Wound up the other night renting a trio of flicks: Something's Gotta Give, March of the Penguins and the Coen Brothers' early masterpiece Blood Simple. Last, of course, is brilliant, though I had not seen it in many years, and its ending remains one of the few truly unforgettable endings in modern moviedom. (Even though the movie's more than 20 years old now, I won't spoil it for those of you that still haven't seen it; I will say, though, that it remains for me the gold standard of macabre humour.) Plus, you've got to love a movie that lets M. Emmet Walsh do that slimy, snarly menace that he does 
March of the Penguins (or "pengweenies," as an ex used to say, as if they were Italian pastas), I have to say, caught me entirely off-guard, despite the terrific word-of-mouth it received (and, as usual, the Not-So-Good Doctor was probably the last person in North America to see it). Like Blood Simple, the movie depends heavily on stark imagery, though to a very different end, namely a strikingly sad affirmation of special persistence. The film presents itself not as a documentary but as a love story (its own words), and despite whatever churlish charges of anthropomorphism that might hurled at the film for doing so, it succeeds. It succeeds, in fact, astonishingly. Some of its sequences are as touching as any in more typical love stories: the coupling penguins nestling each other with their beaks, their heads cast downward in a kind of sombriety, is as tender an image as you'll ever see, a quiet celebration of that basic instinct that opposes death so nobly and sometimes so vainly. That the penguins themselves waddle as they do in their march provides a poignant counter-image: their black backs seeming to lope so sadly through the antarctic wilderness, they look like mourners in a ceremonial death march, even if the whole point of their march is not death but life. If this seems a sensitive reading, that's because it probably is. The film reads its subjects with such lyrical sensitivity that it's all but impossible not to follow its lead. There's a sublime austerity to its sadness, as plaintiveness responds against severity with a greater determination than defiance could provide. That's where the movie's poetry lies, and I think only the most viciously cynical could fail to be moved by it, at least partially. 
Until then, though, the characters can indulge in grotesquely cynical platitudes and whinges, the latter from Keaton, the former from the wonderful Frances McDormand, who is utterly wasted, save to deliver a pompous prognostication about sexist double standards and then vanish all-but-completely. The supporting cast really gets short-shrift here, especially Keanu Reeves, and you know things are bad when I start feeling sorry for Keanu Reeves. Here's he stuck in what they used to call the Ralph Bellamy role, as the decent chap who's finally gonna get screwed over simply because he's not the romantic lead. (It's now called the Bill Pullman role, and it remains as thankless as ever.) What's most putrefying about the movie, however, is that it's finally just a public exercise in art as therapy, writer-director Nancy Meyers clearly overidentifying with her heroine to the point that self-flattery becomes personal sanctification, especially as we're supposed to realize how wonderful her heroine is for deigning to receive at last her rakish and repentant suitor, of course against the cliched backdrop of Paris in winter. You see, we're supposed to think she's perfect because she accepts her age and life with someone her own age, a gesture of such supposed romantic munificence as to suggest its inevitability as an ending. After all, every woman in her late 50s would choose Jack Nicholson over Keanu Reeves, even if Keanu's a strapping young doctor in the Hamptons who loves her work and thinks the sun shines out of her surprisingly still-shapely ass. Any self-respecting feminist that doesn't recognize by this point that Meyers is just composing a cinematic paean to herself should probably just apron herself and beginning looking through Barbara Billingsley's boudoir for her bedtime wear. Even Keaton's estimable radiance can't compensate for this vomitously invidious vanity-project: her vivaciousness isn't quite enough to counteract the movie's fundamental vacuousness and its offensively-vituperative inclinations. 
