leviathan has a really subtle point if i think really hard about it

Last year, the New York Times ran a profile of the filmmakers behind Leviathan, which I just saw on Monday. Here's how the profile began:

Tucked within the syllabus for a class that the filmmaker and anthropologist Lucien Castaing-Taylor teaches at Harvard is a rhetorical question that sums up his view of nonfiction film: "If life is messy and unpredictable, and documentary is a reflection of life, should it not be digressive and open-ended too?"

Just so you know, I cannot in good conscience recommend Leviathan, as I was tempted to walk out of the theater due to boredom. That said, this aphorism from Castaing-Taylor does not even make the best case for the film, and of the reviews I've read, I haven't seen anybody else do it, either.

the great gatsby as a test case for what we lose in adaptation; not a post in which i grumble about the superiority of any medium over another, i promise

Greg Olear, writing for The Weeklings, makes a good argument that Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, is gay. I'm a sucker for unlikely theories about books and movies, but even more so when they rely on a close reading of the evidence. Also, since Baz Luhrmann's movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby is finally coming out this week, Olear's argument has gotten me thinking about the fundamental differences between the art of film and the art of writing.

Before I get to that, I'll have to convey to you the gist of Olear's argument, especially the way he uses Nick's point of view to make it. A big chunk of Olear's evidence comes from the way Carraway describes each of the other five major characters in the novel. Part of the argument comes from how Nick casts a pretty detached eye on the women, even though they are all supposed to be desirable in their own way. As an example, there is a passage where Nick describes Jordan Baker (a golfer), the woman he gets involved with: "She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet." Olear summarizes it this way: "Other than the word small-breasted — which de-emphasizes the golfer's feminine attributes — this could be a description of a man."

inception vs. the matrix: is reality overrated?

Blockbuster season approaches, and despite some moderately good intentions, I will probably go to many of them this summer. Tom Cruise's Oblivion? Already seen it and already vaguely regret having seen it.

Not all blockbusters are as bad as people make out to be, even if most of them are; it's easy to make fun of the somewhat absurd conceits they use. Although it's tempting to think of Christopher Nolan's Inception as "that movie about dreams," there's enough going on to make the movie worth thinking about.

For starters, the "movies about dreams" characterization misses the point, since the dreams are not what make the film compelling. Inception in its plot and many of its methods is really a classic heist, the genre that inspired Nolan. Cobb, played by a very sleek Leonardo DiCaprio, is leading his team on that job that occurs with surprising frequency in heist films: the one that is supposed to be impossible. The twist is that Cobb's group specializes in dream infiltration, but the obvious philosophical questions — like, is reality actually any more valid than a dream? — are not the best reason to watch the movie.

nothing about nothing and the use of narrative explosives

This time around, I didn't stumble onto a Vimeo staff pick I liked as immediately as last time. This go-round I churned through a number, several of which were intriguing — "The fun part is closing circuits through vegetables" a guy says before doing a Massive Attack thing with eggplant and strawberries (!) — but not really worth examining in detail.

But I liked the name of this one, and it turned out to be nice and chewy from a storytelling standpoint. (I'm going to write about specifics below, so you should probably just go ahead and watch all 11ish minutes if you're going to read on.) (And of course you should.)

maybe there's a good reason to rip on django unchained, or maybe not, i can't tell

You know, just because I love Quentin Tarantino doesn't mean I don't want to hear criticisms of him. I do; I genuinely enjoy hearing what people think about movies and why they don't like them. That said, the sophist in me wants you to make the best argument possible, even if it's against a piece of art I happen to like.

photo by Steve Rhodes under cc

To begin with, if you're going to criticize Quentin Tarantino for using the n-word too much, you should probably wait until he's doing a movie that isn't about slavery, since QT has already nicely answered your concerns about Django Unchained:

Personally, I find [the criticism] ridiculous. Because it would be one thing if people are out there saying, "You use it much more excessively in this movie than it was used in 1858 in Mississippi." Well, nobody's saying that. And if you're not saying that, you're simply saying I should be lying. I should be watering it down. I should be making it more easy to digest.

david foster wallace on the terminator movies

From a 1993 interview with David Foster Wallace in "The Review of Contemporary Fiction":

It's almost like postmodernism is fiction's fall from biblical grace. Fiction became conscious of itself in a way it never had been. Here's a really pretentious bit of pop analysis for you: I think you can see Cameron's "Terminator" movies as a metaphor for all literary art after Roland Barthes, viz., the movies' premise that the Cyberdyne NORAD computer becomes conscious of itself as "conscious," as having interests and an agenda; the Cyberdyne becomes literally self-referential, and it's no accident that the result of this is nuclear war, Armageddon.

I came across this quote yesterday and planned to write about it before I realized that Wallace wrote an entire essay about T2 (and how it is "F/X porn"), which will be reprinted shortly as part of a new non-fiction collection. So three cheers for coincidence.

Anyway, I like Wallace and I really liked this theory at first glance, but the more I think about it, the more I think it's wrong — and the more I think about why, the more I think it's wrong for interesting reasons. Before I get to why, let's first acknowledge that Wallace (as quoted at least) got the names mixed up: "Cyberdyne" is the name of the company that creates the artificial intelligence, which is known as "Skynet."