JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

Last night we made the mistake of watching, via a Netflix stream, Surveillance, a 2009 movie that has no saving grace. A NYT critic says , “It seems doubtful that “Surveillance,” …would be taking up space in theaters if its director were not the daughter of a name filmmaker. Jennifer Lynch, spawn of David…”

Sometimes horror movies can be entertaining, but I’m no fan of slasher movies, and this movie is a pretentious drooling blood fest. There is a plausible case to be made that the whole enterprise is the product of the director’s dysfunctional mental and emotional life. That is, the movie is a product of pathology — “art activities” day in the outpatient clinic; because we suspect the director has all sorts of artspeak — camp, ironic, referential justifications — to cover over the psychopathology.

David Lynch was a producer on this movie — a toxic symbiosis between father and daughter, each making the other worse, cascading into the deplorable Surveillance. There is an additional, unfortunate side effect: it points you back to David Lynch — you wonder if, rather than the art school arbitrary affectations in his films, mostly pulled off with some delicacy, the Grand Guignol nihilism of Surveillance was really David Lynch’s subtext all along.

Surveillance is a movie that asks you to identify with, and root for, the psychotic serial murderers.

Sherlock Holmes, the recent (2009) Robert Downey / Guy Ritchie movie, isn’t good for much, even if Downey was given some award nomination (he is good, and art direction did deserve some credit as well), but the end titles are great. I would have liked it slowed down a little actually. And the music is only okay. But the visuals are very well done — they fit well with the movie.

In general the titles are among the best parts of movies these days, like the opening guitar riffs in many rock songs, and then it is downhill from there. The design capabilities displayed in this minor “titles” craft in movie making, done by dedicated separate small workshops, shows a real advance — more so than the movies themselves. In this case they are using that color wash spreading in absorbent paper effect that is now used on a number of commercials. This gives lie to the cliché that “it was about as exciting as watching paint dry.”

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YouTube link to see it larger.

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The movie is a karate-brain, video game looking, magic realism enthralled, karate kicking, story challenged, comic book derived, karate chopping, mixed up mess. The Netflix rental DVD said RENTAL on it. It forced you to watch 10 minutes of what are now old movies. You just let them run through while you try and get back whenever the movie begins, which is guesswork. I don’t think it actually did ever begin.

Wiki says,

A. O. Scott of the New York Times was … reserved: he noted that the director’s approach to films was “to make cool movies about cool guys with cool stuff” and that Sherlock Holmes was essentially “a series of poses and stunts” which was “intermittently diverting” at best.

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The studio that made the titles is Prologue. They deserve applause.

James Cameron’s Avatar, a conventional Hollywood-animistic-war-movie-with-a-heart-of-gold, is mostly about war. The trees win — Gaia triumphant, by using dinosaur rhinos to trample the heartless destroyers. Using “shock and awe” buzzwords, just so we are clear where Cameron stands, the director/writer provides us with airborne attack craft that look like WWII-flying-tanks. Cameron needed someone with talent and a reasonable set of values to write the script.

Cameron also throws in his Hollywood take on Native Americans, which looks suspiciously like paternalistic aboriginal sentimentality but Avatar presents as pure hagiographic goodness; these cat-eyed fashionably anorexic toy-people are violent, but good violent, because they are innocent in Cameron’s condescending fantasy.

Cameron even lifted an evil fighting machine from the Alien movies: a huge robot operated as a larger than life bad-soldier. This monster truck with arms was used as a tool to give the good guys a fighting chance in Aliens, but now is a tool of evil itself, aka America, as Cameron sees it. Cameron is the Busby Berkeley of the extreme green movement. Human Beings=Evil; deserving to die on their dying planet.

This evil is personified in mind-numbing stereotypes: the American as macho-military-dunce along with a sidekick cold blooded corporate drone, to provide the orders to destroy.

Any close examination of the director would betray Cameron as something of a despoiler himself — a major league exploiter of modern technology, which is a primary source of the ruination of the landscape. It must be nice for Cameron, relaxing in his high end hybrid, lecturing the masses on their evil ways, and later being celebrated by his fellow wealthy entertainment-celebrity pals for his nobility. Cameron must believe what his pals tell him — he is that insulated, in his little forest of self-regard.

You have to give credit to someone who will make a movie about a font, but that is what the documentary Helvetica attempted. I’d heard positive things about the film and finally decided to sample it via a Netflix stream.

