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 Tue, 24 May 2005 21:09:18 EDT 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. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/05/24/210918.php Rodney WelchTime Magazine has posted it's "ALL-TIME 100 Movies" list, and the best thing that can be said about it is it's not entirely predictable.Yes, Citizen Kane and The Godfather are on it, but for anyone who regularly follows these things, Time critics Richard Schickel and Richaerd Corliss throw a few curveballs.*Biggest omissions: First of all, the big "news," so to speak, is that it doesn't include Gone With the Wind, but that's really not a surprise; a lot of critics dislike that movie, although I don't. The real news is that there's no Birth of a Nation, no Potemkin, no Jean Renoir -- not even Rules of the Game -- no Antonioni, and no Robert Altman, not even Nashville. Perhaps Altman isn't a surprise; he goes in and out of favor. But the others pop up so frequently on so many top ten lists -- including the Big Kahuna of them all -- or at least hover near the top, that they seem permanently glued there.*Most interesting choices: Fassbinder's great Berlin Alexanderplatz, Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Bresson's Mouchette, and Resnais's blissful (and I think largely unseen) Mon Oncle d'Amerique. *Questionable choices: Blade Runner, Brazil, Charade, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Notorious, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Talk to Her. With the exception of Purple Rose, I generally like all these movies, just not that much. *Unquestionably Bad Choice: The Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing. Long talky bore.*Weirdest choice: Dr. Strangelove I can see, but Barry Lyndon? Ranks with Eyes Wide Shut as the lamest movie Kubrick ever made.*What I would have included: definitely Rules of the Game, as well as Hitchcock's Vertigo, Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky, David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Lina Wertmuller's masterpiece Seven Beauties, Wim Wenders In the Course of Time, Woody Allen's Manhattan, Bunuel's Viridiana, Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet, and Fellini's I vitelloni.Confession Time: I've shamefully managed to avoid seeing a full fifth of the movies listed, including most of The Apu Trilogy as well as The Awful Truth, Baby Face, Camille, Chungking Express, City of God, The Crime of Monsieur Lange, The Crowd, The Decalogue, Drunken Master II, Finding Nemo, Kandahar, The Last Command, Leolo, Metropolis, Nayakan, Once Upon a Time in the West, Pyaasa, Sherlock, Jr., Swing Time, Tokyo Story, Ulysses' Gaze, Wings of Desire and A Touch of Zen. I've never even heard of the last one. Video30099@blogcritics.org Tue, 24 May 2005 21:09:18 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/03/11/232505.php Rodney WelchHave I died and gone to heaven? Is this a film geek's dream? The folks at The Criterion Collection, who besides releasing glorious DVDs have a really smart website, offer not one, but five excellent defenses of voice-over narration. Of course, most of us may not have have ever considered whether it needs defending, but it's a real sticking point with film students and people who read Robert McKee's book on screenwriting, and you could even say it first came out in the open as some pansy-ass aesthetic issue with Adaptation, Spike Jonze' film of Charlie Kaufman's semi-pseudo-autobiographical script, where McKee is a character. The famous money quote:"And God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character." I've heard or read this thought parroted several times since, and three lines always immediately soar to mind."What I do for a living may not be very reputable.    But I am.    In this town I'm the leper with the most fingers. " -- The Two Jakes, screenplay by Robert Towne."I went to call the cops, but I knew she'd be dead before they got there and I'd be free. Bannister's note to the DA would fix it. I'd be innocent officially, but that's a big word, innocent. Stupid's more like it. Well, everybody is somebody's fool. The only way to stay out of trouble is to grow old, so I guess I'll concentrate on that. Maybe I'll live so long that I'll forget her. Maybe I'll die, trying." -- The Lady from Shanghai, screenplay by Orson Welles."You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it on the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it." -- Mean Streets, screenplay by Martin Scorsese and Mardik Martin.All great lines, all voice-over, all perfectly memorable, and all achieving emotional effects you couldn't possibly get through just dialogue. These are the kinds of eloquent thoughts and reflections that come to life in a character's head, not when he's having a beer with a friend or laying in bed with his wife. They would sound too "written," too literary that way -- and even if they weren't, they have more resonance when spoken over a scene rather than within it.Far from being a cheap way out, voice-overs can be an extremely effective, illuminating tool -- and as Sarah Kozloff's essay