It's a lazy day 'round these parts, the Doc's ambition roughly that of a sloth's. At least, however, I managed to convert a few more CDs to MP3 files so I'm not always fumbling with clutter & clobber. In doing so, though, I wound up listening to Van Morrison's Days Like This for the first time in a very long while. An imperfect but generally underrated album at the time of its release (1995), it's one of those easy Sunday-afternoon albums that grows with repeated listenings. Largely a piece of mellow grooves, it's also a work of restlessness searching for rest, as many Morrison recordings are. Differently, though, this one finds rest (after a fashion, anyway) not in contemplation or nostalgia, but in an expression of carnality with the stepping romanticism of its closing track, "In The Afternoon." It's after that song's bridge that flight is assumed, or rather a kind of dizzied ascent, Morrison's voice alternately soaring and growling as he declares how his lover has got him "rollin' and tumblin' / and talkin' all out of [his] mind." Okay, so the lyrics aren't John Donne, but the inflections and cadences are superb, simultaneously liberated and muted; there's something almost perfectly checked about the delivery, as if the album has somehow shifted from being shaken to being stirred right at its finale. There's also something playfully steeling about it all--- and perfectly appropriate for a Sunday (er) afternoon. Carpe meridianus?
Alas, one supposes it was just a matter of time, but the CBC has decided to cease airing Mr. Dressup. Sure, the show had been in reruns for more than a decade, but there was something innocently iconic about it that losing it entirely should be cause for some wistfulness. Those of you not familiar with the show (i.e., non- Canadians) might find this helpful.
Rather half-watching Sin City again last night, I was struck by some of the latent literary connections within it. Not knowing anything about Frank Miller's work, I have to assume they're intentional. Most obvious, and perhaps most cheeky in its inclusion, is the scar on Hartigan's (Bruce Willis') forehead, which has to be a variation on the "lividly whitish" scar on Ahab's head from Moby-Dick. (Not, however, the mark of Cain, which lurks behind Melville's construction of Ahab.) More than the typical hard-boiled detective, he's a man who has been struck by lightning, a clear spirit of fire breathing it back, a self-described "old man" with a vengeful mission. In Melville, of course, it's the whale, but in the film's story the whale has two forms, the Roark family the synoptic one, the Yellow Bastard the particular one. The particular one in both cases is crotch-centred, Hartigan careful to take away the Bastard's weapons ("both of them") with the "cannon" he can barely lift, and Ahab's weapon the harpoon launched from the whaleboat's "conspicuous crotch" (see Chapter 63 for the nautical explanation). Melville's chapter "The Candles"-- from which that last quote was taken, and which itself owes much to King Lear and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner-- strikes me as one of the main presences behind the film's story, though appropriately modified into a context of macho mock-stoicism. Sure, Ahab's often hiding in the arras behind American versions of the (anti-)hero, but in Sin City his mark is plain and played, with surprisingly knowing results. There are other connections, too, of course; see, for example, Marv's (Mickey Rourke's) insistence on sending Goldie's killer to a Hell that will seem like Heaven after what he's done to him, which recalls Satan's deeps and lower deeps in Book IV of Paradise Lost (c.f., esp., ll. 73-78), though the phrasing has largely passed into clichéed parlance since. I'm thinking, though, that a myth critic could have a field day with Sin City. Any ambitious takers out there? Me, I'm more inclined just to try to find the time to read Moby-Dick again.
Just a few random notes on life in general:
All but had my nightcaps comped last night at one of my locals because I gave the bartender a few volumes of short stories (Mavis Gallant's Selected, Ethel Wilson's Mrs Golightly and Alistair McLeod's As Birds Bring Forth The Sun). Mighty kind of her, but it of course had me wishing I could barter books for beer and so establish myself as a kind of millionaire in residence. Would certainly give new meaning to the term "alcohol by volume." Oh, to be lather-bound....
You don't have to be an aficionado of James Joyce to appreciate the (warning: Joycean pun ahead) juicy tales currently surrounding the management of his estate as they are recounted in this fascinating piece from The New Yorker. The situation is a complex one, and I confess to having sympathy for both Stephen Joyce, the manager of his grandfather's estate, and the Joycean community at large. The issues that seems to me to remain undiscussed, though, are those involving academic intentions and responsibilities. After all, the academic community in recent decades has demonstrated a stunning capacity for indulging in speculation that borders on, and often ventures completely into, slander and character assassination. That it often does so under the guise of constructing literary history makes the situation even more querulous, particularly as theories are posited (key word: posited) and that are closer to rumours rather than theories. See, for example, the molestation or rape theory that came to underpin Shloss' research, which should call into question the motives for her research. That's not to suggest that it's not warranted, but merely that the possibility of insidious intent demands examination. We have witnessed in scholarship of late a tendency towards preening judgments of character and ideology that should make any executor of an author's estate wary. Think of the ways in which "anti-Semitism" and "misogyny" are hurled freely about as terms of characterization. I think it's crucial, though, then that academics reconsider, sincerely and methodically, their intentions and responsibilities in a fashion that adequately examines the capacities for research to be a pretentious, and licensed, avenue toward self-advancement. 
