Serious Popcorn tag:www.artsjournal.com,2008-02-19:/popcorn//26 2009-11-09T16:45:10Z Martha Bayles on Film Movable Type 4.31-en Three Films about 11/9 tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.23152 2009-11-09T15:53:13Z 2009-11-09T16:45:10Z Serious Popcorn http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ Briefly, three German films to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 11/9/89.

First, The Tunnel (Der Tunnel), a TV film first broadcast in 2001, about a group of young people trying to leave East Berlin.  Some make it across just as the Wall is going up in 1961, others not until the escapees have built a secret tunnel from West to East.  One of the highlights is the role of the American media in financing the final effort in exchange for exclusive coverage.

Second, What to Do in Case of Fire? (Was Tun, Wenn's Brennt?), another 2001 film that takes a comedic look at the West Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg, which in the late 1980s was a hotbed of anti-Western radicalism and anarchism nestled next to the Wall.  (Not far away on the other side was Prenzlaeur Berg, home of many nonconformist East Berliners.  If someone makes a film about these two mirror-image neighborhoods, please let me know!)

The film begins with a flashback to a group of Kreuzberg radicals battling the police in the spirit of punk rock and anarchism, a sequence that ends with some of them rigging a bomb to explode in an abandoned villa in Grunewald.

But the bomb fails to detonate, and the film then flashes forward 12 years, when the bomb is accidentally set off by a real estate broker showing the property to a West German plutocrat.  Suddenly the hunt is on for the people who planted the bomb -- wherever they are.  And that is the story: the attempt by a now very disparate group to come together and throw the police off their track.  Because some have accepted the post-'89 world and others have not, the tensions are high and hilariously explored, if not finally well resolved.  Indeed, the last line is the group's answer to the question posed in the title: "Let it burn! [Lassen brennan!]."  And needless to say, this rang more appealingly in early 2001 than it did a few months later.

Finally, The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), a 2006 release about an East German Stasi officer who harsasses a playwright less for reasons of state (not that these are justified) than for reasons of spite (sexual jealousy). This is a superb film for many well known reasons, not the least of which is a truly wonderful ending. ]]> Long Slog tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.22930 2009-10-25T21:10:36Z 2009-10-25T22:24:55Z Yes, loyal reader, Serious Popcorn has been suffering from neglect lately.This is because I have spent the summer and autumn slogging through the final revisions of my book, now tentatively titled America's Cultural Footprint: The Good, the Bad, and the... Serious Popcorn http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ Yes, loyal reader, Serious Popcorn has been suffering from neglect lately.

This is because I have spent the summer and autumn slogging through the final revisions of my book, now tentatively titled America's Cultural Footprint: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

But speaking of footprints -- and slogging -- allow me to recommend the 2001 German film, As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me, based on the true story of a German POW sentenced to 25 years hard labor in the Siberian gulag.  Knowing that the alternative is death, Clemens Forell (a pseudonym) escapes and begins a desperate 8,000 trek across Siberia and Central Asia, eluding the Soviet security forces and barely surviving at times, until he crosses into Iran and is identified by an uncle summoned by the Tehran authorities.

At that point, three years after his escape, Forell returns home and is reunited with his wife and children in a scene that, like many others, is as emotionally powerful as it is swift and direct.  There are some Hollywood touches here, notably the added subplot about the camp commander pursuing Forell the way Javert pursues Jean Valjean in Les Miserables.  But for the most part, the film is true to the 1955 book by the German writer Josef Bauer.

This modern Odyssey is not well known in the US, perhaps because the central character is, after all, an officer in Hitler's army.  All I can say is, the tellers of this tale have clearly thought about that, because the best part of the film is the way it portrays the broad swathe of humanity Forell meets along the way, including a Jewish merchant  in Kazakhstan whose family were wiped out by the Nazis.   If these people were willing to risk their lives to help a good man, then the least we can do is watch.]]> 3 Billion Fans, and None in Newark? tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.21838 2009-08-17T22:38:51Z 2009-08-17T22:59:54Z Serious Popcorn http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ Do Americans live in a "parallel universe" separate from the rest of humanity?  To judge by this item from Agence France-Presse, the answer is yes.

Khan.jpgImagine Brad Pitt being stopped in an airport and questioned by people who don't know who he is, and you might conclude that those people live in a different cosmos.  Well, that is what 3 billion Bollywood fans (2 billion of them outside India) may now conclude about the USA, because India's biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan, was recently stopped and interrogated for two hours in Newark Liberty Airport.

It could be a PR stunt, because Khan is apparently about to release his first US-made film, which according to AFP "features the contentious subject of racial profiling."  But Khan is right about one thing: American moviegoers live in a parallel universe where everyone speaks English and foreign countries are mostly backdrop to our well known stars.  OK, I won't try to fight that.  But maybe we should ponder the fact that Hollywood's global audience is only 2.6 billion ...

]]> This is Not Nostalgia tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.21812 2009-08-15T21:55:57Z 2009-08-15T22:04:59Z Invited by the Wall Street Journal to do a short piece on Woodstock, this is what I came up with:"Both a Dream and a Nightmare"The 1969 Woodstock festival wasn't held in Woodstock, N.Y., but in a dairy-farming hamlet 43 miles... Serious Popcorn http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ Hendrix-Woodstock.jpgInvited by the Wall Street Journal to do a short piece on Woodstock, this is what I came up with:

"Both a Dream and a Nightmare"

The 1969 Woodstock festival wasn't held in Woodstock, N.Y., but in a dairy-farming hamlet 43 miles away with the evocative name of Bethel. On the 40th anniversary of what has clearly become a milestone in American cultural history, there is a surprising resonance between the meanings we take from Woodstock and Bethel as mentioned in the Bible.

Bethel first appears in Genesis as the place in Canaan where Jacob dreams of a stairway to heaven with "messengers of God . . . going up and coming down it." This resonates with the notion of Woodstock as a vision of ideal community, where all may enjoy total freedom because all are committed to peace, love and harmony.