shows, it's has a creative history -- and a controversy -- almost as long as the medium itself.So why are we still debating the legitimacy of voice-over? Like the technique itself, the criticisms against voice-over narration go back as far as the medium, stemming from fiercely held beliefs about cinema's unique characteristics--its "specificity"--and its relationship with its audience.The reason has always been the same:A fallback charge against voice-over narration is that using it is insulting to the audience. Voice-over narration is suspect because it is a means of "telling" rather than "showing." "Telling" is judged as a mark of laziness and/or condescension.I don't know much at all about film theory -- I don't really have the patience it takes to read it, any more than I have the patience to read Alan Dale -- but Kozloff knows it, and she points out something that almost goes to the core of any kind of prose or storytelling:Contemporary documentary theorists such as Jeffrey Youdelman and Bill Nichols ... argue that in many circumstances narration is a more forthright, honest approach to the subject matter than pretending that the represented scenes speak for themselves or that editing is noncoercive. In this line of argument, they echo the thinking of literary theorist Wayne Booth, who wrote in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), "Since Flaubert, many authors and critics have been convinced that 'objective' or 'impersonal' or 'dramatic' modes of narration are naturally superior to any mode that allows for direct appearance by the author or his reliable spokesman. Sometimes . . . the complex issues involved in this shift have been reduced to a convenient distinction between 'showing,' which is artistic, and 'telling,' which is inartistic." Booth brilliantly demonstrated, however, that reducing overt marks of narration or hiding the author's hand are just variant rhetorical strategies: "Showing" is just as manipulative as "telling." Ernest Hemingway is guiding his readers just as much as George Eliot--only more surreptitiously.Consider something else, too -- if voice-over is such a sin, what about long monologues in Bergman's films? Ingrid Thulin in Winter Light and Bibi Andersson in Persona both deliver absorbing narrative speeches full of event and detail, so perfectly captivating that you can visualize the stories as they are being told -- that, too, is cinema, and of a very high order. Kozloff and the other essayists frequently cite famous modern uses of voice-over in Terence Malick's Badlands and the Coen Brothers' Raising Arizona -- and something suddenly occurred to me.First of all, I loathe Badlands as I do most of Malick's suffocatingly artsy work, and Michael Atkinson's description of Sissy Spacek's narration cuts no ice with me whatsoever: a "disaffected, twangy, living-deadpan reading, which suggests depths of severe emotional disconnection and mutant perspective that we otherwise hardly see in this superbly opaque character's actions." No, for me, Pauline Kael was the one who Video26610@blogcritics.org Fri, 11 Mar 2005 23:25:05 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/03/11/223645.php Rodney WelchIn a recent New York Times column, Frank Rich refers to The Greatest Dirty Joke Ever Told. Of course, family newspaper ethics proscribed him from really telling it. Thankfully, the New York Observer did just that some years ago, in a brilliantly dramatic account of Gilbert Gottfried's performance at the Friar's Club roast of Hugh Hefner; read it here. If you really want to hear the joke in all its excrementious detail, you can watch the South Park version.Criminally dirty. You have been warned.Visit Rodney Welch: The Blog for far less offensive but equally illuminating commentary on books, movies, music, and Tara Reid's tits. Culture26607@blogcritics.org Fri, 11 Mar 2005 22:36:45 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/30/203128.php Rodney WelchBest American Crime Writing : 2004 Edition, edited by Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook. Pantheon. 521 pages. $29.95.Crime is a personal business, and so are writing and reading about it. An ace crime writer gets too involved in his work and takes you with him; in the process, he reminds you of both your vulnerability and your mortality.So, anyway, are my thoughts after reading the latest anthology from Penzler and Cook. It covers a broad range of turf from both sides of the aisle, cop and criminal, and a number of them pull you right into the heart of the writer's own private obsessions.Take James Ellroy. Riffing away in his trademark staccato style, he gives us the story of Stephanie, a straight-arrow middle-class teenager whose body is discovered one bright day in August, 1965, leaving behind no motive and no suspect. Nearly 40 years later, as the cold trail suddenly heats up again, Ellroy finds himself getting closer to her as he gets close to the case: "Stephanie was a daughter or a prom date. I don't know her. I can feel her. She's twirling. She's showing off her prom gown. I can smell her corsage."In Sabrina Rubin Erdely's "Who is the Boy in the Box?" an aging