be construed as something other than selfish (or at least indifferent to his brother's feelings) so his feelings have to be recast as love because claiming (him to himself and the movie to us) that his actions are motivated by love is the only way to make them justifiable (much less noble).

Heck, even that sort of self-deception might be interesting if the film was honest about it being (or at least mixed with) self-deception. If it admitted or invited you to consider the fact that these characters might be unhealthy (or have unhealthy habits) that have led to periods of regular or prolonged self- (and other-) delusion, then the "heart wants what the heart wants" conclusion might even be poignant as at least it would come on the heels of some self-knowledge or surrender of a constructed but artificial self-conception. (Yeah, can you tell I've been watching Rohmer's Six Moral Tales all last month?)

Dan in Real Life has no such pretensions. Dan gets the girl and gets to keep his conception of himself as a sacrificially giving father (he's willing, at the end, to give up the love that justifies all if that's what they want and they have to practically shove him out the door) and a supporting, loving brother. Bonhoeffer once famously railed against "cheap grace"--pale imitations of a holy and beautiful thing masquerading as the real deal--by pointing out that grace costs something. Dan in Real Life is kind of about "cheap love"--love not proven through putting others first or coming with a cost, but love used as the vaguest of all possible words, love as a label not to be earned but invoked, love not as a reason but as an excuse.

Bah.


¹Nor, really, is the family's response to Dan's revelation consistent with the family dynamics hinted at when the family tells the brother, earlier in the film, that if he messes up the relationship with Marie they will keep her and dump him. Or maybe it is...here, again, the film could be hinting at a truer, realer, film that wants to come out, one in which responses are based not on what people actually do but on assigned roles in the family mythology. Dan is the good brother and Mitch is the f--- up, because, well, because it's always been that way and to let the facts get in the way of a good stereotyping is to question the truthfulness and reality of the family mythology on which the priviliged positions of respect and deference of its members rest.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and No Country For Old Men

John Ford is always a treat.

Many of his works have an air of simplicity about their narrative, yet manage to convey subtlety or complexity through performance, direction, or writing.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) doesn't have much of a plot; it is mostly a character study. John Wayne plays Nathan Brittles, a thirty year army man on the verge of retirement. He visits a loved one's grave for monologues like Henry Fonda in Young Mister Lincoln, but towards the end of the film I kept thinking about Tommy Lee Jones's turn as Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men.

Brittles bristles at retirement, in part because he thinks the world (at least his world) needs him. Custer has just fallen at Little Big Horn. The younger officers destined to inherit his position don't engender a great amount of confidence. To retire in the face of such chaos goes against his grain; it feels, perhaps, like accepting defeat.

Interestingly, though, Brittles has a scene with his commanding officer who tells him this isn't necessarily so. There is a suggestion--not overplayed--that Brittles may be mixed in his motives. It may be less that the world can't do without Brittles so much as Brittles can't do without being in the world. Brittles's friend says that they, too, were green once, and that for Brittles to refuse to believe or act like he is expendable is to rob his junior officers of the opportunity to grow into their roles and to become leaders of the next generation. Brittles himself says in one speech that he will miss having people come to attention at his command; he will miss being someone. In another, when Brittles complains bitterly that he "failed" in all regards in his last mission, he is reminded that the outcome is not the measure of the rightness of his actions. He is neither infallible nor omniscient, and while this truth is a bitter pill to swallow, swallow it he does, and without the sugar coating of Romantic martyrdom to make it go down easier. His commanding officer recognizes Brittles's report of his "failures" for what it is--equal parts bitterness and self-pity, and he reminds the Captain that this experience is by no means unique.

Sheriff Bell doesn't seem to have that sort of equivalent sounding board (or mirror) in No Country For Old Men. The old ones that he measures himself against exist now only in his (idealized) memory or dreams. When he does visit one of the older generation, he gets no comfort but only a fatalistic homily that he can't stop what's coming. The closest thing to a confidant is Mrs. Bell, who, while clearly in love with her husband, suggests she doesn't want him in her hair because she hasn't retired. The voice-over of No Country For Old Men takes on a (perhaps unintentionally) ironic function in this context. Bell, like the Ancient Mariner, stops the audience, like the wedding guests, ostensibly to tell them his story as some sort of cautionary tale. Really, though, the moral of the tale is not that the audience can be spared the curse but that the speaker rises to Romantic tragedy by receiving the greatest measure of the suffering that is universal to all humanity.

I'm tempted to return to my riff about generation gaps expressed in Knocked Up, but that would probably be too long a tangent.

What the comparison to Ford's film suggests to me is that there is something of pride in the form of false humility in Sheriff Bell's apocalyptic fatalism. Of crimes today, Bell says, one cannot take their measure. Yet, when you think about this claim, you may wonder how a drug deal gone wrong and a singular bad decision enmeshing a decent man in a series of hard consequences really qualifies as something new in scope under the sun.

