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Off Off Topic
Joshua Tanzer is the founder and editor of Offoffoff.com. He has been a journalist for a really long time and a blogger for a really short time. He likes romantic dinners by candlelight and long walks on the beach. His turnoffs are regressive tax policy and mean people. Being of mixed French, German and Russian ancestry makes him feel like an honorary member of the Axis of Evil.
NOTE: Offoffoff's blog section is in development and will be open to readers soon. If you're interested in starting your own blog, please write to jmt@offoffoff.com.
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Week of January 2, 2005:
FILM | Everyone's a critic
NEWS | Two's just a coincidence
PICTURES | Picture a week #2: Midtown Manhattan
FILM | Wrapped in kaleidoscopic cool
EVENTS OF THE DAY | The worst of Times Square
NEWS | Happy meal
PREVIOUS: December 26, 2004 | NEXT: January 9, 2005
FILM: GOOD MOVIE REVIEWS
Everyone's a critic
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| James Garner and Gena Rowlands in one of the good parts of "The Notebook." |
As long as I'm anointing myself Film Critic Judge, however undeservedly, I'd like to pick out a couple of praiseworthy examples in addition to my critical entry about the Times writers below.
I read a lot of other film writers — but only after seeing the movie and writing my own review, if I'm doing one — and I often learn a lot from other people's perpectives and writing styles. In particular, I try to read less-enthusiastic reviews of movies I liked, to see if there were points I might have missed, and all the reviews of movies that were hard to write about, to see how other critics handled the task.
The Notebook
A few reviews stick in my mind from this year. One is Phil Villarreal's review of "The Notebook" in the Arizona Daily Star. He's the only one who saw the film the way I did — as a second-rate movie wrapped in a very good one. The main plot is an EXTREMELY standard young romance ("Behind every great love is a great story"), told in flashbacks by an old man to an old woman in a nursing home. Villareal spends most of his review on the schmaltzy predictability of the romance story, and then goes on to write this:
The story is told in a series of flashbacks, intercut with scenes from the present day, in which an old man (James Garner) reads the story of Noah and Allie out of a notebook to an old woman (Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes' mother) who suffers from dementia. Unlike the flashbacks, the present-day scenes are touching, believable and poignant, as it becomes obvious that Garner's character is in love with his listener, who doesn't remember him. There is a deeper connection between the modern segments and the story from the past, which you can likely guess by watching the trailer.
Garner and Rowlands' scenes, which account for maybe 10 percent of the running time, carry real power and seem like they came from a different, better film. It's a shame that Cassavetes didn't balance the two stories. After all, we're overloaded with tales of young love overcoming society, but too few about old love enduring despite physical and mental deterioration. By the end of the movie, every flashback to the predictable Noah-Allie era goings-on starts to hurt.
Yeah, yeah. We get it. Noah and Allie really, really love each other, and they'll do anything to be together. The movie is concerned too much with love's origin. It should have made a note to spend more time with its destination.
See the original article
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He's right on the money. This should have been a movie about the old man and woman. Their story has ten times the pathos, and suspense, of the cotton-candy boy-meets-girl boy-loses-girl romance that takes up the bulk of the movie. But just imagine trying to sell a film about two 70-somethings in a nursing home to a studio executive. Heck, I probably wouldn't have gone to see it myself. But taken by themselves, those scenes made up about 30 percent of a great movie.
Undertow
There's kind of a formula to reviewing the unexceptional movie. You start with, "Director X, maker of the previous movie Y, has now released movie Z." Then you tell what happened in terms of plot, then you say why it was good or bad. "Actress A can do no wrong. Cinematographer B, who worked on movie C, is a genius." I try never to write this article.
But sometimes I'm typing along and I can feel myself just not getting it. The movie "Undertow" was one case where just saying what you saw wasn't enough. The film (by the director of "All the Real Girls," which had many of the same qualities) is simplicity on the surface and turmoil underneath, and that turmoil is hard to capture in words — in fact, maybe it exists only in the mind of the viewer. And maybe it can only be written about impressionistically.
When I get into a rut on a film I know is better than the treatment I'm giving it, I try to stop, reconsider, and describe it in an entirely different way. Instead of saying what the film was about, maybe I look for metaphors or maybe I try to explore what emotional effect it had on the audience and why.