The second mention is in 1 Kings, where Bethel is one of two sites where the ruler Jeroboam corrupts his people by erecting a shrine to the Golden Calf. To less starry-eyed observers of Woodstock, this reference evokes a nightmare vision of human beings given over to self-indulgence, debauchery and destruction.

Which is the true picture? Most Americans embrace one and reject the other, a reflection of how polarized we have been ever since that summer when Jimi Hendrix kissed the sky and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Yet one reason for the continuing allure (not to mention commercialization) of Woodstock is that it was neither all dream nor all nightmare. It was both.

On the dream side, the first performer of the weekend, folk singer Richie Havens, recalls looking out at the sea of humanity and feeling "at the exact center of true freedom." Asked to keep playing until the next act could arrive, Mr. Havens heroically obliged, ending a three-hour set with an improvised medley of the old spiritual "Motherless Child" and a rousing chorus consisting of one word: "Freedom!"

Watching this inspired performance, it's hard not to think of certain subsequent mass meetings--in Krakow, East Berlin, Beijing, Kiev, Tehran--that expressed the same primal urge to break free of all restraint. Some cultures fear and distrust this urge, but American culture applauds it--even though our political tradition teaches that true freedom is not the total lack of restraint but the capacity to substitute self-restraint for the chains of arbitrary power.

Surprisingly, this lesson was in evidence at Woodstock. The event was banned from two other upstate communities because of dire predictions of "maddened youths" rampaging through the streets. Given the violent demonstrations, assassinations and bizarre crimes occurring at the time, these predictions were not paranoid. Yet Woodstock proved them wrong, largely through the efforts of the Hog Farm, an exceptionally well-organized hippie commune whose members, in the words of local merchant Art Vassner, "kept the peace. They were dirty, but they were nice."

Yet chaos was never far from the surface. Abbie Hoffman, leader of the anarchist Youth International Party (Yippies), grabbed the microphone during a performance by the Who to make a political speech. And it quickly became obvious that any attempt to restrict admission would result in a riot, so the sale of tickets was abandoned, along with the fence surrounding the concert area.

Among the various parties taking credit for cutting that fence was another anarchist group called Up Against the Wall Motherf**kers. Significantly, UAW/MF emerged not from any organized political movement but from the arty fringes of Manhattan's Lower East Side, where the priority was not to end racism or war but to ridicule and attack "bourgeois" figures such as Andy Warhol and rock impresario Bill Graham.

A few years later, such adolescent nihilism would produce its own species of music: punk rock. But at Woodstock, this had not yet happened. Indeed, one of the main forces keeping the peace was the relatively upbeat tone of the music. From folk acts like Joan Baez to rock groups such as Creedence Clearwater Revival, the performers drew on a rich and varied array of vernacular American sounds, ending with Jimi Hendrix's fractured "Star-Spangled Banner," a brilliant virtuoso piece that says more about the temper of the times than a hundred political tirades.

Still, the unhappy fate of Hendrix, who died the following year, brings us back to the Golden Calf. In the late 1960s drugs were held up as a quick and easy path to spiritual transcendence. At Woodstock, the worship of this particular false idol peaked during the performance of Sly and the Family Stone. Watching Sly Stone power his way through "I Want to Take You Higher," it is obvious that his roots lay in the Pentecostal Church. But on this occasion he was not referring to the Holy Spirit.

It is a curious irony that most of the nostalgic films about the Woodstock era, from "Forrest Gump" to "Across the Universe," are love stories, because true love was hardly the watchword of the time. On the contrary, the motto was "If it feels good, do it." Of the trio "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll," the first item remains the most divisive. This is because while the orgy at Woodstock may not have reached biblical proportions, it did encourage the 1960s generation to regard sexual fidelity as an antiquated Puritan notion, and erotic liberation as the key to sanity and happiness. It would take another generation for that to show up as a really bad trip.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

]]> Nailed tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.21693 2009-08-09T21:27:01Z 2009-08-09T22:38:32Z Serious Popcorn http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ Nothing But the Truth.jpgHow do you know who your friends are in Washington?  They're the ones who stab you in the chest.

That old joke captures the hard-edged quality of political combat in the nation's capital better than most Hollywood films, perhaps because Hollywood tends to portray power not as it is actually wielded but as a dark, comic-book conspiracy.

One recent exception to this rule is Nothing But the Truth, a 2008 film based loosely on the 2005 story of Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who went to jail rather than name the source who leaked to her the identity of NOC (non-official cover) CIA agent Valerie Plame.

But I almost hesitate to mention the Miller-Plame case, because this film goes far beyond it, to a realm that in its quiet, minimally violent way is truly unnerving.  This is due to no-nonsense writing and directing by Rod Lurie.  But it is even more the achievement of the actors.

As the reporter who suffers a grimmer fate than Miller did, Kate Beckinsdale is solid if uninspired.  But that doesn't matter, because she is surrounded by amazing performances: Matt Dillon as the friendly but feral special prosecutor who goes after her; Alan Alda as the preening but (in the end) principled lawyer who defends her; Vera Farmiga as the changeling spy; and (surprise) prominent First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams as the judge.

This all may sound like standard fare, but it is not.  These characters are more real, and more intimidating, than those in almost all other political thrillers.  Maybe that's because the issue at stake is also more genuine.]]> White Like Him tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.21488 2009-07-27T00:33:20Z 2009-07-27T00:47:30Z Now that everyone has had a chance to woof about the latest RRT (Racial Rorschach Test), let me recommend 5 minutes of comic relief: the brief but memorable skit by Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live called "White Like Me"... Serious Popcorn http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ Eddie M.jpgNow that everyone has had a chance to woof about the latest RRT (Racial Rorschach Test), let me recommend 5 minutes of comic relief: the brief but memorable skit by Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live called "White Like Me" ... ]]> The Professor and the Cop tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.21440 2009-07-23T14:24:39Z 2009-07-23T15:42:59Z Serious Popcorn http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/
But rather than write an editorial here, I refer you to this excellent piece by Boston Globe writer Joan Venocchi.  They should not have given it the title they did, because it is not about "machismo," it is about prominent, entitled people venting their frustrations on police -- and two of the examples she gives are of women.  Her point is that race may be part of the mix, but in places like Cambridge, class and town-gown divisions are just as important and sometimes more so.