"She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" was released in 1949, just a few years after the end of World War II, an event that did have scope and showed advances in technology that made violence seem more pervasive and horrific. Yet within that post-war context, Ford--interestingly enough--eschews a narcissistic modern gloominess. Men have ever felt in each generation that theirs is the worst (if they haven't thought it the best) and wondered how the world will survive without them to stand in the gap.

Brittles uses his experience to avert rather than win one last battle. Bell, on the other hand, is unable to reach Llewellyn in time to make good on his claim to Carla Jean that he is Llewellyn's last, best chance. He must live with the knowledge of that final unsuccessful resolution (I hesitate to call it failure) as he eases towards death. That he--and the film he occupies--seems to think that his knowledge is the biggest, hardest burden of all, that it is unique in degree if not of kind, is (I finally realized) what allows the film to come across as nihilistic and pandering at the same time.

Since screening No Country For Old Men at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival, I've been cool to the film but struggled to articulate why. Certainly the stylized violence, while not Tarantinoesque is still desensitizing and used a bit too much to seduce rather than sadden the audience. Perhaps, too, I thought that the fatalism it trumpeted masked the nihilism at its core. But some people seemed to recognize the nihilism and love the film anyway...and that was something I didn't get.

I think this Romantic sensibility, this sense of Sheriff Bell, and McCarthy, and the Coens' seeming to say, "I have the thorns of life cast upon me and I bleeeeeeeeeeed" is not just what I disliked about the film; it is what I found rang false about it. Captain Brittles does not accept that he can't stop what's coming but, finally, he does accept that he may not be the only one who can.

An Actor for All Seasons

Actor Paul Scofield passed away last night. Even though (according to IMDB) he hadn't done a studio film since 1996 (The Crucible) or major television work since 1998, one always hopes with an actor of his quality that there will be one more encore, one more command performance.

Scofield was by these accounts a good man as well as a good actor, and his ability to convey goodness and decency (much harder traits, I would argue, for an actor to convey that colorful evil) helped elevated A Man For All Seasons from a conventional biopic to a spiritually rewarding and inspiring representation of faith and not just a man of faith.

Emma (65-70) -- "She could not wonder at her brother-in-law's breaking out."

Reader-response critics (among others) are interested in first readings as opposed to subsequent readings. I note, for what it's worth, that for as many times as I've read Emma, I did not have a strong recollection of this scene. I always conflate it in my mind with the scene at the end of the previous chapter. Both involve a conversation with Mr. Woodhouse, and both illustrate the role Emma plays in keeping the fragile peace around the home.

Is this scene superfluous, then?

Two possible reasons jump out at me for the repetition of scenes involving Emma as a peace maker over strained dinner conversations.

First, the repetition make underline just how monotonous these conversations are, thereby making the reader experience a bit, vicariously, of the tediousness of Emma's existence. As we have said before, it is one thing to be told that Emma's father is a bit of a hypochondriac and a high-maintenance relationship, it is another thing to feel the constant presence of such a person in scene after scene.

A second reason for this scene may be a foreshadowing of Box Hill that underscores some of the gender politics that Emma has to live with. In both scenes a benign but irritating person (Mrs. Bates/Mr. Woodhouse) is curtly cut short by a momentarily exasperated listener (Emma/John Knightley). The difference? While Mr. Knightley rips into Emma for her momentarily lapse of patience, Emma "could not wonder at her brother-in-law's breaking out" (69).

Obviously, there is more than one difference between these two scenes, but the central one that jumps out at me is the gender of the person making the curt remark. The woman is apparentely expected to hold her tongue endlessly, while the man, it is understood, can only be expected to take so much before his outburst is considered unremarkable.

Both characters are nearly instantaneously sorry for their remarks. John Knightley pauses and grows "cooler in a moment" (69). Emma "blushes" and "was sorry." John Knightley, after the pause, though, presses on: "[...] growing cooler in a moment, added, with only sarcastic dryness [...]" (69).

So, stop the presses, there is a double standard applied to gender! The same actions considered a huge faux-pas for a woman is considered an understandable irritation for a man. When the man pauses and repeats his cutting remark, the onlooker sees her responsibility as stepping into the breach to separate and soothe the conflicting parties: "[...] the soothing attentions of his daughters gradually removed the present evil" (70). By contrast, when the woman lapses, the onlooker (George Knightley) sees his responsibility to correct the offending party with a stern rebuke: "It was badly done indeed" (246).

Nobody is saying "badly done" to Mr. Woodhouse for scolding his married daughter for following her doctor's advice or to John Knightley for cutting off his father-in-law and host.

Love in the Afternoon and Eyes Wide Shut

Okay, I just finished Love in the Afternoon and I'm a little tipsy on Rohmer having just finished my first run through the Six Moral Tales. I suppose watching paint dry can be pretty interesting if the paint makes a beautiful, nuanced picture. It's certainly more interesting than watching a car explode.