detective is similarly haunted by a frustrating case involving the murder of a child from decades before. Cecilia Ball's "Ciudad de la Muerte" takes us to a desert in Northern Mexico that has become a dumping ground for the maimed corpses of poor young Hispanic women who fell into the hands of the mob. Ball can't help but relate; if she lived here, she might end up the same way. In the single best piece here, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., recounts the recent trial and conviction of his cousin Michael Skakel for the 1975 slaying of Martha Moxley. Kennedy sees Skakel as the innocent victim of a media circus led by Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne and his partner Mark Fuhrman, who helped revive the unsolved murder by depicting the local authorities as fraidy-cats who wouldn't dare go up against the Kennedys. Kennedy has an ax to grind, alright, but he delivers a compelling defense that is surprisingly not defensive. It's passionate and thoughtful, and it made an at least nominal believer out of me.In "Night of the Bullies," Robert Draper revisits a story which all but the principals have forgotten: the random brutalization of a young teenager by a band of Texas fraternity thugs in 1978. Delving into the case 25 years later, Draper finds a victim who is haunted by his memories, and well-to-do perpetrators who are too ashamed of their past to face it. More than that, Draper examines himself, too, drawn to this peculiar story by his identification with both sides; like every man, he's had his ass kicked, and he's also joined the crowd to deliver the same treatment to others.Lethal testosterone is also on display in Clara Bingham's "Code of Dishonor," an investigation of the "rape culture" at the Air Force Academy that will sicken anyone who reads it.James Fallows' "Who Shot Mohammed Al-Dura?" reminded me of Antonioni's film Blow-Up, where a photographer discovers that he may have accidentally captured a murder on film. Fallows' story is about a presumed death that, according to some, wasn't recorded on film: the shooting of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who was presumably felled by an Israeli bullet during a skirmish with the Palestinians. Subsequent examination of the news footage, which has turned the boy into a martyr in the Arab world, suggests the bullets may well have come from the other side, spawning a host of shaky conspiracy theories that the death was a staged Palestinian exercise in demonizing Israel.Aside from the perfectly serious stuff, there's David Grann's "The Old Man and the Gun," about a senior citizen who has excelled at the art of bank robbery and breaking out of jail. I also thoroughly enjoyed grossing out the folks at the coffee shop by reading aloud from Pat Jordan's "CSC: Crime Scene Cleanup," which tells more than you may want to know about decomposing bodies and the hardy souls who scrape them up.On the philosophical side, don't pass up two meaty think pieces: Scott Turow's thoughtful reconsideration of the death penalty and Mark Bowden's tough-minded article on the lifesaving morality of torture.I wasn't crazy about everything here, but the best are knockouts. In Ellroy's apt phrase, they "hook you fast and drag you in slow."More to read at Rodney Welch: The Blog Books20502@blogcritics.org Thu, 30 Sep 2004 20:31:28 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/30/202036.php Rodney WelchDavid Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is this year's literary jazz solo: an ambitious roller-coaster ride through cycles of imagined history that jets up one side of six stories and then down the other, with tongue in cheek and heart on the sleeve. Think of boxes within boxes within boxes -- six related stories, ranging from the far past to the further future, each evolving from the other. Or, more to the point, think of a pyramid, because it has the symmetry of one: five half-stories on one side mirrored by their endings on the other, with one "whole" story at the apex: one, two, three, four, five, six, five, four, three, two, one, so to speak. Like any good game, you understand this more as you play it. It begins with a diary, set in 1850. Adam Ewing, a notary traveling by ship from Sydney to his home in California, is temporarily stranded in the Chatham Isles near New Zealand. Like the typical naif in Melville's early novels, Adam is an innocent whose Pacific journey opens his eyes to the horrors committed in the name of civilization, namely the way the white settlers have used the Maoris to enslave the peace-loving Moriori people. Adam takes mysteriously ill and, while attempting to recover, saves a Moriori stowaway from death; suddenly -- boom -- his journal stops mid-sentence. We move ahead to another place altogether: Germany, 1931, where a carefree, bisexual English composer named Robert Frobisher is writing letters home to his friend Sixsmith. Heavily in debt, Frobisher takes a job helping a selfish old composer complete his unfinished symphony, Eternal Recurrence, which basically means writing it for him. In his off-hours, Frobisher discovers a bound version of The Pacific