"If the outstanding films are never all visible at the same time until the window of their contemporaneity has closed, it means they are truly contemporary only for a small group of people—critics, programmers, and distributors. (The rest of us are like people looking at stars that appear bright but, in their own real time, may have already gone dim.) And if we indeed have a common agreement that this small group can declare what the contemporary cinema is, let’s acknowledge that the conditions under which they exercise their judgment are usually bad. Programmers see almost everything on DVD—usually in an office, at home on TV, on a laptop—or else, like critics, at other festivals, often at the rate of three or four a day, a rate that pulverizes both discrimination and memory."
(Chris Fujiwara, "To Have Done with the Contemporary Cinema," n+1)
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Monday, August 16, 2010
Double Identity
A Val Kilmer vehicle, direct-to-video (or, if not, might as well have been), with a title that bears the brute generic beauty of exactly this kind of movie. Vague potential to be misread as Double Indemnity, which might only led to a couple of disappointed, perplexed viewers. It's also known as Fake Identity: less elegant, more to the point, still not entirely "accurate" with regard to the plot. I admit that I only paid half-attention to the film, and I wouldn't call it good, but I admire the fact that it trusts in its audience's either intelligence or inertia enough to withhold exposition of its outlines of the premise until the hour mark. We don't really know who's doing what, who's working for whom & why, and whether or not Kilmer's character really even does have a "double identity."
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Step
There a plenty of things to say about the richly formulaic world of the Step Up movies, and the alternately lazy-intense, infuriating-charming stories they tell. Nobody needs to tell me about how these movies are awful because I'm aware of the ways in which they are shallow and mediocre; but in some ways they are wonderful - such as in Step Up 3D's reconciliation scene between Adam Sevani and Alyson Stoner, where the "you got served" logic underlying the dancing* goes to the lavatory for a few minutes, and the logic of the classical Hollywood musical takes over, and a - sincerely sincerely sincerely - beautiful, fantastic dance number breaks out. I guarantee you that this sequence will be better than any scene in at least eight (8) Best Picture-nominated movies this year.
* The pinnacles of the hip-hop dance battle in narrative film, that I know of, are Beat Street's amazing subway battle (the set-up is key, more so than the dancing itself), and Step Up 2: The Streets' fantastic final dance (which Step Up 3D alludes to in its own dance battle scenes more than once, but never replicates, let alone tops). I'm happy to accept nominations for other 'greats.'
* The pinnacles of the hip-hop dance battle in narrative film, that I know of, are Beat Street's amazing subway battle (the set-up is key, more so than the dancing itself), and Step Up 2: The Streets' fantastic final dance (which Step Up 3D alludes to in its own dance battle scenes more than once, but never replicates, let alone tops). I'm happy to accept nominations for other 'greats.'
To Hear Your Banjo Play
Pete Seeger, Alan Lomax, Richard Leacock, Woody Guthrie, Willard Van Dyke, Irving Lerner - amazing, the names and talent that can gather around a 16-minute film from 1947 about the banjo.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Realism: Vagaries of Lighting
Above: a tame/risque scene from the James Cameron potboiler-blockbuster True Lies (1994).
Those who would focus solely on the masters and masterpieces are missing out. (Those who focus mainly the Cameron-type films aren't likely to be regular readers of this blog, so I don't think I need to address them, right?) A major reason why the Great Men / Great Film traditionalists are missing out is because aesthetic excellence is - and must be - always relational. The mountain of dreck & routine justifies, contextualizes the jewels. But even more interestingly, if you ask me, the entire field of a/v culture is more fertile when aesthetic standards are ... I do not say abandoned (how could one even pretend to do this?), but placed to one side for a bit.
At a certain point, who cares if True Lies is an awful film, or an awesome flick, or a "genuinely underrated" something-or-other? More important is how we use it and what we draw from it. I have a mild sentimental attachment to True Lies, this movie having entertained me greatly over 5-10 viewings during my early teen years. So, revisiting chunks of it on Netflix Instant over the last few days, I was struck by the scene above: Jamie Lee Curtis' striptease.
No, not as striptease.
It's the lighting. (And the sound.)
We are to believe that Curtis' character won't recognize her own husband in this dim light - not even his silhouette. I'm sure a cognitive psychologist would be able to explain to me something about vision & expectation, but I'm inclined to believe that a realist direction of the scene - in this light, in this sound - would inevitably show Curtis quickly growing suspicious, and from there quickly discovering the truth. And I'm sure Cameron and whoever was working with him would have been able to develop the interaction in a suitably "entertaining" way if Curtis just ended up recognizing Schwarzenegger. So the question is: why this particular deviation of psychological believability in a film that draws all of its energy from the interplay between the quotidian and the violent-sublime-absurd?
(And the sound, about which I have even less-formed thoughts, is intriguing here too: presumably Curtis does not hear the clicks of the play/stop/ffwd/rew buttons, but in close-up the film indeed replicates them, shows that this tape recorder is a perfectly "normal" tape recorder, not a special digital gadget requiring special CIA-ninja training ... is the disconnect the blatant, and open, jump from realism to fantasy, i.e., realism as a type of fantasy?)
In the videotape of the film I saw the film on multiple times in the mid-'90s, as I recall, the image was darker, murkier: it was somewhat more believable that Curtis wouldn't recognize Schwarzenegger. The YouTube clip above is a little closer to this VHS experience. The more optimal digital future, however, has scrubbed the composition clean - it seems - and at least on Netflix's stream, it seems baldly impossible that Curtis can't just recognize her husband sitting in a chair a couple yards away from her.
How are we to take this series of images? Depending on the level of incredulity one applies to the narrative as well as the medium (and condition of the medium) in which one views the film, the lighting is a marker either of very subtly, deftly coded realism or quasi-realism (if the image is murky and Schwarzenegger cannot be recognized in long-shot by the viewer), or it is a bold divorcement from realism that requires our faith, much like the scenes of Westerns shot in la nuit américaine.
The Moment of Decision
Below: something about the inscrutability of the child actor ("child actor") - the last scene of the first episode of Freaks & Geeks. The character Sam Weir's hopes to dance to a slow song with his freshman year crush look to be horribly, inevitably stunted once Styx's tune starts the rock-out portion ... but there's a moment of beauty around the 2:34 mark here, because it looks like - crucially! - the body decides what to do first, and then the cerebral cortex does, and for that split second John Francis Daley's face becomes a portal into infinity, folks.
Sunday, August 08, 2010
Quote of the Day
“I am not a historian; I am a writer challenged by enigmas and lies, who would like the present to stop being a painful atonement for the past, who would like to imagine the future rather than accept it: a hunter of scattered voices, lost and true.”