Roger Ebert does this a lot, and I think I caught him doing it right in the middle of a paragraph when he reviewed "Undertow." Notice how he starts by trying to categorize and delineate, but winds up settling on a couple of simple thoughts that do more to capture the appealing disorientation of the movie than all the film-studies expertise in the world:
His style has been categorized as "Southern Gothic," but that's too narrow. I sense a poetic merging of realism and surrealism; every detail is founded on fact and accurate observation, but the effect appeals to our instinct for the mythological. This fusion is apparent when his characters say something that (a) sounds exactly as if it's the sort of thing they would say, but (b) is like nothing anyone has ever said before. I'm thinking of lines like, "He thinks about infinity. The doctor says his brain's not ready for it." Or "Can I carve my name in your face?"
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| Scene from "Undertow." | |
See the original article
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I really liked the simple observation at the end — that the characters feel real because they speak in an unexpected way and a natural way at the same time.
(I came up with my own semi-satisfactory way of describing the movie's indescribable undercurrents in my own review, which I thought was halfway decent. At one point I wound up reporting on what I noticed in the audience, which can be another way of talking around the issue when the frontal assault isn't working.)
Hero
I was one of a very small handful of critics left behind by the "Hero" bandwagon. (The number of "rotten" reviews on Rotten Tomatoes is now up from 4 when the movie was released to 10 today, but we're still a tiny and despised minority.) I don't think most Americans had the perspective on Chinese culture to appreciate what a Chinese audience would understand clearly from the final scenes of the movie — an open defense of the Tiananmen Square massacre and other government repression in the name of stability and "unity." (Which itself sounds like a harmless ideal to an American but is a highly charged pro-communist term in Chinese politics. Think Taiwan and Tibet.)
A few critics, probably vaguely aware that there was some controversy over the film's political ideology in the Chinese media, gave it a brief mention while falling all over themselves with praise for the pretty colors and exciting action. Only one other writer really called the movie what it was, and that was Sean Burns of the Philadelphia Weekly:
Every shot should be a full-page photo in a coffee-table book, and if you flip through them fast enough, you'll think you've died and gone to heaven.
Which is a really good thing, because the story sorta blows.
... With his final reel a strange salute to fascist dictatorships, Yimou argues that a mighty empire can be formed only through forcible occupation and oppression. The film's rugged individualists are snuffed out faster than those psychic candles, and Tan Dun's score (almost identical to his music for the vastly superior, deeply moving Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) soars in triumph while black-suited armies storm previously autonomous city-states.
Ugly pictures have never been so pretty.
See the original article
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Kudos to Sean for dealing with the movie's actual message and keeping the indisputably pretty pictures in perspective.
January 8, 2005 | 5:21 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050102.php#e86
NEWS: NEWS ITEM
Two's just a coincidence
Mitigating Circumstances Dept.:
Today's Post includes two stories about teachers accused of sex with students, including one about a foot fetishist who confessed all. Well, almost all:
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Probers said Teague admitted performing oral sex on the girl and sucking her toes twice, but not a third time.
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Related links:
Original article
January 8, 2005 | 3:52 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050102.php#e85
PICTURES: MIDTOWN PHOTOS
Picture a week #2: Midtown Manhattan
Continuing my dilettantish foray into photography ...
I've been reading up on three kinds of photography in particular — sports, concerts (there's actually a whole book on the subject, and it's very good), and street photography. Some of the things I've gleaned from what street photographers have written are:
• Learn to shoot really fast. (Makes sense. Today alone, I missed a bunch of the best shots because I wasn't quick enough.)
• You're going to be in people's faces a little bit. Act like everything's okay. Rarely will somebody make an issue of it. (Actually, I felt like kind of a jerk several times today. As a journalist I have no problem walking up to someone and starting a conversation, but snapping pictures right in front of their faces is pretty intrusive and disrespectful. I'm not sure I like the dynamic; I'd rather do something more purposeful, more connected with hournalism.)
A couple of things I observed today:
• Pay attention to backgrounds. I liked last week's picture because of the juxtaposition of kids on skates looking out at the snow-covered outfield, with the unused baseball scoreboard looming in the background. But it was very cluttered and it took a lot of looking to pick up the connection. This time, I liked the picture of the man and dog as they came toward me, but I didn't get a good shot. Once they passed me, I happened to get a picture of them against the blank yellow wall of a Starbucks, and it simplified the picture quite a bit. I've also seen some street photographers online who clearly pay attention to ads in the urban background and wait for something interesting to happen in front of them. Clever.