In some ways this is a documentary about taste and about consensus. The Helvetica font was settled upon by large institutions, as an acceptable, non-offensive, bridge from modernism into the contemporary. Helvetica expressed bland authority and unquestioned entitlement.

In some ways, the Helvetica font is the Trajan font of our age — the font you see on Roman buildings and governmental buildings in America — invisible by its ubiquity. A cold and anonymous typeface whose chief attribute is legibility — although Trajan has an authentic beauty of form Helvetica does not. That said, I am sympathetic with the designers who feel that typefaces deliver content but aren’t the content. So Helvetica does its utilitarian job.

The array of designers commenting on the font had its own interest. One overwrought designer likened Helvetica to a glass of fresh water on the desert of awful, terrible, horrible 19th century design. Personally, I like much about 19th century design, although Helvetica is okay as well. It would take an effort to get too worked up about this peripheral realm of design.

One other designer pointed out the push/pull in Helvetica — a Hans Hofmann, abstract expressionist idea — the tension between ground and figure. The sharp insight was that Helvetica had a perfect fit between ground and typeface. Helvetica is of the grid and the machine and it locks in place visually.

The problem with Helvetica is that it is dead, drained of human interest, and purely utilitarian. The strange conflation of ideas that images are always conjuring: Helvetica is both socialist in its aspirations and corporate in its manifestations. Helvetica is not personal, but astringently impersonal. On the other hand, minimalism works very well in graphic and industrial design: witness Apple.

Macbeth struggled with the milk of human kindness; current evolutionary theory is predisposed towards the mechanical survival mechanism as paramount in explaining compassion. If kindness is there, it is there for a purpose, so they say.

In this NYT article about a study of empathy in the young it is suggested that the young are hollow careerist vessels…

In a decisively everyone-for-themselves manner, [the young] are less likely to agree with statements like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.” …
Previous studies have documented an increasing narcissism among college students since the late 1980s. And Americans in general perceive decreases in other people’s kindness and helpfulness.

Given that studies like this are at the edges of what could even loosely be called science…and so might only be an expression of a general despair about the way things are going in this age…we can still speculate about the general proposition:

…these days, a transference of empathy is apparent: people love their pets with a fierce empathy. Then again, those pets might not be the real focus, but the extension of ego that the pet represents. A proxy narcissism. And pets aren’t people, which is the real target of meaningful empathy.

…there is tribal empathy: people show empathy towards and make excuses for those they see as members of their affinity group — in our time, conformist partisans are particularly prone towards enabling. But aren’t they affirming the tribe, and their group membership, not their fellow tribalists? Look at what nastiness ensues when the tribal conceptual bond is broken, even slightly. Thought police always lurk in partisan climes, always ready to ostracize and expel from the hive.

The milk of human kindness appears of no benefit in a competitive society — although the appearance of kindness can have its cynical value. But that would not be an empathic insight. Or would it?

Hollywood cares about money and awards so you have sequels. Well, remakes may not win many awards, but they beckon as safe commercial  bets — even if they don’t payoff as hoped, who can question bringing out another version of something already approved by popular interest? Nothing guarantees the popular taste though — even familiarity.

The NYT says,

The mercenary impulses of the culture industry always have a plausible populist basis: DreamWorks Animation and Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer and Marvel Studios and all the other serial peddlers are giving us what we want — what they know we like. And this is hardly new. The current era of big-budget, mass-market movie sequelization dates back to the 1970s, when the personal cinema of the New Hollywood spawned, almost as a byproduct, a handful of nostalgic baby-boomer adventures, horror movies and action spectaculars that eventually took over the business.

This is true about the popular culture in general — TV, music, and a portion of the commercial art bureaucracy, which is really an extension of the popular culture — in particular. Formulas are synthesized into “new” vehicles. It isn’t influence. It is just lifting an idea and combining it with another lifted idea. Many Indie movies instantiate this approach. They aren’t Indie at all, just conventional remakes.

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After a long hiatus we’ve been sampling Netflix to tryout the streaming feature. We’ve hit on some interesting movies — which is pretty good considering the Netflix streaming library is large but mostly unsatisfying.

Passengers was a good remake of The Sixth Sense. It was actually better in many ways, because Anne Hathaway brought a layered warmth to the role that made the movie more appealing. Speaking of The Sixth Sense, we watched Signs, another M. Night Shyamalan movie that was panned on release. A bit grim and slow moving although M. Night is a talented and bright fellow — you can see his intelligence on the screen. He needs to find some humor, fun, and energy in his movies. His source material is the pop culture but his movies lack that foundationalist quality of junk culture.

