Author: michael

The documentary Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (dir. Robert Stone) is not remarkable in itself, being mostly a combination of footage and talking heads interviews. Nevertheless, the overall effect is simultaneously icy and almost comic, heartbreaking and ludicrous. The film, in a tight 85 minutes, chronicles the rise of The Symbionese Liberation Army generally and its specific crime of kidnapping Hearst and making her one of the SLA over the course of a year and a half, during which Patty robs two banks and sprays a store with bullets. For those of us familiar with the combination of earnestness, self-righteousness, naivete and otherworldliness brought by many children of the middle classes to graduate school many of the “characters” may seem vaguely familiar; but instead of the humorless radical correcting another student on his/her interpretation of Foucault, these humorless radicals take up automatic weapons, rob banks, kill people and issue “communique’s.” They call themselves “Generals” or “Field Marshalls” in the Unified Army of the People. They refer to the “pigs” and claim spiritual connections to Che and George Jackson.
Continue reading Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys Upon the Life of the People

I believe people have posted on Chronicles of Narnia elsewhere, but I can’t find it, so I’m starting a new thread. I saw this tonight—again, like Kong, it was entertaining enough, but it made me wonder if C.S. Lewis is as much of an English dimwit as this film would indicate. is the film fairly true to its source? It seems like C.S. couldn’t make up his mind whether the English or Christ is more powerful or whether the King of Kings really trumps earthly royalty after all–since the result of saviour Aslan’s triumph is the coronation of not merely one royal power, but four. And is there anything those good English kids can’t do after some toast and tea? And wasn’t the sacrifice of Christ the result of a series of events put in motion by God himself, rather than a self-willed action? And where is the moment of doubt, the “Why have you forsaken me?” The whole thing is so bloodless and painless that Christianity comes off like some kind of ludicrous wish-fulfillment. The completely colorless Peter becomes the King Arthur figure–why? I guess merely because he’s the oldest male. If Lewis’ politics were any more conservative and royalist, the whole thing might be embraced by the National Front. It’s nice that the Beavers and the fauns know their place–to place eagerly the supernaturally-blessed crowns on the divinely-inspired Kings and Queens. In what century was this claptrap conceived? Perhaps it is the latent Protestant in me that protests at a religious view so smugly self-satisfied that Church and State are seamlessly integrated with the blessings given right down to the last stone of “nature.” Was Lewis’ series of books sponsored by the Anglican Church? T.S. Eliot is hard to take but he’s like a raving radical compared to this guy. Continue reading Bad Allegories….

riddle me this, dynamic didacts: let’s say you were assigned to teach a class with the unwieldly title “Popular Culture, Civil Society and the Public Sphere” where at least one unit would focus on comedy, another on historical representation and yet another on critique of the media/culture industry. What films (and affiliated texts) might you wish to teach? in 100 words or less, why? I ask purely out of curiousity and not at all because I am preparing a sample syllabus for such a topic and wish to pick your brains….that would be unseemly.

From Yahoo news….in which we learn 1.) maybe just maybe a spielberg film of uplift will transform the middle east; 2.) spielberg condemns the mass murder of athletes 3.) having a family makes someone a nuanced “individual” and 4.) killing a person up close is “excruciating” (who did spielberg kill? I hear he lunged at Phyllis Diller with a steakknife at Morton’s). spielberg, as a one man hollywood blitzkrieg, has taken on world war 2, the holocaust, prehistory, outer space….and now international terrorism! can’t the guy just do something about a couple of people sitting in a room? however, I do look forward to Tom Hanks playing Arafat.

Continue reading Egomania

What happens when you lose track of movies as stories, as self-contained constructed objects, and start thinking of them as ghostly records of dead people moving through lost locations in a piece of time that you can never recover? What do you say to that, Mrs. Jean-Paul?

