Ryeberg has posted my compendium of award show trainwrecks, just in time for the Oscars. Enjoy.
Cellphoto: Spadina on Ice
No Such Thing As a One-Ended String
I am beginning a small bout of learning, if that is possible, into what is called “string theory” (there is a nice article here, which summarizes the basics at the bottom). I’m learning about it, because there is so much controversy directed at it. On the one hand, it is a contender for The Theory Which Explains Everything (Ultimately). Yet, there is (after over 40 years of theorizing) no documentable proof of its existence. This would be a question of trivia were this theory not so heavily influential – and invested into – within academia (particularly in America’s most elite universities), where there is growing concern that this theory has become a self-propelling conceptual vehicle which is capable of using unanswered questions of its existence to justify its existence.
I once chatted up someone who revealed himself to be a retired physics professor, and the subject of string theory came up. He smirked and said dryly, “String theory is a cult, waiting for its Jonestown.”
How could I not take that as a cue to learn more?
Brief Reviews: The Town vs. Animal Kingdom
When Ben Affleck’s The Town came out, many praised it as a powerful crime drama/action film. And yet, the shine seems to have come off of that project, probably as a result of people chasing the hype and actually watching it.
First, let’s discuss its poster. In recent years, I’ve become sensitive to bad marketing. A good example of this is the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall: the ad campaign (in Toronto at least) consisted of anonymous black and white bus and streetcar ads, with hand-scrawled “I HATE YOU SARAH MARSHALL!” (and the like) written on them*. In short, the campaign was cheap-looking, lame, and soured any potential expectation I had for the film – it wasn’t until much later, at my wife’s urging, that I caught it on DVD and found it to be one of the highlights of the year.
Similarly, the poster for The Town (displayed here) is a marketing mystery to me: it looks like a horror movie. It’s directed by and stars Ben Affleck, yet the poster is covered in evil nuns with automatic weapons. In short, I don’t get it: sure, it’s a “serious movie” but what were they thinking? Was it reverse psychology? Who knows. If it were me, it would be a close-up photo of John Hamm licking Ben Affleck’s unshaven face, with the caption: “Holy shit! It’s the guy from MadMen with Ben Affleck! And they shoot weapons!”
Then there’s the film itself. Technically, it’s very impressive. Affleck’s direction is solid. The performances are gritty and engaging. It’s free of stunt-casting. Camerawork, editing, sound: great. But when the credits rolled, I realized what was wrong. The story’s been done a hundred fucking times before – twice by Michael Mann. So, for me, there was nothing being risked as a viewer because, having watched more than one crime drama in my life, there were no surprises in the script. Believe me when I say that I wanted this film to be as good as it promised – and, in fact, it is good. Just not as good as it clearly could’ve been when you take into account all that it has going for it.
So what did I want The Town to be? I wasn’t sure…until I saw the Australian crime drama Animal Kingdom on DVD. It has all the grit, tension, and complexity of The Town, with less overt style and more substance, and no actors recognizable to most North American audiences (outside of Memento‘s Guy Pearce). Its poster? Have a look:
It reminds me of a Jeff Wall photograph. And in the middle of it all is the crafty look on the face of actor Jacki Weaver (nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 2011 Oscars).
Animal Kingdom is a film fluent in the crime drama language – it even shares some of the tropes of The Town (the nervous druggie robber, the dutiful police detective) yet never once feels as if you are watching a re-treaded story. It is unpredictable and the performances are naturalistic and subtle.Its lack of artifice keeps us watching, whereas with The Town, each successive car chase weighed it down with Hollywood cliché. Where one carries broader tension, the other is quietly disturbing and takes a more nihilistic view of the cops and robbers game.
The good news is that both are available for your perusal on DVD, and both are extremely watchable. Neither, ultimately, will disappoint: it depends on where your expectations are set. I feel that Animal Kingdom is the film The Town wanted to be.
* I admit I’m particularly sensitive to ads which don’t make it clear that they are ads, especially if they look like actual public messages of hatred.