The Criterion DVD had an interview with Neil Labute talking about how Rohmer influenced him, but I confess that towards the end of Love in the Afternoon, the film I kept thinking about was Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

When Frederic leaves Chloe's apartment I thought, "Wow, there really is a thematic parallel with Eyes Wide Shut," particularly in the way the film plays off the ambiguity between what the characters say they want/believe and the actual choices they make. Then when Frederic calls his
wife on the phone right after he leaves Chloe's apartment, I thought, "Okay, if he [or she]
says 'And it's really important for us to f--- right now now'" it really is going to play for me like the end of Eyes Wide Shut." Neither character uses that line, but darned if the final scene with Helene isn't, essentially a much more ambiguous parallel to the final scene between Bill and Alice in Kubrick's film.

I also made a connection to Eyes Wide Shut at the very beginning of the film. Love in the Afternoon opens with Frederic walking in on a nude Helene in the bathroom, and this scene made me think of the opening scenes of Eyes Wide Shut and how Kubrick juxtaposes the more voyeuristic opening shot of Kidman which seems to be about woman as object of the male gaze with the shots of Alice in the bathroom while Bill is getting ready for the party which are all about familiarity, suggesting the ways he is and isn't looking at her. This Bill's indifference to Alice echoes Frederic's indifference to Helene.

Finally, I see a third parallel in the penultimate scene of Love in the Afternoon and a central scene of Eyes Wide Shut. In the climactic scene of Love in the Afternoon, it looks like Chloe and Frederic are moving towards a consummation. Chloe is undressed and moves to the bed (from whence we get the iconic shot of her on the bed that is in some of the movie posters). Frederic begins to undress and in the process of pulling his shirt off catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror.

The image of the shirt over his head is a visual echo to an earlier scene in which Frederic was playing a game with his daughter, and while ultimately ambiguous, I don't think it a stretch to suggest that Frederic is remembering that earlier moment himself. It is immediately after that glimpse that he leaves Chloe's apartment.

This scene reminds me of the scene (structurally earlier) in Eyes Wide Shut where Bill visits the prostitute and gets a call at a key moment on his cell phone that reminds him of his family, causing him to leave her apartment. (It is later suggested/reported in Eyes Wide Shut that the prostitute was HIV positive and so there is yet more ambiguity about this scene. Is it meant to be providential or coincidental? In my meditation on Eyes Wide Shut when it first came out, I wrote that while on the surface it may appear that Bill would have consummated the adultery had not he received a well timed interruption, it was at least plausible to think that given the fact that he can never seem to seal the deal, that something is always interrupting, the structure of the film invites us to contemplate whether or not there is some deeper seated reason Bill cannot (or at least doesn't) sleep with someone else.

Returning to Chloe in the Afternoon, I remember feeling a bit surprised at the shirt/glimpse in the mirror scene. It seemed uncharacteristic to me of Rohmer's style in the other tales, a bit more underlined. Neil Labute said in his commentary interview that one thing he appreciated about Rohmer in the Moral Tales is that he didn't judge the protagonists. He allowed you to do so, to be sure. In fact, he almost forces you to do so by withholding his own judgment. This scene, then (or the shot anyway), was one of the few times in the tales where I felt Rohmer was editorializing--or at least spotlighting--telling you what to pay attention to.

The comparison to Eyes Wide Shut, though, made me wonder if this scene weren't more ambiguous than I was giving it credit for being. Labute said he found Rohmer's men to be the great self-justifiers, and while I agree up to a point, the tales seem to me to have a lot of ambiguity in that there is often a tension or a discrepancy between who and what they claim to be and what their actions reveal them to be. Just as in Eyes Wide Shut where a central question (for me) was how to reconcile who and what Bill said he was and what he wanted with what he actually did (or didn't do), so too in Chloe, I felt like there was a bit more self deception going on, that maybe the glance was not a providential reminder that pulls him back from the edge but the moment in which he really sees himself (not the image he is trying to protect) and what he really wants. [Of course, it is also equally plausible that Chloe's well timed gossip sort of backfires and rouses him not to reciprocal hurt but recognition of possessive love...hmmm...that is another connection to Eyes Wide Shut, isn't it? It is Alice's "confession" about the fantasy with the naval officer that prompts Bill to want to start a journey of revenge but ends with him being shaken out of his complacency and familiarity with her and a realization (I think) that he doesn't want to hurt her back, he wants to have her back.]

Anyway, I'm fascinated by the Tales, because while I'm sympathetic to the naysayers who might say "It's the same movie over and over" I do think exploring the same themes allows Rohmer to make nuanced comparisons that articulate the important (or meaningless) distinctions between similar characters. To me, these films are more like classical music with variations on a theme than pop music with a lyric/medley being repeated over and over again.

Postscript: I'm adding a link to the Eyes Wide Shut review here and in the text above. I realized after writing this post that my review was from when I had the blog at a different web address and thus was no longer available.

My New Favorite College Football Team...

...is whoever is playing Clemson.

I don't have a child, but if I did, could I imagine any coach I would less want that child to play for than Tommy Bowden? (Maybe Dave Bliss, but that could be a toss up.)