I think this back-of-the-head picture happened to work out because the guy looks like he's scratching his head or tipping his cap to someone who isn't there — you can almost fill in his face in your mind.
• If somebody seems irritated at your taking their picture, give them a smile as if everything is fine and it's just a normal event in a normal day. I did this in the Louvre and it worked well. The woman whose picture I'd taken looked up at me just as I snapped the shutter, and seemed to be unsure whether she should be angry or not — just like a little kid who falls down and then looks up at his parents to see whether they're worried before deciding whether to cry for sympathy or just get up and dust himself off. She hesitated a moment and then smiled back. (Not so the guy smoking in his funny slippers, below, but no harm was done.)
• Walk slower. Stop sometimes. Look around more. Don't take pictures while moving. (I'm normally a fast walker and don't stop for much of anything.)
• Don't go out to take pictures on a cold day with and empty stomach and shaky fingers.
January 7, 2005 | 11:33 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050102.php#e84
FILM: CRITICS OF THE TIMES
Wrapped in kaleidoscopic cool
Still on the subject of Top 10 lists, I'm proud to say mine is bigger than Manohla Dargis's. My Top 10 is actually 17 films long, whereas the Times Triumvirate of Dargis, Holden, and Scott managed only 10 films apiece. How conventional.
Reading their lists reminded me of two of the worst reviews I saw this year, done by two of the above.
One was Stephen Holden's "review" of "Maria Full of Grace," which was a review only in the sense that he confirmed that he had seen the movie by "reviewing" every single plot point in an article of about 8 million words. Whereas most good critics strive to give some kind of halfway intelligent opinion about a film, this article did the two things you never want to do as a critic — fell back on recounting the plot instead of evaluating the film, and gave away pretty much all of the story's surprises. Needless to say, don't click through and read the article unless you've already seen the film.
Manohla Dargis writes this weird thing about her No. 1 movie of the year, "Million Dollar Baby":
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A film about life, death and everything that comes between, this latest masterwork from Clint Eastwood has the ease of late John Ford and Howard Hawks, and the deep spirit of late John Coltrane. About playing on Coltrane's "Love Supreme," the pianist McCoy Tyner observed, "You could do what you wanted, keeping the form in mind," which is something a musician like Mr. Eastwood and his glorious sideman Morgan Freeman know down to their bones.
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A few weeks ago, I happened to have two conversations in two days about Ms. Dargis, one with a writer who loves her and one with an industry person who hates her. I can't say I've thoroughly studied everything she's written, but I think I'm onto why people think she's extraordinary: It's the magic of the inexplicable juxtaposition. How did the description of "Million Dollar Baby" turn into a paragraph about John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner instead of the movie? If there is a significant connection, she doesn't exactly explain what she means by it. And by not actually making her point, she contributes not to her readers' enlightenment but to her own sense of unapproachable cool. She wants you to admire her for admiring Coltrane.
This is something that's been bugging me for half a year, ever since we both reviewed the awful, pro-fascist, pro-Tiananmen-massacre Chinese film "Hero." At least in my review, I explained why I felt there was a connection between the ancient emperor who first united China and the current-day communist rulers that the film glorifies. Here is what Dargis had to say:
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Roll over, Chairman Mao, and tell the comrades the news: in Hero, the history of the empire now comes wrapped in kaleidoscopic kung fu cool.
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To start with, this is just that bad kind of writing where an unconnected phrase sticks in your mind and you use it for no particular reason. Roll over Chairman Mao? Tell the comrades the news? Not only does this sentence have nothing to do with Chuck Berry, it also has nothing to do with "Hero." "Hero" is a pro-Maoist film, and the news the comrades heard from it was that it's still okay to slaughter your own people in the name of a unified state. Dargis precedes this sentence with a muddled mentioning of the film's "nationalistic message," which only underlines that she's willing to overlook a little authoritarianism as long as it's "wrapped in kaleidoscopic kung fu cool." Emphatically, nothing in the review betrays any actual knowledge about China. She simply wants to be admired for her snappy phraseology and her allusion to kung-fu flicks. It's just a weird, weird lead that seems to betray a mental fog — wrapped in edgy, "kaleidoscopic cool" writing.
