Media Review - Sideways

Years ago, I would likely have seen a new film from a director like Alexander Payne shortly after it was released, but I didn't get around to seeing Sideways until after it has already won a lot of awards and been called "the most overrated film of the year." Sideways has also now gotten several academy award nominations, but not one for lead actor Paul Giamatti who seemed like a shoo-in.

As much as we might like to believe otherwise, I don't think anyone sees a movie or reads a book without evaluating it in light of whatever information they have about it beforehand, whether it come from a genre classification, pre-release hype, critical response or even friends' assessments. The most pernicious manifestations of this are the "conformist" and "contrarian" reactions. Some people will tend to follow what they perceive as a consensus opinion, especially of people they consider their "peers" or "opinion leaders" while others tend to form their opinions in opposition to people they think of as poor judges of value.

Critical consensus and backlash can both be explained by these impulses, but that doesn't mean that they are always caused by them. It's just hard to say whether you would respond to something the same way if you were experiencing it unmediated by whatever you already think about it. I went into Sideways to come to my own conclusions, so I hope.

Overall, it wasn't bad. In fact, I liked Sideways all right, although I can't imagine naming it the best film of the year, even in a bad movie year. Despite all the hype and counter-hype, over the course of watching Sideways my thoughts about it became shaped as much if not more by its resemblance to another movie. Before I get to that, though, some other thoughts.

For the first 20 minutes or so, I was not feeling too generous toward it. The story of a bachelor and his friend enjoying a last romp of freedom before his marriage isn't exactly untravelled dramatic territory. Of course, every story is familiar at some level of generality, but this particular story doesn't merit the frequency with which writers and filmmakers return to it. At any rate, it wasn't a promising beginning.

The characters themselves are familiar. Miles, Paul Giamatti's unpublished novelist, is embittered, alone, temperamental and finicky, but witty, literate and intelligent. Jack (Thomas Haden Church,) the actor bridegroom, is his more successful friend and like all cinematic bridegrooms, he is determined to enjoy a final bacchanal. He wants his grumpy friend to join in, or at least stay out of his way. In short order, Maya (Virginia Madsen) and Stephanie (Sandra Oh) are established as matches for Miles and Jack. Or at least as targets, respectively.

And this is where it becomes difficult to know whether your responses are your own. AO Scott asserts that the critical response to Sideways is due in part to the identification of film critics with the middle-aged, verbally adept writer character with overdeveloped critical faculties who's not too confident with women, and the responsiveness and attention he receives gratifies them. Critical regard, it should go without saying, should result from something more than gratification of personal desires. When I read it I couldn't tell whether Scott's comments were fair as applied to Sideways (I hadn't seen it) and I now think he's overstating it a bit. That said, I definitely think his larger point, that critics tend to rate films that they can relate to and that share their own concerns better, is true and believe that the unusually generous critical response to Sideways can't be explained by the quality of the film itself. David Poland wrote a response to Scott's article that I had read about before and just read now. Poland is a very enthusiastic film critic, and by that I mean that he's crazy. His claim here is that the NYT and Scott particularly are trying to influence the outcome of the Oscars, which I find hard to believe. Whether or not NYT critics can actually influence the outcome of the Academy Awards is debatable, but if film critics and reviewers actually care who wins them, then film criticism is in a lot worse shape than I thought. I recommend Poland, though, if you ever need a good laugh. He's like a much less generous, pugnacious Harry Knowles.

With movies that adopt the point of view of male characters as explicitly as Sideways does, there's always a temptation to suspect that the female characters exist merely to react to or provide motivation for the male characters. Stephanie is game and sexy, playful and fun, but is quickly marginalized. Her character is difficult to take seriously; she develops a level of affection and trust in Jack very quickly. Not impossible, but it's hard to believe a woman with a child wouldn't have developed some emotional defenses. Maya is certainly more interesting and gets at least a semblance of subjectivity and self-direction.

Scott's claim that middle-aged male film critics felt affinity with the material that leant it greater appeal is certainly plausible. While watching it, I was reminded repeatedly of Swingers, a comedy about the floundering professional and personal lives of guys in their mid-20s that appealed disproportionately to guys in their mid-20s. I was in my mid-20s when Swingers came out and I liked it a lot, but didn't think it was great cinema. I knew a lot of guys who did, though and I'm sure there are a lot more out there like those guys who are film reviewers now.

