A scene from the new film Casino Jack about lobbyist Jack Abramov, in which the filmmakers cleverly use a moment’s fantasizing by the title character to reveal the real corruption in government. Too bad it doesn’t happen in real life.
Kevin Spacey is a wonderful actor and although I haven’t seen the film, I hope that after a long time he has a role worthy of him. Here’s the trailer.
I just saw the comedy Clockwise starring John Cleese. Here’s the trailer:
Cleese is one of my favorite actors and here he is playing a role that is perfectly suited for him, that of an authority figure frustrated when things don’t go the way he wants them to, as in this scene from Life of Brian
His character Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers is another example of his manic comedic touch.
In the film Clockwise he plays a punctuality-obsessed, super-organized principal of a school invited to give the most important speech of his career to an elite organization of school principals. He starts out in the morning to take a three-hour train ride to give the speech but due to a misunderstanding he misses his train. The entire film is about his efforts to find alternative ways to get to his destination on time, with every plan ending in disaster.
This is a role that is tailor-made for Cleese and so you would think I really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I found the film to be only mildly amusing. I think the problem may lie with me and not the film itself. I don’t enjoy comedies in which the premise is someone trying desperately to achieve some important goal and being thwarted every step of the way. This is why, for example, I did not like Ben Stiller’s Meet the Parents, because you knew from the beginning that the film would be about how he would fail in every effort to please his future in-laws.
There are two reasons for my lukewarm response to such comedies. One is that if the main character is sympathetic, I want the person to achieve his or her goal and be successful and having their hopes repeatedly dashed makes me feel sorry for them rather than want to laugh at their plight. The second is that I tend to plan things somewhat carefully and usually have a backup plan in case things go wrong. When things fall apart, I tend to stay calm, analyze the situation, examine the alternatives, and select the best rather than panic and grab wildly at the first option that presents itself, the way that the characters in these kinds of films do. So while I can enjoy this set up in a short sketch comedy, in full-length features I tend to get annoyed with people for repeatedly acting so stupid and that spoils the fun for me.
In an interview in the extras section of the DVD, Cleese makes an interesting observation about a difference between British and American humor audiences that may explain why Clockwise was not a success in its American release. He says that he thinks that the British find absurd situations funny in themselves (which is why farces are so popular over there) while Americans seem to require actual jokes and wisecracks to make them laugh. He may have a point.
Apparently the German film about the female pope may get a US release soon. Here’s the trailer (thanks to reader Norm).
It’s been a couple of decades since I watched a James Bond film. I saw almost all of the Sean Connery originals, then a couple of the Roger Moore versions, and then gave up on the franchise, thus missing out on what George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan added to this iconic figure of cold war fiction.
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You have to grant writers-directors-producers Joel and Ethan Coen one thing: they make interesting films. Not for them the formulaic, genre-tailored approach to filmmaking. Not for them endless sequels to hits or even to follow up a hit film with one similar in style. Each film seems to go off in a different direction from the previous one and stands alone. They take risks and for that quality alone one has to respect them.
Having said all that, the results are a mixed bag and I cannot say that I have enjoyed all the films that I have seen of their oeuvre: Raising Arizona (1987), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), Burn After Reading (2008), and A Serious Man (2009).
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
Up is a truly outstanding film that I can strongly recommend to anyone.
This latest animation coming out of Pixar Studios tells the story of Carl, a 78-year old curmudgeonly man who, on the verge of being forced out of the home he lived in with his beloved late wife Ellie and sent to a retirement home, decides to carry out their unfulfilled joint childhood dream of following in the footsteps of a legendary explorer who disappeared long ago in South America in search of a mystical place called Paradise Falls that harbors an exotic bird that no one else believes exists.
The explorer used a blimp to travel and this inspires the old man to attach a huge number of helium balloons to his house and use it too as a blimp to get to his destination. But a complication arises when a little boy named Russell, a novice member of a children’s explorer’s club, accidentally ends up as a stowaway on his journey.
You get a good sense of the set up of the film from the trailer below, though it does not hint at what happens later.