Cellphoto: Purple Sweet Potatoes
Guilt By Association
An article I wrote back in March of 2010 (“I’ll Show You Stupid”) is getting a lot of steam, it seems. Nice to see new visitors. It’s nice to look back at something I’ve written in the past – the good stuff at least – and see that my instincts were well targeted. In the case of this particular article, it was about the dangers of denigrating (political) others on the basis of how intelligent they come across; the danger was that such actions back-fire more often than not. It mentioned a certain former governor of Alaska.
I’ve been thinking and discussing the subject of elitism quite a bit lately. There are many subtleties in the way we use the word “elite”, but when used in its current populist political form, what people are particularly referring to are those who are educated. Plain and simple. I’ve spent many an hour, day, year, working with and speaking to people who are very educated and worldly, and I must say that they desperately need to get organized if they are to live up to the hype of being the human whippets they are made out to be.
This last October, Toronto voted for a populist mayor – a champion of the surrounding suburbs – who played the “elite” card quite a bit. Regardless that the man is a millionaire from a millionaire family, that he went to Carlton University, he was able to parlay the us-versus-them thing quite well. Helps that he coaches football and is built like a linebacker and probably looks exactly as he did in high school. Thing is, by all rights, he is an elite. Meanwhile, the target of his vitriol, the downtown intellectuals that I hang with (I swear I don’t do it for this reason) – the people who think bike lanes are safe and that public transit is important – are positively victimized by the very thing they are accused of. You see, I think the intelligentsia failed Toronto, just as they typically do most civilizations: where were they (hell, we) during the ten months of the pre-election hype? Where were they when a candidate capable of beating Ford needed to be picked (I don’t think anyone really supported Smitherman – for *’s sake, he adopted a child six months before the election, how responsible is that?). Well, the “elites” were chattering amongst themselves, refuting Ford’s populist bullshit as just that. What everyone forgot is that elections are competitions and without a competitor we ended up with the bully from high school as our hall monitor for the next four years.
The point I’m trying to make (casually, and without credentials because this is a blog and I’m not a journalist) is that the so-called elitists are too busy looking at subtlety, too busy drawing examples from the history of civilization to actually stick their necks out and actually pick a candidate. In short, intellectuals hate making decisions and would rather prefer to show off how much they know about things. That’s how we end up with Rob Ford as mayor. That’s how we ended up with Stéphane Dion leading the Liberal party, or allowing members of the Reform Party to vote twice (if they belonged to both parties) in the merger of the Progressive Conservatives and Reform Alliance parties. The intellectuals – the so-called elites – were busy sitting on the sidelines trading notes, impressing each other with witty barbs.
And this is why I have a stake in the whole “elite” argument. In a sense, yes, they are the enemy. Not because they want anything, or that they are organized enough to have an agenda in the first place, but rather because they don’t know what they want for anyone other than themselves and most of them are too afraid of being politically active. In other words, they should know better, should do better, but they don’t. And as a result they doom the viability of the very life they live.
Book Review: The Tiger, by John Vaillant
(I had done a mini-review of this on my end-of-the-year post, but thought it merited its own entry)
I found myself flipping through the Globe and Mail book section one weekend in the fall of 2010, and found myself staring at a review for a non-fiction book called The Tiger, by author John Vaillant. Let me begin by saying that I am a prolific reader, yet not someone fazed by what’s new so much as what interests me. To this extent, given my eclectic tastes, I will switch from Turgenev to Bukowski, from John Ralston Saul to Stanislaw Lem, and so on. I sometimes don’t have a lot of time to read books, period, owing to a fairly full schedule of projects (which includes working on a novel). As a result, I sometimes feel a little out of touch with the contemporary world of books, especially when there are people on Twitter who are aiming to read fifty books this year.
Getting back to me and the review, I glanced at the synopsis and was struck by how meaty it was: the Russian far east, a vengeful killing machine, a dark exploration of our ties to nature. It seemed to be everything I was looking for (especially as a Russophile) and gave me an opportunity to actually read something published in the year that I was reading it.
