Monday, December 1, 2008
As you might imagine, things work out for Fred and Ginger. Like I said, the story is fairly silly. The characters, too, are pretty thin, and could just as easily have been called "Fred" and "Ginger" with no loss of movie illusion. Nevertheless, the Lucky gambler character is an extension of the suave Astaire persona which lets you know that no matter how bad things look, don't worry, they'll take a turn for the good soon enough. David Thompson, in his New Biographical Dictionary Film, says that, "Astaire is utterly tranquil, hence the inane playboy figures he embodies, men who exist only to walk sweetly across lounges, to preserve rigorous trouser creases and that high, carefree tone of voice."
The payoff of the movie is the dance and the songs. Goodness, the songs. Two of my all-time favorite songs are in Swing Time-- "Just the Way You Look Tonight" and "A Fine Romance". "A Fine Romance" is sung against an amazing snowscape, shown in the image at the top of this entry. I would like to hear the story behind choosing that backdrop. I'm almost positive that it is a studio set, rather than an actual location. I'm guessing that it was up for another movie, and they just used it for that one scene in Swing Time. I think that's the case because there's no special reason for the scene to take place in a winter forest. Probably, the makers of the movie noticed that all of the scenes take place in hotel rooms and night clubs, and they decided they needed an outdoor scene for a change of pace. As integral as the dance scenes are to the success of the movie, amazingly the first dance doesn't happen until almost a half-hour into the movie, when Fred, masquerading as a novice dancer, asks for a dance lesson from Ginger, whose character is a dance instructor. The climax of the movie is a 6-minute song-and-dance performance, "Never Gonna Dance". Fred and Ginger's characters are each about to marry other people, despite the fact that they love each other. Like almost all of Astaire's dances, it's filmed in a single take (there are a few cuts during the initial singing, but none after the dancing begins). In order to keep filming when the dancers went up steps, the camera was mounted on a crane. I have two favorite parts of this dance. The first is when Ginger initially breaks away from Fred after the first bit of dancing. Fred runs and grabs her. His head and hand shake before they dance again. It's an interesting thing to do, even a little bit awkward. It embodies the desperation of a lover who is trying to anything, anything at all, to keep the person he loves from getting away. My other favorite part is right before the end, when Fred spins Ginger three different times. The spins are amazing and energetic. It makes you excited to see them, especially after the somberness of the beginning of the dance. Below is a YouTube of the "Never Gonna Dance" number. I highly suggest watching the video on full screen. I've seen it about 5 times now, and it still takes my breath away, every time I see the dance.
A kindergarten teacher named Poppy is the central character in Happy-Go-Lucky. In real life, she may be insufferable. She is one of those people who is never even a little bit down, whose bubbly setting is stuck on max. If she's not joking, giggling, or bouncing, then she's not awake. I said that in real life, she would be insufferable, but it's hard to believe that in a 2-hour movie in which her character is on the screen for nearly every second, her shtick isn't excruciating. But it isn't. She grows on you. And this is a testament to the actress who plays Poppy, Sally Hawkins, who is expected to be nominated for an Oscar for her work in the movie. Happy-Go-Lucky starts off as a light-hearted few-days-in-the-life story of the eternally silly Poppy. It actually could have probably pulled that off for the whole duration. The counterpoint to Poppy's character is Scott, the tightly-wound driving teacher whom Poppy hires after her bike is stolen. Their back-and-forth is delightfully Abbott-and-Costello-like (or Dwight-and-Jim-like, or Cox-and-J.D.-like, pick your favorite comic duo). Poppy knows how to push Scott's buttons, and despite her seemingly kind nature, she can't help doing it. This interaction is the life of the movie most of the way through. After about the halfway point, several "serious" subjects are thrown into the mix, and, indeed, we see an interesting and deeper side to Poppy's character when she has to deal with a student who is coping with a troubled home life. But, ultimately, this is not a serious movie. When it starts to veer too far towards the darkly serious territory, it rings false. I don't think it is impossible that people like Poppy exist, but in the real world, there is a danger to being so innocently optimistic and cheerful. At times, the movie broaches this, but then it backs off. It either had to go all the way into the dark consequences that linger just on the other side of cheerfulness, or pretend that no such things exist, but going halfway was the worst of all choices. These missteps are small parts of the movie (although one of those small parts is right at the end), so it's little more than a distraction.