It's early Saturday morning and, strangely, I seem ahead of the game. This week's NYT Sunday crossword, which arrives in my local daily on Saturday morning, is already done, finished in less than 45 minutes; so too is my correspondence, which seems increasingly a waste of time, as does this blog. Also watched both Hitchhiker's Guide and Kingdom of Heaven in the wee hours, and was modestly impressed. The first was about what I expected, but the latter caught me off-guard, as I expected another trite Hollywood history lesson but got something rather more sophisticated. Sure, it takes the typical liberties-- and of course inserts all the typical freedom-pap-- but at least the writing and the direction weren't as wretched as I had anticipated. It's certainly an improvement for director Ridley Scott on his abysmal Gladiator. (I still want that time back, damn it.) Best part, though: the DVD's excellent-- and quite thorough-- bonus-track of historical information, about half of which I knew and half I didn't, and which lays bare the Hollywood manipulations in a disarmingly candid fashion. Frankly, my main reason for even renting the thing was that the stunning Eva Green was in it, but whose role as Sibylla of Jerusalem is rather limited and repackaged for the purposes of forcing an unnecessary romance. For her, however, I'd not only endure a movie with Orlando Bloom in it, I'd gladly take up a career in the Sibyl service. (QED: Bertolucci's The Dreamers.) Hell, I'd even take an internship. 
Deciding late last night to occupy my noggin with some ostensibly intelligent flicks, I rented a triplet of movies: Kingdom of Heaven, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Luther. Have still to watch the first two, but the last was a pretty profound disappointment. After hearing some glowing assessments of it, I had expected something much better. The script, though not horrible, left much to be desired, and I think I am now officially sick of seeing Joseph Fiennes in every picture set in the sixteenth-century. The real problem with the movie is its clumsy, in fact bloody awful, direction, which seems like it was done by an undergraduate with a keg party to go to. Each scene feels like it's just filmed dialogue, and the narrative a crudely spliced-together summary of events. (It was directed by a chap named Eric Till whose previous film was Red Green's Duct Tape Forever, which suggests something about Luther's editorial process.) I'm not sure whether the movie feels more like a miniseries that had two hours hacked from it or a Coles Notes version of Luther's life, reduced to abbreviated bullet-points that are trundled out dutifully and dully. Till doesn't seem at all interested in any of his characters, Luther included, with some of them presented as little more than guest-star cameos, like Alfred Molina's Johann Tetzel and Marco Hofschneider's Ulrich, their parts in the story picked up and dropped like potatoes off of a barbecue. Everything about the movie seems cursory, and its ending has to be one of the most unsatisfactory endings I've seen in a very long time, so much so that it reminded me more than a little of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which at least had the virtue of being funny. Sadly, this was Peter Ustinov's final film, and he's okay as Frederick the Wise, but Till's ramshackle manner runs rough-shod over possibilities for giving the Prince-- or Luther, for that matter-- any dramatic gravitas. Till, put simply, just doesn't seem to be even nominally interested in his characters or his story, and the result is a laboured and cliched precis of Luther's life, as riveting as a Wikipedia entry and just as inspired. 