Gates.jpgAs for Professor Gates and his reaction to Officer Crowley, we can all relate.  The flight from China to Boston is agonizingly long, and when you get home and your front door is jammed, the last thing you need is a cop asking you to show him your ID.
 
It seems to me obvious that Gates lost it -- I might have, too.  But as everyone (including the average white person) knows, it is not wise to mouth off at a police officer.

Unless, of course, you're a Harvard professor.  Then you get to climb on your high horse and refuse to get off.  But as Venocchi points out, that high horse is the real issue.

The best comment I've seen so far -- much better than President Obama's -- came from William Carter, the neighbor who snapped the photo posted here.  "I know he [Gates] was tired and upset, but someone of his stature and education should be a little more understanding."

Amen.

And, uh ... don't ask about the Man Who Wasn't There -- the black cop in the foreground of the photo, keeping his cool while the professor loses his.  All cops are white racists by definition, right?  
]]> A Formula That Works tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.21377 2009-07-20T00:03:33Z 2009-07-20T00:59:32Z Serious Popcorn http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ Dresden.jpgThere was a time when German film makers scorned the formulas of American movies and (horrors) TV dramas.  On the contrary, the postwar struggle to depict -- or not depict -- the horrors of the Nazi past kept obsessively clear of anything that smacked of Hollywood.

I am not sure exactly when that changed, but one milestone was the American TV miniseries Holocaust, which despite being lambasted by critics, drew a massive audience in West Germany in 1979 and opened an unprecedented public discussion of the topic.

Since then, German TV has become very adept at making American-style miniseries, borrowing every trick in the book, including the much scorned device of placing a love story center stage, with cataclysmic historical events as backdrop.  What the critics miss, though, is that a formula does not determine the quality of the result.  Artistry does.

In the right hands, the TV miniseries can do amazing things.  Case in point: the 2006 German production Dresden, now available on DVD in the US.  The cataclysmic backdrop is the firebombing of that city, said to be the most beautiful in Germany, by the British Royal Air Force in 1945 -- an act that some have compared with America's dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Predictably in a production that carefully weighs the guilt of both sides, the love story is between an English pilot shot down over Dresden a few days before the firebombing and a German nurse who helps him.  Conveniently, the pilot (John Light) is the German-speaking son of a German mother; so he and the lovely Anna (Felicitas Woll) have no trouble communicating their way into romance.

I was not one of the critics who disliked Holocaust.  Of course it did not do justice to its topic.  But surely some awareness in the popular mind is better than none.  And the same can be said of Dresden.  If your reaction to that immense act of destruction was "they deserved it," I won't argue.  But see this film anyway.  It treads a delicate path between showing the evil of the regime (the scales tip deeply toward Germany's greater guilt) and reminding us that along with a horrendous load of guilt, Germany carries a horrendous memory of suffering.  And compared with some countries in the world, the Germans work very hard at coming to terms with both.  Even at the price of borrowing formulas from the USA.

]]> Truly Bella tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.21254 2009-07-12T23:57:33Z 2009-07-13T00:25:44Z Serious Popcorn http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ Bella.jpgTwo young Latino men in a souped-up car, laughing and preening about their good looks and nice clothes ... what do we expect to see next?  A drug deal?  A sexy woman pushed around by macho men?  Maybe a hail of gunfire and spurts of blood on the nice upholstery?

Bella (2006) steps into none of these cliches.  Instead, it drives that flashy car right into a real-life tragedy followed by a beautifully drawn process of real-life redemption.  The debut film of Mexican director Alejandro Monteverde and starring another young Mexican, Eduardo Verastegui, Bella deftly weaves together the fates of a lonely young waitress (Tammy Blanchard) unable to imagine any outcome to her unwanted pregnancy but abortion, and her co-worker (Verastegui) who tries, for reasons of his own, to expand the range of her imagining.

]]> When the Revolution Is Not Televised tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.21158 2009-07-07T01:16:40Z 2009-07-07T01:27:02Z Serious Popcorn http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ Iran.jpgThings are still boiling in Iran, and I cannot presume to know what's really going on under the lid.  But I can explain why some of the chitter-chatter about it seems silly to me.  This piece appeared in the Boston Globe, then was picked up by the International Herald Tribune.

The protests in Iran have been dubbed the "Twitter Revolution'' because the latest social-networking tools proved useful in organizing demonstrations and uploading eyewitness texts, images, and videos to the Internet. Indeed, the shooting death of 26-year-old Neda Agha Soltan became an icon after the "citizen journalist'' who captured it on video sent the link to a friend outside Iran, who posted it on YouTube and forwarded it to the Persian-language service of the Voice of America. Finally, at the end of what is now a turbo-boosted news cycle, the video appeared on CNN.

But what if this sudden deployment of media technology doesn't move the regime?

]]>
But there are two problems with this. First, the same technology that empowers the individual also empowers the state - sometimes with American help. True, the Office of the US Trade Representative and the Commerce Department lodged a complaint Wednesday with the Chinese government about a rule requiring website-blocking software in all computers sold in China. But this is a departure from the usual pattern by which companies such as Cisco, Google, and Yahoo have cooperated with censorship, then defended their actions as the cost of doing business with Beijing.

Similarly, Freedom House reported recently that Iran's "automated filtering'' of the Internet is "enabled by SmartFilter, a commercial content-control software system developed by a US-based firm.'' The company contends that the software is pirated, but that is irrelevant to the larger point, which is that there is nothing inherently liberating about state-of-the-art information technology. Like all previous tools, it is only as benevolent as the human beings who use it.