(Eduardo Galeano,"Words About Memory and About Fire," trans. Mark Fried)
(Eduardo Galeano,"Words About Memory and About Fire," trans. Mark Fried)
Knots
In cinema there inheres a promise of viewership - as with writing, painting: the medium is a form given to intentional reception as well as to interception. Some films may be said to formally invite or close off viewers in some patterned way (the ‘openness’ of the classical Hollywood commercial text as opposed to austere high modernism, or dialogue-free chase film in distinction to in-jokey film about the film industry). There is truth to this. But a film is a knot of social forces, a note inscribed by actors, propelled into the social sphere - as weapon, encouragement, shelter, admonition …
Different 'discursive shapes' themselves structure an apparently discrete audiovisual object, not only in its production/encryption, but in its 'afterlives,' and in its directionality when released into the sphere as a knot (which is sometimes well before its full release). These shapes describe the cultural reckoning around cinema - not cinema as an entire medium or entity, per se, nor individual films, but in terms of cinema as an agglomeration of myriad strings of knots, beads (strings of types of knottings).
Different 'discursive shapes' themselves structure an apparently discrete audiovisual object, not only in its production/encryption, but in its 'afterlives,' and in its directionality when released into the sphere as a knot (which is sometimes well before its full release). These shapes describe the cultural reckoning around cinema - not cinema as an entire medium or entity, per se, nor individual films, but in terms of cinema as an agglomeration of myriad strings of knots, beads (strings of types of knottings).
Ears
Sergio Leone’s debute feature, Il Colosso di Rodi (1961): a captured rebel leader is tortured by having a bell placed over his restrained, upright body, and beated repeatedly. When removed, thin rivulets of blood run down his neck from his ears (particularly visible on his right ear). A visual echo, later in the film, when the hero (Rory Calhoun as Darios) exits the Colossus’ ear and is pursued by red-cloaked soldiers, steaming out of the statue’s right ear.
Friday, August 06, 2010
Monday, August 02, 2010
Realism C
A while back I caught up with a critics' favorite, Children of Men, about which I can mostly only muster very bad things to say. (Disappointments like this are what, in part, prevent me from staying as comprehensive as I could be on the apparently important new releases each season or year.) Tripping over itself to make hackneyed decisions as quickly as possible - most of the time - Children even goes so far as to have a baby who conveniently never cries ... until of course, it is narratively convenient for the sound of a crying babe to touch the humanity deep within the military-industrial complex, and cause soldiers to lower their weapons. What point is a dirt-smudged face, or the glorious thrill of depicting a "radical underground," in the face of such illusionistic wish fulfillment?
Of course, to be too disappointed in Children of Men would probably be to give too much credit (or at least the wrong kinds of credit) to the system which had produced the film. A lot of my problems with Children stem not from the film being incompetent than from my utter distaste for its organizing principles, which precede and will outlive it. Only a poor, callow sort of masochist could truly (a) exhibit the rudiments of a taste much superior to the Hollywood companies, and also (b) continually let the jaw drop at failure to live up to these standards.
{ - Hollywood produces a steady trickle of decent middlebrow films, and puts out a fair number of good genre films. Of course, Hollywood also bleeds into non-Hollywood in these respects, e.g., the EuropaCorp family, which is working wonders in putting out vulgar/ian beauties. Who could deny that any one of the Transporter movies is far, far better than most films that get nominated for Best Picture these days? Even Taken - which is basically EuropaCorp consuming zombielike, shamelessly, a D.W. Griffith purity narrative - has its fine efficiency of storytelling, competent performances, and fewer impulses to make a solipsistic trendy mess of itself than a lot of big-budget films. The number of real Hollywood masterpieces the past decade is shockingly low, though, which is why the people who early on pointed to contemporary television as (at least) the US's closest industrial a/v equivalent to classical Hollywood were, we must admit, quite correct. - }
One of the problems with a film like Children of Men, then, is not so much that it fails on some level of realism, as that it feints toward certain kinds of realism (sociopolitical "hardhittingness," like a TV current affairs show in thick black eyeglasses) by means of the scaffolding of sheer fantasy ... the fantasies of grime, privation, and dystopia that are well-worn in Hollywood storytelling.
*
Related points, on another movie (one I haven't seen yet):
"A look at the above production still shows that the people who make these films haven’t a clue what dirt, grime, poverty or desperation really look and feel like. The trailer showed more of the same – again the fraudulent clothes out of costumes, theatrically gritted up but nothing like what a pair of pants worn a week on a farm look like, much less the endless months McCarthy’s book depicts. And ditto for the burnt out cars, wrecked towns, and the glowingly lit skin of our protagonists." (Jon Jost)
*
Recent promos for CNN International's "Beyond Borders" have irked me in their smarmy, privileged shallowness. Always, the modernist-enlightenment call to progress, innovation, going beyond borders, a new perspective. Delivered with sharp suit & glasses, a British - or, if American, moneyed - speech (a sign that you're not one of the Fox News faux downhome anchors), and an earnest gaze. And then, after the fearless call to go beyond, we get ... the soundbite.
Of course, as with Children of Men, to be too disappointed in this is to risk the foolishness of granting too much credit to begin with.
Of course, to be too disappointed in Children of Men would probably be to give too much credit (or at least the wrong kinds of credit) to the system which had produced the film. A lot of my problems with Children stem not from the film being incompetent than from my utter distaste for its organizing principles, which precede and will outlive it. Only a poor, callow sort of masochist could truly (a) exhibit the rudiments of a taste much superior to the Hollywood companies, and also (b) continually let the jaw drop at failure to live up to these standards.
{ - Hollywood produces a steady trickle of decent middlebrow films, and puts out a fair number of good genre films. Of course, Hollywood also bleeds into non-Hollywood in these respects, e.g., the EuropaCorp family, which is working wonders in putting out vulgar/ian beauties. Who could deny that any one of the Transporter movies is far, far better than most films that get nominated for Best Picture these days? Even Taken - which is basically EuropaCorp consuming zombielike, shamelessly, a D.W. Griffith purity narrative - has its fine efficiency of storytelling, competent performances, and fewer impulses to make a solipsistic trendy mess of itself than a lot of big-budget films. The number of real Hollywood masterpieces the past decade is shockingly low, though, which is why the people who early on pointed to contemporary television as (at least) the US's closest industrial a/v equivalent to classical Hollywood were, we must admit, quite correct. - }
One of the problems with a film like Children of Men, then, is not so much that it fails on some level of realism, as that it feints toward certain kinds of realism (sociopolitical "hardhittingness," like a TV current affairs show in thick black eyeglasses) by means of the scaffolding of sheer fantasy ... the fantasies of grime, privation, and dystopia that are well-worn in Hollywood storytelling.