Journals of Adam Ewing. Unfortunately, the book has been torn in two and he can't find the other half; "the pages cease, mid-sentence." Frobisher's letters likewise stop suddenly, but the game of eternal recurrence continues apace. We bolt ahead to California in 1975, where Sixsmith is now an atomic engineer and would-be whistleblower at the nuclear facility of Seaboard Corporation, trying desperately to get someone's attention about the dangers of the company's latest reactor. Sixsmith tries to pass along his own suppressed report on the reactor to an investigative journalist named Luisa Rey, who becomes drawn into Sixsmith's past, intrigued both by the letters from Frobisher 40 years before and that late composer's little-known "Cloud Atlas" symphony. The story of Sixsmith and Luisa reads just like a popular thriller. And, as we learn in the story that follows it, that's exactly what it is -- an unpublished manuscript that has fallen into the hands of Timothy Cavendish, a wily, frustrated, conniving and charming old man, living in the present day, who runs a vanity press and whose own life becomes a bizarre comedy of errors that will result in his imprisonment in a hellish nursing home. Cavendish, too, proves to be "fictional"; in the story following his, set far in the future, his life is recalled as the plot of a film from way back in the 21st Century -- well before the emergence of "corpocracy," the new corporate state where, among other things, movies (especially ones about people aging naturally rather than being euthanized) have been deemed counterrevolutionary. It's in this world -- the fifth, if you're counting -- that we meet Sonmi-451, a clone or "fabricant" who has spent her life working in mindless domesticity in a restaurant and, thanks to a secret scientific development, has assumed human emotions and thought processes, threatening the structure of an established slave order. When Sonmi's story cuts off, we soar even further ahead in the future to a post-apocalyptic world, where a farmer named Zachary tells of society divided between the Prescient, or Smart, tribe, which is black, and the peaceful but largely ignorant white people of the Valley, who worship a god of old, a Christ-figure who died for the sins of the world named ... Sonmi-451. From here, midway through the book, we go back the same way we came; we find out not only how all those stories ended, but all they have to do with each other. Besides the obvious connections, there are other echoes: story for story, main characters share a comet- shaped birthmark between the shoulder blades, and indeed they are all vanishing comets or clouds going through history -- effectively, the same cloud, the same soul, changing shape as it drifts through the sky of history. Each main character is a victim of some oppressive force, waging a lonely fight either for their independence or others. A Biblical cycle keeps replaying itself: Eden, the fall, a long or short-term salvation. The destruction of the Moriori people in the middle of the 19th century is essentially the same story of the destruction of the fabricants and the war upon the Valley. The more the story works its way back into the past, the more it comments on the future. By the time we get back to where we began, with Adam in the Chatham Islands, corporate greed and slavery -- as well as religion, which in Mitchell's view only legitimizes and sustains the other two -- are staring both him and us right in the face: aspects not of a distant past but of life itself. Like Henry Adams at the dawn of the 20th century, Mitchell sees annihilation as the ultimate endgame, as humans are never more collectively creative than when they are waging war, enslaving others or blowing themselves up. The book doesn't end on a note of despair though; rather, there's a ringing hopefulness to it that individuals still matter. However tragically they end up, the six main characters of the book are all heroes; counterforces, to use Thoreau's phrase, against the machine. Mitchell brings to mind all the usual suspects who stalk the great multi-narrative, from Joyce to Woolf to Nabokov to Barth to Pynchon to Rushdie, and places itself very much in their tradition; some might say a dying tradition. Swooping all over time and space isn't as impressive as it was in 1966, and Mitchell all but acknowledges that he's treading a worn path. As Timothy Cavendish huffs, "I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowing, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with MAs in postmodernism and chaos theory." Mitchell pays him no heed. Instead, he takes the droopy, shriveled-up old hag known as postmodernism and shows there's life in the old girl yet. Cloud Atlas is a passionately experimental, exhilarating and exhausting novel; the Somni and Zachary stories, one hyper-scientific and one written in post-nuke Huck Finn dialect, frankly wore my patience down, and I was glad to see both end. But forget I said that, or remember it and put it on the shelf. Let nothing dissuade you from reading this book, which is one of the year's best. When you finish it, you'll know you've really been