what special editions and gift boxes are you lusting after for the holidays? I go to the criterion collection website and get quite dizzy. of course, if i get any of these items i will receive puzzled looks and questions from my family (what kind of movie is that? that looks dull…etc. etc.) but I want Criterion’s Le Samourai, The Wages of Fear, L’Eclisse, The Leopard and Fassbinder’s “BRD Trilogy” (Marriage of maria Braun, Lola and Veronika Voss). i also lust after the Val Lewton collection coming out. and though I am generally opposed to music box sets and question my need for another version of Blitzkrieg Bop, I am inexorably drawn to “Weird Tales of the Ramones” which includes a DVD and a comic booklet. some of the boxed sets fill me with anger–the laurel and hardy “collection” includes their most painful film Utopia which is only there because it is not under copyright protection while most of their classic silents are totally unavailable; the steve mcqueen collection includes a bore like The Thomas Crown Affair while totally neglecting Hell is for Heroes, the coen brothers collection includes Intolerable Cruelty but not Miller’s Crossing, etc. etc. and when i see the glittering collections for the simpsons, futurama, monty python, ren and stimpy, aqua teen hunger force, the prisoner, etc. i weep with despair at my financially marginal position–all that neatly packaged nostalgia and culture, all those commentaries, all those anecdotes lost to me!!! but who exactly is buying the boxed sets of Diagnosis Murder?

Tomorrow I have to go into New York for two days; it will be my mission there to go see this Sarah Silverman concert film. partly for an ulterior motive–I am a sucker for sexy semites with a slight overbite. but also because of all the raves I’ve heard from all of you concerning her part in The Aristocrats, and because I just heard a good interview with her on NPR. of course I will also feel like a fool paying $10.50 for a 75 minutes film of a stage show. but the chances of ever having an opportunity to see it here in the lehigh valley are about as good as pennsylvanians giving up scrapple and deep fried pork bits. i’m not saying pennsylvanians are fat….but when they sit around the movie house…

by the way, i believe john and mike might have been in the car with me and Pete (in Pete’s old volvo), on our way to the “good luck” bar, when a woman who I believe was Sarah Silverman pulled up beside us to tell us that she too was from Nashua NH (she saw it on the license plate)…even though I recognized her, I stared blankly and missed my opportunity to invite her along, knowing that probably in her secret heart she wished to spend the night with a bunch of English graduate students from USC. instead, i believe the evening ended with the “little New Yorker” at Cantor’s , served by a matronly Helga in white shoes, and then a morning of nightmare-ravaged sleep. ah, the days when we towered over the LA entertainment scene and made or broke careers with a mere glance….or at least the days when we had a regular table at Musso and Frank’s and every agent in town solicited our opinions…or at least when we dominated the Taco Bell on Figueroa and the homeless begged us for nickels and dimes….or maybe it was Norm’s and just that one guy who smelled….

yesterday evening I spent 8.50 to see Doom. to paraphrase the Zodiac Killer: I can’t help it. Can someone stop me?

nifty half monster dog/half wheelchair, though.

I succumbed to the hype and watched this sweeps-month live “event.” almost as dull as a real debate and almost as “beside the point” as a real debate where everything about American life gets reduced to “the economy.” nevertheless, interesting as an experiment. they must have known it would be somewhat dull in order to include the heckler about halfway through. many discussed the possibility that an event like this might have some actual impact on real television debates–that they might follow the fictional model and dispense with “the rules.” fat chance, since nobody does anything without a rehearsed script. even the coughs and gestures are scripted I imagine (here, George should lean forward to express intimacy and suggest that folksiness always trumps the need to be articulate, etc. etc.) also perhaps, too, this always rather self-important show undercut itself with the cutesy ellen degeneris bits, which more than anything in the actual show, demonstrates what politics is all about now–the short con and corporate control masquerading as “lifestyle” choices. demonstrating further that the show–by featuring as a kind of ‘anti-ad’ ad the cool lesbian chatting amiably with us, the purportedly open-minded and educated West Wing viewers–is heavily invested in the kind of imagery of dualism, the liberals vs. the conservatives regarding “issues,” that you wish it would critique and take apart; the issues march happily by in their pre-determined places(education, jobs, health insurance….) fragmenting real life into pieces while covertly homogenizing it. or should I be less grumpy and praise the attempt to “raise” the level of civility in politics in this kind of episode and acknowledge its attempt to advocate for less constrained political discussion…

p.s. anyone else find it strangely totalitarian that the audience gets chastized by a TV news talking head for “inappropriately” reacting during the course of the event. screw you, Forest or Chad or Don or whatever the hell your name is.