2010 January | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Jan

tell all of your friends what you've seen

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: Amazing. Gobsmacking. Addictive. One hell of a novel.

Many novels begin with some epigram, used to illuminate or foreshadow, before the opening chapter. Stieg Larsson’s posthumous debut novel begins with the following:

Eighteen percent of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man.

No follow-up, no context and no prescription to cure it. Larsson’s not proposing a way to treat this endemic culture of violence and abuse. He’s just telling us about the setting and what we should expect from it.

Our tour guide through this cesspool is the titular Lisbeth Salander, a borderline Asperger’s who dropped out of high school and works as a researcher for a security consultant. She responds to affection with blank stares or active distrust. But behind her unblinking facade is a rigid code of self-written ethics and a penchant for vigilante justice. And it doesn’t hurt matters that she is (by the admission of other characters) Sweden’s best hacker. She is Larsson’s champion: a woman who appears to be the typical victim-in-waiting, but is actually a Fury made flesh.

To the story itself: we first meet Mikael Blomquist, an attractive, stubborn and fiery financial reporter, as he’s walking out of a Stockholm courthouse where he’s just been convicted for libel. His reputation in tatters and the magazine he publishes on the brink of bankruptcy, he still has the presence of mind to hesitate when offered an unusual job. But the job, offered by retired industrialist Henrik Vanger, captivates him: find out who murdered Vanger’s grand-niece, Harriet, thirty-six years ago. Before too long, circumstances drag Blomquist’s path across Salander’s, and the two of them soon team up to bring a dormant murderer to justice.

I haven’t found a novel this compulsively readable in months. I went out of my way to find excuses to read it. Smart, passionate, clear and engaging. Recommended without qualification.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlF-hk3IJQE]

A TV miniseries based on the novel was recently released in Sweden, and the film rights have supposedly been optioned in America. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Community lately, but I can picture Alison Brie (Pete Campbell’s wife Trudy on Mad Men) as Lisbeth Salander very easily. She can pull off that unblinking repression very well. I’d post a photo of her, but they’re all too glamorous: picture her in punk hair and nose ring.

Update: I found a picture of Alison where she isn’t smiling. Still a little too glam, but you get the idea.

Jan

but we've got the biggest balls of them all

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

Talking with a very good friend of mine last week, we mentioned a mutual female acquaintance whom, I said, “had the ovaries to pull something like that off.”

“Huh?” my friend asked.

“Like saying, ‘she had the balls to pull it off.’ Only, y’know, ovaries.”

“Right, right; I got that.” I still got the quizzical look, though.

“I figured it’s diminutive to refer to a woman as ‘having balls’ to do something because she’s confident. ‘Oh, congratulations at having presence. You’ve been promoted to ‘Male.’ ”

“I’m with you,” my friend said. “But at the same time, I’m not comfortable with females getting special female-only titles that distinguish them from male roles. Like ‘actress,’ which is the same thing as an actor, but female. As if there’s some inherent difference in a woman’s performance than a man’s.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

(We settled on cojones, which means “balls” but is obscured by the language barrier and retains neutrality)

But the question lingers in my mind.

There’s a wealth of jargon in English to encourage someone to take bold action, and all of it points at a guy’s crotch. A guy with confidence has “balls”; astonishing confidence, “big brass ones.” Someone who needs to show confidence is told to “sack up” or “grow a pair”; someone who lacks confidence is a “pussy.” One of my favorite lines from The French Connection comes when an American mobster needs to convince his boss that French druglord Alain Charnier is a cold-hearted operator. “This guy’s got ‘em like THAT!”, the mobster yells, making a cupping motion under his crotch. It’s a guttural, striking image, and it conveys the message in a heartbeat.

So how do you describe a woman with confidence? Let’s ignore for the moment the tendency of many people to refer to women exhibiting confidence, a refusal to be interrupted or a low tolerance for errors as “bitchy.” Not because that’s not a problem, mind, but because that’d be its own 1000-word post. For now, let’s settle on the problem of language.

We can’t erase ten thousand years of linguistic development, so we can’t get people to stop referring to confidence as “ballsy.” That’s not an option. So our remaining options appear to be:

Appropriate that language for women as well, reproductive irony be damned. That chick’s got balls; you see that?
Invent parallel language for women. Doubting yourself isn’t going to get the job done. Now egg up and get back out there.
Create some gender-neutral term that’ll work well for both. Now this one’s got some real gametes, walking up and saying that.
A fourth option that I haven’t figured out yet.

I ask not because I’m looking for the Orthodox Answer From Feminism (there isn’t one, and that’s a good thing). Rather, I want a good colloquial way to talk about the women I respect. Also, I like stirring up interesting discussions about language on Mondays.