Second, many Americans assume that massive media exposure will automatically lead to positive change. Yet this requires responsive and accountable political institutions, which are clearly lacking in Iran. It also requires a consistent flow of information that sustains a view of the world different from the regime's. But right now, Tehran is carrying out a bloody crackdown that combines old-fashioned brutality with newfangled censorship.

Worst of all, the Iranian protesters cannot command the world's attention indefinitely. As the regime chokes off all cross-border communication, CNN will move on to other more telegenic topics. In addition to imprisonment and other abuse by the authorities, thousands of Iranians will suffer the pangs of obscurity.

In this they are not alone. Human rights activists languish in many countries where the CNN spotlight rarely shines. Some of these countries are of little strategic interest to America or its adversaries. Others are too poor to attract commercial media. But there is a way for America to connect with these populations. Like the BBC, Voice of America broadcasts news and information in 45 languages around the world. And its "surrogate'' counterparts, Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (which broadcasts into Central Asia and the Middle East), use a variety of media platforms, from shortwave radios to social-networking tools on the Internet, to send reliable news to millions of people whose own media are censored.

In Iran, the Persian-language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty uses several different radio frequencies and the Internet, while Voice of America's Persian television service claims to reach more than 15 million viewers. Accurate audience measures are hard to come by in places like Iran. But the fact that Tehran spends a huge amount of money jamming these channels and blocking their websites tells us something.

These broadcast services are not well known to Americans, because of a 1948 law that forbids the domestic dissemination of all material created for foreign audiences. But this law is now moot, because like everyone else, Americans can access these services online.

Do so, and you will see that, contrary to what many assume, these channels do not merely broadcast US government propaganda. Nor do they follow CNN and other "global'' media in hopscotching between hot spots. On the contrary, these channels maintain a consistent, steady presence, outwitting the censors and keeping brave reporters on the ground, so that the people living in those countries can know what is going on, even when the whole world is not watching.]]> The Legacy of Michael Jackson tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.21015 2009-06-27T19:18:20Z 2009-06-27T20:48:34Z Serious Popcorn http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ M Jackson.jpgWhat did the King of Pop bequeath to the world?  Your answer will probably depend on your view of American pop music.

If you take the view that American pop music is nothing but a manufactured product designed to exploit human lust and desire, then you will focus on the seamy side of Jackson's career: the occasionally risque song lyrics and video images; the strangely whitened skin (caused by a disease called vitiligo, which destroys pigment); the bizarre cosmetic surgery that left him with an eerie mask-like appearance; and the tortured private life, tarnished by unproven but damning accusations of child molestation. Like Elvis Presley, Jackson became a superstar when he was too young to handle it, and by the time of his early death, he had become a freak.

But there is another side to Jackson.  If you take the view that American pop music grows out of a rich tradition of song, dance, and showmanship created by African Americans but now practiced by performers of all backgrounds, then you will focus on the highlights of Jackson's career: the irresistible 10-year-old star of the Jackson 5; the gifted vocalist of Thriller (the 1982 album that has sold almost 65 million copies worldwide); the astonishing dancer whom critics compared with Fred Astaire and Rudolph Nureyev; the creator of artful music videos; and finally, the master of the extravagant live stage show.

What is the relationship between these two sides of Michael Jackson?  The answer lies in the larger cultural context within which he lived.  If Jackson had been born 50 years or even 25 years earlier, he would have joined a long list of extraordinary African-American musicians working in a succession of popular but also challenging styles: ragtime at the turn of the 20th century, jazz in the 1920s, swing in the 1930s, rhythm and blues in the 1940s, rock and roll in the 1950s.  Or perhaps, coming as he did from a religious family (his mother is a devout Jehovah's Witness), Jackson would have been one of the century's great gospel singers.

Any of these styles would have kept Jackson close to what is best in American music.  Indeed, he got his start within that tradition: the all-male singing group put together by his father has a long pedigree in both religious and secular realms.  But Jackson was born in 1958 and began his career a decade later, during the tumultuous late 1960s, when pop music was changing very quickly - and not always for the better.

The greatest frustration of Jackson's life was that he never repeated his early success with Thriller.  He tried, and several of his later albums sold millions of copies.  But there was something magical about Thriller that seemed to elude him for years afterward.  What was the source of that magic?  I would say Quincy Jones, the older man who produced Jackson's first three solo albums.

Quincy Jones was born in 1933 and is still going strong, a trumpeter, arranger, producer, and all-around master who got his start playing and arranging for superb artists: Lionel Hampton, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie.  Not only that, but he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris.  Few people on this earth know African-American music as well as Jones, and he wove that knowledge into every track of Thriller.

But nothing succeeds like success, and after his next album, Bad, Jackson decided that he did not need Jones any more, and the two parted company.  The magic went out of Jackson's music at that point, and in my opinion, it stayed out.  And Jackson let this happen because, after all, this was the 1980s, and there was more to being a superstar than just singing and dancing.  There was MTV.

Amazing as it sounds, MTV in the early 1980s played mostly white acts, and for a while refused to air Jackson's videos.  Finally his record company threatened MTV, and they yielded, only to discover that their largely white audience adored Michael Jackson.  After this triumph, Jackson vowed to break every other barrier as well, and be accepted as a major artistic talent.

But unfortunately, Jackson's universe did not include the culturally sophisticated attitudes of the dominant musical style of the 1980s: the British New Wave.  With its roots in punk, the visual arts, and trendy downtown fashion, the New Wave depended less on artistry than on attitude - a campy, ironic attitude that mocked commercial success while also pursuing it.  This kind of thing was beyond Jackson's comprehension, and when the British press dubbed him "Wacko Jacko," he was deeply hurt.