somewhere -- hell, you'll know you've been everywhere. More to read at Rodney Welch: The Blog Books20500@blogcritics.org Thu, 30 Sep 2004 20:20:36 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/30/201222.php Rodney WelchSome years ago, I wrote a feature story for the Camden, S.C. Chronicle-independent about a group of foreign exchange students visiting Camden, and it kicked up a small storm.The students had been nursed from birth with this idea that that they were inherently superior to this country of vulgarians which they had apparently been sentenced to visit. People here ate with their fingers, for God's sake; they saluted the flag -- which, a German kid actually had the King Kong-sized balls to lecture me, people in his advanced country associated with the Nazis -- they go to church (the German kid, again, pointed out that most people in his country don't make such an extravagant display of religious faith, provided they have any) and, worst of all, people in this country smile and say hello even to complete strangers, the very epitome of insincerity. The standard line, repeated ad nauseum, was that they knew about our country but we knew nothing about theirs. These little pronouncements were all met with the approvingly smug nod of a host parent, a loud, garish, overweight hairdresser who -- appearances to the contrary -- seemed anxious to demonstrate that she wasn't an ugly American. Whenever I pressed a student on any point, she jumped in to explain his point for him, usually with double the smugness. The hour or so I spent in the company of these kids brought out my own arrogance, although I held it in check. Why should we know about your country, I wanted to say. The reason you know about us is because you live in our shadow, not the other way around; what we do in this country affects you and what you do back home in Grevenmacher or Prague or Brussels or wherever you hail from just doesn't account for one whole hell of a lot.On the other hand, they did have an advantage in that they were here and I'd never been to Europe in my life; hell, I've barely been out of the South. Maybe they knew something I didn't. I like to think of myself as something of a non-citizen of the world, not unlike Mason O'Leary in Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist, who wrote travel books for stay-at-home types who find themselves in the unfortunate situation of having to actually go somewhere. So I suppose I have to contend with the fact that I'm very limited in how far I can see this country with a foreign point of view -- which, ever since President Dumbass wandered into Iraq, seems to be the one with the most currency. Improving the world's low opinion of America is a central theme of Kerry's presidential campaign for the presidency, or it will be if he can ever shake the Swift Boat Veterans for Slander off his ass."Foreigners can see things about America that natives cannot," says Mark Hertsgaard in his book The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World " . . . Americans can learn from their perceptions, if we choose to."Whoa horsey, says Bruce Bawer in his superb "Hating America" in the Spring issue of The Hudson Review -- an exhaustive rebuke to Hertsgaard, his academic kin, and most of the European world.What [Hertsgaard] fails to acknowledge, however, is that most foreigners never set foot in the United States, and that the things they think they know about it are consequently based not on first-hand experience but on school textbooks, books by people like Michael Moore, movies about spies and gangsters, "Ricki Lake," "C.S.I.," and, above all, the daily news reports in their own national media. What, one must therefore ask, are their media telling them? What aren't they telling them? And what are the agendas of those doing the telling? Such questions, crucial to a study of the kind Hertsgaard pretends to be making, are never asked here. Citing a South African restaurateur's assertion that non-Americans "have an advantage over [Americans], because we know everything about you and you know nothing about us," Hertsgaard tells us that this is a good point, but it's not: non-Americans are always saying this to Americans, but when you poke around a bit, you almost invariably discover that what they "know" about America is very wide of the mark.Bawer writes dispassionately, but his essay is something of an act of vengeance; he spent several years in Norway, and the deep-seated anti-Americanism of his former countrymen clearly continues to stick in his craw. The Hertsgaard book, and several others on the same topic, gives him a perfect opportunity to respond.Hertsgaard claims that Americans are poorly served by the media; actually, as Bawer sees it, what we have in this country is a free-for-all of multiple viewpoints.Reading the opinion pieces in Norwegian newspapers, one has the distinct impression that the professors and bureaucrats who write most of them view it as their paramount function not to introduce or debate fresh ideas but to remind the masses what they're supposed to think. The same is true of most of the journalists, who routinely spin the