*
Related points, on another movie (one I haven't seen yet):
"A look at the above production still shows that the people who make these films haven’t a clue what dirt, grime, poverty or desperation really look and feel like. The trailer showed more of the same – again the fraudulent clothes out of costumes, theatrically gritted up but nothing like what a pair of pants worn a week on a farm look like, much less the endless months McCarthy’s book depicts. And ditto for the burnt out cars, wrecked towns, and the glowingly lit skin of our protagonists." (Jon Jost)
*
Recent promos for CNN International's "Beyond Borders" have irked me in their smarmy, privileged shallowness. Always, the modernist-enlightenment call to progress, innovation, going beyond borders, a new perspective. Delivered with sharp suit & glasses, a British - or, if American, moneyed - speech (a sign that you're not one of the Fox News faux downhome anchors), and an earnest gaze. And then, after the fearless call to go beyond, we get ... the soundbite.
Of course, as with Children of Men, to be too disappointed in this is to risk the foolishness of granting too much credit to begin with.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Word & Image
"The second great event that affects the image-itself also closely linked to television, this great machine that speaks even more than it shows-is a more and more profound relation, penetrating the image itself, between words and images, making it more difficult still to speak about “the image” since it is so often permeated with language and voice. Here again, the history of cinema returns: words intimately linked with the image in silent film (following the old tradition of words in painting), the establishment of talking cinema, and above all the expansion of voice as the material support of fiction and reflection in all the great works of modern cinema. But here again, video precipitates things by making language return in force in the material of the image and everywhere around it, with enhanced freedom, strength, and an implied and disturbing power." (Raymond Bellour, "The Power of Words, The Power of Images," trans. Elisabeth Lyon)
"There have been several attempts, none very successful, to analyze the iconography of D.W. Griffith's melodramas. An iconographic approach to early cinema was advanced by Erwin Panofsky, who believed that a persistently iconographic stage was a necessary moment in the way cinema evolved its semantic strategies. Traditional iconography helps us to understand early cinema. It functions a little like the subtitles in silent movies, which, according to Panofsky, played a role analogous to that of medieval tituli . . ." (Mikhail Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias, p. 10, trans. Harsha Ram)
"There have been several attempts, none very successful, to analyze the iconography of D.W. Griffith's melodramas. An iconographic approach to early cinema was advanced by Erwin Panofsky, who believed that a persistently iconographic stage was a necessary moment in the way cinema evolved its semantic strategies. Traditional iconography helps us to understand early cinema. It functions a little like the subtitles in silent movies, which, according to Panofsky, played a role analogous to that of medieval tituli . . ." (Mikhail Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias, p. 10, trans. Harsha Ram)
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Realism B
"Irony is also part of the conspiracy of art." (Baudrillard)
"In a bourgeois country, just as in a Communist land, they disapprove of “escapism” as a solitary vice, as a debilitating and wretched perversion. Modern society discredits the fugitive so that no one will listen to his account of his journeys. Art or history, man’s imagination or his tragic and noble destiny, these are not criteria which modern mediocrity will tolerate. “Escapism” is the fleeting vision of abolished splendors and the probability of an implacable verdict on today’s society." (Nicolás Gómez Dávila)
Double bill - Hail the Conquering Hero and When Willie Comes Marching Home. When the populace gets plucked to serve national interests abroad, escapist narratives take on "real" significance. The dream factory produces confections which act as salves ...
"In a bourgeois country, just as in a Communist land, they disapprove of “escapism” as a solitary vice, as a debilitating and wretched perversion. Modern society discredits the fugitive so that no one will listen to his account of his journeys. Art or history, man’s imagination or his tragic and noble destiny, these are not criteria which modern mediocrity will tolerate. “Escapism” is the fleeting vision of abolished splendors and the probability of an implacable verdict on today’s society." (Nicolás Gómez Dávila)
Double bill - Hail the Conquering Hero and When Willie Comes Marching Home. When the populace gets plucked to serve national interests abroad, escapist narratives take on "real" significance. The dream factory produces confections which act as salves ...
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Realism A
The detail. Above: sweat stains on the back of the policeman's shirt after he's just exited the car (in Quick Change, directed by Bill Murray and Howard Franklin, 1990). I would be highly surprised if a "detail" like this were ever allowed to make it into a movie like, say, The Dark Knight, even though gritty "details" - and the posturing that underscores such grit - are a cornerstone of the appeal of the contemporary Genre/A films.
The unremarked-upon sweat stain is the sort of detail that can anchor an image to reality; it might coax us (viewers) to project that reality, to begin or continue to wonder what it is, to hold in our heads a relation between the image & the world. The scenario may be ridiculous or fantastic, but there is a corporeal or sensuous link that remains which is erased by an image scrubbed too clean, where one can't imagine (or is not led to imagine) the feel of cloth upon the body, the humidity and odors of a hot city street, or the taste of a hot dog from a sidewalk vendor. It's the difference, to me, between visions of civilizational collapse as seen in Children of Men and Time of the Wolf: two critical darlings, the former being (in my eyes) a horrendously bad film, and the latter being a quite good one. Part of the difference is that Haneke's movie tries to imagine and think through the sensuous and emotional terrain of civilized people living through the crash, a day at a time. The characters in Children of Men are going through a theme park version of a crash, it seems to me. (More on this particular point in a forthcoming post.)
That these aspects of the world are often jettisoned from cinema is just a fact of its history, and of its continuing practice. The power to ignore all such things and yet still aspire to any sort of realism, a kind rhetorical access to reality, is one level at which cinema operates "ideologically."
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Airbungler
Admittedly, I'm otherwise an easy mark for offbeat genre films that look like they're trying to do something interesting. I'll give M. Night Shyamalan plenty of room to stretch. I like, at least on some level, all of his films that I've seen, even the one that I think is still largely beyond redemption on most rational bases (The Lady in the Water). He has bad taste, true, but I don't even feel the urge to hold it against him. I do wonder though if he's reached the point where, between his vocal, loyal fans, and his snap-judgment detractors, there is no longer any room for constructive criticism.
I was the only person in the theater for The Last Airbender - it was a Monday, noon showing and I was killing time because my car was in the shop. So I can't say a sociological word about how it played to "the audience." But I'm curious if my experience seeing this film is how most people feel when they have seen the last few (heavily, heavily criticized) Shyamalan titles. And I do think that here Shyamalan has strayed from believing, himself, in the travails of his characters (thus conveying this conviction to the filmmaking) to assuming that the audience was already on board, so he wouldn't need to do any work at getting them on board. Maybe it's because this wasn't an original screenplay, and that Shyamalan was handling a franchise; I don't know. The film is oriented toward children, and it does presumably have some global market ... so one can almost overlook the simplistic dialogue. Yet ... this movie takes no risks! No risks in trying to show us (e.g.) the chemistry between the pony-tailed fellow and the Northern Water Princess ... yet, at the same time, Shyamalan apparently feels it is necessary to have characters introducing other characters in order to say things like, "The avatar has something he has to say to you." Honestly!? (Regarding belief and risks, see Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's letter to Abel Ferrara...)
