Saturday mornings are a good time to think about all the conversations you had last week, and assess whether you were boring your conversation partners to within an inch of their lives:
1. Repeated, perfunctory responses. A person who repeats, “Oh really? Wow. Oh really? Interesting.” isn't particularly engaged.
2. Simple questions. People who are bored ask simple questions. “When did you move?” “Where did you go?” People who are interested ask more complicated questions that show curiosity, not mere politeness.
3. Interruption. Although it sounds rude, interruption is actually a good sign, I think. It means a person is bursting to say something, and that shows interest. Similarly…
4. Request for clarification. A person who is sincerely interested in what you’re saying will ask you to elaborate or to explain. “What does that term mean?” “When exactly did that happen?” “Then what did he say?” are the kinds of questions that show that someone is trying closely to follow what you’re saying.
5. Imbalance of talking time. I suspect that many people fondly suppose that they usually do eighty percent of the talking because people find them fascinating. [...] Or maybe you just aren't letting them get a word in -- recently I was talking to someone who, though fascinating, didn't want to let me contribute to the conversation. I enjoyed it, but not as much as if I'd been able to talk, too.
6. Abrupt changes in topic. If you’re talking to someone about, say, the life of Winston Churchill (I have a tendency to dwell at length on this particular subject), and all of a sudden the other person says, “So how are your kids?”, it’s a sign that he or she isn’t very interested or perhaps not listening at all.
This is a pretty good list of topics that are always boring:
1. A dream.
2. The recent changes in your child’s nap schedule.
3. The route you took to get here.
4. An excellent meal you once had at a restaurant.
5. The latest additions to your wine cellar.
6. An account your last golf game.
7. The plot of a movie, play, or movie—in particular, the funny parts.
This all really gets back to what we think conversation is for. Do we converse with others to hear their experiences, or to bounce our own back at ourselves? Do we listen, or do we wait to talk?
Dreams are boring to listen to because, by definition, no one can relate to them. They were a broadcast from you, to you. Plots of movies and TV shows are the same way. The only way a listener can really engage with that as a topic is if it reminds them of a TV show they saw once -- and now you're bored.
We're narcissistic creatures, we look for patterns that resemble our own. Listening to someone talk about how their parents grounded them for trying to eat the couch cushions or whatever is interesting because it's vaguely parallel to your own. It triggers an anecdote ('that reminds me of the time my aunt got stuck in the couch!') that then reminds them of something, and so on.
If something's not relatable ('I had a dream last night where I was a squirrel!), then it's not conversation, it's fucking talk radio. If we as a species are gonna give this conversation thing a shot, we should aim to bring out the 'dotes.
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It’s been a strange decade for movies. Looking back, it seems like the events of the last 10 years and the things we were watching and listening to have occurred completely independently of each other. This decade’s paradigmatic movies – Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, all the comic book movies – have been specifically designed to be timeless. They don’t comment on the events of the last 10 years, or even attempt to. Movies that have tried to ‘take on’ the things we’ve all lived through and talked about – 25th Hour, Elephant, Stop Loss, United 93, anything by Michael Moore – have been shrill, uneven and generally ignored. There still isn’t a good movie about 9/11, and the only good one about Iraq—the Hurt Locker—is mostly good because it avoids taking a stance or making a point.
The movies’ have not only circumvented what we’ve lived this decade, they’ve also circumvented how we’ve lived. In spite of Hollywood’s increasing focus on tweens as a market (old enough to have money, not old enough to figure out The Pirate Bay), movie-adolescence is still trapped somewhere between ‘Leave it to Beaver’ and ‘Gidget’.
Movies depict routine, decidedly non-exotic components of our daily lives—texting, cell phones, the internet—like alien mating rituals. The genuine moral dilemmas of modern life—constant information without the tools or the maturity to process it—are sidelined in favour of fossilized geek-jock star crossings. Movies, even when they take place in the present, somehow don’t resemble the way we live and talk.
Judged on verisimilitude, it’s been a terrible decade for movies. Which doesn’t mean that they’ve all been bad, just that, in 50 years, they won’t tell us very much about where we are now.