So trust me, though unceasingly bubbly, happy people may be grating in real life, not so in this movie. So you should give it a try. And you can have fun annoying your friends when you're out driving by repeating "enraha, enraha, ENRAHA!!!!" over and over again. Watch the movie, and you'll get it.
I'm already regretting saying yes to going to Thanksgiving dinner. I've mentioned before how I'm a loner. What that means is that the prospect of spending a full day meeting with and socializing with people whom I don't know and whom I've never met before is dreadful. I hate small talk. I hate talking about work or sports or where I'm from. I know, right now as I'm writing this, the rational part of my brain is telling me that it won't be terrible, and, in fact, it will almost definitely be a fun and entertaining and generally pleasant experience. But I'm dreading it. I honestly want nothing more than to stay home all day on Thanksgiving and watch House reruns and read and surf the Internet. But I live in a society, and part of living in a society is being social. So I'll be cooking my squash or cucumber or zucchini or whatever rings tomorrow night, and I'll meet new people on Thursday and that will be that, and probably when it's all said and done I'll have a good time. And then if I'm lucky, maybe I'll get home in time to watch some House reruns.
Pauline Kael is my favorite writer.
If I'm ever asked who my favorite writer is, which I never am, but if I ever were, I might give any number of random answers. Thomas Pynchon or Neal Stephenson would be possibilities. At one time, I might have picked Jack Kerouac. I fell so in love with Catcher in the Rye for a while that I might have picked J. D. Salinger on the strength of that one book. I've read more of John Updike than just about any other author, but I can't say have a great affection for his works.
But when I have the time to stare at my bookshelf and make a mental tally of the books I've read and loved, the books I've read and hated, the books I've read and forgotten about, I have to admit that Pauline Kael is the one writer whose writing I would keep coming back to because she has such a gift for words - for being intelligent and engaging and persuasive and maddingly disruptive to your sense of what you thought was true. She was a film critic who made her name in the late 60s into the 70s working for The New Yorker. I first found out about her through reading Roger Ebert's movie reviews, which often referenced Kael. I fell in love with her work when I read the piece Replying to Listeners, which originated as a radio broadcast on KPFA. It begins thusly:
I am resolved to start the New Year right; I don’t want to carry over any unnecessary rancor from 1962. So let me discharge a few debts. I want to say a few words about a communication from a woman listener. She begins with, “Miss Kael, I assume you aren’t married—one loses that nasty, sharp bite in one’s voice when one learns to care about others.” Isn’t it remarkable that women, who used to pride themselves on their chastity, are now just as complacently proud of their married status? They’ve read Freud and they’ve not only got the illusion that being married is healthier, more “mature,” they’ve also got the illusion that it improves their character. This lady is so concerned that I won’t appreciate her full acceptance of femininity that she signs herself with her husband’s name preceded by a Mrs. Why, if this Mrs. John Doe just signed herself Jane Doe, I might confuse her with one of those nasty virgins, I might not understand the warmth and depth of connubial experience out of which she writes.
I wonder, Mrs. John Doe, in your reassuring, protected marital state, if you have considered that perhaps caring about others may bring a bite to the voice? And I wonder if you have considered how difficult it is for a woman in this Freudianized age, which turns out to be a new Victorian age in its attitude to women who do anything, to show any intelligence without being accused of unnatural aggressivity, hateful vindictiveness, or lesbianism. The latter accusation is generally made by men who have had a rough time in an argument; they like to console themselves with the notions that the woman is semi-masculine. The new Freudianism goes beyond Victorianism in its placid assumption that a woman who uses her mind is trying to compete with men. It was bad enough for women who had brains to be considered freaks like talking dogs; now it’s leeringly assumed that they’re trying to grow a penis—which any man will tell you is an accomplishment that puts canine conversation in the shadows.
The end of the piece is something that inspired me to take up, very briefly, a career as a movie critic. And by career, I mean, a 10-minute weekly radio spot on the Rice University student radio station, KTRU, that lasted for one semester. But let's call it a career. Here's what inspired me, the end of Kael's article:
I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.
