http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Thu, 20 Jan 2005 03:49:38 EST http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. 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Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/01/20/034938.php Luke BaumgartenOriginally appeared as The Legacy of Scopes' monkey on Correct My SpellingGood little opinion piece about the anti-evolution push and how Scopes didn't end creationism as many predicted, but fueled the fire and created divisive splintering where an uneasy peace might have taken root. I know I'm beating a dead horse because my hand's getting sore, but metaphysical speculation is not science, and casting doubt on theory A is not sufficient proof of theory B. In case you're new, I don't hold these people in high esteem.A person once gave me a view of the Bible and of religion in general that speaks not only to the academic turmoil caused by Creation Science, but to the human tragedies of genocide and holy war caused by the same mindset. He said, "The Bible tells you how to go to Heaven, not how the Heavens go." Lacking this insight, literalism breeds narrow-mindedness, which breeds intolerance, which breeds conflicts that--by definition--offer no hope of resolution. All of which, eventually, breed death. And unfortunately, in those major world religions where fundamentalism is so prevalent, a divine mandate of in-kind retribution, read literally, ensures that death will always breed more death.This isn't just about Science books. Politics24453@blogcritics.org Thu, 20 Jan 2005 03:49:38 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/11/29/142023.php Luke BaumgartenOriginally appeared as The Meager Decency Un-Hoax, on Correct My Spelling.At the behest of the FCC, I'm self-censoring my spewings [can I say that?] in case this blog is read before the 10 o'clock hour, Eastern Savings Time.People are talking. There's some lewd, indecent s[expletive deleted] going down all around us: dropped towels; exposed, pierced nipples; censorship. People are outraged by sex before junior's bedtime, but it's no one I know. People are outraged that "opportunistic ayatollahs on the right have been working overtime to inflate this nonmandate into . . . censorship by a compliant F.C.C. and, failing that, self-censorship by TV networks," but again, it's no one I know.No one I know is worried about these things for two reasons: (a) I don't know anyone who has kids and (b) I don't know anyone who watches network television. That said, even if (a) weren't true, no one I know would be worried because (b), no one I know watches network television. And the reason, dear sirs and madams, that no one watches network TV, is because it sucks a[expletive deleted]oles. It's only now, with the penetration [can I say that?] of cable and the revenues generated, that pay TV has begun creating its own shows which are subject to much less stringent regulations.You see, in paying extra money for cable, and more money on top of that for HBO, Showtime and the others, you are creating a demilitarized zone into which the FCC is loath to enter. You are, by virtue of your conscious patronage, consenting to as many breasts and expletives [within reason] that Comedy Central or HBO can throw at you. Basic cable networks self-sensor because there is a less specific consent in buying a basic package than specifically opting in for HBO and they still have to deal with advertisers, many of whom are "family companies". Whatever, the point is: where the FCC treadeth less, there bloometh intelligent programming. On HBO and Showtime, in a land of a[expletive deleted] and expletives, writers are free to make their characters cuss like real people, do drugs like real people, and copulate like real people.This allows for shows real people like to watch.Because real people aren't perfect. Real people have flaws.So go ahead and censor all the advertising during all the bu[expletive deleted]it, sucky a[expletive deleted] programming I never watch. Big deal. Give the puritans their cloistered public airwaves with its intrusive commercialism. I take my smut straight.All the same, I think we should reach out to them--they of the bible-belt. Maybe the whole problem is just that the red-state people, the welfare state people, the people worried about the effect of Nicolette Sheridan's lower back on toddling Jimmy's soul, are just too poor to afford HBO. Too poor to gain confirmation from Home Box Office that the things they think about in their private moments and the things they do in their darkened bedrooms are not, in fact, deviant.Allow HBO to speak the unfettered truth, saying, "indeed, Jeraboam [Ezekiel as