The film has comedy and adventure in abundance and never drags. After watching it, it struck me how much superior it was to the film Avatar, despite all the hoopla generated by the latter. (See my review of Avatar.) Both films are fantasy adventures. Both have highly predictable storylines, Up even more so than Avatar. You have no doubt that both will have happy endings with some bittersweet elements thrown in. Both use computer graphics extensively, though Avatar is far more advanced and has 3D.
So what makes Up so much better? The answer is simple: it has a much better story, writing, and characters with depth. It does not hurt for a dog-person like me that it also has lots of dogs. Even though the main characters are a grizzled old man and a rotund little boy, you soon find yourself really caring about them in a way that you did not about the much better-looking lead couple in Avatar. There was one short and silent sequence early on, showing the life of Carl and Ellie from childhood to old age, that was extraordinarily beautifully done. I am not usually emotional while watching films but this sequence was so exquisite and poignant that it brought tears to my eyes.
It seems to me that it is the creators of animations that are making some of the better films these days. I recently saw another excellent animation Ratatouille and that managed to make a rat (a rat!) a highly engaging character. And going back to 1967, Walt Disney’s Jungle Book has remained one of my favorite films of all time, combining great songs with humor and suspense. Perhaps the reason that animations tend to be among the better films is that the creators of animations know that they cannot depend on film-star power and sex and violence to overcome a weak plot or clunky dialogue. The story, writing, and direction are always the keys to good films, and for animations they are even more important.
A good guide to how good a film is is the extent to which I pay attention to implausibilities, incongruities, and inconsistencies. In the case of Avatar, several such elements struck me even while watching the film, as I noted in my review. But while watching Up I simply did not care if there were any. Looking back, Up had a lot more plot holes than Avatar but I still don’t care. Maybe the reason is because it was an obvious animation while Avatar looked more realistic, and one gives animations more slack. But I think another important reason is that when you get absorbed in a film and its characters, one does not want to let small things destroy one’s enjoyment.
I have never quite seen the appeal of awards and so am baffled that there is so much anticipation about the Oscars and that people actually watch over three hours of the awards show. Having said that, I am glad that Up won for best animated feature film and was also nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards. If that gets more people to see it, that is a good thing.
POST SCRIPT: On being an art critic
“People have pointed out evidence of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanour, not knowing that a criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic. The artist who accounts for my disparagement by alleging personal animosity on my part is quite right: when people do less than their best, and do that less at once badly and self-complacently, I hate them, loathe them, detest them, long to tear them limb from limb and strew them in gobbets about the stage or platform…. In the same way, really fine artists inspire me with the warmest personal regard, which I gratify in writing my notices without the smallest reference to such monstrous conceits as justice, impartiality, and the rest of the ideals. When my critical mood is at its height, personal feeling is not the word: it is passion: the passion for artistic perfection – for the noblest beauty of sound, sight and action – that rages in me. Let all young artists look to it, and pay no heed to the idiots who declare that criticism should be free from personal feeling. The true critic, I repeat, is the man who becomes your personal enemy on the sole provocation of a bad performance, and will only be appeased by good performances. Now this, though well for art and for the people, means that the critics are, from the social or clubbable point of view, veritable fiends. They can only fit themselves for other people’s clubs by allowing themselves to be corrupted by kindly feelings foreign to the purpose of art.”
– George Bernard Shaw, quoted in Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality by Hesketh Pearson (1961), p. 126
(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
In a series of recent posts titled The Noble Lie (part 1, part 2, and part 3), I explored the idea of whether lies can have some positive benefits. The highly enjoyable film by comedian Ricky Gervais adds interesting perspectives to this question. (Note: Almost everything in this review about the film can be seen in the trailer below, so there are no real spoilers.)
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
I suspect that my spoiler warning will not matter much because going by the box office records this film is setting, I may have been one of the last people to see it last weekend.