I suspect that if one watched The Last Airbender with some Pink Floyd album (or two) substituting for the soundtrack, things would be far more bearable. Even then, the imagery itself is so ridiculous that I was reminded of something I had previously (and charitably) forgotten, the whitewashing of the cast, so that the three heroes are caucasian but the "tribes" they represent are suitably "ethnic." The mismatch is so obvious in the film itself that it's distracting. I'd be more willing to temporarily overlook "whitewashing" as just your everyday Hollywood racism if The Last Airbender didn't make most of its supporting characters and background players "ethnic." But this, and Shyamalan's on-the-record profession of love for vague concepts like 'Hinduism,' or 'Japan,' just makes this film even worse.
My personal bone to pick with a lot of commercial historical, sci-fi, or fantasy stories is that, in trying to imagine a very different world, the film (or whatever) in question almost inevitably makes a few broad-brush changes to our own world, and then sutures up the gaps by making characters behave in utterly recognizable (and often comfortingly stupid) ways. Vocal intonations (and vocabulary/phraseology), gestures, hairstyles, characters' morality and mores, it all seems like such trifling coin to throw in the big fountain of Imagination. What I'd give for a for more movies & miniseries that were actually invested in probing differences, in imagining differences. It speaks to another problem at the heart of realism, and while this post isn't quite about that, it does help further set the stage for more to come here at EL ...
I was the only person in the theater for The Last Airbender - it was a Monday, noon showing and I was killing time because my car was in the shop. So I can't say a sociological word about how it played to "the audience." But I'm curious if my experience seeing this film is how most people feel when they have seen the last few (heavily, heavily criticized) Shyamalan titles. And I do think that here Shyamalan has strayed from believing, himself, in the travails of his characters (thus conveying this conviction to the filmmaking) to assuming that the audience was already on board, so he wouldn't need to do any work at getting them on board. Maybe it's because this wasn't an original screenplay, and that Shyamalan was handling a franchise; I don't know. The film is oriented toward children, and it does presumably have some global market ... so one can almost overlook the simplistic dialogue. Yet ... this movie takes no risks! No risks in trying to show us (e.g.) the chemistry between the pony-tailed fellow and the Northern Water Princess ... yet, at the same time, Shyamalan apparently feels it is necessary to have characters introducing other characters in order to say things like, "The avatar has something he has to say to you." Honestly!? (Regarding belief and risks, see Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's letter to Abel Ferrara...)
I suspect that if one watched The Last Airbender with some Pink Floyd album (or two) substituting for the soundtrack, things would be far more bearable. Even then, the imagery itself is so ridiculous that I was reminded of something I had previously (and charitably) forgotten, the whitewashing of the cast, so that the three heroes are caucasian but the "tribes" they represent are suitably "ethnic." The mismatch is so obvious in the film itself that it's distracting. I'd be more willing to temporarily overlook "whitewashing" as just your everyday Hollywood racism if The Last Airbender didn't make most of its supporting characters and background players "ethnic." But this, and Shyamalan's on-the-record profession of love for vague concepts like 'Hinduism,' or 'Japan,' just makes this film even worse.
My personal bone to pick with a lot of commercial historical, sci-fi, or fantasy stories is that, in trying to imagine a very different world, the film (or whatever) in question almost inevitably makes a few broad-brush changes to our own world, and then sutures up the gaps by making characters behave in utterly recognizable (and often comfortingly stupid) ways. Vocal intonations (and vocabulary/phraseology), gestures, hairstyles, characters' morality and mores, it all seems like such trifling coin to throw in the big fountain of Imagination. What I'd give for a for more movies & miniseries that were actually invested in probing differences, in imagining differences. It speaks to another problem at the heart of realism, and while this post isn't quite about that, it does help further set the stage for more to come here at EL ...
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Advert
The film done in the style of a lengthy advertisement (slick, sensuous, frequently under threat of becoming just vapid): after a while I've come to realize that I sometimes like this style, a hard fact to face for the part of me that revels in some other austere cinematic traditions & lineages. Nevertheless: Vittorio De Seta's Un uomo a metà, Tom Ford's A Single Man, strains of a few Pere Portabella films (not to mention a few by Godard and Antonioni) ... I remember the first time I watched Fallen Angels by Wong Kar-Wai (on VHS, shortly after I'd seen Chungking Express), and I failed to realize at first that I was watching the trailer for the film, which oddly ran before the feature on the videocassette ... disoriented by the weirdness of the "opening" of the film, I figured that this was what a more advanced cinema looked like.
The vulgarity of advertising might blind some of us to the fact that advertisements - by necessity - need to exercise a lot of skills necessary in the creation of art in order to effectively communicate. Advertisements that "aren't quite art" may often be soulless or what have you, but a lot of times they look & feel something like art because they have so much else in place - traditions, strategies, continuities, short cuts. When a film takes some of these aesthetics and mimics them (often echoing back through cinema what had been cinema originally a few decades before - echoes of perfume ads that echoed Resnais films) it may be tempting to overlook the style, say that it is merely shallow, not bother ourselves to see if it is, instead, both sumptuous/sensuous and efficient, condensed, intelligently abbreviated.
Which brings us to I Am Love / Io sono l'amore (Luca Guadagnino, 2009), about which I'm still working out my opinions. I liked it a great deal but after one viewing I can't tease apart the evidence as to whether it was simply a slick looking experiment, in the style of a fashionable commercial, that I "bought" ... or if it indeed the style looked slick but held multitudes. Was I duped or treated to a luxurious experience? This film seems simple, bare, austere, but also expensive, magnificent, haute. All as it was surely intended on the surface - but it also seems this way in terms of its symbols, its internal references. What hooked me with regard to this 'cool melodrama' is how subtly or obliquely it registers its dramatic lines. Its subject matter includes processes, manners, perceptions. Where does one stand, how loudly is one permitted to sigh or speak, how is a banquet pulled off (and not just from the receiving end), who does one comfort (and how) in the wake of a family tragedy - these gestures are handled, foregrounded, delicately as in a film by Shimizu, Ozu, or certain John Fords (all directors that are in other respects quite alien to I Am Love). And this is precisely why scenes that would seem to play as self-parody instead work in an almost primal way ... in another context, or filmed slightly differently, Tilda Swinton's Sanremo love scene (for instance) would, should induce howls of laughter. But I find it instead comforting and erotic; the scene where her character tells Antonio her childhood name ("Kitesh. Say it.") is heart-wrenching. Thus I'm tempted to say that if so much of cinema is in fact the result of industrialism and commercialism (the content-output of a ravenous machine), at least in a few cases the most brutally consumerist devices have nevertheless provided the cinema, or at least the privileged realm of the art cinema, with some rather beautiful effects ...