A movie called Man, Woman, and the Wall was offbeat but held our attention. About an audio voyeur. That’s a new category. Apparently the walls in many apartments in Japan are thin and it is common for people to listen in to their neighbors. The main interest in the movie was the insight into Japanese society: the casualness with which the main character, a young guy, discussed his obsession with his friends who accepted it without judgment or crudeness. The sexual material was devoid of Western guilt. Japan may be a repressed society, but not sexually. The sexual scenes — sped up by Netflix to keep themselves family safe, a weird decision — was actually sweetly portrayed, when the voyeur and object of his adoration finally began to relate.

We’ve been catching every episode of Justified as it is posted @hulu. It is a well-done throwback-modern-day cowboy drama. With so many eunuch-boys in the media and commercials, with so many males portrayed as imbeciles on everything from TV drama to movie comedy (not to mention their black belt rocket scientist girlfriends) the appearance on a TV show of a retrograde knuckle dragging macho guy is almost refreshing. The dialog in Justified can be very funny and the acting is uniformly solid. The level of violence doesn’t correspond to the sophistication of the characterizations, but I guess in an update of Gunsmoke, you’ve got to update the violence quotient as well.

We had been watching CBS nightly news but the story choices are beginning to fail. They had pretty much been the best of the network news shows, with more material and a somewhat more serious look at issues. CBS’s coverage of the oil spill has been excellent. Even with Couric, not a fave, they were better. But it is story choice and point of view that draws you to news shows and CBS is fading as NBC seems to be getting better again. Lehrer now known as something else, has stories that are too long — wannabe video magazine stories. The strength of shows like Sixty Minutes — being able to tell a coherent story — has almost completely been lost in media news coverage. From local to national news to the BBC, the flow of the story is dysfunctional — it doesn’t answer your questions as they come up in the story. It doesn’t help Lehrer that the reporters are boring and the whole enterprise appears adrift. I’d like to see more of Kwame Holman and Woodruff and less of everyone else. New producers and a new group of reporters would be just great. It is amazing the way PBS strives for diversity, wears it on their sleeves, and produces the blandest, most colorless broadcasts.

We missed the Smallville finale. It is probably the best TV has to offer in integrating computer effects with storyline. That means it is better than the movies actually. Video games have deeply influenced the look of TV shows. Many TV shows are beautifully photographed and well-edited. Writing is another matter.

The problem with Smallville is that it is acquiring Heroes Syndrome: character creep. Too many players, and with it, too many storylines.  The finale to V was very good and we look forward to more. I don’t know if it is intentional, but the Queen lizard is looking more and more sinister in every episode. It’s good. Also most fine was the finale to Supernatural.

Having mentioned Hulu: Strictly Sexual and The Sex Monster were pretty good and are very popular. You think it might be subject matter and you might be right. But they are pretty well done TV-movie-sitcoms/melodramas really.

This is the Lost weekend where the networks show they are desperate and lost and looking for something, anything that is popular, and will squeeze every last ounce out of it, even if it is a conventional, juvenile show. Here is another viewpoint about why Lost is lost.

Two end-of-thread comments @ask.metafilter:

OMG. Clearly the most amazing site thread of all time. So glad all is working out.
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I just stumbled across this 10 minutes ago. To all who offered their help: thank you for restoring some of my lost faith in humanity.

The thread: “Help me help my friend…” turned into an online transcript of a rescue mission.

Amazing.

The local library was rebuilt. It took about two years. Probably something to do with codes. It looks pretty much the same. In fact, frustratingly so, because it still is airless, with an oppressive heat embedded in the new building — an inheritance from the old. Apparently no one said anything to the powers that be, although the librarian’s themselves seem sensitive to the heat, which makes you want to nod off or get out the minute you walk in.

In addition, there was a change in layout which speaks to the time. The stacks were further deprecated; a remant of books on shelves like marginalized visitors, while there are numerous tables for laptops, covering most of the floor space, and a large area devoted solely to children — not so much books as children’s activities, and a reserved book and media section, for pickup.

No more wandering the stacks and picking up books you would not have known existed. Now it is more likely to be media you accidentally come upon, like The Darjeeling Limited, which we borrowed,. Like much in the society, gimmicks and trendiness and multi-media status have replaced content. The House of Books has become a laptop cafeteria sans food with an attached pre-school center and a pick-up point for material reserved on the net.