I'm not saying that Sideways is exactly like Swingers, but they share several qualities. Both are centered on two friends, one more contemplative and downbeat, unable to get over a previous relationship, the other more juvenile and hedonistic, to whom things come a bit easier and disinclined to think too deeply about things. The main characters, Miles the unpublished novelist in Sideways and Mike the comedian in Swingers whose career is similarly dead-ended, are both pretty annoying and capable of being pains in the ass, but are played by likeable actors. The friend characters, Jack and Trent, are both themselves actors, successful with women, and less sympathetic. Swingers has nothing even resembling a female character, but that movie is brave enough to suggest that the reason Mike isn't successful as a comedian is that he isn't actually very good at it. Sideways, meanwhile, generously leaves you with the impression that Miles' novels are unpublished because of the failings of the overly commercialized publishing industry.

Whatever. The point isn't that these movies are exactly the same or that they are both terrible. Their similarity does suggest, to me, that if I did think Sideways was one of the best films of 2004 I'd have to entertain the possibility that Swingers was the best film of 1996. I don't think either of those things are true.

Sideways has its own virtues and vices worth discussing as well. The acting is very good, but I can understand not nominating Paul Giamatti for best actor. He's fine, but not revelatory and the part isn't unfamiliar. It's hard for an actor to do really exceptional work with a character who, to be honest, is already pretty well known to anyone who has watched a lot of movies. Virginia Madsen is excellent, however, since she's given little to work with apart from one strong monologue and nevertheless gives the audience a sense of her character's depth. I've been a fan of Madsen since Candyman, where she almost singlehandedly saved an intriguing horror film premise from being buried under an indifferent production as so many intriguing horror premises are.

Thomas Haden Church doesn't do much with Jack, but the failing lies just as much with cowriter/director Payne as it does with Church. An interesting movie might have been made trying to shed light on Jack's "plight," as he refers to it, but his character is presented as self-evident to the extent that he isn't inscrutable. Woody Allen (whose movies are replete with verbose anhedonics and failed artists that serve as models for Miles) once wrote that "marriage is the death of hope" and that quip could probably serve to explain everything we learn about Jack's compulsive infidelity. Jack's actions and problems matter in the film primarily in how they affect Miles. I suppose it's safe to conclude that Jack's marriage will encounter some difficulties, but like all questions related to Jack this is a peripheral issue. In fact, Payne's singular concern with Miles' problems and issues lends indirect support to Scott's argument, since Sideways comes across as a movie where Miles "matters" and other characters don't. Someone could always respond that Jack is just an unsympathetic person and thus less interesting, but that's not a satisfying answer for a movie whose only claim to depth has to rest on its humanism. Humanism, to be valuable, has to encompass people we can't imagine as ourselves.

The fact that defenders of the film have reacted angrily to Scott's article is interesting to me, particularly since many reviews of Sideways have referred to the main characters as "losers" and Scott's suggestion that critics identify with them implies that many film critics are losers as well. I think the "loser" appellation unwarranted; perhaps both characters wanted other things for themselves, but the fact that they haven't achieved everything they wanted in life hardly makes them losers. Calling Miles a loser only makes sense from the "Sideways as humanist masterpiece" perspective, where sympathy for a character becomes a virtue by overlooking the character's shortcomings. It helps to evaluate those shortcomings harshly, then forgive them as long as the character remains sympathetic.

In sum, I enjoyed Sideways somewhat, but I can't imagine watching it again. It's quite familiar and narrow, and its precision can't make up for that. At the same time, AO Scott's speculation about the cause of its critical success is just that, speculation. I noticed that Jonathan Rosenbaum was similarly dismissive of Sideways, but attributes its adulation to a regressive impulse, a retreat into the proficient execution of a moviemaking model from decades past, a way of saying "[i]t's been a tough year. Let's get back under the blankets" in his own words. This is a good theory as well.

Brushes with the law

The post title comes from the title of the infamous book I finally got around to reading over the holidays and I may write something about it soon, but for the moment I wanted to post a little wrap-up of law-related items from the week.