It is, in short, a fabulous book. Fabulous, above all, because of the depth of Vaillant’s research into his subjects and his skill at balancing this collective learning against the white knuckle tension that is at the heart of the story. The Tiger begins with the stalking and subsequent killing of a tayozhnik – a Siberianism for forest dweller – named Markov and the series of events it sets in motion against the backdrop of the merciless taiga (or “boreal forest”) surrounding the little logging town of Sobolonye.
The tension is established early, not by Markov’s demise so much as the complex relationship between humans and tigers in this paradoxical part of the world, much of the relationship predicated on the aboriginal teaching that a tiger will never attack a human, so long as the former respects the latter’s spiritual and physical superiority. This superiority is laid out in full measure: from a zoological perspective, the tiger is perhaps the most sublime killing machine that exists in the world of mammals and Vaillant spares no time outlining how every inch of the beast exceeds any comparable hunter on the planet – both in physicality and mentality. The tiger thinks. The tiger learns. Most compelling of all, the tiger remembers.
It is this last quality which lends much tension, because, as the tiger is tracked by a team of professional hunters over the course of two weeks, the question is repeatedly asked: did Markov bring this on himself? And how?
The Tiger is a stunning combination of layered storytelling and educational insight into the evolutionary relationship between man and animal. Indeed, given the barren environment of the setting, it feels sometimes as if the conflicts between man and animal are staged in a prehistoric past rather than their modern setting in the late 90s. There are also some sad truths made about the aftereffects of the economic collapse of the former Soviet Union and the perennial designs China has on the taiga’s natural resources – tigers included.
The Tiger, by John Vaillant (ISBN: 978-0307268938) is published by Knopf and is readily available in your local, independent bookstore.
On Elitism
There is a lot of anger these days being directed towards a group known as “the elites”. I’m not sure who they are. Sometimes I am part of them. Sometimes I’m not, but standing apart from a crowd, with their torches, storming toward the castle gates which protect “the elites”.
The elites are the rich.
The elites are liberals.
The elites are the well-educated.
The elites are neo-conservatives.
The elites are the well-connected and entitled.
I keep hearing this term: the elites. And when I step back I think of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge movement, and how they ultimately targeted people who wore glasses. And when I say targeted, I mean murdered.
When I hear, in that angry, spittle-on-the-microphone voice – elites – I think of the ease with which we can take a non-specific swath of individuals from various classes, ethnicities, and educational backgrounds, and clump them together almost by magic. And they suddenly become something standing in the way of common sense, progress, Providence. Those fucking elitists.
I can take everything that makes your life hard – the year-to-year complexities of living in a society with others – and compel you to believe that if it wasn’t for some small band of conniving intellectuals things would be better, simpler.
I can blame the elites.
Doris Lessing:
There is a certain social process that is known and very visible, but perhaps not acknowledged as much as it should be. It is that one where a new idea (or an old one in new form) is accepted by a minority, while the majority are shouting treason, rubbish, kook, Communist, capitalist, or whatever is the valued term of abuse in that society. The minority develop this idea, at first probably in secrecy, or semi-secrecy, and then more and more visibly, with more and more support until…guess what? This seditious, impossible, wrong-headed idea becomes what is known as “received opinion” and is loved and valued by the majority. Meanwhile, of course, a new idea, still seditious etc. and so forth, has been born somewhere else, and is being cultivated and worked out by a minority. Suppose we redefine the word elite, for our present purposes, to mean any group of people who for any reason are in the possession of ideas that put them ahead of the majority?
If holding certain beliefs or regarding some aspects of life as being too complex to reduce to unconditional conclusions sets me apart from the crowd, and if this standing apart-ness is sedition, and if this is what it means to be an elitist, then I am an unrepentant elitist.
Movies & A Book: Some of The Best Things I’ve Witnessed in 2010
Here’s the best of what I’ve seen this year. I haven’t seen everything. You may disagree with what I have seen. This is life.
FILM:
Inception
Go ahead. Try. Try disagreeing that this is one of the most technically (and perhaps conceptually) elaborate mainstream Hollywood productions released in years which also happens to work as a “movie” that a wide variety of audiences would enjoy watching.