news from the perspective of social-democratic orthodoxy, systematically omitting or misrepresenting any challenge to that orthodoxy--and almost invariably presenting the U.S. in a negative light. Most Norwegians are so accustomed to being presented with only one position on certain events and issues (such as the Iraq War) that they don't even realize that there exists an intelligent alternative position. The European mindset, says Bawer, is so adamantly anti-American because it is preserves a mentality of victimhood.If Europe's intellectual and political elite was briefly pro-America after 9/11, it was because America was suddenly a victim, and European intellectuals are accustomed to sympathizing reflexively with victims (or, more specifically, with perceived or self-proclaimed victims, such as Arafat). That support began to wane the moment it became clear that Americans had no intention of being victims.Bawer, paraphrasing Jean-François Revel's L'obsession anti-américaine, says the America seen by Europe is a cartoon.... the European media still employ the same misrepresentations as they did back then, depicting an America plagued by severe poverty, extreme inequality, "no unemployment benefits, no retirement, no assistance for the destitute," and medical care and university education only for the rich. "Europeans firmly believe this caricature," Revel writes, "because it is repeated every day by the elites."This goes rather a long way toward explaining not just the students I met, but the Danish director Lars von Trier, whose films are deeply absorbing and profoundly stupid. He has a kind of pornographic fetish for the idea of women as Jesus figures: pure sacrificial martyrs, trusting, decent, kind, and born to be victims. With Dancer in the Dark, the victim was the singer Bjork, cast in the role of a poor factory worker who is slowly going to blind, and is struggling to hold on to a job and save money for an operation that will prevent her son from having the same debilitating illness. The Bjork character is obsessed with The Sound of Music and sees her life, for all its grimness, as a fantastic musical, complete with choreographed dance numbers and bursts of song; if you like Bjork, as I do, these numbers are easily the best thing in the film, which begins as an absorbing melodrama and ultimately becomes this ludicrous story of a poor woman who gets screwed by the American system of justice. It's a movie made with very much of a preconceived notion that American justice is an oxymoron and if you're poor and noble and decent you're finished before you've started.The same goes double for Dogville -- a strange, beautiful, highly stylized, fascinating and abysmally stupid kind of pornographic S&M thing that follows very much the same track, only this time with Nicole Kidman as the martyr, a gangster's moll who hides out in a small town, makes nice with everyone, and ultimately is turned into everyone's bitch. Again with the preconceived notion: it's a movie made with a mythically ugly viewpoint of this country. Unless you believe that the worst that can be said of any place is the truest reflection of it, then this film exists in the America that lives in von Trier's head. Perhaps I shouldn't be so offended by all this, and in fact I have resisted becoming so; because, really, this vulgar little parable, right down to its Old Testament-by-way-of-Chicago-gangland-justice ending, could have taken place anyhere in the world, as von Trier says on the Dogville website. But the credits stick it in all over again: a montage of pictures of nothing but wretchedly poor people -- from the iconic Dorothea Lange ones right up to the present day -- playing against David Bowie's "Young Americans," the absolute nadir of von Trier's facile, high school, and amateurish mindset. A great, imagistic song, and it towered over von Trier's little slide show.More to read at Rodney Welch: The Blog Video20499@blogcritics.org Thu, 30 Sep 2004 20:12:22 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/30/195738.php Rodney WelchWhy is lust a sin? Several thoughts come to mind. Mainly, it's a source of frustration, like greed or covetousness, that gets in your way, obsesses you, keeps you from moving forward. It wastes your time, and I think that's the reason a lot of people, as they get older and their time on earth gets shorter, are glad to see it go. I think a character in a Kurt Vonnegut Jr. book says that losing desire is like getting off a bucking bronco. And I'm reminded of what Luis Bunuel said when asked what he would say if God offered to restore his virility: "No thank you, but please repair my lungs and liver so I can continue to smoke and drink."There are likely no two men on this earth who were ever more dissimilar than William Blake and the Marquis de Sade, one a great religious mystic much given to seeing angels, the other a florid pornographer who revelled in rape and mutilation and just general all-out disgust. Both had some kind of general belief that man is ruled by desire:"Those who restrain desire," Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling."And being restraind