The USSC brought Jeb Bush's involvement with the Terri Schiavo case to an end Monday. I've seen several items about this story over the week and have been thinking again about the misleading ways that many journalists cover the Court. The NYT is generally pretty good about it, but in other stories in local press or AP you often get mischaracterizations of just what has happened procedurally or what issues are actually at stake in a case. Particularly, journalists often depict denials of review, like this one, as rulings on the merits. Practically speaking, when the Court declines to disturb a lower court judgment, it is not intended to mean that they necessary approve of the legal conclusions in the decision. Nevertheless, reporters often depict them as such. Of course, practitioners and students of the courts know enough to realize that denials of discretionary review and the like can sometimes hold clues to what the justices think about the merits, but it's a lot more complicated than the impression you can get from reading the news.

This isn't a surprising outcome, since the action taken by the Florida legislature and governor was ridiculous. Whatever one may think of euthanasia, the dispute between Schiavo's husband and parents over what her wishes were with regard to her life and the facts of her prognosis are not for disposition by the political branches. It would be like your state legislature passing a law overturning a jury award to you from the guy who hit you with his car or the governor ordering you to take mood stabilizing drugs after your doctor says you don't need them. Sure, they can pass general laws affecting the resolution of future litigation on those issues, applying to everyone, but resolving preexisting disputes is the courts' job.

So, a state senator in Washington wants to make it OK to call a woman a strumpet? This is what happens when Democrats take over, I guess. Seriously, I brought this up in a class this week and one of my students thoughtfully pointed out that this is likely a violation of free speech. I pointed out that it likely was, but that courts have no occasion to strike down such laws unless they are enforced, and that the efforts to repeal laws like this had more to do with eliminating vestiges of bygone cultural assumptions. In this case, the assumption that a woman's virtue is a valuable quality, worthy of protection with criminal sanction, that could mean the difference between marriageability and spinsterhood. I found it interesting that the law exempts prostitutes (I suppose if it didn't it might make brothel-keepers' jobs harder) and had to be false to be illegal. Thus, like slander (at least in the US) truth is a defense.

If this law passes, I suggest that in celebration everyone pick a woman at random from a Washington phonebook and call her a hussy (or courtesan, trollop, Jezebel, etc.) Of course, you should be sure to thank her as well.

Also predictably, the DC Court of Appeals seems inclined to deny the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch access to energy task force records. I'm not terribly surprised, despite the typically qualified outcome of the Supreme Court's controversial review of the earlier discovery ruling. In fact, I think the justices basically divided the labor between Kennedy, who authored the cautiously worded opinion sending the case back to the circuit court with instructions to "be careful," and the concurrence by Thomas (joined by the non-recused Scalia) which blazed through to the separation of powers issue and favored ruling for the VP. Now, the Court gets the equivalent of a contentious expansion of constitutionally protected executive secrecy without actually demanding it.

One thing worth noting from the DC court's oral argument. Here's Douglas Ginsburg, the chief judge who would be sitting in Kennedy's seat if he hadn't fired up some weed with blabbermouth students years ago, interpreting the Supreme Court's handling of the case for Judicial Watch:

You're proceeding as if this were ordinary litigation and the Supreme Court has said this is not ordinary litigation because of the vice president...

Now, let's recall Scalia's memo explaining his non-recusal:

Certainly as far as the legal issues immediately presented to me are concerned, this is "a run-of-the-mill legal dispute about an administrative decision." (emphasis in original)

Scalia was responding to an assertion that despite the fact that Cheney's role as a litigant is due to official action, his presence in the case was a mere formality and thus his personal relationship with the VP was not relevant to questions of his impartiality. This was the weakest part of his often-combative and rambling defense of sitting in the case, leading to his bald assertion that the stakes of the underlying litigation were irrelevant because "political consequences are not my concern..."

There are several other interesting legal issues swirling around, like the Court's recent Booker decision striking down the mandatoriness of federal sentencing guidelines (but not the guidelines themselves) and the same-sex marriage litigation popping up in various states, but I'm not certain right now just how significant these developments are.

Senate showdown continued?

Very interesting piece on judicial confirmation by T.R. Goldman. Even though the Democrats lost seats in the Senate in November, they're still numerous enough to filibuster and chances are pretty good for continued blocks on several of the judicial nominees President Bush has named and reupped. Still, a few things have changed, including the appearance of the publicity-friendly "nuclear option" (should it be the "nucular option"?) of disallowing filibusters of judicial nominees.