There has been a backlash against Inception. I don’t know how or why this is – perhaps it was over-sold as a deep “puzzle-solver” film, which it is not. And yes, the NYT’s A.O. Scott has a point in his comment that the film’s literal depiction of dreams are lacking psychological heft (outside of Marion Cotillard’s performance as DiCaprio’s wife). In any case, something has caused a revolt against this film and I say this revolt is missing the point.
Inception is, generally speaking, the most watchable, the most fascinating film of 2010. You are allowed to hate it.
A Prophet
I am a huge fan of Jacques Audiard, a French director who has always rewarded the viewer with films (Read My Lips, The Beat My Heart Skipped) that balance passion with style. With A Prophet, Audiard expands his canvas, creating a gritty, novelistic masterpiece on-par with The Godfather (yes). The story concerns a young incarcerated Muslim who slowly rebuilds himself from within the treachery of prison life, rising from under the thumb of a vicious mob leader to become his own person and create his own empire. Epic, patient, and in places extremely violent. People will be referring to this film for years to come even if it has not really made a mark in North America. Again, a masterpiece.
The Eclipse
I realize this Irish film was released in 2009, but it didn’t get here until now. A compelling ghost story which eschews the two-dimensionality of ghost story films. It was around the twenty-minute mark that I realized it was a film which was going to confound my expectations (expectations based upon years and hundreds of similar plot lines): it wasn’t going to squander what it was and fall prey to hackneyed cliché. A gorgeous, touching, ultimately humanistic film with a stand-out performance by Ciarán Hinds as a grieving father of two children who must swallow his pride to escort a loud-mouthed Aidan Quinn through the motions of a book tour of the small coastal city of Cobh, in County Cork. A sublime achievement by director Conor McPherson.
Notable: Winter’s Bone – see it. It’s on DVD now. Like A Simple Plan, it’s a self-contained “rural thriller” (ugh) with a chilling undertone of barren hopelessness. Unlike A Simple Plan, it’s uncomplicated which is what gives it more of an honest strength. Exit Through The Gift Shop is the perhaps best film made about art and the art world that I have seen – like Inception, it’s not trying to be deep, just smart. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World blew me away because I expected it to be weak (perhaps because all the publicity photos inexplicably used a static image of Michael Cera standing against a fucking wall…imagine if you will, trying to sell Star Wars with a picture of Mark Hamill sitting cross-legged in the desert – sounds awesome, eh?). Not only was it not weak, it was the strangest case of “I don’t know why I love this movie but I really do”. Painstakingly, sublimely Toronto-centric (which, unlike the inexplicable promo photos of Michael Cera, shouldn’t be factored into explaining why it didn’t fare well at the box office) and wildly imaginative – those two things have never met before…oh but wait, I forgot the perfect companion piece: Kick Ass – also shot in TO, and also exceedingly expectation-defying (although the climax is kinda drawn-out). As far as performances go, Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) and Colin Firth (The King’s Speech) stand out, along with Winter’s Bone‘s Jennifer Lawrence, and Hailee Steinfeld for True Grit (who, at 14-years, shows huge promise as an actor).
BOOK:
I would have said “BOOKS”, but due to work and school I haven’t read anything published this year (that I can remember), with the exception of John Vaillant’s The Tiger. Lucky for me, since it is without doubt one of the best non-fiction titles I’ve read in years.
The Tiger is a meaty real-life tale of vengeance by the titular beast, in the winter hinterland of the Russian Far East (which the author calls, paradoxically, “the boreal forest”). Vaillant describes an environment historically, politically, and biologically unique, inhabited by hardened outcasts. The shadow of a predator male tiger, known never before to attack without cause, creates a wave of dread throughout the land, with only a small band of volunteers to figure out the mystery. Vaillant provides wave after wave of fascinating detail – examples of how man and beast have evolved throughout time, how human and animal behaviour have worked in similar paths – that by the end of the book you feel as if you should have a credit in Ethology. This is truly a page-turner and I cannot recommend it enough.