Let me return from my long blog absence to extol the virtues of melancholy. Or more specifically, let me recommend this link (via Andrew Sullivan) to someone else extolling the virtues of melancholy. I don't have much to add to it except that I think being dishonest and inauthentic does more damage to people than most anybody realizes. Pretending to be happy when you're sad, pretending to be ok when you're not, is a denial of who you are as a person. There are sometimes when self-restraint is called for - there's a quote I Iove from Catcher in the Rye, "I'm always saying 'Glad to've met you' to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though." - but when you start lying to yourself, when you start telling yourself that you're happy when you're not, that's when you are really hurting yourself. It's ok to be sad and down and depressed, but, in our society, it can really feel like it's not ok.
On a different note, the NFL season is about to start, which means another season of Loser Bowl. Loser Bowl is a league run by my sister-in-law, Leanne, in which you have to pick one losing football team every week of the football season. The catch is you can't pick the same team twice in a season. So the first few weeks are, theoretically, easy, but then you start having to pick better and better teams to be losers. I've never come close to winning the league. This year is going to be tough, I think.... the Chiefs seem pretty crummy, but they're not completely crummy, so as soon as I pick them, they'll surprise me with an out-of-the-blue win and ruin my Loser Bowl season. The Dolphins should stink, but they look like they're getting better. The Raiders are saying that they want to run the ball about 600 times this year, which is, um actually, a pretty good idea. But the thing is, for the run-heavy offense to work, you need to have a defense that, how should I put this diplomatically, lacks suckiness. Which the Raiders defense traditionally does not lack. So we'll see. Speaking of defenses that lack suckiness, it looks like Houston is willing to start anyone and everyone at cornerback, so be expecting a call. And the new quarterback in Arizona is Kurt Warner, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the old quarterback in Arizona, Kurt Warner, who also bears an uncanny resemblance to your grandfather. Because he's so old. It's a joke, laugh! Ok, well, I'm calling it a night.
Now that Barack Obama has more or less sewn up the Democratic nomination for President, you are going to start to hear a slew of stories about the next big dramatic event in the Presidential race - selection of the Vice Presidential candidates. Already, you might have caught news stories about John McCain inviting potential VP candidates to his house for a Memorial Day barbeque. As the last few Democratic primaries play out, you'll hear more and more stories speculating on whether Obama will offer the VP slot to Hillary Clinton as part of a deal to get her to leave the race. Regardless of what you hear, you should keep in mind that it doesn't matter. As this post at The Plank says: "[T]he evidence indicates that running-mate selections usually have zero impact on election outcomes, even in the running mate's home state." So feel free to ignore all the news stories that breathlessly speculate on all the possibilities, typically illustrating their points with bar graphs and poll data and quotes from inside each campaign.
Speaking about Vice Presidential candidate speculation, I read a story about Jim Webb, one of the leading Democratic VP possibilities, that made me not just enormously disappointed but also repulsed by someone whom I had admired until quite recently. One of the major knocks against Webb as a VP candidate is that he has made questionable comments about women in the past. I didn't quite realize the extent of his questionable comments until I read about the specifics of them in this post on Matthew Yglesias's blog, by guest poster Kathy G. In a 1979 article arguing that women don't belong in the military, Webb declared that no senior female in a leadership position at the Naval Academy won her rank by merit, thereby impugning the accomplishments of every female midshipman and throwing fuel on the smoldering resentments of a vocal minority of disgruntled midshipmen. This article had a very real effect on women at the Academy. Kathleen Murray, a 1984 Naval Academy graduate, said, "This article was brandished repeatedly. [Men] quoted and used it as an excuse to mistreat us." More recently, Webb has tried to minimize the sexual abuse of women by Navy and Marine officers in the Tailhook scandal, placing the blame on "social engineers" who were insistent on ever-increasing sexual mixing in the military and on feminists who seized upon the Tailhook scandal to attack military culture.