The vulgarity of advertising might blind some of us to the fact that advertisements - by necessity - need to exercise a lot of skills necessary in the creation of art in order to effectively communicate. Advertisements that "aren't quite art" may often be soulless or what have you, but a lot of times they look & feel something like art because they have so much else in place - traditions, strategies, continuities, short cuts. When a film takes some of these aesthetics and mimics them (often echoing back through cinema what had been cinema originally a few decades before - echoes of perfume ads that echoed Resnais films) it may be tempting to overlook the style, say that it is merely shallow, not bother ourselves to see if it is, instead, both sumptuous/sensuous and efficient, condensed, intelligently abbreviated.
Which brings us to I Am Love / Io sono l'amore (Luca Guadagnino, 2009), about which I'm still working out my opinions. I liked it a great deal but after one viewing I can't tease apart the evidence as to whether it was simply a slick looking experiment, in the style of a fashionable commercial, that I "bought" ... or if it indeed the style looked slick but held multitudes. Was I duped or treated to a luxurious experience? This film seems simple, bare, austere, but also expensive, magnificent, haute. All as it was surely intended on the surface - but it also seems this way in terms of its symbols, its internal references. What hooked me with regard to this 'cool melodrama' is how subtly or obliquely it registers its dramatic lines. Its subject matter includes processes, manners, perceptions. Where does one stand, how loudly is one permitted to sigh or speak, how is a banquet pulled off (and not just from the receiving end), who does one comfort (and how) in the wake of a family tragedy - these gestures are handled, foregrounded, delicately as in a film by Shimizu, Ozu, or certain John Fords (all directors that are in other respects quite alien to I Am Love). And this is precisely why scenes that would seem to play as self-parody instead work in an almost primal way ... in another context, or filmed slightly differently, Tilda Swinton's Sanremo love scene (for instance) would, should induce howls of laughter. But I find it instead comforting and erotic; the scene where her character tells Antonio her childhood name ("Kitesh. Say it.") is heart-wrenching. Thus I'm tempted to say that if so much of cinema is in fact the result of industrialism and commercialism (the content-output of a ravenous machine), at least in a few cases the most brutally consumerist devices have nevertheless provided the cinema, or at least the privileged realm of the art cinema, with some rather beautiful effects ...
Cup 2
* Germany: the most impressive World Cup team of the past decade? Unfortunate, too, that they had their best 'placement' in 2002, when their squad at that World Cup was the most boring, the least impressive, and had the easiest route to the final (Paraguay/USA/Korea). I feel as though they put in more excellent performances in this World Cup than any other team I've seen in the last two. While Spain may have earned their semifinal victory, and I don't begrudge Spain their Cup, it hurts just a bit to see Germany go home trophyless again when they've found a style that is both stereotypically efficient and exciting, attacking football.
* I was very relieved this World Cup eventually became a somewhat less defensive affair - the Netherlands-Uruguay game was quite fun to watch, for instance. (As was Germany-Uruguay.) That's how games should be played! In fact Uruguay really were one of the class teams of the tournament, such defensive power paired with Suarez + Forlan proved formidable. I wonder how they'll fare in 2014, especially with Diego Forlan highly unlikely to play a major part.
* We had a plane to catch, and as a result we could not stay to see the last 15 minutes of extra time for the Spain-Netherlands final. Our cab driver kindly put on the staticky Cuban broadcast of the match, where I strained to make out what was happening as best I could. Did Spain, with one of the most fearsome attacking squads in recent years, really score so few goals in the competition, and did they really only come from just three players? (And all of whom, of course, will start the next football season at Barcelona.)
* I was very relieved this World Cup eventually became a somewhat less defensive affair - the Netherlands-Uruguay game was quite fun to watch, for instance. (As was Germany-Uruguay.) That's how games should be played! In fact Uruguay really were one of the class teams of the tournament, such defensive power paired with Suarez + Forlan proved formidable. I wonder how they'll fare in 2014, especially with Diego Forlan highly unlikely to play a major part.
* We had a plane to catch, and as a result we could not stay to see the last 15 minutes of extra time for the Spain-Netherlands final. Our cab driver kindly put on the staticky Cuban broadcast of the match, where I strained to make out what was happening as best I could. Did Spain, with one of the most fearsome attacking squads in recent years, really score so few goals in the competition, and did they really only come from just three players? (And all of whom, of course, will start the next football season at Barcelona.)
Realism (Overture)
I apologize for my absence, readers - matrimonial matters have kept me occupied! On our honeymoon, we went to Mexico where we inserted ourselves fully and unironically into the trappings of traditional tourism: a resort, guided tours, fruity cocktails, a couple hundred photographs.
At Chichen Itza, our (very good) tour guide at one point asked who has seen the movie Apocalypto. Someone in the front said, "Yeah, it's good!" The guide responded, "Well, as a movie, it's OK. As a documentary ... not so good." Whoever exactly mistook Apocalypto for a documentary remains uncertain. Perhaps a few people have. More pedantically and professionally, I wonder why people persist in assuming that documentary equals unalloyed, unimpeded truth. One might like to know that the company which provided this tour, on the bus ride back, showed us a ridiculous History Channel 'documentary' about the apocalyptic Mayan calendar.
As our guide went on to explain, Mel Gibson's Apocalypto made the Maya look "merely" bloodthirsty - and he, i.e. Gibson, didn't mention the culture's astronomy, mathematics, architecture, all of its other good points in the matter of high civilization. This complaint, I feel, is underscored by the idea that an Othered culture can be known and appreciated specifically and primarily for its cultural Highlights Reel, which is to be reflected microcosmically (we presume) in every fragment of that given Culture (TM). It is mandated that the entirety of a culture, and especially the entirety of its achievements that we find valuable, should visibly frame and underscore any fictional representation of this people. Thus the emergence - or relegation - of indigenous American people in Hollywood & Environs to so much stoic, environmentalist finger-wagging. Concern for what you can do for the Other masks a deeper desire towards what the Other can do for you. And the bourgeois liberal wishes to call this representational protocol 'realism.' Not the definition of all realism(s), but merely the conditions for one kind of realism. Hence, criticisms of Apocalypto are underscored by a concern that the film ("as a documentary") is not sufficiently realistic.
If you read a piece like Prof. Traci Ardren's for instance, you will find a few symptoms connected to this complaint. ("But in Apocalypto, no mention is made of the achievements in science and art, the profound spirituality and connection to agricultural cycles, or the engineering feats of Maya cities.") I do think that Ardren makes some good criticisms, and some of her larger questions which are skeptical towards Apocalypto (is it pornographic?, for instance) are indeed worth asking. But I'm going to use Ardren's short article as an touchstone for something else, a symptomatology of a certain kind of critique maybe. Two facts emerge which may not be immediately apparent.