This piece is nice, because it brings out several of the wrinkles in this issue that are smoothed over in a lot of the journalism I've seen. Filibusters and the nuclear option (I'll address the Republican preference for "constitutional option" in a few moments) both have potential political and legal consequences. Also, as Goldman notes, even with 55 votes the GOP can't guarantee decorum due to the Senate's collegial nature. Since much of its routine business proceeds under unanimous consent agreements, Frist will have to change a lot more than just the rules for judicial nominees to prevent Democrats from frustrating Bush's domestic agenda a lot more than they will anyway.

As contentious as the Senate is likely to get in the near future, even an attempt to exercise the nuclear option will lead to war on the floor. Minority rights in the Senate get a lot of rhetorical support from parliamentarians who argue that extended debate and collegiality are part of the tradition of the body and that they distinguish it from the less gentlemanly House of Representatives. Still, the existence and use of minority rights are undoubtedly partisan and outcome-oriented. With all the mayhem that Bush wants to do in the next couple of years domestically, he'll need a Senate that can actually move legislation, and that won't come without some compromises, maybe the kind of compromises on judicial nominees that Goldman elaborates in the article.

During the last four years we heard a lot of noise from Republicans about the impropriety, even the unconstitutionality, of using filibusters to block judicial nominees. Now, impropriety is in the eye of the beholder to a large extent when you're talking about politics, but the claim that it's unconstitutional rests on the argument that the Senate's constitutional function of providing "advice and consent" to appointees of the president carries with it an affirmative duty to act on nominees. Bush's use of recess appointments to overcome the filibusters of several nominees weakens that case, especially given the liberal definition of "the Recess of the Senate" the president has been using. The core of the argument, however, is that preventing votes on a nominee hides the blame for a particular action, like the failure of a nomination, and frustrates the ability of the electorate to discipline senators for unpopular votes. However, Republicans are arguing now that filibustering itself is an unpopular activity with its own political consequences, pointing to the defeat of Tom Daschle as an act of voter discipline for obstructing judicial nominees. There are still arguments to be made that the Senate has a duty to hold up-or-down votes on nominees, but to embrace it you have to confront the possibility that many other functions served and powers enjoyed by various branches are not discretionary.

Naturally, the Democrats have pointed out that the Republicans delayed action on Clinton nominees through failing to move them through committee and that the only difference is the means by which a majority and minority accomplish what they want, which is to prevent an opposing-party president from being able to fill judicial seats permanently. Everybody seems to think this is bad, but I'm actually not so against it. It would be a disaster for judicial independence if presidents named a substantial number of judges through recess appointments, but the political costs of a largely temporary judiciary should prevent that. A more realistic and optimistic consequence is that judicial nominations return to being the currency of political horse-trading. Sure, it's possible that the competence of judicial appointments might suffer, but recent research suggests that the focus on the ideology of judicial appointees by presidents has actually led to the same thing.

It may sound unenlightened, but maybe it's time for judicial nominations criteria to de-emphasize comprehensive jurisprudential philosophy and turn toward function. Critics on the left and the right have made strong arguments against a merely functionary Court and even against too much emphasis on "mere" competence as a sufficient criterion for exercising judicial power, but if a little more focus on function could reduce the pressure that's building between the executive and Senate (even during unified government) I'd take the trade.

Music of 2004: Brian Wilson, Smile and William Shatner, Has Been

Continuing my treatment of notable music releases of 2004 with these two albums. I bought them around the same time, listened to them back to back, and started a review of them together (cannibalized below.) It seemed to make sense at the time, since both of them are pop figures associated with the 60s whose recent work points back to that decade. After sitting on this post for months, I offer it now in place of fresh content.


I don't know exactly why, but even before I heard that Brian Wilson was going to release a completed version of Smile it had been on my mind. Maybe it was the release of the "naked" version of Let It Be, which I never bought or even heard since I don't really like the original release. For some reason, I started getting curious about what Smile really sounded like, or what it would have sounded like had it been released in 1967. I've avoided the versions available elsewhere, although I imagine I would have eventually listened to the 60s recordings if Wilson had died without allowing Smile to be released in any form. I guess the point of this is that before now I was mostly curious about it as an artifact of the 1960s or of the artistic development of Brian Wilson, rather than as a piece of music.

Like many people, my first reaction to hearing that Smile would be coming out was trepidation, since it's hard to imagine it living up to its reputation or the associations it invariably carries with Pet Sounds and Sgt. Peppers. The album now released as SMiLE (this is the only time I will reproduce this spelling) isn't in the same league with either of those albums, but listening to it is remarkably disarming of those unrealistic and unhelpful comparisons. The bottom line is that it's a really interesting, highly listenable album. There's not a hint of the unfulfilled ambition or sense of failure that I, and perhaps other listeners, feared it would inspire. Despite my earlier reasons for interest, I appreciate Smile mostly because it doesn't come across as a cultural artifact.