I hope that, for everyone reading this, I'm merely stating the obvious when I say that the time has long since passed when it was questionable whether women should be in the military or whether women should be officers in the military or whether women should have equal status to men in the military. It's amazing to me that people still argue, quite vociferously, that that's not the case. I have a feeling that 25 years from now, long after openly gay people will have been allowed in the military, there will be similar situations where hardline military folks, typically from traditional military families, will make ludicrous arguments about how much better the military was when the gays weren't messing everything up. Just like 35 years ago, I'm sure there were people arguing about how much better things were when blacks and whites were separated in the military. Like I said, it's discouraging that these things have to be fights. I don't claim to be more enlightened that anybody else, but when you're doing dangerous, difficult, stressful work, then it seems to be that anybody who can get the job done should be welcomed and accepted whether they are a person of color or whether they have boobs or whether they share their bed with a person of the same sex.
I realize I'm very late to be jumping on the happy holidays train of emails (or very early to be starting off the happy valentine's day train of emails) but it's been so nice hearing from everyone that I didn't want to be left out. And I also wanted everyone to know that I haven't dropped off the face of the Earth, which some of you may have thought based on how terrible I've been at replying to emails for the last few months.
I don't have any big news or revelations. I went home to Pittsburgh for the holidays and had a wonderful time with my family. I even took a detour to visit my brother in Rochester, NY and see his new house. As you all know, I started a new job teaching introductory physics at the U.S. Air Force Academy in August. This is what's made me a terrible email correspondent. Teaching is the most amazing, difficult, and time-consuming job I've had by a longshot. My student evaluations were average (compared to other physics teachers) and my students performed a little below-average in the class, so I can't say I was a rousing success right off the bat, but I absolutely love being in the classroom and towards the end of the semester, when I realized that classes were going to be over, I realized how much I was going to be missing those 19-year old kids who probably wanted to be anywhere except in physics class three days a week, but who were amazing people to get to know and work with. I don't want to tarnish my reputation as a rock-hard cold-as-ice manly man, but I choked up a little, or maybe a lot, on the last day of classes. I hate being such a crybaby anymore, but it seems like I'm always saying goodbye to people I adore.
Anyway, I'm teaching a new set of students this year, and I'm just as busy and just as much loving the job. We have a long weekend this weekend, which is how I'm finding the time to write this long email. I read some teaching handbooks over the break, so I'm hoping the students like the class a little better and do a little better on the tests. We'll see. I've already been told, unofficially, that I'm hired on for another year. I'm going to be course director for the intro. physics classes this summer. Course director, I'm told, is Latin for "work your ass off", so I'm hoping to squeeze a vacation in before the class starts in July, after which I'll have no time whatsoever.
Well, I wish you all the best and I hope you know that you're all in my thoughts often. That little two week trip really does seem to have been a life-changing experience for many of us in both large and small ways, and it makes me so excited to hear about where we've all gone from then.
Os extrano muchismo,
"Total Eclipse of the Heart" falls into the group of songs, best epitomized by Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", of rock drama ballads that sound and feel momentous, but upon further analysis, are mostly just confused imagery with orchestral backing. Which doesn't make them bad songs, but doesn't make them good songs either. Led Zeppelin's "D'yer Maker" is a cousin of these songs. It's a love song that forgoes sappy love lyrics and uses mostly nonsense lyrics - "Oh oh oh oh oh, you don't have to go oh oh oh oh":
I was a little disappointed by the Espenson article because for whatever weird reason I'm endlessly fascinated by the economics of Hollywood. Edward Jay Epstein wrote a book called The Big Picture about how Hollywood really makes money off of movies. The Washington Post, in their review of the book, wrote:
Each week the box-office grosses rung up by the big new movies are published, and each week it is near universally assumed, reflexively and reverentially, that they represent not merely an accurate ranking of current films but also an accurate record of how much they are making for the studios that produced them. Tommyrot, says Epstein. These seemingly huge earnings are wildly misleading, as the cost of making, distributing and showing new movies almost always far exceeds what they earn in theaters. Hollywood's highly imaginative accounting practices disguise this reality, but more to the point, theaters aren't where movies make money any more.