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The Darjeeling Limited is one of those works that requires you to adjust to its long loping rhythms and quaint perspective before you can enjoy it. It is about three brothers traveling through India as they search for connections. Connections between themselves and their long estranged mother.

Owen Wilson grew up with and is friends with Wes Anderson. Both have the same flattened quality in work and manner — you can see them thinking — they aren’t, blessedly, in a rush. The trust in the audience in this approach is almost touching. Owen and Wes are from another time. It is a welcome change from the quick cut, bang bang chase and destroy movies.

The movie would be maudlin but for Anderson’s ability to be realistic about the intractable nature of human beings; yet, Anderson isn’t afraid of charges of sentimentality — he allows for the possibility of growth. With the gorgeous, unsentimentalized poverty of India as a background, and a slew of characters that break with stereotype, there is much to like about this movie. A great soundtrack, from Ravi Shankar to the Stones, to The Kinks.

The Freakonomics guys are presenting a slickly produced series of iTunes podcasts.

On their most recent episode they hung the show on the premise of a new book called, “Faking It.”

The idea is that we lie to get by. They start by interviewing a woman who keeps kosher, except sometimes, when she orders dishes with bacon added — when not at home. She isn’t really faking it because her husband knows, but this is their example.

Next the podcast presents one of Obama’s faking it moments. A big one. Obama had a lunatic pastor whom he called his spiritual advisor; Obama even named one of his books after one of his pastor’s sermons. Obama said he was a devout Christian but the truth was, according to a reporter who examined the subject, that he scarcely went to church. This tidbit was provided not to extend the faking it bit, but to exonerate Obama from the question that pervaded his campaign, “How could you and your wife sit there and listen to…?”

In this enabling scenario, Obama could not admit his non-attendance because it would put in question the genuineness of his beliefs. So, according to the logic and value system of the host, this was a minor case of faking it, because the cost of admitting the truth, that he had never heard Pastor Wright’s rants against America, would be politically costly. (You do wonder if before the birth of his children, when he was attending Wright’s sermons, if Obama did hear the sermons he claimed not to have. Do you doubt it?)

According to this logic, which rescusitates an unpleasant part of the campaign for the sake of chatter rather than insight, it is a minor thing: professing religious belief for advantage. An odd standard. There is also the odd moral equivalence between someone of another religion not observing a dietary law and Obama’s manipulation of religious belief for political advantage. We are back in moral equivalence land — a familiar media landscape.

Although the Freakonomics guys are more interesting than Gladwell, even if of the same stripe — because their ideas lead to some deeply needed irreverence in a conformist America — they then try to cover over uncomfortable truths.

There are real issues here. The issues have to do with social pressure, conformity, the personal impact on character of faking it, and how to determine the acceptable white lie from the character vitiating conformist curtsy to gain personal advantage.

Well, the election is over. It is too bad this unpleasantness needs to be brought up again. In many ways, faking it most pertains to the impetus to gain status and the costs and benefits to society of that impulse . That is, if you want to take the idea as presented seriously at all.

I was a fan of Chris Rock and then heard a discussion on TV where Rock was described as needing to get over himself. It did turn me off. But Rock’s recent appearance on Tavis Smiley made me change my mind.

Some wit and wisdom from Chris Rock:

On being your own judge:
Chris said, in answer to a question about rave reviews and taking them to heart, that if you do that, then, when the same source criticizes you, you have to accept the criticism as valid. So he doesn’t believe in raves and therefore is not honor bound to accede to cavils. I agree with him. Only you can decide how good what you do is.

I just compiled a book of quotations — Saul Bellow said the same thing. Bellow’s context was that early criticism and rejection is good for a writer because it forces him/her to decide for themself what is good.

On other people’s negative opinions of you:
Chris said his mother had said: “If they don’t pay your bills and they can’t whup you, then why do you care what they think?

He said, and you can tell it from the richness and openness of Rock’s comic persona, that he is influenced by everyone — not just black comedians — which is an attitude he disparaged as ridiculous. Among the pantheon he mentioned: some expected, and even required, like the great Pryor, and some seldom mentioned, like Steve Allen; it shows he knows whom to turn to for models. Identity politics never works if you want to do your best. Exaggerated and sardonic truth telling is what comedy is about and that characteristic belongs to no single group. Rock said, “I embrace everyone.”