I wanted to put together a list of the movies that, in spite of all the upwind incentives, told us something about this decade. I don’t necessarily think these are the best movies of the last 10 year per se, I just think these are the ones we will show our kids when we want to tell them what it felt like to live in the first decade of the new millennium. Not all of them directly take on ‘how we live now’ or whatever. These are just the movies I feel like I’ll look to when I’m sitting in a hovering rocking chair in 50 years, looking for a celluloid bookmark.
1. The Bourne Identity series
One of the central innovations of action filmmaking in the ‘00s has been the dedication of writers and directors to taking their premises seriously. The genius of the Bourne movies is that they take a pulp premise—You wake up with amnesia! Gasp, you’re a superspy!—and ask ‘what if this actually happened?’
The Bourne movies doesn’t admit for a second that their premise is far-fetched. There’s no snappy sidekick, no meta-jokes for the audience’s benefit. The reason they work is that they put real people into these premises, and we watch how they live with it. Bourne doesn’t wisecrack, he doesn’t one-line before he kills the bad guy. He feels bad about what he does, and laments rather than celebrates the killings he performs. He is Oughties Man. He’s not only allowed to feel bad, he’s expected to.
Along with the dedication to their premise, the Bournes are a good example of the increasing TV-ization of the movies. Among all the sequels and serieses released in the ‘00s, few bother with the ‘last time on…’-style recaps of the previous films. They simply expect that you have seen them, and can keep up. The Bourne movies perform almost no hand-holding at all. Each movie is darker, more serious and less talky than the last. The Bourne Ultimatum probably has five lines of dialogue that aren’t a variation on ‘he’s on your left!’ or some other spatial declaration. The most devastating scene in the movie consists of two characters looking at each other in a diner.
2. Dancer in the Dark
In a decade where everyone from film students to Michael Bay got all shaky-cam on us, only a few movies actually used the technique to elicit any audience reaction beyond ‘get a fucking tripod!’
I’m not going to defend ‘Dancer in the Dark’s’ content. I know a lot of people who absolutely hate this movie, and most of their criticisms are valid. It is pretentious. The musical scenes are amateurish. The premise and ending—my God, that ending!—are mawkish and manipulative.
‘Dancer in the Dark’ succeeds or fails solely on whether you fall in love with the main character. If you do, none of those criticisms matter. The stylistic misfires of the decade (obtrusive handheldery, time shifts, CGI everything) failed because they thought ‘how did they do that?’ was an acceptable substitute for empathy.
‘Dancer in the Dark’ succeeds because, a week or a month after you see it, you don’t remember that it was grainy, or shaky, or that the actors didn’t wear makeup. You just remember the main character. And that fucking ending.
3. High Fidelity
Forty years after feminism, we’re still figuring out how to date each other in a world without door-holding and dad-meeting. ‘High Fidelity’ is the only romantic comedy this decade to actually address this. The movie opens with the two protagonists breaking up, and follow them as they date and fuck other people, humiliate themselves, and finally get back together because they don’t know how to be themselves with anyone else. It ends with cautious optimism (the opposite of the ‘oh shit what have we done’ shot at the end of The Graduate), and leaves them right where they started. This movie says more about modern relationships than a Mao army of Sandra Bullocks.
4. In the Loop
Here’s one! A movie takes on one of the major events of the decade. Wait, who’s it by? The Brits?!
This movie’s actually not on this list because it tells us anything new about Iraq. It’s actual content is pretty much coincidental. In the Loop is on this list because it lays bare the way that governments actually work in industrialized, middle-class nations. Not just the backroom handshakes, but the way that everyone’s concerns monolithically boil down to ‘what does this mean for me?’
Beyond the profanity and Brit-casm, the central joke of In the Loop is the bottomless selfishness of all of its characters. Everyone wants credit, everyone wants to hold the lever. And in the end, everyone ends up in an outcome they didn’t foresee or even particularly want.