Here we find the real explanation for Jackson's weird, sentimental notion of himself as a "spiritual" artist, a veritable angel of love.  It was the only way he could fight back against the dark, cynical tone of the musical styles that surrounded him: punk, grunge, alternative, gangsta rap.  It was a hit with people all around the world.  (See comments from former Soviet bloc countries on the RFE-RL website.)  But this was never enough.  Jackson also longed to be taken as seriously at home, as seriously as the stars of these cynical styles.  But he never was.  The critics dismissed him as "pop," and the rest of the media focused on his eccentricities, not his genius.

Perhaps now that Michael Jackson has passed from the scene, it will be possible to reverse these priorities.

]]> Social Trust tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.20892 2009-06-21T23:28:15Z 2009-06-22T00:19:29Z Serious Popcorn http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ Gran Torino.jpgDon't be put off by Clint Eastwood's character at the beginning of Gran Torino (2008).  It's a caricature of a cranky old widower, the only white resident left in a Highland Park, Michigan neighborhood, and it's so over the top you might feel tempted to bail out.  Don't.

According to the 2000 census, Highland Park is 93 percent African American, 4 percent white, and less than 1 percent Asian.  But as it happens, Walt Kowalski (no relation to Stanley) is surrounded by Hmong immigrants, whom he dislikes quite intensely.

But eventually he befriends Thao and Sue Lor, the young son and daughter of the Hmong family next door.  And true to Eastwood's persona, he also proves tougher than the local gang-bangers, who are out to enlist the timid, confused Thao.  The bond between Walt and Thao is at the heart of the film, and it is wonderfully executed by Eastwood and a young Hmong actor named Bee Vang.

This is a classic American film in one key respect: it shows how learning to trust someone very different from you can be the cure for unhappiness and social isolation.  But it takes some liberties that most such films do not.

For example, from beginning to end, Gran Torino shows Walt ladling out the racial and ethnic slurs.  No one is spared, from his Italian barber, whom he calls a "guinea" just for starters, to his neighbors, who endure being called "gooks," slants," and "zipperheads" with stoic politeness (except the grandmother, who relishes insulting him back).

It's like listening to one of Don Rickles's outrageous comedy riffs, only most people would not see the humor.  I do, because I come from Boston, one of the few cities left in America where ethnic insult, when delivered correctly, is still an accepted form of social lubrication.  We see this in the wonderful scene where Walt helps Thao get a job on construction but must first "man him up" by teaching him how to insult without offending.

To judge by the commentary on the DVD, none of the young actors associated with this film understood that such talk is not "racism" or "bigotry."  This is kind of amazing when you consider that they were the ones who made the film.  But I won't criticize them, because to judge by the brilliant result, they got it in the end.  All credit to Eastwood and the writer, Nick Schenk, for this slice of non-politically correct social trust in the making.


]]> Higher Ground tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.20774 2009-06-14T23:29:17Z 2009-06-15T00:29:43Z Serious Popcorn http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ Half Nelson.jpg
It's an old American movie cliche: an affluent but mixed-up white character is helped and guided by a black character who, despite being poor, is blessed with a head that is screwed on straight.  In the old days the formula was a rich socialite and a salty, wise-cracking maid, or a great leader and a humble but wise valet.  More recently we have seen a spoiled golfer and a clairvoyant caddy (The Legend of Bagger Vance) and a scruffy but honest cop and a smooth but honorable crook (American Gangster).

This hardly exhausts the list, but you get my drift.  All the more credit, then, to the 2006 indie film Half Nelson, for making the old cliche new.  Ryan Gosling is superb as a history teacher in a struggling Brooklyn middle school whose life is spiraling out of control, due to a cocaine habit rapidly turning into a crack addiction.  His classes consist of pop Marxism laced with political ideas ca. 1968, but his mordant, self-effacing riffs capture the imagination of one student, a 13-year-old girl whose mother works long hours as a security guard and whose only other adult influence is the neighborhood drug dealer, who looks out for her because he feels responsible for having landed her older brother in prison.

When the student discovers the teacher's drug problem, the tables begin, ever so slowly and subtly, to turn -- until, without a single false note, the student emerges as the salvation (we hope) of the teacher.

Then best thing about Half Nelson is the performance of Shareeka Epps as a young girl who just happens to be the moral center of at least four other lives: her mother's, her brother's, (improbably) the drug dealer's -- and her teacher's.  That's a lot to pull off, but Epps's performance looks effortless.  She and Gosling are two of the most remarkable actors out there today (which is why they don't seem to be getting many parts).

I've already told you how the story comes out.  But this is not a "feel-good" movie in the usual sense of the term.  The ending is hardly uplifting, it just manages to lift us slightly higher than we were before -- and that feels not good, exactly, but somehow miraculous and believable.
]]> Dan Brown Redux tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.20182 2009-05-22T16:12:35Z 2009-05-22T16:24:14Z Serious Popcorn http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ Venus.jpgSeeing the reviews of the latest Dan Brown phantasmagoria, , I am moved to post my best effort regarding this author and the films that he spawns.  It was written about The DaVinci Code but will do perfectly wellas a comment on Angels and Demons.

BIRTH OF A BLOCKBUSTER

The following is a transcription of the pitch session for Dan Brown's next novel, The Botticelli Botch.  Present are the author, his new agent Bizzy Boca, his new publisher Ernst Kluliss, and (getting in on the ground floor) the famous film producer Sam Schnellgeld ...

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Sam (arriving two minutes later): Well, hello dream team.  Bizzy, that skirt is hot.

Bizzy:  It's so exciting to have you here, Sam.

Ernst:  Yes, and for a stodgy old bookbinder like me, it's exciting to do business with a real Hollywood mogul.

Sam:  How about you, Danny?  You excited?

Dan:  Sure.  But we need to close quickly.  I have another appointment in an hour.  Crazy schedule.  Can't wait to get back to New Hampshire -

Sam:  No biggie.  I got lunch in twenty.  So Bizzy, you wet dream, lay it on me.  And please, no retread.  The Da Vinci Code is a hard act to follow.  Will this new one get all the religious nuts crawling out of the woodwork to do our marketing for us?