the case may be], all of humanity thinks bad thoughts from time to time, no one is perfect. Imperfection isn't evil, imperfection is human. Indeed, Jer [Zeke], though nauseating in retrospect, sex is fun in the moment, necessary and most of all, OK for consenting adults."So I think, post election, those socially liberal 527s with money left over should pool their resources and focus on subsidizing HBO for the heartland's poor and sexually-repressed. Beam them smut, give them Sex for Dummies, and send them forth to preach the sexy, foul-mouthed gospel. Politics22714@blogcritics.org Mon, 29 Nov 2004 14:20:23 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/11/29/102620.php Luke BaumgartenOriginally appeared as Wine Grapes as Life, on Correct My Spelling.I like this Alexander Payne guy. Three very funny, moving, true movies. Election, About Schmidt, and now, Sideways. He's done some other movies as well, Citizen Ruth with Laura Dern, The Passion of Martin, which I can find no information about, and two soft-core loveathons for Playboy--real passion, simulated penetration. The breadth of his work as a filmmaker is already considerable.I went into Sideways with the personal expectation bar probably set too high after seeing Election, About Schmidt and American Splendor (for star Paul Giamatti). I hoped it was better than all of these, a stupid desire that always ends with me sucking my thumb, in tears. I'd more or less decided I wouldn't see the film at all, the odds were just stacked against me. Then, something unexpected happened. Driven by Kismet--fate as only the Turkish can manage--the bar was inexplicably nudged higher by various reviewers. It seemed then, that this movie was going to be so damned good I couldn't help but be devastated by its inability to live up to the brain-monument I would create to it. The monument destined to become a sepulcher. I needed a fall guy, something to drag my perception of the movie down enough that I'd feel okay watching it. To find that, I looked to the supporting actor.The x-factor I found, the only potential flaw in the Carrara-marbled monolith--the only thing that could soften the blow of dissappointment--was Thomas Hayden Church, you know, Lowell Mathers. I hadn't seen him since Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight, which I think was at Ben Kromer's birthday party in 8th grade. He was good then, but not great. To stifle hope, I imagined him being neither good nor great.It was a bust of Thomas Hayden Church, then, with which I crowned my expectations, and that sullied the whole thing enough that I felt okay about actually watching it. You can imagine, then, my surprise at his gleeful performance. In Sideways he's both good and great, often simultaneously. In such instances, like Voltron, good and great form to become real great.Jack is an actor. Jack is guided by "nothing but [his] instincts". Jack's instincts are fantastically horny, and grateful for every piece of ass he gets. Especially the pieces of ass he gets days before that final, symbolic piece of ass, the honeymoon. Church plays Jack in some inexplicable way, a way that makes us like him. He's so selfish, so emotional, so starving for something resembling love, that he detaches his soon to be married self from his remaining bachelor self. All he wants is to be accepted, by his fiancee, by Miles (Paul Giamatti), by single mother Stephanie, by the chubby waitress who recognizes him as his decade-old One Life to Live doppelganger. He loves no one so much as himself, but somehow, Church makes us feel like there might be enough left over that he really loves all of these other people quite a bit too. Except the chubby waitress, that was probably a rebound thing. Probably also an ego thing. So we like him. He's our asshole friend. We all have one.As good as Hayden is, Paul Giamatti is better, by virtue, probably, of being Paul Giamatti and playing a character that once again feels like retreading territory he's already covered in real life. Like Harvey Pekar in American Splendor, Miles is a child of pain and failure. Miles is a man of aspiration and brilliance. He's also, unfortunately, an anachronism. An alcoholic of the wine-tasting variety, he appreciates with monklike fervor something that most of modernity treats as an afterthought. White with fish and pork, Red with beef--or something like that. For Miles, it goes much deeper, wine is a reason to live. He also teaches 8th grade and has written a novel that is at least 750 manuscript pages. A novel Miles fears is a great book that won't find a home. From the beginning we know he's probably right.I say the book is at least 750 pages because, at one point, as