Jan

this is not the greatest song in the world

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 11:22 am

Dragon Age: Remember when I said of Mass Effect that I’d almost rather read a novel set in that universe than play a game in it? With Dragon Age, I feel as if I’ve already read that novel.

Follow along: in a world where magic is heavily regulated by a religious order (Wheel of Time), a secretive order of knights defends against irregular incursions of demonic creatures (A Song of Ice and Fire). Our young hero sets off from the home he once knew into the unknown world (everything, really; it’s Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces monomyth, but just to keep to the trope I’ll pin it to Edding’s Belgariad) and meets exotic strangers along the way (The Lord of the Rings). And so on.

Dragon Age turns a genre convention from previous Bioware games into an outright, obvious flaw. I’ll explain by way of example: one of the lands you can explore is Redcliffe Village, a hamlet under siege from hordes of undead that pour out of its castle every night. Here’s how a talented production team with an eye for direction might have introduced you to this dilemma.

How It Might Have Gone

(The party approaches the village at night, fog wafting up from the canyon on which Redcliffe sits. Suddenly, a shambling figure bolts from the mist – a miller from the village, bleeding from many wounds!)

Miller: The … hordes … (dies)

(Suddenly, a bunch of skeletons show up. AWESOME FIGHT SCENE!)

(As the skeletons are dispatched, the village mayor, Murdock, runs up, his blade black with the ooze of the undead)

Murdock: Thank the Maker! Whoever you are, we’re in dire need of help. Walking corpses are assaulting our town!

(The party follows Murdock into the village, where skeletons assail panicked knots of spear-carrying villagers. ANOTHER AWESOME FIGHT SCENE!)

(Once the last corpse is put down, Murdock approaches)

Murdock: Thank you again for your aid. This was the closest battle yet. If any more of those creatures had come out of the castle, we’d've been done for.
You: Out of the castle?
Murdock: I’ll explain. For the last three nights, (EXPOSITION DUMP)

Fun, right? It puts you right in the heart of the crisis and starts the action at a good pitch.

How Bioware Actually Did It

(Heroes amble up to village in broad daylight)
Alistair (who’s in your party): By the way, when we get to the castle, there might be some awkwardness. Regarding me. You see, (EXPOSITION DUMP).
You: Ah. Well, thanks.

(Heroes walk another five feet)

Town Guard: Thank the Maker you’re here! Our town is under assault by the undead.
You: What, now?
Town Guard: No, at night. Every night. You see, (EXPOSITION DUMP).
You: Ah.
Town Guard: You should go speak to our Mayor.
You: Right.
Town Guard: And to Bann Teagan, who’s in the Chantry.
You: Right.
Town Guard: And to Ser Perth, who’s leading the defense.
You: Okay, got it.

And so on. There’s a minimum of twenty minutes of conversation – dialogue trees, running up and down hills, fetching and delivering items for NPCs – before you slay your first walking corpse. I don’t know why this didn’t bother me more in prior Bioware games, but it’s exasperating now.

Though the plot may be cliched, Dragon Age tries to innovate a little in combining MMORPG gameplay with console controls. But the result confused me more than it helped. Take crafting, for instance. As you level your characters up, they can learn how to combine herbs and make useful potions. So let’s say you’ve gathered a mess of herbs and want to start brewing healing salves. Do you click on an herb? No. Do you go to the Character Record screen and click on your Herbalism talent? No. Do you click on an empty flask? No. You open up the radial menu using the left trigger, select Potions, then select the Herbalism talent – oh, you’re already on a character who knows Herbalism, right? if not, back out and start again – and then pick the potion you want to brew. It makes a certain kind of sense, but why the designers felt the need to get creative was beyond me.

What bugs me the most is my lack of investment in the story. You start with one of six origins, depending on the race and class you pick. I was a Human Noble, schooled in the arts of war. I played through a little vignette where my noble father sent off a detachment of retainers to fight against some darkspawn. A Gray Warden, one of the knights traditionally charged with defending against darkspawn incursions, shows up at the house. When a treacherous relative betrays my family, the Gray Warden helps me escape, on the condition that I join his order. My father, with his dying breath, agrees. (You have enough control to decide whether to join reluctantly or willingly, but you have to follow this guy out of the house)

This backstory complete, I’m now thrust into the middle of a demonic invasion. I have almost no investment in how this turns out: the war sounds nasty, sure, but a traitor sits in my ancestral keep! And shortly thereafter, I’m given the quest to travel to various points around the country and draw more recruits for the Gray Wardens. But I’ve seen nothing yet to suggest they’re more capable of defeating darkspawn than anyone else.