Coincidentally, a number of rather good pieces on film and film criticism have cropped up. They include Anthony Lane's devastating review of The Da Vinci Code for The New Yorker, Clive James' cheeky review of the new volume American Movie Critics, and a lengthy but amusing entry on the sorry state of reviewing over at 2Blowhards. This occasioned me to track down an old favourite, Roger Ebert's "Glossary of Movie Terms," a piece that may need some updating but still holds its own. Ebert, after all, hadn't yet identified that the essential premise of a Tom Cruise movie must necessarily be the redemption of a callow-but-decent ne'er-do-well, a fact that surely warrants a term unto itself. (A friend recently noted that he had never seen a Cruise craptacular; one wonders not only how this could be, but also if seeing one would complete him.) There's, naturally, a bit of irony to all this, because later today I have to submit applications for some courses to teach, and there are two film courses for which I'm considering tossing in my name. (To bother or not to bother, that is the question.) Odd in all this is that Clive James in his review ends up sounding a lot like Harold Bloom in The Western Canon. Something tells me that would horrify Mr James as much as it would Mr Bloom.Which Famous Modern American Poet Are You?
| How bloody predictable but completely wrong.... As for loving everything,--- well, I'll just let each of you do the eye-rolling for me. For the record, this blog would like to note these words from the letters of Emily Dickinson: "I find ecstasy in living--the mere sense of living is joy enough." |
Anyone else hear a Tina Turner song playing in the background?
Jeebus Aytch Keeryst, it's hot today! The mercurial mercury, from languishing in the mid-teens earlier in the week, has vaulted into the thirties yesterday and today, leaving those of us in Southern Ontario utterly unacclimatized. Poor Jenny seems especially to be taking the heat hard, uncharacteristically napping the time away in seclusion rather than on the Doctor's bed. (Trouble, on the other hand, has been surprisingly sprightly.) Methinks we're a few degrees away from a Tennessee Williams play here. I'll leave it to your naughty, naughty imaginations to speculate as to whom Big Daddy might be.
Watched yesterday the Pacino Merchant of Venice and was moderately impressed with the performances. Pacino, of whom I had expected the worst, was refreshingly restrained (by his standards, at least), though he continues as ever to rely on a lot of the same tics and mannerisms that have become his trademarks. The real discovery was Jeremy Irons, who managed to give Antonio a subtle nobility that few actors have been able to give the part. Unfortunately, the movie does the typically corrective re-rendering of the play that I find too apologetic by half. When the film opens with title cards explaining the plight of the Jews in Venice, one knows well in advance that the story will be redone against contemporary templates of ambiguity and irony, and so become the implied tragedy of Shylock. So, yes, the film is sensitive and nuanced-- and finally quite bloodless. In fact, the film alternates between being melancholic and phlegmatic, with predictably ponderous results. I remain convinced that we can't make nicey-nice with Shakespeare, nor with Merchant in particular, which I think needs to be treated in much the same ways that we currently treat Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well, as dark comedies (and cynical allegories) in which none of the characters are especially admirable. Ultimately, I think we're more uncomfortable with Merchant than it is with us. What that means, I'll leave you to decide.
Earlier, this blog was quite harsh unto the Pittiable Troy. It would now like to temper that judgment, having now seen Antoine (née Mutha) Fuqua's King Arthur. Troy is, in retrospect, an earnest and blindingly-brilliant film, studded with astoundingly tolerable performances and action-sequences that extend daringly upon the six-second shots straight out of a cinematically-cacophonous music video. Oh, and dare I forget that Clive Owen has helped me to understand that Brad Pitt may well be the super-buffed Alec Guinness of his generation? Could The Brad play Fagin next? I'm suddenly a-drool in anticipation.
Usually, it bloody blows being an insomniac. One of the few benefits, though, as I rediscovered this morning, was rewatching the Angel episodes that introduced Amy Acker to the series. Damn that lass did adorability to perfection. More pointedly, though, I was impressed with her impeccable sense of comic timing, a quality that's very, very rare among young actresses. (And among pretty ones, almost non-existent.) She seems to do everything with those gargantuan, often giddy-looking eyes and with that lanky, almost spindly frame that always seems to shrink in on itself. No wonder she seems perpetually aflutter: if she isn't suppressing a giggle, she's releasing one, either way with the infectious enthusiasm of a four year-old getting away with something. It's not hard to see in retrospect why she so lightened up the otherwise ponderous and clunky Angel -- and easily became the best thing about it. Too bad the writers of Alias didn't learn to make better use of her in their final season. Good comediennes are so rare, I find myself hoping she'll get the chance to follow through. After all, do we really want to be stuck with Kate Hudsons and Jennifer Anistons? Gawd, I hope not.