I don’t usually go to see much-hyped blockbusters as they are often overly focused on action for its own sake and thus not the kinds of films I enjoy but I felt that I should see Avatar. At the beginning of each semester, I ask my students various questions to help me get to know them better and one of these is their favorite film. Many of them replied that it was Avatar, which made me intrigued as to what was so appealing, especially since some of my faculty colleagues also said it was their favorite film ever. (I also ask students their favorite book and this year for the first time many students said Harry Potter, which suggests that the first generation of students for whom those books were a formative reading experience are now entering college.)
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)
I realized that I hadn’t discussed a film that deals with evolution and intelligent design (ID), topics that are central to this blog, so here is my long overdue review.
Frankly, Expelled is a mess. The film is polemical but that is not the problem. There is nothing wrong with having a point of view and making the case for it. The creators of Expelled have a story to tell of a scientific community (especially biologists) acting like a totalitarian cabal that demands Darwinian orthodoxy from all scientists and expels heretics from their midst, by denying them tenure, rejecting their papers, and firing them. All those who would even dare to whisper that evolution may be wrong and that there is a possibility that a designer is at work in life processes are victimized, ostracized, and expelled from the academy.
To tell this story, the narrator Ben Stein basically tries to copy Michael Moore’s patented shtick of the bemused Everyman, just a simple guy who has a childlike belief in truth and justice, trying to figure out what’s going on, and constantly being surprised at all the chicanery and bad intentions that he stumbles across almost by accident. In Stein’s case, he acts like a naïf who assumes that scientists were open to every possibility and every alternative theory and he is shocked, just shocked, at the extent they are willing to go to suppress ideas that they see as contradicting Darwin, and the appalling lengths they will go to destroy the people who are brave enough to do so.
Stein starts off by speaking to five scientists and a journalist who say their careers were destroyed because they criticized aspects of evolution and spoke in favor of intelligent design. I am not going to examine the validity of these claims since they have already been scrutinized here, but will instead focus on the filmic aspects.
The major difference between Moore and Stein is that Moore has a deft touch with comedy. He knows how to make people laugh by inserting verbal, visual, and musical gags that can startle the viewer into laughter while at the same time making an important and serious point. With his huge bulk, disheveled appearance, and trademark baseball cap, Moore comes across as a big lug, a doofus, a regular guy confronting the rich and powerful.
Stein, by contrast, looks throughout the film like an undertaker having a bad day. He seems to never crack a smile and speaks in a monotone. We see a lot of him walking everywhere in a dark suit and sneakers, with an inflectionless voiceover narration, and interviewing people with a dour expression.
The filmmakers have all the subtlety of a sledgehammer and the word ‘overkill’ is not in their vocabulary. The tone is set right at the beginning, with stark black and white images of the Berlin Wall going up as dismayed onlookers watch helplessly. The Berlin Wall is a central metaphor throughout the film. (The scientific community wants to prevent the free flow of ideas, just like the Communists, get it?)
From then on, we get repeated black and white stock film footage of Nazi and Communist soldiers marching in formation (the scientific community marching in lockstep, get it?). We also see lots of footage from what seems like old school education filmstrips and newsreels and films, with the grimacing, scowling faces of old wrinkled people (the hidebound nature of the scientific old guard, get it?) and slapstick comedy (the childish arguments against intelligent design, get it?).
And then there is Hitler. There is always Hitler. Religious people never seem to get enough of Hitler. They seem to think he is an argument against evolution and atheism even though Hitler was a Catholic and his entire program of mass extermination was carried out by a nation of presumably devout Catholics and Lutherans. We see images of Nazi death camps and hear much about their eugenics program. The claim is made that the theory of evolution leads in a straight line to eugenics, which in turn leads to not only the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps but also to euthanasia and abortion. In other words, when you accept evolution, you embrace a culture of death. The scientific community apparently just loves the thought of killing people in huge numbers. Oh, and Stalin appears in the film too but Pol Pot does not. He must have ended up on the cutting room floor.