he quizzes Jack about his newest draft, Miles asks about the new ending. It's much, much better, Jack says. Miles tells him that nothing after page 750 has changed at all. Jack reasons that it must have just seemed different because everything leading up to it is so different. "Yeah, I'm sure it's that," Miles says with an acidity that belies his sullen exterior.A lot of the humor in this movie, and there's a shitton, is based around these kinds of exchanges. An equal amount is based on personal humiliation. A third and no less significant source is how these two things are held beautifully in suspension by slapstick action. Jack gives Miles some bad news. It's some really horrible, absolutely awful news. Personally humiliating news. Miles shrinks away, then attacks Jack for keeping it from him. Jack on the defensive, explains his wrong-headed but good-hearted reasoning. That's the exchange. What makes the scene transcend what we've seen a million times in a million buddy movies is Miles' final move. There's a High Noon moment. Miles has a crazy look in his eye and Jack hunkers down like a linebacker. Miles dives into the back of his 70's Saab convertible, grabs a bottle of Pinot Noir and dashes headlong down a really steep slope, thumbing the mouth of the bottle between deep swigs, while Jack, the more conventionally brutish and manly of the two, gingerly and carefully runs after. It serves to lighten up a very confrontational scene, but also underscore that Miles, so close to rock-bottom, really has nothing left to lose.It's the near constant and unexpected moments like that which make Sideways a really beautiful film. Also unexpected is Alexander Payne's respect for his audience and the importance he places on the film's many details. Nothing is wasted. This tasting tour of the Santa Barbara wine country isn't just a running gag machine. It doesn't just facilitate Jack replying, regardless of whether Miles loves or hates his wine, "Tastes pretty good to me." Wine is an interwoven and accessible metaphor for both Miles' and Maya's lives. In a moving scene, when Miles explains his unearthly love of Pinot Noir, the entire theatre gradually erupts in laughter as people realized he was talking about a certain variety of grape, yes, but more expressively about himself as well. Thin-skinned, not a survivor, it can't just grow any where . . . needs a lot of love. Payne expects us to understand the mystery that Miles can't, and subtly but deliberately gives us the clues to unravel it.If I, myself, weren't so much like that lovely, fragile Pinot Noir--more perhaps like the hardy Cabernet--I might not have liked Sideways so much. But, I think, like all the subtle blends of California wine country, there's a little Pinot in everyone. Video22704@blogcritics.org Mon, 29 Nov 2004 10:26:20 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/11/27/134421.php Luke BaumgartenOriginally appeared as Before Lunch, on Correct My Spelling.Ethan Hawke needs to eat a sandwich. Richard Linklater needs to let his existential dilemmas rest for a while. I guess he did that in School of Rock, whatever. Julie Delpy needs to get herself cast into more movies I see. I guess I could work on seeing more of her films.Before Sunset, real-time sequel to the well regarded Before Sunrise, is a conversation movie; it's a getting to know you again movie that wastes no time in the intellectual void of non-dialogue. It is, literally, all dialogue. Not all of it is good, a lot of it is inexplicable. The movie succeeds, by and by, despite its clunkiness, verbosity and the kind of metaphysical subject matter that has no place in a getting reacquainted kind of conversation.I think it succeeds, primarily, because Hawke and Delpy, essentially the only two people in the movie, have bought into the concept, they co-wrote the script, they played in the movie shot nine years ago that was about the encounter that happened (in movie time) nine years ago. They have a familiarity with the characters that allows Linklater to pull off the gorgeous tracking shots. There's no doubt that Linklater has bought into the concept. There's nothing flashy or pretentious about the direction of this movie. There are essentially three shots: The long tracking shot, the closeup on Delpy, and the closeup on Hawke. That's it really. This is a movie about two people Linklater wants nothing, especially tricky directing, to get in the way of their rediscovery.Hence, Before Sunset, lives and dies by its dialogue. There's considerably more living than dying. Linklater and company are most successful when they put away the angst and liberal proselytizing and let the characters explore their lives