Dan:  I'll make the pitch, if you don't mind.  Bizzy's still learning the names.  Sam, Ernst, The Botticelli Botch will not be a retread.  For starters, the opening money shot will not be in Paris but in Florence.  The Uffizi.

Sam:  Uffizi, eh?  Didn't know you were into automatic weapons.  I confess, I did wonder why your wacko Opus Dei albino monk didn't shoot the curator with an Uzi.  But here's some advice: if you're taking the Mafia route, use Russians.  More sadistic, and no goddamn lobbyists.  Does this one start with a murder, too?

Dan:  No, a rape.  Under Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.

Ernst:  Splendid!  And who will play the victim?  How about Kiera Knightly?  She certainly has the face and figure to be a descendant of Mary Magdalene.  And personally, I'd be very interested in meeting her.

Bizzy:  Don't you just love the Mary Magdalene theme in The Da Vinci Code?  The Holy Grail as her uterus, and Jesus as her stud muffin?  I meant to tell you, Dan: I dreamed I was part of the bloodline, right down through the Merovingian dynasty.  Talk about royalty!

Dan:  Actually, I'm skipping that plot.  Too much hate mail from narrow-minded Christians who won't even consider that Emperor Constantine might have cooked up the whole Jesus-divinity thing in order to stamp out goddess worship.  Not to mention all those nit-picking Bible scholars.  My facts all come from Henry Lincoln's Holy Blood, Holy Grail, I tell them, and if he were a charlatan, would the BBC have funded his programs?

Bizzy:  Plus it's a novel.  It's scary, isn't it, how some people can't distinguish between fact and fiction?  The Da Vinci Code is a work of the human imagination!

Ernst:  And a tribute to the human spirit, unfettered by the chains of religious dogma.

Sam:  For marketing, you're probably right to sideline the Jesus stuff.  I gotta hand it to Sony.  It was brilliant to hire that Jesus-freak consultant - you know, that Jonathan Bock guy - to set up a "Da Vinci Dialogue" at the Sony Pictures website.  Company-sponsored blogging catches the mall rats, so why not the Bible thumpers?  The more they blog, the more they want to see the movie.  It's amazing how your average mouth-breather will do anything to feel like he's part of the industry.

Ernst: Wish we could do that in publishing.  But the masses want to be Dan Brown, not Ernst Kluliss.  Ha-ha.

Sam:  Trouble is, you can only milk that for so long, before some harpy like Barbara Nicolosi comes along and accuses you of turning people into "useful Christian idiots."  Next time, I fear, it'll be The Last Temptation of Christ all over again - pickets, not tickets.

Dan:  I beg you, don't mention that title.  Some lunatic in Athens keeps emailing me about how that Greek writer, Katzi-somebody--

Ernst: Nikos Katzantzakis.  He also wrote Zorba the Greek and an amazing, if interminable, re-creation of the Odyssey.  A passionate, learned man who--

Dan:  Right.  So this lunatic keeps emailing me I should read The Last Temptation of Christ, because Katzi-what's-his-face deals with Jesus' humanity and the relationship with Mary Magdalene in "a really profound way."  This implication being that I don't.

Bizzy:  Oh, please.  How many copies did it sell?  Danny, I gotta ask you.  You're not going to drop the Sacred Feminine riff, are you?  Despite what you hear, Joe Six-Pack's not the one making movie choices these days.

Ernst:  My priority too, Dan.  All those book clubs out there - overwhelmingly female.  The books are mainly an excuse to swill wine and talk about their sex lives.  But who cares?  Book groups move product.  Ha-ha.

Bizzy:  Poor men!  Sometimes I wonder what's left in the culture for them.

Sam:  Sports, video games, online porn.

Dan:  Now, Sam, you're making my pitch for me.  The Botticelli Botch will unite the male and female demographic like no other book.  Every writer has a secret, and mine is something I learned in prep school.

Bizzy:  By the way, we don't advertise Dan's not-so-humble background.  Not only did he go to Phillips Exeter, he also taught there for a few years.

Dan:  Yeah, during my semi-failed literary career.  But I did learn something from cramming literature down adolescent throats.  Why do ordinary people buy novels?  Out of mixed motives.  On the one hand, they want a fast-paced story that will keep them turning pages and get their mind off their troubles.

Ernst:  Sad but true.  Which is why we publish Dean Koontz and Christine Feehan.

Dan:  But people also aspire to higher things.  Great books, great art - a lot of Americans crave to know more about them.  But they also associate them with snobbery and pretentiousness, which they hate.  So the road to riches is to satisfy the public's craving for high culture without setting off their anti-snobbery alarm.

Ernst: You mean, revive the middlebrow?

Dan:  Oh, no.  You can't go back to dumbing down high culture and spoon-feeding it to people.  You gotta spike it, twist the meaning, hit 'em where they live.  What do most readers learn from The Da Vinci Code?

Sam:  That Jesus was Abraham and his seed are a bunch of French Frogs?

Dan:  You assume they make that connection.  They don't.  Who reads Genesis these days?  No, what people learn is what they want to learn: namely, that you can travel around Europe, visit all those museums, churches, and castles, and understand it all, without effort. You don't need a Ph.D. or even a B.A.  Western Civilization is a riddle, and if you know the solution - which you can get from one book, mine - you're good to go.

Ernst:  Brilliant!  But please, make it two books.  Tell us about The Botticelli Bitch.

Dan:  That's Botch.  Cue the Power Point, Bizzy.  This time I'm not using a painting that's half flaked away.  Compared with Leonardo's The Last Supper, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus will knock your socks off.  I'm jumping ahead, but imagine the camera panning down this babe as she covers her boobs with her right hand and pulls her hair over her privates with her left.

Ernst:  Astonishing!  I've seen the painting dozens of times, but it never occurred to me that she's being modest.  How unlike Venus!