All I know is that I have to go to these three cities because the game won’t progress until I do. Contrast this to Mass Effect, where I was getting evidence to bring in a rogue Spectre, or Jade Empire, where I was rescuing my kidnapped master, or Knights of the Old Republic, where I at least saw evidence of what the main villain was capable of in the destruction of Taris.

I’m only eight hours or so into the game, maybe 20% of the way through, so I’m not passing final judgment yet. But Bioware’s starting to remind me of Kevin Smith. We all got excited by Clerks: what a bold voice! what a creative talent! Then each succeeding movie grinds the shine off his reputation, until he’s producing unremarkable stuff like Dogma and Jersey Girl. Dragon Age isn’t quite Dogma-bad, yet. And, again, I haven’t finished the game entirely. But Dragon Age reminds me a lot of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: a whirlwind tour of cliches and genre elements, a series of entertaining moments with a threadbare plot to wrap them together.

Jan

freedom, that's just some people talking

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

Lone Wolf McQuade: Wow.

Everything that’s ridiculous about this movie can be gleaned, like nuggets panned from a river, in its first 10 minutes.

After a credit sequence that begins with a photo-negative montage of a wolf crossing sandy scrub, we cut to a convoy of Mexicans rustling horses. The local sheriff and some deputies stake them out from a hilltop. J.J. McQuade watches them. As the sheriff and his men ride down to arrest the horse thieves, McQuade shakes his head in disgust.

What should the sheriff’s men, who outnumber the rustlers, have done? I don’t know, but probably what J.J. McQuade did:

Waited until the rustlers took several deputies hostage;
Shot out the gas tank of their truck with a hunting rifle;
Stood up where the head rustler can see you and get a good bead on you;
Watched while the sheriff got shot;
Came down and surrendered your rifle and sidearm;
Kicked everyone in the head

To be fair, McQuade shot a lot of guys, too.

Lone Wolf McQuade takes the foreign stereotype of Americans – beer-swilling, gun-toting, violent, unwashed, antisocial louts – and turns it into a virtue. Drinking Pearl Beer (which he keeps in his glove compartment), hoisting an illegal sidearm confiscated from arms smugglers, kicking people’s teeth in and showing up to his boss’s office sweaty and gross is what makes McQuade a hero. His strength comes from his filth. It’s the prissy Rangers in the downtown offices, or the pansy sheriff’s men, or the leather-shoed FBI, who’ve traded in their masculinity for style. But McQuade’s such a man, he doesn’t even wear a shirt at home!

Contrast McQuade with his nemesis: the amulet-wearing, metrosexually-sweatered Rawley Wilkes (David Carradine).

When Wilkes shows up at a racetrack (in a foreign car with the license plate ‘CARATE’), a woman tells McQuade that Wilkes won the “European Karate championships” a few years back. What’s the matter, Rawley? American Karate championships not good enough for ya? Anyhow, Wilkes gets into a boxing ring and kicks a variety of martial arts practitioners in the head, because someone thought that would be a good time. Then he calls out McQuade! But McQuade doesn’t fight for sport. Frustrated, Wilkes later sends a few of his lackeys to pick a fight that McQuade will have to break up, in order to test him.

When Lola Richardson (Barbara Carrera, Never Say Never Again) falls in love with McQuade, she shows up at his house one afternoon and begins cleaning it up. Never mind that they’ve been on one date to this point. Never mind that a shack full of filth rarely makes a man more attractive to a woman. Richardson cheerily throws out his beer and makes with the vacuuming. McQuade tries to scare her off, but then regrets making her cry. He resolves to let her into his disgusting life, and soon the two of them are making out in a mud puddle. Seriously.

And yet, this is probably one of the saner Chuck Norris movies. Even with the Mexican midget mob boss. In a wheelchair.

Jan

you can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

Sherlock Holmes: first, a word about the source material.

The Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories, written by Arthur Conan Doyle, are a lot of fun. I could read them for hours, and, as a bookish teenager, did. But you could hardly call them classics of detection. Doyle didn’t assemble clockwork mysteries for his protagonist, the asocial savant Holmes, to solve. He decided what he wanted to have happened, and then summoned a series of clues which would support that outcome. Take for instance this section from the very first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet:

The train of reasoning ran, ‘Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded?’

The annexation of Burma? The Siege of Khartoum? The Battle of Abu Klea? A railway accident the day after he got back?

‘Clearly in Afghanistan.’ The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.

Ah, right. Of course. Clearly in Afghanistan.