with and without each other. In those moments, which get better and more numerous as the film comes to a close, Hawke and Delpy look more comfortable and earnest about the words they're saying. Before that you have a lot of insecurity and uncertainty, which is a natural outgrowth of not having seen someone in nine years, but more often than feeling like nervous expectation, it comes off hackneyed.Rather than disbelief that they're finally seeing each other again, it seems like disbelief that they're talking about freedom fries, globalization and nihilism.Linklater has harvested the ether of modernism better and more pointedly in The Waking Life, which is a more ambitious film, but ultimately one that doesn't hit the emotional stride Before Sunset does, precisely because of the primacy of philosophic pursuit.Then, just when Before Sunset finds itself, it's over, which is just how it should be.occurring in realtime and coming in at 80 minutes, it's a terse but vivid exploration of human desire, expectation, longing, and reclamation. Hawke has a plane to catch, and only has about an hour with the woman that has ruled his imagination for nine years. Like its characters, Before Sunset connects powerfully, but only once it gets serious about rediscovering itself. Video22671@blogcritics.org Sat, 27 Nov 2004 13:44:21 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/25/143817.php Luke BaumgartenOriginally published as: "Not "this year's" anything really"I finally saw Garden State, four months after I missed it at the Seattle International Film Festival, and probably a month and a half after its semi-wide release.The result was something like the emotional upswell experienced by Zach Braff look-a-like and Garden State protagonist Andrew Largeman. He stops taking his pills. He usually takes lots of them. The pills he takes are prescribed to cure problems with his brain. He says they make him numb.Amid the grass-roots, indie-fan love-fest this movie has enjoyed, numb is exactly what I was going for. Read no reviews, watch no trailers, wait it out, see the movie when it comes was my mantra. It was a hard pill, for the deluge was near-complete--I could brook no shelter. I was beset on all sides by surging, phantasmogoric buzz. Somehow I kept it at bay.Sitting in the theatre was like surfacing from immersion in that sea.Half-drowned and shivering, the movie unfolded itself with quirky characters and ham-fisted dialogue. Things happened that made me laugh. Things happened that made me groan. Things happened that made my capacity for suspension of disbelief nearly overheat from stress. Throughout, In the back of my mind was the one quote that had somehow evaded my filter and slipped in my buzz cortex. It now plagued me. Garden State is "this year's Lost in Translation."It's not that at all actually. The poignancy of Lost in Translation was in its silent moments. It was the shared glances, the longing, the uncertainty on the faces of its characters that fueled the emotional payload that connected Sofia Coppola's dissertation on loneliness with audiences. Braff's face twitches so much you don't know what emotion he's going for--he might be trying for all of them at once, I really can't tell. Natalie Portman's character has epilepsy, which she plays like a severe case of ADHD. Tears flow and you're unsure where they've just come from.The movie is funny. But the laughs are a completely unconnected series of kitschy sight gags and drug references. It sometimes feels as though the plot exists to suspend these things in a logical order. That's a shame.A friend and I once had a conversation about Lost in Translation. He didn't like it because he said it offered up a problem without having the courage to put forth a solution. He's a smart guy and that's an excellent point. Coppola's movie was, though, complete and coherent.Garden State is coherent certainly, but far from emotionally complete. It offers solutions to the existential, drug-addled dementia of its characters. The solutions though, are hackneyed and tired. It's a new gloss on the love conquers all motif. In forwarding that cause, the sometimes snappy, inventive dialogue becomes laughable, the plot sputters, the actors don't seem to know what to do with themselves.It's a fun movie, but also kind of an unfortunate one. Video20262@blogcritics.org Sat, 25 Sep 2004 14:38:17 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/22/235202.php Luke BaumgartenOriginally published as: Best specialized robot name ever: GynoidI feel a little guilty talking about this movie right now. It's a little like going to class without having fully digested the previous night's reading assignment. Sure, you