The tracks are explicitly divided into three song cycles, each of which has high points and low. The same thing can be said for each individual song, since Wilson has followed through on the pattern of using rather simple melodies to anchor individual songs in a way that initially reminded me of Count Basie's use of "heads." It doesn't really have the same effect, though, since Wilson's melodic touchstones don't contribute structure as much as they do a sense of theme, almost like skeleton keys to the cycles. As a result, there aren't any particular songs that I'm inclined to "skip ahead" to hear, although there are portions of certain songs, like "Roll Plymouth Rock," "Surf's Up," "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow," and "Heroes and Villains" that cause me to perk up.

Van Dyke Park's notorious lyrical contributions don't interest me much by themselves, which I suppose is another saving grace. Nothing overly "psychedelic" stands out to make the project seem like a dusted-off nostalgia piece. At the same time, the lyrics don't contribute much to the album as a whole, despite the sense one gets that there's supposed to be some lyrical themes to match the melodic continuity of the song cycles. Actually, I get the feeling listening to Smile that it would make great material for a remix along the lines of Dangermouse's Grey Album.

As 60s pop art pieces go, Pet Sounds holds a different place than William Shatner's first album, The Transformed Man. But while Brian Wilson's new album is very nice, it doesn't seem as essential to me as Has Been, the new release from Shatner. Smile certainly brings Wilson's 60s ambitions to a satisfying conclusion without wallowing in the past too egregiously; Shatner's work is jarringly engaged with the present. Not only does it directly address his own concerns and events in his life, it also presents a powerful challenge to hipster critics and listeners who are too defensively jaded and dulled by irony to be able to deal with something that's simultaneously funny and serious.

I was very excited to hear word of Shatner's return to recording. I was a fan of Star Trek as a kid, before Next Generation, and have always liked Shatner's public personality and even his acting on occasion. He "discovered" himself as a comedic talent primarily in the 80s, appearing in Airplane 2 (by far the best thing in that movie) and his infamous Saturday Night Live appearance in 1986, and then clinched this new direction with his appearances as "The Big Giant Head" on 3rd Rock from the Sun. I picked up The Transformed Man nearly ten years ago on CD. When I tell people of my enthusiasm for Shatner, they usually assume that it's one of those "ironic" enthusiasms for things that suck. Shatner's first album has been described as "campy," which is often taken to mean the same thing, but it's very appropriate given the death of Susan Sontag recently to note that camp doesn't necessarily mean bad. As Sontag put it, "Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the 'off,' of things-being-what-they-are-not." All of this can be found on The Transformed Man.

Arguments about TTM tend to revolve around whether Shatner is "serious" or trying to be "funny," as if this were a dichotomy. Sure, there's a sense in which this is an attempt at heady important pop art. But welding together over-the-top readings of "Cyrano" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" (my favorite piece on the album) makes a serious point about ambition and release, as well as offering a stark contrast between what was once considered accomplished verse and what passes for it now. Part of this work is done by being funny. Peter Sellars had already had a hit earlier in the 60s with his dramatic reading of "A Hard Day's Night," so it can't be said that Shatner had no frame of reference for such an approach. This isn't to say that everything on TTM is a success. I particularly think his take on "It Was a Very Good Year" is flat-out wrong. In contrast, his reading of "How Insensitive(Insensatez)" another interpretation of Sinatra coupled with "Romeo and Juliet," is very well done.

Regardless, Shatner's at a different game in Has Been and it's a game many people apparently weren't ready for. Many critics responded to the album as if it were an attempt at deliberate camp (always a bad idea, as Sontag says.) But reading the album as nothing but a joke makes it impossible to understand most of its content, including an unaccompanied elegy for his wife, who drowned in their pool. Unlike stupid bad taste pop phenomena like William Hung, Shatner doesn't sing badly; he doesn't sing at all. His performances are readings and are meant to be taken as such. He only does one cover, a sharp interpretation of "Common People." I don't really know the original, but the only qualm I have with Shatner's version is Joe Jackson's interruption on the chorus (undoubtedly producer Ben Fold's idea.)