First, it is intriguing how rarely critics of Apocalypto's lack of realism consider the possibility that the Maya could be done justice in fiction through any route but the obvious genuflection to 'Maya art, science, and architecture.' To do justice to a culture or civilization at all is, innit, to properly depict what we discern are its strengths, its achievements, and its values worth imitating or respecting. The prosocial liberal sees these as the knowledge and technology of the Maya elites. This liberal would not (want to) think of it in these terms, but it is a stance toward an other highly inflected by elitism. However, Apocalypto casts the Maya elite as Others even in its own diegesis; its approach to the Maya is from a lower class - it's part ode to the Jeffersonian yeoman, part appreciation of pagan-natural village life, part individualist idyll-turned-nightmare. I don't claim the film's stance is coherent; and it's certainly a composite of mythologies on Mel Gibson's part. But I am convinced that Apocalypto's ideology, if it can be said to have one, is not at all that of colonialist salvationism. It is, instead, much more like an agricultural romanticism.
The idea that what we see as precious or admirable in a culture could or should be quite different from what a particular character from that culture sees as such in a work of fiction does not always occur to us. (We can see something similar described in this post, which unpacks an incident in the Odyssey which may be mysterious if we do not consider layers of audience, reception, and intention.) And in the case of Apocalypto we have an actual world division, so-called "red state/blue state," grafted onto how we interpret the film based on where we want to see located (and elaborated) the achievements of the political elites.
For Gibson, and for admirers of Apocalypto, it is fitting that the Maya rulers are depicted as bloodthirsty tyrants because to our protagonists and their non-elite perspective, that's precisely what they are! In her piece, Ardren brings up the implications of a fiercely violent movie about the Maya when present-day Maya people face discrimination & worse. It's a valid point, and a much more important concern than simply any entertainment value Apocalypto may provide. But I think it is highly telling that Ardren should read the way the film depicts the elites - decadent, bloodthirsty, unstable, and very much not the heroes of the film - as the way it depicts the entirety of the Maya. Anyone on Gibson's wavelength would instead focus on Jaguar Paw and the villagers as good, likable, stable folk who are caught in a history larger than themselves and victimized by imperial rulers - first, the late rulers of their own ethnos, and then, white rulers from Europe. The prosocial liberal is inclined to see Apocalypto's qualities of tragedy as a condemnation of the Maya people en toto because the Ancient Maya = art, science, architecture, mathematics, astronomy. Passing over these achievements of high civilization, from this perspective, is tantamount to disavowal that they deserve the very title of civilization. But I don't think Gibson or his sympathizers see it this way. I think that Gibson locates the corruption of Maya (or any) civilization at the heart of the State - and any State that would subjugate its citizens in the way that we see depicted in this high-adrenalin narrative is the tragedy.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but the majority of the ancient Maya people don't seem to have had a very good idea of their culture's elite achievements - and if they did, would they have been compliant political subjects? My Chichen Itza tour guide seems to think (and I pretty much agree from my armchair position) that the Maya rulers used the masses' ignorance about mathematics and astronomy to their own advantage. So why would it make sense to have a film that takes place over a few days in the lives of Maya commoners, living outside the confines of a city, that foregrounds an entire millennium of elite achievement? (As opposed to the knowledge of plant and animal life, the rich & complex family structures, the sense of heroism that Apocalypto locates in its non-elite villagers. Apocalypto may still be sloppy, inaccurate, or mythopoetic in these respects, but it does celebrate them and grants them as worthy.) But this is where we can see the logical contradictions at the core of what we might call Putumayo liberalism.
One might say that Apocalypto goes through an awful lot of hard work, including the courting of "authenticity," to make a film that is simply an action-chase narrative with a muddled if sincere thematic framework. That's a spot-on criticism. It is a bit ridiculous for Mel Gibson to have meticulously made this in Yucatec Maya while boasting merely cavalier concern for, say, historical chronology and Mayan representational art. Additionally, though, I wonder if some of the invective thrown at Apocalypto (fair and otherwise) is, in part, spurred by the fact that Gibson - this antisemitic, trad Catholic troglodyte! - is encroaching upon the elite territory of authenticity, guarded dear by the functionaries and clerics of (Enlightenment, Protestant) American civilization. Yes, I wonder.
I said there were two things that emerge from the above complaint. The other has to do with authorship. Despite decades of modern & contemporary debate over authorship which, more workaday concerns of the authorship of fiction seems to proceed along the same old basic assumptions. Some people may roll their eyes over 'Genius of the Author' rhetoric, but I've yet to meet anyone in the world of film & culture writing or in humanities academia who I could actually say provides an example of how to practically get by without the author-function. Of course the question of authorship is historical and systemic, and my pointing out of the failure to surpass authorship despite theories of authorial death is not the accusation of any individual shortcoming, but rather the indication that our individual agency is minuscule contrasted with the webs in which we move socially. This should be obvious, but I want to be clear.
Yet ... sometimes the Author is a perfectly acceptable figure for those who are otherwise "over" authorship, as long as this author is being attacked rather than celebrated. Consider this - Apocalypto, when it has been criticized and attacked by academics, has been laid squarely at the feet of Mel Gibson. (In Ardren's piece, adjectives ascribed to all the other contributors to this film are glowing!) Many people have no problem allowing Gibson 'mastermind' status with this film, particularly if they're critiquing it as a dangerous or reactionary work, which gives credence, or at least consonance, to Foucault's argument that the concept of authorship arose in part from punitive origins. Who is to blame for inscribing this?
More on realism, and I hope in a less roundabout way, to follow. (If you want to read even longer Internet writings on film & realism, the gold standard is, of course, Andrew Grossman - one, two.)
At Chichen Itza, our (very good) tour guide at one point asked who has seen the movie Apocalypto. Someone in the front said, "Yeah, it's good!" The guide responded, "Well, as a movie, it's OK. As a documentary ... not so good." Whoever exactly mistook Apocalypto for a documentary remains uncertain. Perhaps a few people have. More pedantically and professionally, I wonder why people persist in assuming that documentary equals unalloyed, unimpeded truth. One might like to know that the company which provided this tour, on the bus ride back, showed us a ridiculous History Channel 'documentary' about the apocalyptic Mayan calendar.
As our guide went on to explain, Mel Gibson's Apocalypto made the Maya look "merely" bloodthirsty - and he, i.e. Gibson, didn't mention the culture's astronomy, mathematics, architecture, all of its other good points in the matter of high civilization. This complaint, I feel, is underscored by the idea that an Othered culture can be known and appreciated specifically and primarily for its cultural Highlights Reel, which is to be reflected microcosmically (we presume) in every fragment of that given Culture (TM). It is mandated that the entirety of a culture, and especially the entirety of its achievements that we find valuable, should visibly frame and underscore any fictional representation of this people. Thus the emergence - or relegation - of indigenous American people in Hollywood & Environs to so much stoic, environmentalist finger-wagging. Concern for what you can do for the Other masks a deeper desire towards what the Other can do for you. And the bourgeois liberal wishes to call this representational protocol 'realism.' Not the definition of all realism(s), but merely the conditions for one kind of realism. Hence, criticisms of Apocalypto are underscored by a concern that the film ("as a documentary") is not sufficiently realistic.