A good Sherlock Holmes story is not about the mystery, rather, but about the man himself – Holmes, a master at chemistry, biology, geology, fencing, jiu-jitsu and the soils of London – and about the grotesqueness of the crimes he investigates. In both these regards, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes excels. Plus it’s a lot of fun to boot.

The plot jolts along at a rattling pace, obscured somewhat by Ritchie’s crack-the-whip editing and some questionable English accents. But Holmes, conceited genius that he is, always takes the time to explain things to the remarkably patient Dr. Watson. He also has a foil in femme fatale Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), whose place in the overall mystery I don’t quite get. She can never make up her mind whether she’s hindering Holmes or helping him, and the director seems equally confused. She hires Holmes to find a man, who ends up buried in a coffin that he’s summoned by the police to investigate. So … what did it profit her to hire Holmes, since events which they knew about were already nudging him in that direction?

But Ritchie never slows the coach long enough for us to inspect the damage that his tour of London has done to the undercarriage. From bareknuckle boxing pits to opulent hotels, from clanking shipyards to occult lodges, we see a city grim with industry. Holmes is a product of the Victorian Age’s fantasies of itself: a self-made expert in all the modern sciences who’s equally versed in the exotic customs of the colonies. He’s a man who can tread comfortably in all worlds. Ritchie, and his excellent cast, let us indulge that fantasy for just enough time to make it fun.

Jan

we were so in phase in our dance hall days

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

To Live and Die in L.A.: 1985: The Motion Picture.

Everything about this movie screams “it’s the 80s!” The jackets. The slang. The edgy selfishness. The gritty crime. The soundtrack. The montages used to set scenes. Put this movie in a time capsule so future generations will know that no, we weren’t kidding about the sunglasses.

Count with me: William Petersen (C.S.I.) plays Richard Chance, an adrenaline junkie Secret Service agent who doesn’t play by the rules but gets results. He’s after master counterfeiter Rick Masters, played by Willem Dafoe, who treats his crime like art and drips weird homoeroticism into every interaction. Chance’s partner, who’s like a father to Chance and who only has three days left until retirement, gets blown away while investigating one of Masters’ hideouts. Now Chance has to take on a naive new partner and push the envelope – perhaps even breaking the law himself – in order to bring Masters to justice.

Wang Chung composed the entire soundtrack.

To Live and Die in L.A. is about counterfeiting. Every crime film needs at least one sequence of process (except Le Samourai, which was all process): the car being hotwired, the assassin setting up in a sniper’s nest, the cocaine being cut and packaged. Here, we get a gorgeously detailed montage of Rick Masters counterfeiting twenty-dollar bills. We see the plates being designed, paint being applied, serial numbers being forged, and miniature brushwork being applied with a master’s eye for detail. Trivia has it that the film’s technical adviser was a convicted counterfeiter himself, and that some of the counterfeit money got into circulation. We watch these bills being manufactured in Masters’ garage, bills just like the ones we have in our wallets. Watching the process of a fake being assembled makes us question what we know to be real.

Money isn’t the only counterfeit commodity in L.A., though. Chance spends a good portion of the movie testing his new partner Vukovich (John Pankow, Mad About You), seeing if he’ll go as far as it takes to bring in Masters: is Vukovich “real” or not? Chance tests himself as well: the first time we see him, he’s about to go BASE-jumping off a bridge with his Secret Service buddies putting bets on him. Masters pays for favors in counterfeit money that he produces, which everyone willingly accepts, knowing it’s close enough to the real thing. And when Masters follows a man in a unitard backstage after a modern dance show and makes out with him, the audience wonders for a second – until the dancer pulls off her wig. (Not to suggest that she was “counterfeiting” as a man, but a guy-on-guy kiss like that would have been very edgy in 1985).

When Chance goes undercover to lure Masters in, there’s some artful ambiguity as to whether or not Masters knows Chance is for real (“love your work”). That question hangs over every interaction in To Live and Die in L.A.: between Chance and Vukovich, or his jailhouse snitch (John Turturro), or the C.I. he’s sleeping with, or Masters himself. Is this other person the genuine article? If not, can I make use of them anyway?

Is it a perfect film? Hardly. There are two gaping plot holes, one never resolved and one resolved only as an afterthought. Many of the key players never get any characterization to speak of. And, as described above, the movie bulges at the seams with corniness. But you could call kabuki theater corny too, if you looked at it with a jaded eye. To Live and Die in L.A. is a kabuki action movie: a stylized depiction of a world too inflexible to actually exist. Were it less serious by one quantum, you couldn’t watch it without guffawing. But only by embracing its attitude with a complete lack of irony can Friedkin pull this off.