Dan:  If you'll forgive me: "Our preconceived notions are so powerful that our mind blocks out the incongruity and overrides our eyes."

Bizzy:  The Da Vinci Code, chapter 58, page 242.

Sam:  Wow, chapter and verse. Where'd you get her, Danny?

Dan:  Hands off, she's mine.  Anyway, while the camera is eyeballing Venus, we hear the soundtrack of a terrible assault - male grunting and cursing, female screaming and crying.  The war between the Roman Catholic Church and Sacred Womanhood is ratcheting to a new level, as the stunning and intelligent Dr. I. Connie Klast, professor of Feminist Art History at Georgetown University and world-famous expert on Botticelli, is being brutally raped by a priest.

Ernst:  Splendid!  Timely!  The Church won't have a leg to stand on!  What kind of priest, if I may ask?  A Jesuit?  It would be nice to avoid an embarrassing mistake, like having an Opus Dei monk, when there aren't any.

Dan:  No problem.  The assailant is a Dominican, from the secret Twenty-Ninth Province, known as the Manfriars.  The Manfriars were founded in 1498, the year Pope Alexander VI had the excommunicated monk, Savonarola, burned and hanged.

Sam:  Burned and hanged at the same time?

Dan: Yup, and in the same place, the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, where Savonarola staged his famous Bonfires of the Vanities, in which he burned all the luxury goods he could lay his hands on - including several "pagan" paintings by his loyal follower Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, a.k.a. Botticelli.

Sam:  I'm liking it.  Whatever it costs, we'll shoot these scenes on location at the ... Pizza della Whatever.  But wait a minute.  Who are the good guys?  You're saying Botticelli was a follower of the creep who burned his pictures?

Dan:  That's right.  Savonarola was a magnetic figure.  Look at this portrait of him by Fra Bartolommeo.

Sam:  Wow, intense.  Look at the schnozz!  Maybe Tim Roth?  Love the hood, by the way.

Ernst:  Monks From the Hood?  Ha-ha.  But seriously, Dan, if I get your drift, you're making Savonarola and Botticelli the good guys.  But who are the bad guys?  The pope?  That could work - dollar for dollar, your pope is your most reliable movie villain, next to your Nazi and your oil CEO.  But how will you twist the meaning so it hits ''em where they live?

Dan:  Cue the painting again, Bizzy.  Check yourselves, guys.  You're drooling, like me.  None of us can take our eyes off that sexy Venus.  The feminist art historians have got us pegged.  What is the essence of art?  The male gaze.  Admiring, yes.  But also lustful, possessive, controlling.  For 2,500 years, depicting nude women (and in the case of queer artists like Michelangelo, nude men) has been a way of asserting power over them.  My heroine, Connie, became interested in Botticelli for that reason.  Her first book, Beauty As Rape, denounced Botticelli for reducing his model, the young Simonetta Cattaneo, to a passive object literally blown about by the winds.  It's no accident that Simonetta was the mistress of Giuliano de' Medici, brother of Botticelli's patron, Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Sam:  Hold on, my eyes are glazing over.  I thought we were talking entertainment here.

Dan:  Let me translate.  Simonetta is the hottest babe in Tuscany, married at 15 to a dull dude named Marco Vespucci (whose only claim to fame is that they named America after his cousin, Amerigo).  Every rich playboy in Florence wants Simonetta, but the one who gets her is Giuliano - brother of the city's godfather.  Giuliano wins a big jousting tournament under a banner with her picture on it, painted by Botticelli.  She becomes Giuliano's prize, but then dies a year later - never having really lived.  All her life she's been a possession, an ornament, a trophy.  Now look at the painting again.  Not the naked flesh.  The eyes.  See how sad they are?

Ernst:  That's why the painting is so lovely.  There are many other portraits of Simonetta, but most have a vacant expression.  Only Botticelli captured her soul.

Dan:  It's not a question of soul.  It's a question of gender politics.  As Connie comes to realize, the sadness, the victimization, is the whole point.  Botticelli wasn't just painting the objectified Venus, he was painting the Venus who resists being objectified.  This work is subversive!  Look at how awkwardly Venus is drawn - her left shoulder barely exists, and her left forearm is the size of her calf.  An objective observer not blinded by reverence for Renaissance art might say that he botched it.  And Connie is that observer.  For reasons I will relate in a moment, she sees through all the lies about this being a great painting.  In truth, it's a deliberate botch!

Ernst:  Dan, you've done it again!  I'm on the edge of my seat!  Why did Botticelli botch it?

Dan:  Because he understood.  He, too, was in love with Simonetta.  But as an employee of the Medici, he had to keep his distance.  But distance reveals truth.  Botticelli came to understand the patriarchal system - in essence, he became a radical feminist.  Like Savonarola.

Ernst: What?  Savonarola a radical feminist?

Dan:  How do you know he wasn't?  Or rather, what has conditioned you to think that he wasn't?  What got burned on his Bonfire?  Silk dresses, lacy lingerie, cosmetics, fancy wigs, corsets, paintings of nude women - all the trappings of female oppression!  Why did Botticelli throw some of his own paintings onto the flames?

Bizzy:  To liberate the women!  To empower them!

Dan: Right!  But then the Church cracked down, condemning Savonarola to a horrible death and forcing Botticelli to spend the rest of his life painting the Virgin Mary.  This is where the Manfriars come in.  Savonarola was a Dominican, but when he began to crusade for women's rights, the order got into trouble with the pope.  They knew that if they didn't deal with Savonarola, the pope would shut them down.  So they founded the Manfriars, a secret province devoted to the suppression of the Sacred Feminine.  Their first act was to hand Savonarola over to be hanged and burned.  Then they went after the artists, making sure they painted gorgeous, sexy nudes for powerful men to ogle.  This was called the Renaissance, and we've all been brainwashed - even you, Ernst - into thinking it produced great art.  In truth, it was a huge propaganda campaign on the part of the nobility and the Church to keep women in their place.  And the deadliest weapon in this campaign was beauty.  The beauty of helpless girls like Simonetta, turned against them as the instrument of their oppression.