Having said that, I did see a long think-piece Dargis wrote in November about what's happening with international film, and it wasn't bad at all. So maybe I'm jumping to conclusions. I just fear that she may be the film-critic equivalent of Maureen Dowd, prone to pretentious name-dropping and unfunny fun-making. And even worse, that a lot of readers are going to see her non-thinking non-sequiturs and think there's something clever about them.
January 7, 2005 | 4:09 a.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050102.php#e83
EVENTS OF THE DAY: TIMES SQUARE NEW YEAR'S EVE
The worst of Times Square
I honestly expected the reports about New Year's Eve in Times Square to begin with the number dead.
For 17 years as a New Yorker, I avoided the whole insane extravaganza — until now. When you live in some other part of the country, you see the new year arrive on TV. The ball makes its way down to the crowd, lights go on and fireworks go off, the people cheer euphorically and Dick Clark introduces the new year on behalf of us all. When you live here, you realize a lot of things — first among which is that the ball doesn't descend into the crowd. It's actually a little blip high atop a skyscraper (as seen in the attached picture) and it only comes down as far as the roof of the building. The second thing you realize is that the happy crowd is actually a bunch of drunken kids from the suburbs wedged into human holding pens on the street, where they've been standing on their feet since they got there 15 hours earlier.
This year, I went out for dinner and then headed back to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which is a block away from Times Square, getting there just after 11:30. The crowd wasn't that heavy — until we got there. With the entrances to the bus station blocked off, suddenly the fenced-in sidewalk area filled up with about three times the number who could fit there, and the mother of all shoving matches ensued. Half the people were pushing toward what they thought was a vantage point on the ball-drop; the other half were pushing the other way, trying to get the hell out. At some point, as people kept on arriving, it became impossible to do anything but get crushed.
Even that, by itself, might not have been so bad. But then around 11:45, one very burly and insane guy started plunged into the throng and started fondling people. So now we had a herd pushing north, a herd pushing south, and concentric circles of people pushing away from Mr. Friendly, none of them actually moving.
Somebody pointed west — toward a wall, but ultimately toward 41st Street — and said that was the way out. And finally, after my companion had been slammed against a concrete trash bin, we did make it out of danger. There on 41st were four cops — three PA police and one Postal (!) police — standing around doing nothing about the Cincinatti 1979 disaster gathering right in front of them. I told them people were getting crushed inside the pen, which they shrugged off. Inside the building, the Port Authority Police rightly have a monument to their members who died in the World Trade Center, so I don't want to be disrespectful, but to me, this was one of their worst days. I am not impressed with their dedication.
Inside the building is an Irish karaoke bar called McCann's (it used to be called the "Briefkâse Pub," which is a bizarre name if you've ever taken German), and we ducked in there at 11:58. I actually felt a touch of euphoria after getting the hell out of the new year's crowd, and when the new year came, I felt happy to be rid of the old one.
January 7, 2005 | 4:03 a.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050102.php#e82
NEWS: GUANTANAMO DETAINEES
Happy meal
My favorite news item from this weekend's papers was this one from the Times, under the headline "Fresh Details Emerge on Harsh Methods at Guantánamo":
"We are detaining these enemy combatants in a humane manner," General Miller told reporters in March 2004. "Should our men or women be held in similar circumstances, I would hope they would be treated in this manner."
His successor, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, told reporters in November that he was "satisfied that the detainees here have not been abused, they've not been mistreated, they've not been tortured in any way."
Journalists who were permitted to view an interview session from behind a glass wall during General Hood's tenure were shown an interrogator and detainee sharing a milkshake and fries from the base's McDonald's and appearing to chat amiably. It became apparent to reporters comparing notes in August, however, that the tableau of the interrogator and prisoner sharing a McDonald's meal was presented to at least three sets of journalists.
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Obviously, a happy meal makes a happy prison.
The article also includes details of borderline torture methods used at the prison, but this can be attributed to media bias, given the beautiful Potemkin-prison-camp picture we've been painted. Here's how today's kinder, gentler interrogations go:
OFFICER: "All right tough guy, now tell us where Osama is hiding."
PRISONER: "I know nothing!"
OFFICER: "Perhaps this Egg McMuffin will refresh your memory."
If pork sausage doesn't break the prisoner, they bring in a female guard in a knee-length skirt to mock his Koranic interpretation.
January 3, 2005 | 4:11 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050102.php#e81
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