If you read a piece like Prof. Traci Ardren's for instance, you will find a few symptoms connected to this complaint. ("But in Apocalypto, no mention is made of the achievements in science and art, the profound spirituality and connection to agricultural cycles, or the engineering feats of Maya cities.") I do think that Ardren makes some good criticisms, and some of her larger questions which are skeptical towards Apocalypto (is it pornographic?, for instance) are indeed worth asking. But I'm going to use Ardren's short article as an touchstone for something else, a symptomatology of a certain kind of critique maybe. Two facts emerge which may not be immediately apparent.
First, it is intriguing how rarely critics of Apocalypto's lack of realism consider the possibility that the Maya could be done justice in fiction through any route but the obvious genuflection to 'Maya art, science, and architecture.' To do justice to a culture or civilization at all is, innit, to properly depict what we discern are its strengths, its achievements, and its values worth imitating or respecting. The prosocial liberal sees these as the knowledge and technology of the Maya elites. This liberal would not (want to) think of it in these terms, but it is a stance toward an other highly inflected by elitism. However, Apocalypto casts the Maya elite as Others even in its own diegesis; its approach to the Maya is from a lower class - it's part ode to the Jeffersonian yeoman, part appreciation of pagan-natural village life, part individualist idyll-turned-nightmare. I don't claim the film's stance is coherent; and it's certainly a composite of mythologies on Mel Gibson's part. But I am convinced that Apocalypto's ideology, if it can be said to have one, is not at all that of colonialist salvationism. It is, instead, much more like an agricultural romanticism.
The idea that what we see as precious or admirable in a culture could or should be quite different from what a particular character from that culture sees as such in a work of fiction does not always occur to us. (We can see something similar described in this post, which unpacks an incident in the Odyssey which may be mysterious if we do not consider layers of audience, reception, and intention.) And in the case of Apocalypto we have an actual world division, so-called "red state/blue state," grafted onto how we interpret the film based on where we want to see located (and elaborated) the achievements of the political elites.
For Gibson, and for admirers of Apocalypto, it is fitting that the Maya rulers are depicted as bloodthirsty tyrants because to our protagonists and their non-elite perspective, that's precisely what they are! In her piece, Ardren brings up the implications of a fiercely violent movie about the Maya when present-day Maya people face discrimination & worse. It's a valid point, and a much more important concern than simply any entertainment value Apocalypto may provide. But I think it is highly telling that Ardren should read the way the film depicts the elites - decadent, bloodthirsty, unstable, and very much not the heroes of the film - as the way it depicts the entirety of the Maya. Anyone on Gibson's wavelength would instead focus on Jaguar Paw and the villagers as good, likable, stable folk who are caught in a history larger than themselves and victimized by imperial rulers - first, the late rulers of their own ethnos, and then, white rulers from Europe. The prosocial liberal is inclined to see Apocalypto's qualities of tragedy as a condemnation of the Maya people en toto because the Ancient Maya = art, science, architecture, mathematics, astronomy. Passing over these achievements of high civilization, from this perspective, is tantamount to disavowal that they deserve the very title of civilization. But I don't think Gibson or his sympathizers see it this way. I think that Gibson locates the corruption of Maya (or any) civilization at the heart of the State - and any State that would subjugate its citizens in the way that we see depicted in this high-adrenalin narrative is the tragedy.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but the majority of the ancient Maya people don't seem to have had a very good idea of their culture's elite achievements - and if they did, would they have been compliant political subjects? My Chichen Itza tour guide seems to think (and I pretty much agree from my armchair position) that the Maya rulers used the masses' ignorance about mathematics and astronomy to their own advantage. So why would it make sense to have a film that takes place over a few days in the lives of Maya commoners, living outside the confines of a city, that foregrounds an entire millennium of elite achievement? (As opposed to the knowledge of plant and animal life, the rich & complex family structures, the sense of heroism that Apocalypto locates in its non-elite villagers. Apocalypto may still be sloppy, inaccurate, or mythopoetic in these respects, but it does celebrate them and grants them as worthy.) But this is where we can see the logical contradictions at the core of what we might call Putumayo liberalism.
One might say that Apocalypto goes through an awful lot of hard work, including the courting of "authenticity," to make a film that is simply an action-chase narrative with a muddled if sincere thematic framework. That's a spot-on criticism. It is a bit ridiculous for Mel Gibson to have meticulously made this in Yucatec Maya while boasting merely cavalier concern for, say, historical chronology and Mayan representational art. Additionally, though, I wonder if some of the invective thrown at Apocalypto (fair and otherwise) is, in part, spurred by the fact that Gibson - this antisemitic, trad Catholic troglodyte! - is encroaching upon the elite territory of authenticity, guarded dear by the functionaries and clerics of (Enlightenment, Protestant) American civilization. Yes, I wonder.
I said there were two things that emerge from the above complaint. The other has to do with authorship. Despite decades of modern & contemporary debate over authorship which, more workaday concerns of the authorship of fiction seems to proceed along the same old basic assumptions. Some people may roll their eyes over 'Genius of the Author' rhetoric, but I've yet to meet anyone in the world of film & culture writing or in humanities academia who I could actually say provides an example of how to practically get by without the author-function. Of course the question of authorship is historical and systemic, and my pointing out of the failure to surpass authorship despite theories of authorial death is not the accusation of any individual shortcoming, but rather the indication that our individual agency is minuscule contrasted with the webs in which we move socially. This should be obvious, but I want to be clear.
Yet ... sometimes the Author is a perfectly acceptable figure for those who are otherwise "over" authorship, as long as this author is being attacked rather than celebrated. Consider this - Apocalypto, when it has been criticized and attacked by academics, has been laid squarely at the feet of Mel Gibson. (In Ardren's piece, adjectives ascribed to all the other contributors to this film are glowing!) Many people have no problem allowing Gibson 'mastermind' status with this film, particularly if they're critiquing it as a dangerous or reactionary work, which gives credence, or at least consonance, to Foucault's argument that the concept of authorship arose in part from punitive origins. Who is to blame for inscribing this?
More on realism, and I hope in a less roundabout way, to follow. (If you want to read even longer Internet writings on film & realism, the gold standard is, of course, Andrew Grossman - one, two.)
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Cup
* I wonder which big club will now sign South Africa's Tshabalala - who looks like a hard-working player, and whose goal against Mexico was a beaut.