And Epstein writes in the book:
The main task of today's studio is to collect fees for the use of the intellectual properties they control in one form or another and then to allocate those fees among the parties -- including themselves -- who create, develop, and finance the properties. It is now essentially a service organization, a dream clearinghouse rather than a dream factory. As clearinghouses, they are very different creatures from their predecessors, and this difference is as apparent from looking at their financial reporting as it is from looking at their products.
Epstein also wrote a regular column for Slate called the The Hollywood Economist where he examined different aspects of the Hollywood money-making system, talking about, among other things, why Tom Cruise might be a wacky Scientology nut, but he's a brilliant businessman, and describing what steps you have to go through if you want to make an indie film, and telling why, until recent changes to their tax codes, Germany is an awesome place to find investors for your film. Anyway, people like me who watch movies to see something good and artistic would be well-served to never lose sight of the idea that, in a very direct way, films released in theaters are a vehicle to sell action figures in America and DVDs in Europe and Asia. If artistry manages to seep through, it is more a side effect rather than an intention of the film business.
I officially graduated from my DFP orientation today. I can now work on preparing lessons pretty much full-time until classes start on August 9, except I have one more all-day DF orientation thing to go to on Thursday... And now you're asking DFP, DF, WTF??? Or else you've already gotten bored and clicked over to Go Fug Yourself to find out what fashion atrocity Sienna Miller is currently perpertrating (sample quote from one of today's entries on the site: "The makers of Kate Mara's dress would like to apologize to Ms. Mara, to the fans, and to the fine people at the premiere of Stardust: The Movie With Tons Of Famous People In It Like Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert DeNiro, Yet Which Somehow I Had No Idea Was Even Being Made.") Anywho, the military loves loves loves abbreviations. So DF stands for Department of the Faculty, DFP is Department of the Faculty - Physics, the U.S. Air Force Academy is USAFA, which is pronounced you-soff-a, if I go to a conference, I'm going TDY, and I have no idea what that means, and so on and so forth. So what happened today was that I finished by physics deparment orientation, but I still have one more general faculty orientation thing to go to this week. Most of the orientation stuff has centered on the learning focused approach to teaching that is being pushed across the Academy. Learning focus is a teaching technique that, tautologically, focuses on what students are learning rather than on what teachers are teaching. It seems obvious, but most traditional college teaching has been based on the assumption that students are just dump trucks waiting for teachers to shovel knowledge into them. Under that assumption, anything the teacher writes on the board is new knowledge for the student. But recent studies have shown that students don't learn that way. Just because something gets written on the board doesn't mean that students know it. Learning focus says that you have to actively engage the students in the learning process. Prompt them to arrive at knowledge rather than feeding it to them, motivate them to want to learn rather than just have them sit zombified in class just because their major or a general education requirement says they have to be there. There are also some other aspects that are a bit more difficult for me to see. One of the things is that you have to form a trust relationship with students, which in itself is fairly noncontroversial. In order to have a good learning environment, you have to trust students and they have to trust you. But one aspect of the trust relationship, at least according to one of the books we had to read, is that we should try to avoid forcing students to do work by grading them on it. So, if we want students to read the textbook, we shouldn't have a graded quiz every few days to make sure they are keeping up with their reading. We should trust that they are doing the reading. But the thing is, I've been a student, and no matter how exciting or stimulating the class is, I'm not reading that stinking textbook. I still hate reading textbooks, even when I understand what they're talking about. So I don't know if I can ever see that happening - motivating students to read their text just through trusting and inspiring them. But who knows, maybe I'm more inspiring than I know.
The Thing Called Love, River Phoenix's last movie (I think, Wikipedia says it was one of his last roles), also starring Sandra Bullock and Samantha Mathis, who is totally off the radar now but gets a blue ribbon for awesomeness if for no other reason than her role in Pump Up the Volume, is an amazing underrated movie about up-and-coming country music stars and about Dermot Mulroney constantly getting screwed over, both movie-worthy subjects in my book. Anyway, from that movie came one of my favorite songs, "Blame It On Your Lyin Cheatin Cold Dead-Beatin Two-Timing Double-Dealin Me-Mistreating Lovin Heart", known more often by it's short name "Blame It On Your Heart". Below is the movie version of the song, and below that is the real version of the song, by Patty Loveless.