I converted this blog over to WordPress 1.5, out of curiosity. For some reason, the front page takes about ten times longer to load in WordPress. I probably won’t be switching any time soon.
Author: Bryant
The great thing about weblogs is that sometimes people will write down the things you were thinking about in such a clear and cogent fashion that any need for you to write about them is utterly eliminated. Thus, I give you Maciej’s essay “Dabblers and Blowhards.” In theory, there’s an entire class of annoying bloggers I’ll never have to write about again.
In practice, I’ll get frustrated every four months or so and post something irritated and someone will say “Dude, what did you expect?” But it’s nice to have dreams.
Now, that’s pretty close to being a government. Good news.
It’ll be interesting to see who winds up in the cabinet. More specifically, it’ll be interesting to see who gets to be the oil minister. The Kurds want it, but they probably got the right to have their own independent army (people keep saying militia. It’s got tanks and artillery; it’s an army in my book), so maybe they gave up the ministry. And what happens to Kirkuk?
A few months ago, Ryan of the Dead Parrot Society debunked the claim that certain photographs of an execution on Haifa Street, in Baghdad, were taken from close range. Ryan is the online producer for a Washington State newspaper; he has experience with news photography and the ability to ask real photographers questions. So he did. He found out that the photos in question were almost certainly taken from a distance.
This hasn’t stopped Powerline and Michelle Malkin from continuing to perpetuate the myth that the photographers were standing right next to the execution.
That issue seems, at first, as if it’s tangential to the bigger question of cooperation — but it’s not really. Consider: if I say “the photographer got a picture of the execution from a block away, which proves that the terrorists knew the photographer was there,” does that sound reasonable? Not so much. That’s very different than saying “the terrorists were right next to the photographers, so the terrorists must have had a reason to leave the photographers alone.”
Mitt Romney still isn’t going to be the Republican Presidential nominee in 2008. I know he’s the trendy choice, but barring a significant shift in the party, he doesn’t stand a chance of getting past the primaries. He’s got to tack too far to the left in order to effectively govern in Massachusetts, and that’s
On the way into work this morning, I heard a commercial from Mitt about stem cell research. This is a very topical issue in Massachusetts right now; our House and Senate just passed bills concerning this research which explicitly allow both embryonic stem cell research and something called “somatic cell nuclear transfer.”
Romney came out against the latter, but — in the radio ad — explicitly states his support for embryonic stem cell research. This is probably necessary for him from a political standpoint; he can’t afford to get too far away from the mainstream of Massachusetts politics, and the mainstream is in favor of the entire bill. If he wrote off embryonic stem cell research entirely, the reaction would be fairly intense, and you can’t run for President from a state that dislikes you. Let alone govern effectively.
On the other hand, it’s going to kill him on the national scene. This is a hot ticket issue for people who vote in the primaries. It won’t affect him in New Hampshire or Iowa, but it’ll be a big deal for Super Tuesday. In 2000, Bush didn’t stomp McCain until Super Tuesday, in the south; I’d predict the same kind of dynamic here.
The Independent Film Festival 2005 is coming: April 21st through April 24th. Tight schedule. Just about all the narrative movies look good, and I hear great things about the documentary Murderball. I’m also intrigued by The Fall of Fujimori.
OK, let’s rough out a schedule, here…
Friday
5:15 PM, Somerville: Abel Raises Cain (work permitting)
8 PM, Somerville: Blackballed (Rob Corddry stars)
10:30, Brattle: The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things
Saturday
2 PM, Coolidge: Spew: The World of Competitive Debate
4:30 PM, Coolidge: The Fall of Fujimori
7 PM, Brattle: Murderball
10:30 PM, Somerville: White Skin
Sunday
Noon, Brattle: The Girl From Monday
2:30 PM, Brattle: Stolen (documentary about the Isabella Stewart Gardener theft)
7 PM, Somerville: Childstar
10 movies? Aggressive but not unreasonable if I really devote to it.
I was going to watch Infernal Affairs last night but then I said “whoa, Bryant. Cut back on the noir. There’s been nothing but for a while; maybe it’s time for a break?” In service of purging the noir obsession from my system, let’s get the last two movies I saw at the Brattle L.A. Noir series into one post, shall we? It’s especially convenient since they were a double bill. Sounds like a plan.