The Doctor's maternal unit, however, returned a few days ago from Lost Wages-- er, Las Vegas-- with an unexpected gift, the DVD set of the restored Lawrence of Arabia, truly one of the great films of all-time. It's not something I'd have bought for myself, mainly because I have said version on VHS and so it would have been an indulgence I'd have disallowed. That said, though, I found myself the night of receiving it watching the whole bloody set-- first the added features, then key scenes of the film (the train attack, Sherif Ali's manifestation), and then surrendering and watching the move entire from start to finish-- and being utterly riveted for the six hours it took to screen. There's little one can say about that movie that hasn't already been said, but I was especially struck by the magnificent tactility of it. It's as if one could extend one's hand into the screen and run one's fingers through the desert sands. In so many ways, the movie shores (?) itself on key physical elements-- sun, dust, rock, smoke and even occasionally water-- and those vast sands in-between become a gigantic tabula rasa upon which destiny is made and unmade. I know of few films that alternate with such dizzying profundity between centripetal and centrifugal perspecta as to be truly epic in both sweep and sensibility. Only two directors, to my mind, deeply and genuinely understood the art of the epic, Akira Kurosawa and David Lean, and Lean with Lawrence may well have set the bar for that understanding beyond anyone else's reach. (Cecil B. DeMille, Stanley Kubrick and Bernardo Bertolucci are all, alas, graspers despite their finest efforts.) If you have not seen Lawrence, or if you have but not recently, I urge you to watch it again-- and again and again-- with due dispatch. Then see if you can get through more than ten minutes of Troy without wanting to empty your stomach. Lawrence is a masterwork; Troy is just a Pittance.
In other "news," I'm getting increasingly skeptical about a few of the positions for next year for which I almost dared to have that bizarre thing some call "hope." Don't ask me why. Just call it a sneaking suspicion. (Admittedly, I'm usually pessimistic, but I'm almost invariably proven right when I am.) On the flip-side, though, a visit to one of my locals the other night brought to my attention that Van The Man is coming to Toronto in early August. Tickets go on sale Monday, so I guess I'll have to figure out very quickly whom I'm going to have to kill or canoodle to get me into those nosebleeds. It occurs to me to that the last time I saw the Belfast Cowboy in concert-- eleven years ago!!-- I was, well, a very, very different person than I am now. (Some of us had to pay our dues in Canada.) But, alas, another sleepless day awaits. I just might have to hard nose the highway....
And suddenly everything makes sense: they're all the better to hear him with.... She will surely be livid with me for calling attention to it, but today is Zelda's something-somethingth birthday, and this blog of course wants to wish her a great one and many happy returns. Discretion prevents me from including an actual picture of her here, or (temptation of temptations) revealing her nouvelle age, so I'll instead reproduce one of her own self-portraits in which she does one of her very favourite things, mainly mocking the Not-So-Good Doctor, whom we all know is only ever an innocent bystander to her savagery. Have a happy, tingly and ecstatically misanthropy-filled birthday, kiddo. 
Happy happy joy joy, happy happy joy joy! 
Sorry, folks, but it looks like the Not-So-Good Doctor, after a short rustle of activity on this blog, will probably be falling silent again for a while as he rushes feverishly to get all of his marking done in time. This is why he is not going to bother responding to this article, which is cause for no end of unconvinced "okay, buts" on his part. Perhaps some of you might be sufficiently bored to offer the all-too-obvious counter-arguments. Those of you looking for interesting reading should check out RK's blog , which too has rustled to life with the near-end of the academic year. Dr J, however, looking again or still very much like his alter ego (Kenwood the moose, pictured above, whom some of you may recall), must get to scoring assignments, in whatever sense of the word "scoring" you elect to infer. But, oh, to be in pleasanter pastures like Kenwood here.... 