it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire."De Sade probably lived by this decree, and spent many years in prison as a result; Blake probably didn't and lived to an old and, according to Harold Bloom, happy old age. You can, actually, restrain desire and prosper; the only thing you can't do, really, is flee lust. There's that old saw of Martin Luther's: "You can't stop the birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair." Actually, I think the nest will be made; it's the baby birds you want to avoid. You can refuse to act on desire, but desire itself won't be chased from the yard. It's like Joe Mantegna said in House of Games: "The things we want, the things we feel. We can do themn or not do them, but we can't hide them."More to read at Rodney Welch: The Blog Culture20498@blogcritics.org Thu, 30 Sep 2004 19:57:38 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/30/194930.php Rodney WelchI just watched Jean Cocteau's 1930 art film The Blood of the Poet, read a lecture by him on the same, and watched about ten minutes of a documentary about his life, and you know what? i'm really beginning to tire of the old boy. He's a jabbering French aesthete who seems more than anything to be not so much a poet as he is someone in love with the idea of being a poet, or what it means to be a poet, or what a poet is.The first film it makes you think of is Bunuel's 1928 Un Chien Andalou and his L'Age d'Or and it bears some similarity to both; like them, it's a somewhat crude, somewhat amateurish attempt to give filmic life to abstract ideas, and it bears some of the same images involving identity, sexual or otherwise, and hands. Bunuel had ants crawling out of one of his; Cocteau's artist-figure wipes a mouth off a portrait he's drawing -- it becomes attached to his palm and the lips talk to him, not unlike those celebrity figures in those Robert Smigel segments on Conan.I could detail other things that happen in the film -- which is, basically, a very metaphoric film about an artist who tries to penetrate the nature of himself, so some such thing -- but why bother? It's an art film where a guy falls into a mirror, people writhes on walls, and you hear irritating little apercus like "By breaking statues one risks turning into one oneself," which also happens.I could see someone having the same reaction to Bunuel's early work, although I don't. To me those films were genuinely inspired and witty and anarchic. Cocteau taikes himself too seriously; he's too cerebral, too pretentious. You know, the first you do in watching a movie like this is tell yourself not to laugh, because it's kind of immature to laugh at something so old that is made with such serious intent; to try to meet the artist at least half-way, to see beyond the limitations of his actors or a technique imposed by a small budget. On the other hand, it's so insular that it tends to short-circuit whatever fascination it might provoke.I don't know if I'll get around to finishing the artsy little docu-thing about his life, which he finds more fascinating than I do.Do I want to sit through more Cocteau? I have Orpheus and The Testament of Orpheus to go yet. Sometimes you have to approach these things like a student -- suffer to learn. Actually, I saw Orpheus and the super-imaginative Beauty and the Beast years ago and liked both. Maybe Cocteau at his artsiest just isn't triple-feature material for any but the committed. Maybe he's preferable on, say, a piecemeal basis.Addendum: Marginally interesting historical note: Had Cocteau actually seen Un Chien Andalou before making Blood of a Poet? I glanced through my old Bunuel notes. Cocteau says he didn't, others say he did but they conflict as to when, exactly.In his memoir My Last Sigh Bunuel says Cocteau was there on opening night, part of a "sprinkling of well-established artists" that included Picasso, Le Corbusier, and the composer Georges Auric." Also in attendance: Andre Breton's Surrealist group - a notoriously tough crowd. They loved Bunuel's film, and would later loudly hoot at Cocteau's.Cocteau's biographer, Frances Steegmuller, says he saw Bunuel's film at the home of the Vicomte Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, the wealthy art patrons who would finance both Cocteau's film and Bunuel's follow-up, L'Age d'Or -- which was so blasphemous it would end their movie-making career. Cocteau would later cite Un Chien Andalou as one of the great works of cinema, along with The Gold Rush, Sherlock Holmes, Jr., and Potemkin."Hollywood was becoming a deluxe garage," Cocteau wrote, "and its films were becoming more and more like sumptuous makes of automobiles. With Un Chien Andalou we were back at the bicycle." Still, give Cocteau his due:"And surrealism? Wasn't it, too, born from the work of Poe as much as from Lautreamont? That school of literature certainly had an enormous influence on film, especially around the years 1925-1930, when surrealism was brought to the screen by Bunuel with L'Age d'Or and Un Chien Andalou; by Rene Clair with Entr'acte, by Jean Epstein with The Fall of the House of Usher and by Jean Cocteau with The Blood of the Poet. I was