And I don’t care what you think: “Dance Hall Days” is a good song.

[dailymotion id=xis7s]

Jan

the decade in film: 2006-09

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 11:02 am

The end of a decade brings out the End Of Decade lists. I have little qualification to talk about the Best Movies of the Decade. Better critics than I have already put their lists together; I could only re-arrange the order.

So the following list does not contain the Best Films of the Decade. But it has films that all meant something to me, personally. Call them my Signature Films of the First Decade of the Second Millennium. Or something snappier.

Part Three: Growing Up: 2006-09

My hatred for musicals began in high school, when RENT came out and everyone I did theater with started playing it at high volume. If I had to pick one thing I hate about this perversely popular show, it’d be the theme, and the characters, and the story, and the CTRL-H substitution from La Boheme, and the song about how many minutes there are in a year (Q: “How many minutes are there in a year?” A: “Love!”). It bothers me that this musical made people famous, and that mawkish sentimentality trumps clever lyricism in this new century.

(This hatred morphed from an informed and unyielding criticism into outright pathology in the summer of 2003, when my car was jacked from outside my apartment in Allston. Eight weeks later, when the Boston PD sent me a letter asking me to pay parking tickets the car had acquired during the time I reported it stolen, I called them and got the tickets removed. Then I realized a bunch of the tickets were assigned at the same address. Grabbing my roommate Hawver, we pulled up Mapquest, punched in some street names, and found that my car had been abandoned less than a mile from where it had been stolen, and three blocks from our current apartment. The rear passenger window panel had been smashed in and the stereo had been stolen. The scumbags had also taken a CD wallet with about forty discs in it, and replaced it with the original cast recording of RENT.

“So they thought RENT wasn’t even worth stealing?” people ask.
“No,” I explain. “I didn’t own RENT.”
“Oh.” Then: “Ohhhh.”)

So when everyone I knew waxed enthusiastic about Once, I remained skeptical. But there was a recurring tone to their endorsements: glowing language, stern admonishments to see it, but a lack of explicit detail. They couldn’t put into words just why it was so great, but they all agreed it was. Seeing it on the big screen, I agreed with them: Once is a hell of an experience. I don’t know why a grainy indie movie about a guy and a girl, both getting over heartbreaks of their own and tentatively discovering each other, floored me when set to folksy music. But it did. Sure, it’s sentimental, but it’s powerful sentiment, shot straight into the vein. It’s the last movie I saw with my friend Josh before he moved to the West Coast, so that might also grant it some significance.

I spent Thanksgiving 2006 in Boston, my first Thanksgiving outside of Maryland in all my life, due to work. Since I still had the day off, I resolved to put it to some use by going to the Loews Boston Common and theater-hopping. Hopping in the Loews poses no challenge: the second floor boasts a dozen theaters and the minimum-wage ushers can barely handle the holiday crowds. So I was able to see Casino Royale and The Departed with little difficulty. The one-two punch of gritty crime and action left me wandering, shell-shocked, for the rest of the day.

In the fall of 2007, I helped out with one of the most ambitious and rewarding theater projects of my life: The Waste Land Comedy Hour starring T.S. Eliot. Some of the most talented people at ImprovBoston pitched in to produce 7 original shows in 7 weeks, mixing live and video elements, and we all still agree it’s the best thing we’ve ever done. It had a raw and crazy energy that I hope to one day duplicate.

One evening after rehearsing some new material, Matt T., Eric P., Eric’s wife Hannah and myself all trucked to Kendall Square Cinemas to see No Country for Old Men. I warned them we’d have to get there early, as I’d tried to see the show last week but had been turned away once it sold out. The Waste Land had also been selling out early and turning people away. And like The Waste Land, the Coen Bros. hit on some untapped vein of creative juice. It took me several tries to get The Big Lebowski and Fargo. While I love Miller’s Crossing and O Brother, Where Art Thou? to pieces, I recognize them more as homages and pastiches then as some compelling new works. But No Country for Old Men clicked with me. Maybe it was the unity of the Coens’ nihilism with McCarthy’s existentialism. Maybe it was getting a really good cast. Regardless, I took to it like I’ve taken to no other Coen film.

Finally, I saw The Dark Knight the day it opened, having taken the day off to fly to Baltimore in the afternoon. This breaks a long-standing rule of mine about seeing a genre movie on the day it opens, but nobody goes to the theaters in Batman costumes anyway. And it was worth it for me. Not just because I love the Batman mythos and what Nolan has done with it. But because, like I said on Wednesday, someone’s using Serious Art techniques to tell an action film. That’s important to me.

As I said, not necessarily the best of the decade, but the most memorable for me.

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