* When I was younger I very much bought into 'official,' proselytizing US Soccer stances. These days, I don't necessarily care if soccer becomes more popular in the States (though if it does, sure, great) ... which means I'm bored by the ridiculous commentators that ESPN hires for each World Cup, who are surely instructed to cater to the soccer newbie, but seemingly not allowed to do so in any kind of a sophisticated or agreeable way. The commentary is sometimes worse than the vuvuzelas this year. At the other end, I am still endlessly annoyed by the constant "think pieces" (hah) that come around every four years where non-soccer-loving American blowhards decide they know what it takes to "solve the problem" of "Americans just not liking soccer." The World Cup makes me quite jingoistic every time the USMNT takes the pitch, but honestly, why the hell should anyone care if Americans en masse embrace the sport or not? As long as the matches are readily televised, I myself am fine - and if people have a problem with draws or the offside rule, well, big deal. The sport doesn't "need" to become more popular.
* Bad and inconsistent officiating, which is of course the rule rather than the exception for World Cups. I admit my bias is what has me harping on it, but any neutral observer will grant that the US got horribly treated by Coulibaly in the Slovenia game (both the disallowed goal and the mind-boggling yellow card on Findlay), and also didn't get any favors in the game today v Algeria (another legitimate goal disallowed, plus what looked to be another phantom handball yellow card - on Beasley, this time). Brazil's Luis Fabiano scores a beautiful goal but after having blatantly used his arm to control the ball (but the goal stands, no official notices the handball); Clint Dempsey is swiped hard in the face in the penalty box by the Algerian captain, but again no call; but poor Harry Kewell of Australia gets red carded (one of many harsh red cards in this tournament) for an unintentional handball against Ghana ... likewise Gourcuff's (FRA) and Klose's (GER) excessive sendings-off ...
* As my 'second team' in any international competition is always Germany, I'm glad they didn't end up having to play the US in the Round of 16. That would have been rough to watch, like '02. Some predictions, though, for the eliminations round - Uruguay to surprisingly advance to the semifinals. This is because they've shown themselves to be defensively organized and also deadly upfront (what with Forlan, Suarez, etc.), and should be able to defeat the hard-working, easy-to-like South Korea, and also bypass the winner of the USA/Ghana match. Uruguay will fall in the semis, however, I'm supposing, to either Italy, Netherlands, or Brazil. Probably Brazil. Smart money for the semifinal match-up on the other side of the bracket (I guess, without checking any bookmakers' odds) is Argentina-Spain, and I'd bet that Maradona's side go through to meet Brazil in the final, and that the final four places look like this: 1. Brazil, 2. Argentina, 3. Spain, 4. Uruguay.
* USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! (Actually, though it would be a series of big surprises, it's certainly not beyond the pale for them to edge past both Ghana and then Uruguay or Korea, and then to make the semifinal - that would not be a bad run, considering that once upon a time, US soccer optimistically planned on winning the World Cup by 2010.)
* I'll keep my fingers crossed for the Ivory Coast and New Zealand ... just because ...
P.S. My favorite new soccer site/blog, discovered a few weeks before the World Cup, is Zonal Marking, which in addition to all kinds of fascinating analyses and rundowns, has also gone on record to combat the thoughtless public wisdom that (a) Dunga's Brazil are a purely defensive squad lacking any kind of attacking prowess, beauty, or fun, and (b) that all African teams are "tactically naive" (which I think I heard again today on ESPN before the morning games).
* When I was younger I very much bought into 'official,' proselytizing US Soccer stances. These days, I don't necessarily care if soccer becomes more popular in the States (though if it does, sure, great) ... which means I'm bored by the ridiculous commentators that ESPN hires for each World Cup, who are surely instructed to cater to the soccer newbie, but seemingly not allowed to do so in any kind of a sophisticated or agreeable way. The commentary is sometimes worse than the vuvuzelas this year. At the other end, I am still endlessly annoyed by the constant "think pieces" (hah) that come around every four years where non-soccer-loving American blowhards decide they know what it takes to "solve the problem" of "Americans just not liking soccer." The World Cup makes me quite jingoistic every time the USMNT takes the pitch, but honestly, why the hell should anyone care if Americans en masse embrace the sport or not? As long as the matches are readily televised, I myself am fine - and if people have a problem with draws or the offside rule, well, big deal. The sport doesn't "need" to become more popular.
* Bad and inconsistent officiating, which is of course the rule rather than the exception for World Cups. I admit my bias is what has me harping on it, but any neutral observer will grant that the US got horribly treated by Coulibaly in the Slovenia game (both the disallowed goal and the mind-boggling yellow card on Findlay), and also didn't get any favors in the game today v Algeria (another legitimate goal disallowed, plus what looked to be another phantom handball yellow card - on Beasley, this time). Brazil's Luis Fabiano scores a beautiful goal but after having blatantly used his arm to control the ball (but the goal stands, no official notices the handball); Clint Dempsey is swiped hard in the face in the penalty box by the Algerian captain, but again no call; but poor Harry Kewell of Australia gets red carded (one of many harsh red cards in this tournament) for an unintentional handball against Ghana ... likewise Gourcuff's (FRA) and Klose's (GER) excessive sendings-off ...
* As my 'second team' in any international competition is always Germany, I'm glad they didn't end up having to play the US in the Round of 16. That would have been rough to watch, like '02. Some predictions, though, for the eliminations round - Uruguay to surprisingly advance to the semifinals. This is because they've shown themselves to be defensively organized and also deadly upfront (what with Forlan, Suarez, etc.), and should be able to defeat the hard-working, easy-to-like South Korea, and also bypass the winner of the USA/Ghana match. Uruguay will fall in the semis, however, I'm supposing, to either Italy, Netherlands, or Brazil. Probably Brazil. Smart money for the semifinal match-up on the other side of the bracket (I guess, without checking any bookmakers' odds) is Argentina-Spain, and I'd bet that Maradona's side go through to meet Brazil in the final, and that the final four places look like this: 1. Brazil, 2. Argentina, 3. Spain, 4. Uruguay.
* USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! (Actually, though it would be a series of big surprises, it's certainly not beyond the pale for them to edge past both Ghana and then Uruguay or Korea, and then to make the semifinal - that would not be a bad run, considering that once upon a time, US soccer optimistically planned on winning the World Cup by 2010.)
* I'll keep my fingers crossed for the Ivory Coast and New Zealand ... just because ...
P.S. My favorite new soccer site/blog, discovered a few weeks before the World Cup, is Zonal Marking, which in addition to all kinds of fascinating analyses and rundowns, has also gone on record to combat the thoughtless public wisdom that (a) Dunga's Brazil are a purely defensive squad lacking any kind of attacking prowess, beauty, or fun, and (b) that all African teams are "tactically naive" (which I think I heard again today on ESPN before the morning games).
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