Bizzy:  Oh Dan, that's beautiful.  Excuse me - I'm choking up.

Ernst:  I'm beginning to see, Dan.  A dramatic medieval tale, full of passion and blood, that also illustrates the very truth you revealed in the previous novel.  I must say, I admire your integrity.

Sam:  I'm liking it, too.  But I'm a little worried about the broad who gets raped.  What's her name, Connie?  An art history professor?  That's gonna put a crimp in the casting.

Dan:  Not at all.  Remember, I described Connie as "stunning and intelligent."  In fact, when I get all the details worked out, she may turn out to be a descendant of Simonetta - and if I'm feeling bold, of Botticelli.  That's why she understands.  When she was growing up in a Dominican orphanage, the nuns made her pose for figure drawing classes.  So some of her earliest memories are of shivering in a cold drafty classroom, stark naked, while everyone stared at her - not just the other girls, who hated her beauty, but also the nuns, including a couple of real bull dykes.

Sam:  Good, that could work.  As long as she's not too young.  You know lawyers.

Dan:  Do I ever.  No, I think that can be done tastefully - to establish Connie's character as a dynamic teacher who empowers female students.  Kind of like Julia Roberts in Mona Lisa Smile.  The contemporary plot, which will be action-packed, involves a struggle between Connie's students and the Georgetown administration over a production of The Vagina Monologues-- - you know, that play where women talk candidly about their, uh ...

Bizzy: See?  Even Dan can't say it.  I did the play all four years at Smith.  What an experience!  So empowering!

Sam:  Hmm.  Not sure that will fly at the box office.  Could we maybe fudge the details?

Bizzy:  No problem.  At most schools the play is part of "V Day," which is devoted to raising awareness of violence against women.  At the stricter Catholic schools, they allow the anti-violence activities but not the play (which is kind of raunchy).

Ernst:  Well, we certainly don't want to make strict Catholics look good!  The trick, Dan, will be to frame the conflict so that it looks as though normal women are being oppressed by the Church.

Dan:  No problem.  I'll background the play, and foreground the big event planned for Georgetown's V Day: a keynote address by Connie, in which she reveals the hidden truth about Renaissance art, and explains why The Birth of Venus was not included in Savonarola's bonfire.  Thanks to the Florentine art market, the painting soon became too valuable to burn, anyway.  So it lives on today, complete with its botched drawing, as a reminder of the injustices that have killed literally trillions of women.

Sam:  Very nice.  But I'm still fuzzy on the rape.  How does that fit?  I'll be frank: I don't see a lot of box office in old Connie.

Dan:  She's not old!  And like I said, she's a knockout!  Maybe we could even use the same actress to play her and Simonetta.

Ernst:  I would discourage that.  Why have just one pretty face when you can have two?

Dan:  The point is, Connie's a framing device.  We begin with the rape, then flash back to 15th-century Florence, where we witness the whole back-story, including Simonetta's stunted life, the founding of the Manfriars, and the destruction of Savonarola and Botticelli.  Next we flash forward through the centuries, highlighting the Manfriars' more horrible deeds, and end up with the conspiracy to silence Connie. We show the rape as a political act, orchestrated by the province and the Florentine authorities, then accompany Connie back to Georgetown, where, deeply traumatized, she's on the verge of quitting - until, miraculously, her students appear and through their devotion to her message, start the healing process.  On the big day, when the president of the university is about to announce the cancellation of the keynote speech, we see Connie, bruised but not broken, struggle to the podium and proclaim the truth to the world.  Tears stream down thousands of fresh young faces, the music swells, and once again the camera pans the succulent body of Botticelli's Venus - only this time, it lingers on those sad, sad eyes.

Bizzy:  Omigod, I can't stand it!  Anyone got a Kleenex?

Ernst: Here, my dear.  And they say the novel is dead!

Sam:  Nice, Danny.  Like the yadda-yadda at the end.  Have your people call my people.  Meanwhile I'm outta here.  Lunch is getting cold.

This transcription first appeared in the Claremont Review of Books.
]]> Tri-Ocular tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.19926 2009-05-08T23:28:02Z 2009-05-09T00:36:20Z Serious Popcorn http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ How West Was Won.jpgIt's not historically accurate, we all know that now.  But How the West Was Won (1962) is nonetheless historic.  One of the very few feature films to utilize the short-lived Cinerama technology, it is now available on DVD.  And if you have access to the Blu-Ray version shown on a sizable flat screen, you will be in the historic position of watching Cinerama at home.

That is, you will experience something of the eye-popping illusion and eye-crossing headache experienced by the original audiences who flocked to Cinerama in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  The most salient aspect of this is a form of tri-ocular vision.

Instead of using one camera and one projector to create a single focused image on a screen roughly square in shape, Cinerama used three cameras and three projectors to create a panoramic image on a huge wide curved screen.  Audiences felt they were actually in the landscape, as opposed to looking at it.

A similar effect is now achieved by IMax by enlarging the image until it is picked up by the viewer's peripheral vision.  But Cinerama was weirder than IMax, because it had three different lines of perspective leading to three different vanishing points.

In one famous scene, the characters are in front of a cabin with a road forking off on either side, and your eye tries in vain to follow each road separately while also focusing on the house.  Ouch.

Not only that, but the actors frequently look and talk past each other, because basically they are in separate films spliced together, and the splice is never quite good enough.

All of which makes How the West Was Won utterly fascinating.  And Jimmy Stewart is mighty fine, as always.

Best of all, the DVD contains an excellent documentary about the history of Cinerama, from its origins in World War II as a method to train air force gunners to its flowering during the Cold War as a weapon of mass distraction, and its decline during the 1960s, when powerful directors and actors began to bellyache about the weirdness.


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