read it through fairly deeply. You take notes. Maybe you had a midnight BS session with your roommate or the kid down the hall.But maybe you were tired or a little drunk--for whatever reason, you think you might have missed something important.That's more or less Ghost in the Shell 2's 100 minute running time in a ghostshell. It doesn't help that the dialogue is in subtitles (the way it should be) and the animation is some of the most beautiful I've seen since . . . ever. Your eyes pull double duty, straining to digest polysyllabic words stacked 10 deep while soaking up animation of unrivaled scope and grandeur. Beauty and the Beast has nothing on this.It's a much more assured and revelatory work than it's 1995 predecessor.Credit Mamoru Oshii with improving upon every facet of an already intelligent and fascinating premise. Yes. Everything is better.Much of the first Ghost in the Shell felt like a fleshing out of the various philosophical topics woven into the game of Artificial Intelligence. It was about debunking the line of demarcation between man and machine. It was about finding something unique in humanity amidst the clamour of our technological near-future. Oshii was struggling with this right alongside his characters, and it showed in a somewhat lackluster visual presentation, a jumbled thesis, and a messy ending. The plot itself, a techno-noir murder mystery, felt tacked on. Still, the original Ghost in the Shell was something to behold.In the 9 years that have passed though, Oshii definitely did his homework. In a time when everyone needs a kickass firewall for that lumpy grey mass between their ears, knowledge is immediately available to all, and the section nine detectives Batou and Matoko use all the net has to offer in contemplating their place in the vast, jacked-in world they inhabit.They drop anecdotes about Descartes, quote Confuscious, the Old Testament, reference Rabbi Judah Low ben Bezalel and the Golem of Prague. They quote Milton. I studied English literature and I can't quote Milton.But then, maybe it takes someone like Milton, someone with sympathy for the devil, to live as a human in a world where men are ever more becoming mechanized, and the machines they build take on the characteristics of their creators.Maybe it took Oshii a few years slogging through the quagmire of western skepticism and self-doubt to realize that.The plot this time--another nod to noir--is more focused and accessible, except for the beginning of the third act, when someone hacks Matou's brain. Things get a little fuzzy then, but they're supposed to.I don't believe the philosophy involved can totally reveal itself in one sitting. Certainly, trying to flesh it out here would be pointless and boring. Suffice it to say that in Oshii's future, humanity has angst to spare and it looks like things are only getting worse.Even the animation choices reflect a feeling of alienation, and shows such painstaking love on the part of Oshii. The movie is dominated by advanced computer graphics and lush matte paintings for its backgrounds and many of the dolls (see also: robots, see also: gynoids, see also: sexroids etc, etc). Cars, library Stacks, great post-apocalyptic landscapes are by turns vivid and dingy and exploding with detail. They burst off the screen. Batou and Matoko and the rest of the humans (as well as the gynoids who have been given ghosts [souls]), in contrast, are cell animated the old fashioned way. In this environment they seem helplessly two dimensional, out of place and almost inferior--which is just the way they actually feel. And when a gynoid, through pursed lips and with seductive langour, pleads "help me," the hackles on your neck are at full attention. Brilliant.I took notes during this movie. I felt compelled to. I think I'm going to find some pop-culture doctoral program and write my thesis on it. The depth and breadth and sheer complexity of the imagery and symbolism in Ghost in the Shell 2 is crippling. It feels at times like Heart of Darkness, but is able to remain far less turgid and depressing. It fully warrants a second or third viewing, to mine the depth of what Oshii is offering.At a time when the vast majority of films--even arthouse flicks--opt for allegorical poverty rather than alienate potential ticket sales, it's all the more refreshing to see a beautiful, self-assured movie that's content to do more talking--about Milton for godsake--than shooting.You can find more of my reviews and antics here."If our Gods and our hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then let us admit it must be said that our love is scientific as well." Video20156@blogcritics.org Wed, 22 Sep 2004 23:52:02 EDT