Shatner's warm-up for Has Been was his contribution to Ben Fold's Fear of Pop album from 1998, a sinister piece called "In Love" that almost sounds like another take on the situation depicted in "How Insensitive." Many pieces on Has Been ruminate on fear of failure or its reality, each taking a different position. Several are seemingly autobiographical while others are clearly not. Although the funnier tracks, like "You'll Have Time," "Ideal Woman" and "I Can't Get Behind That" are likely to be the most popular, I find the more sober pieces equally compelling. "It Hasn't Happened Yet" required a few listens before it fell into place. I even like "That's Me Trying," one of the few pieces written by someone else (Nick Hornby, in this case.)

I've always thought that successful art can be distinguished in part by its willingness to risk being mistaken for something that it is not without running away from what it is. Shatner's Has Been is an unqualified success in this fashion. It's an entirely unironic exploration of several important themes, but bravely runs the risk of being interpreted as a novelty product. Such an interpretation doesn't withstand listening to it, though, unless you've already decided that whatever Shatner does must be kitsch.

Shatner's acting career has taken off again with his supporting role on Boston Legal and I have to admit that if it weren't for his and James Spader's efforts selling the same old stuff that David Kelley shows have been recycling for the last decade or so I wouldn't be watching it. Shatner's acting technique, obvious as it is, has only improved with age. I think this is due partly to continued practice, partly to his growing comfort with his comic gifts and partly due to his embrace of the honesty and vulnerability displayed on Has Been. Shatner's character on BL, like his voice on Has Been, is struggling with age and decline. It's hardly the likeliest material for a buffoonish camp object wallowing in self-conscious mediocrity. That he can make us laugh at the same time ("Live life like you're gonna die, because you're going to...") makes its achievement that much more remarkable.

January is the stupidest month...

I've been very distracted recently, leaving this place kinda neglected. Never fear, I'll be back with some actual content before too long.

The Year in (Greencine) Movies

I can only vaguely remember what books I read this year, but I have an easy way to recall what movies I've seen. A lot of them I rented from Greencine and as I noted before, I've been keeping records of which movies I get, how long I keep them and how long it takes for them to get to and from me. I started doing this in order to assess whether the service was actually worth what I was paying for it, or so I told myself. In truth I'm just a compulsive data collector.

So, over the last year I averaged 6.58 discs per month. I did better in the second half of the year than the first, averaging 7.33 per month from July to December against only 5.83 January to June. I didn't start collecting delivery-time data until a few months into the year, but for the period of study the average time from Greencine to my mailbox was 3.62 days, while the average return time was 3.27 days. I think the slight difference can be accounted for by a mailing pattern: we watch movies over the weekend and put them in the mail Monday, they arrive on Thursday and new discs are sent which would arrive on Sunday if mail were delivered. I have total "time out" data for all discs of the year and the mean time between when a disc was sent to us and when it was received by Greencine was 13.45 days. That includes a high of 42 days (Wit, which we held on to until we were emotionally ready to watch) and a low of 5. The five day movie was Bottle Rocket, which sat at the top of my cue for months before we finally got it.

It's depressing as hell to find someone whose summary of the year in films turns first to calculations such as this.


So, what did I see? A lot of bad stuff, actually. My queue is always crowded with horror films, relatively new straight to video filler and older movies made available through the exhaustive efforts of genre-specialty outfits like Synapse, Blue Underground, Anchor Bay, Elite, Image, etc. Although I enjoy a lot of this stuff, there's still a healthy portion of dull, slapdash stuff you have to sit through to enjoy the good stuff. I did get to see a few Christopher Lee movies I'd not seen before, like The Bloody Judge (1969), The Virgin of Nuremberg (1963) and To the Devil a Daughter (1976). I also saw a very nice looking copy of Blood and Black Lace (1964), probably the best of the vintage horror I saw this year. I think Spasmo (1974) was the worst - no, it was Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks (1973). Of the newer horror, I would definitely put Ginger Snaps 2 - Unleashed (2004) as the best and Dracula 3000 (2004) as the worst. In fact, Dracula 3000 is the most pitiful movie I've seen in some time.