influenced by all this, as you can tell by certain dream and fantasy sequences in some of my films . . . " - Alfred Hitchcock, from Donald Spoto's The Dark Side of Genius.More to read at Rodney Welch: The Blog Video20496@blogcritics.org Thu, 30 Sep 2004 19:49:30 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/01/224917.php Rodney WelchThat's the question that seems to be the focus of this New York Times article from a few days ago -- specifically which tracks the Shuffle feature randomly selects, and which is causing iPod users to question whether their devices "prefer" certain types of music.Some users seem to think that when hooked to a stereo so that other people can hear, their iPods are bent on embarrassing their owners by randomly displaying the lamest entries in the catalog. Others say their iPod "knows" just what will ruin a workout, or that it's lacking in sensitivity. "It was totally not reading my moods," says one user, who complained it "would play upbeat music when she was feeling low, and dark, somber selections when she was feeling upbeat."Naturally, the Apple expert quoted in the article, laughs all this off."I have friends who say, 'My iPod is, like, totally into 80's music,' ... And I will say to them, 'Well, how much 80's music do you have on your iPod?' " The answer, he said, is usually an amount sufficient to ensure a steady stream of Flock of Seagulls and Duran Duran. I've only recently come into the iPod universe and haven't yet had any disorienting listening listening experiences -- although I would hate for Jim Stafford's "My Girl Bill" to suddenly pop up at just the moment when I did not need a hearty homophobic laugh.Just now, sitting at the computer, I went into the iTunes library and hit Shuffle. Out of 4,469 songs, the first ten that popped up are:*"Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll" -- Ian Dury*"That's How Strong My Love Is" -- Otis Redding*"Forever Young" -- Bob Dylan*"Epilogue," poem read by Robert Lowell*"Ballad in Plain D" -- Bob Dylan*"By the Time I Get to Phoenix" -- Isaac Hayes*"Whatever Happened to Saturday Night?" -- Buffale Springfield*"Bard of Armagh/Streets of Laredo" -- Vince Gill*"Track 11" -- Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (Sorry, never got the title logged in.)"Under My Thumb" -- The Rolling StonesAll this says about me is how extremely predictable I am: Dylan, punk, soul, classic rock -- those are pretty much my tastes. What do your MP3 players say about you, if anything? Music19358@blogcritics.org Wed, 1 Sep 2004 22:49:17 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/01/162838.php Rodney WelchAs seems to be my custom, I just discovered some interesting old news: this BBC Poll of the Greatest Opening Lines of Rock Songs, which ran last April. I can't really quibble with their choice of Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London" at the top of the pack -- that is a great line, and the Lee Ho Fuk reference gives it a distinctive touch.What follows are a few of my own favorites. As is true with books or movies, there are no rules as to what makes for a knockout lead -- it can have a telling scrap of conversation that sounds like it came out of a Raymond Chandler novel (Joni Mitchell), poetic imagery (Bruce Springsteen), or just be bravely and brazenly retarded. The main thing is to hook and hold the attention, and all these songs make me drop what I'm doing and listen:"Just before our love got lost you said I am as constant as the Northern Star and I said `Constantly in the darkness, where's that at? If you want me I'll be in the bar.'" -- Joni Mitchell, "A Case of You."*Some people say little girls should be seen and not heard, but I say `Oh bondage, up yours!'" -- X Ray Specs, "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!"*"In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream/At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines." -- Bruce Springsteen, "Born to Run"*"Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?" -- Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna"*"Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste." -- Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the Devil"*"Everybody's heard about the bird, buh-buh-bird-bird-bird buh-bird is the word, uh well-ah bird-bird-bird buh-bird is the word ... " -- The Trashmen, "Surfing Bird"*"I am Governor Jerry Brown, my aura smiles and never frowns -- soon I will be pres-i-DENT!" -- The Dead Kennedys, "California Uber Alles."*"Heeeeeeeere, kitty, kitty!" -- The Cramps, "Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?*"All aboooooard -- for night train!" -- James Brown, "Night Train"*"A cheap holiday in other people's misery!" -- "Holidays in the Sun," Sex Pistols*"Well he shot four men in a cocaine deal ... he left them lying in an open field, full of old cars, with bulletholes in the mirror...he tried to do his best, but he could not..." --"Tired Eyes," Neil Young...and, of course, my absolute Number One favorite opening line:"Come on, everybody, let's do the hawg!" -- Eddie Kirk, "The Hawg (Part One)." Music19337@blogcritics.org Wed, 1 Sep 2004 16:28:38 EDT