Asea in marking still, the Not-So-Good Doc turned this morning for solace to the ever-playful, and occasionally instructive, Richard Lederer, whose website you should all visit and peruse, especially the various articles in the archives. (Check out especially "Four Cheers Five Victor Borge.") If only my students-- this year and in any given year-- would read Lederer and discover the lunacies of their own language....
Truly unbelievable quote of the day, from some poker competition in the UK, in which a woman named Helen Chamberlain was competing and whose chip count was being depicted as a pink share of a pie graph:
Helen Chamberlain has eaten her pink way across this field.
Now THAT's what I call skill....
Many of my pseudo-colleagues in the academic, and especially the literary, world very seldom appreciate that they are among the most dangerous influences on language and thought. Check out this mea culpa from The Guardian from a counterfeiter begging forgiveness, and this sampling of some of the more egregious examples of intellectual piety run amok. All this reminds me of George Orwell's claim that language "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts" ("Politics and the English Language"). I wonder how many articles in any given year's publications of the MLA would pass Orwell's muster. Two? Maybe three? Probably not. Orwell's rule number five, on not using jargon terms, would surely slay all but the most truly maverick pieces with Kurosawan ferocity. (It's okay, though. Most academics don't respect Orwell anyway. Snort.)And I'm tore down a la Rimbaud
And I wish my writing would come....
--- Van Morrison, "Tore Down A La Rimbaud," from the album A Sense of Wonder (1984)
It seems I'm forever making apologies on this blog lately, but I guess yet another one is in order. The past few weeks have been chaotic and silly (and even a bit moribund), and now I'm hip-deep in end-of-year grading which includes both essays and examinations. I'm pretty sure a few of you out there are at least slightly miffed at my recent lack of communication, and for that I am sorry, except to say that sometimes discretion is the better part of dolor. (Boredom and business, I'd hasten to remind anyone with doubts, are not mutually exclusive.) I haven't even had the energy to remark on the typically silly trials and tribulations that hang, perpetually, from me like pubic hairs from Pamela Anderson's teeth. Even the latest Van Morrison effort, the country album Pay The Devil, has gone entirely without remark here, which is perhaps the clearest testament to my general indifference to expression. Email has gone by the wayside, except to deal with matters directly related to work. It has, alas, been one of those spells. I should probably not even be writing here now, marking beckoning me like misery to Mr. Beckett, except that guilt still can get the better of me. Oh, and temporary procrastination, too. To leave that out would be utterly dishonest.
There are, alas, also a number of things on the radar that bleat more than they bleep. So much to do, so little energy to do it with. (I'm temporarily allowing myself to dangle that preposition.) Worse still, I find myself more and more with less and less to say, or at least less and less anything that will either (a) matter or (b) at least seem worthwhile. These problems have tarnished my creative and critical work for some time, but they seem now even to be daunting my other forms of communication. Beyond immediate conversation, I can feel myself drying up like a worn-down rag. (Make your own wet-blanket associations as you wish.) "I've cleaned up my diction," Van Morrison once sang, adding that he had "nothing left to say." Increasingly, I am understanding what that might have meant. After all, I've been saying less and less for years, though usually in far too many words. "There is nothing new under the sun," says the Preacher from Ecclesiastes. He, of course, neglected to note that the sky was perpetually overcast. (Once upon a mid-lilfe dreary?)
This probably sounds depressed, which is by no means how I intend it to sound because it by no means reflects whatever the fark it is I'm "feeling" (G-d, what a dreadful word that has become!). The French word blasé perhaps sums things up best. Discretion, I know, is not the better part of dolor-- but what else is there when one senses there's so very little left to say? After all, didn't Mr. Beckett say it all?
And yet, knowing this, some of us still do not move.
Try substituting the word 'women' for 'drinking' in the AA questionnaire. Are women affecting your peace of mind? Are women making your home life unhappy? Do you show a marked moodiness since women? Are women disturbing the harmony of your life? Have women changed your personality? Do you crave a woman at a definite time daily? Do you require a woman next morning? Do you prefer a woman alone? Have women made you irritable? Yes, yes, yes, and again yes.Innnn-deeeeed.... Now if only there was a way I could hide women around the house.... One wonders, though: Is there a 28-Step Programme available?