I caught up with a few prominent releases of 2003, like American Splendor, Under the Tuscan Sun, Le Divorce, Willard, Pirates of the Caribbean, Love Actually, Finding Nemo, The Shape of Things, Shattered Glass, Capturing the Friedmans, Peter Pan, Big Fish and Bend it Like Beckham. I'd seen Demonlover before (I saw the unedited version that was shown at Cannes early in 2003 at Lincoln Center) but rented it to see what the edited version was like and so that my wife could see it. I think it was my favorite film of 2003 and would probably name it my favorite of 2004 if it were in the pool. Other than that, American Splendor was quite good and several of the preceding were enjoyable. A few disappointments: The Shape of Things, Big Fish and especially Capturing the Friedmans. I'm starting to get a bit disturbed at the enthusiasm "independent" movie audiences are showing for non-fiction films that flatter their audiences' sense of difference from middle or lower class non-urbanites, a pattern that began as far as I could tell with Paradise Lost years ago. These true crime docudramas aren't entirely alike, but both blatantly cater to the indie-hipster crowd that tend to champion films in this market. They also succeed in large part by making a real story conform to the dramatic structure of fictional whodunits without any sense of self-awareness.

I was anxious to catch up with Shattered Glass, since I was a subscriber to the New Republic during Stephen Glass' tenure and remember reading several of the articles that he fabricates in the course of the movie. Actually, I recall his piece about the young Republican hotel room orgy that is detailed early in the film, because I didn't believe it at the time. I hate to come off sounding wiser-than-whoever, but between that, his piece about the Church of George H. W. Bush (a cover story!) and his bit about investment firms with shrines to Alan Greenspan, I became convinced that TNR was printing satire, sort of Spy magazine style, without overtly saying so. It never occurred to me that these things were supposed to be accepted as true. I also remember the hacker story that ended up bringing him down, which was actually one of the more plausible concoctions he produced during this time.

The movie benefits from good performances by Hayden Christensen (really) and especially Peter Sarsgaard. Still, I was disappointed at the lack of relevance, the missed opportunities to say something about the implications of Glass's success as a fabulist. Maybe I'm more interested in institutional, or at least political/social, content than the average bloke, but a movie that covers this material and has nothing to say about the string of high-profile ethical problems within media is a waste.

I think I'll devote another post to bashing the handful of films I saw in 2004. Meanwhile, watch the fur fly at Salon's Movie Club, this year featuring the Paulettes!

More questions than answers

I've had several things keeping me from posting to the blog in the last week, including holiday time spent offline (how novel) and finishing up year-end work. Like many people, however, I've struggled to think of anything valuable to contribute in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. I had started a post about legal developments of 2004, but haven't returned to it. Other issues preoccupy, but they're issues upon which I can't offer any special insight or expertise. What worth is it for yet another person to write about how difficult it is to comprehend loss and suffering on this scale?


I spotted this piece in the Guardian off of ALDaily last week along with other discussions of related topics. I won't reiterate the points made in the original piece or some of the follow-ups. As a non-theist from a family and community where believers are the norm, I'm often drawn to think of events within the context of religious faith or its lack. Non-believers are naturally drawn to point out the illogic, the perverseness of an all-powerful, benevolent God causing such spectacular, unreasoning pain and death. Of course, it shouldn't require such a spectacle to make clear the preponderance of random, cruel and amoral outcomes that visit people every day. Insensitive as it may seem, events like the recent tsunami are only different in scale from other examples of nature's indifference to justice and desert.

It's a mistake to think that Christians or other believers are insensitive to these questions. Atheists often unfairly assume that belief in God must result from a preference for fantastic, comforting certainty over self-evident, difficult doubt. Sure, for some believers, faith is safe and effortlessly reassuring, but for a lot of theists, believing in God means having to face conflicts like those raised by the tsunami and much smaller scale tragedies regularly. Many theists express mystification at how atheists can encounter the goodness and beauty in the world without a loving God to provide some explanation for it. How could a random, blind universe, cold and utterly indifferent to human concerns and feelings possibly produce the pleasures and beauties that bind people to each other in couples, families, communities and societies? In the end, isn't belief in God just about which of these implausibilities one finds easier to live with?

Yes, the Indian Ocean tsunami raises serious questions for anyone who believes in a God that is simultaneously omnipotent and benevolent. When I was a child, questions like these brought an end to my belief in God. But even as non-theists raise these questions, we can't also maintain that those who do believe in God do so in order to avoid any difficult questions. For many intelligent and thoughtful people, believing in God means having to live with a great deal of uncertainty.

I may post some thoughts about the institutional responses to the tsunami later.