The heavy-handed allusions last right up to the end. The film concludes with clips of Reagan making his famous speech calling for the Berlin wall to be torn down, juxtaposed with cuts to Stein concluding a speech to some college students, exhorting them to break free of the chains of scientific orthodoxy and fight for freedom. As the students stand and cheer Stein at the end of his speech, the film cuts away to the Berlin wall being brought down by young people. The take-home message is clear: Stein=Reagan and Evolutionists=Berlin wall. The self-aggrandizement is so painfully obvious as to be cringe-inducing.
The film was interesting to me in that it gave me a glimpse of some of the people in this debate whom I had not seen before. Evolutionist (and atheist) P. Z. Myers, author of the blog Pharyngula that has a pugnacious, take-no-prisoners writing style, comes across as low-key, soft-spoken, and mild-mannered. Mathematician David Berlinski, an apologist for intelligent design, comes across as smug, supercilious, condescending, and thoroughly unpleasant.
Richard Dawkins is of course the person the ID people hate and he gets a lot of questioning from Stein, mainly to highlight the fact that he thinks evolution and science tend to support and encourage atheism. Stein goes to great pains to get Dawkins, perhaps the world’s most famous atheist, to explicitly say that he does not believe in any god. In fact, after Dawkins has made it quite clear that he thinks the idea of god is absurd, Stein starts listing the gods of the various religions individually by name, asking him if he believes in each. Dawkins’s expression clearly signals that it is beginning to dawn on him that he may be talking to an idiot. He asks, “How could I? Why would I? Why would you even need to ask? Any god, anywhere, would be completely incompatible with anything I’ve said.”
Stein spends a lot of time in the film talking about the origin of life and the fact that we do not as yet have a good theory of how the first self-replicating molecule and the first cell appeared, even though neither the theory of evolution nor intelligent design has anything to say about this question. The reason is, of course, that religious people’s last resort is to insert god as an explanation for whatever question science has not yet answered, and the origin of life and the origin of the cosmos is their Little Big Horn, their last stand. But even here, they will meet the same fate as Custer.
One of the chief negatives about ID is that it is a useless theory that does not make any predictions or provide the basis for any research program. The film did not provide any either, because there is none. In the DVD edition though, it promised a bonus segment dealing with the practical applications of ID. This I had to see. It lasted a little less than three minutes and dealt with just two items: a neurosurgeon who looked at how engineers designed buffer systems and used that idea to understand how blood pressure to the brain is modulated, and another person who said that he thought a part of a cancer cell looked like a turbine (which is of course designed) and used that idea in his research.
That was truly pathetic. Scientists borrow ideas from other areas all the time. The fact that you got an idea from something that was designed and used it to understand the workings of a biological system is not evidence for the truth of ID. Doing science means postulating mechanisms that enable one to predict new outcomes and do experiments to test hypotheses. After all these years and all that money, ID still has not done any of that basic science and this is the truth that they cannot hide from.
ID is rejected by the scientific community because it has failed as science, not because of any grand conspiracy to keep it from exposing the weakness of evolution. This film is, at the end, a confession of this failure.
POST SCRIPT: Obama’s disingenuousness
In his State of the Union address, Obama said the following concerning the current health care reform plan being discussed by Congress, whose weaknesses I have discussed here and here:
“[I]f anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. Let me know. I’m eager to see it.”
Really? He hasn’t heard of the single payer option, the Medicare-for-all option, and the public option? All of these things would achieve all his goals and have been widely discussed. It was he and his cronies in Congress who went out of their way to make sure that they were never seriously considered.
To pretend that he is open to better ideas is simply a flat out lie. He sold out to the health industry and all his fine words cannot hide that ugly truth.
Rashomon is the classic 1950 film by the then unknown but later highly acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, that first brought him to the attention of the western film world. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and an honorary Academy Award (Oscar) for the most outstanding foreign language film released in 1951.
The story is set in 11th century Japan and is about the death of an aristocratic man and the rape of his wife by a notorious bandit in a secluded grove in a remote area of Japan. The events are told in a series of flashbacks, by a bewildered woodcutter and a priest to a cynical thief they meet while huddled for shelter in an abandoned and dilapidated building during a fierce rainstorm.
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