First, Criss Cross. It’s a quintessentially noir story about a big lug who’s in love with the wrong woman; he left her, and when he comes back, she’s involved with a local gangster. Nobody in a noir ever says “Well, we screwed up, and we have to live with the consequences.” These two are no exception, and before you know it the only way out is to screw up even further.
Burt Lancaster is a big dope in the lead role. That’s not really a criticism — he’s fine in the part, which isn’t too demanding. He’s got to be in love, and he’s got to be dumb enough to be duped. Yvonne De Carlo is a great femme fatal, pretty and sultry and just a little tawdry. In my book, the really good performances were Dan Duryea as the gangster and Stephen McNally as the detective trying to help his pal. (His great line: “I should have been a better friend. I shoulda stopped you. I shoulda grabbed you by the neck, I shoulda kicked your teeth in. I’m sorry, Steve.”)
What else? Structurally sound, satisfying, a really great set piece for the end of the movie which appears to be located at the end of the world. It was remade by Stephen Soderbergh as Underneath; I’m betting that’s one of the reasons it was chosen for this series. With this alongside Point Blank, you begin to see the outlines of the ways in which these noirs influenced Soderbergh.
The other reason’s got to be the astoundingly surreal robbery scene: it takes place in a cloud of poisonous gas, with all the gangsters wearing gas masks, and I almost gasped when I saw what was happening. Lancaster is without a mask, and the gangsters come looming out of the fog with this inhuman masks on their faces and guns in their hand, and the paranoid tension just hits a whole new level. It’s man facing an alien world of the future. (C.f. Point Blank again.) Awesome, awesome scene.
And then I saw This Gun For Hire. Skipping to the end for a second: gas masks play a pivotal role. Heh. And Yvonne De Carlo has a bit part. So Criss Cross was the perfect prelude, even though it’s not an exceptional movie.
That is not the case for This Gun For Hire, which left me with a warm little glow in my tummy. Yeah, it’s a grim story of a lone assassin who was abused by his aunt, but so what? It’s a great understated tale and those make me happy. It’s also the seminal grim story of a lone assassin: John Woo lifted the theme by way of Le Samourai for The Killer, Jean Reno’s Leon owes his style to Alan Ladd’s Philip Raven, and I could go on for quite a while.
So what’s so great about This Gun For Hire? Besides Alan Ladd, it’s also got Veronica Lake, who kindly defines winsome for us. She’s not really the type to wind up with her cop fiancee — she’s a nightclub performer who instinctively wants to help the stone cold killer. But hey, it’s a Code movie, what are you going to do?
Mostly, though, it’s got Alan Ladd. Touch on Point Blank again: This Gun For Hire is also about a criminal going down from San Francisco to Los Angeles for revenge. Alan Ladd’s as stony as Lee Marvin (except for one misconceived scene where he breaks down in front of Veronica Lake), but it’s a cooler, more cerebral calm. He knows he’s been done wrong, and he’s getting revenge not for the sake of revenge but for the sake of business. Unlike Lee Marvin, he gets what he wants at the end. Like Lee Marvin, he pays a price.
And despite it being a Code movie, Alan Ladd has a distinct edge. There’s a moment quite early on when I said “He’s not going to shoot that woman — ah, see, his gun misfired! It’s an out!” I was quite wrong. There’s no effort to paint him as evil: he’s just a man who happens to kill for a living. No compunctions.
Somewhere between Graham Greene’s novel and the screen, a fairly noticeable dose of patriotism crept into the movie. I wound up deciding that Ladd wasn’t motivated by the patriotic appeals, though, even if Veronica Lake was. The key was the woman and the desire to do good — not for his country, but for her. To think of him as a hitman who decides to fight for America weakens the movie by abstracting his decision.
So there you go. A whole lot of noir this week. Maybe I’ll divert myself with some classic comedies next; nice change of pace, you know?
There’s a blog for everything. Papabile is the one that follows the election of Pope John Paul II’s successor.
Part of a government! Seriously, it’s a good start.