5. Borat
I think I’m the only person in America who doesn’t like this movie. Most of ‘Borat’ felt to me like a mid-90s Tom Green sketch (‘let’s go ruin someone’s day!’), and the racism and homophobia he found in my home country just made me sick to my stomach.
For the purposes of this list, though, I can’t deny the huge paradigm shift that ‘Borat’ represents. All the 2.0-ish trends of the ‘00s—amateur media creation, YouTube, viral videos, post-modern satire (‘I’m making fun of racism by being racist! See?’)—it’s all here. Not to mention the cringe docu-comedy invented by the UK version of ‘The Office’ and perfected by the US version. I don’t ever want to see ‘Borat’ again, but if I was burying a time capsule, this would be the first DVD in it.
6. Donnie Darko
Behind all the mobius-stripping and clear-complexioned angst, ‘Donnie Darko’ succeeded by being the first movie of the ‘00s to really understand its audience. The first cult classic of the DVD era, ‘Donnie Darko’ unabashedly rewarded repeat viewings and channel-surfing attention spans. Most of the movie’s humor comes not from the writing but from the performances, and seems engineered to be pasted into your Facebook status (‘I’m beginning to doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!’).
The movie’s poor critical reception and box-office failure almost add to its credibility. There’s always going to be movies that your parents don’t get. This was the first decade where they don’t need their permission.
7. Amores Perros
The apex of the ‘we’re all connected!’ trend. Temporal creativity and coincidence-hung plotlines eventually got played out, but ‘Amores Perros’ (and its brethren Memento and The Prestige) demonstrate the difference between technique and gimmick.
8. The Royal Tenenbaums
Instead of trying to come up with a name for this decade that plays on the numbers (oughties, naughties), can’t we just call it the Wes Anderson Decade? Anderson has made only four movies this decade, and two of them were mediocre (I haven’t seen Fantastic Mr. Fox yet), but no one else has had bigger influence—or a more precise eye—for where we are aesthetically this decade. Too fastidious to be reality but too painstaking to be camp, the sets, costumes, cinematography, even the dialogue of every Wes Andersen movie has been a milestone. No one remembers much about the narratives, but the visuals have been the most admired—and imitated—visuals of the last 10 years.
9. X2: X-Men United
Still the best comic book movie ever made (yeah, Dark Knight, I said it), and one of the only movies of the ‘00s to deal with the new paradigm of difference. The X-Men, in all their iterations, have always been a powerful metaphor for minorities and the way they see and are seen by the mainstream culture.
In the ‘90s, the battles over minorities mostly consisted of representation—are we in your movies and TV shows? How many of us? In the ‘00s, the battle over minorities seemed to consist of ‘now what?’ The major minority groups in America have gone through their Sydney Poitier phase in entertainment, and are ready for more nuanced portrayals. X2, took this seriously, seriously, and somehow found the vulnerable teenager underneath a blue-skinned, horned Canadian.
I wish there was another movie this decade that addressed this issue. I’d even take one without an airborne F-16 vs. lighting-bolt battle. But with a few small exceptions, X2 is the only movie to even attempt to depict as its leads a group of minorities and the way they struggle to fit in.
10. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep
If the ‘80s were the Me Decade, the ‘00s were the Meta Decade. The defining genre was the mixtape, the defining humor was snark, the defining pose was irony. In spite of our generation’s obsession with authenticity, no one has wanted to take anything particularly seriously for the last 10 years.
The Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind weren’t the most realistic movies of the decade, but they were definitely the most earnest. The characters love and fuck and fail without showing any awareness of the cinematic-ness of it all. No one makes self-referential jokes or Dave Eggersly gazes at their navel. The soundtracks aren’t self-conscious or obtrusive. This systematic refusal to try and sum up the young people of this decade is what makes them so good at it.
11. Bad Santa
The end of the redemptive arc, finally!
In spite of its flaws, I’m a huge proponent of Bad Santa. After a childhood growing up on raunchy comedies that were only good until the spiky protagonist meets The Girl, it’s great to finally have a ‘scoundrel goes mainstream’ movie that doesn’t pussy out and turn the protagonist into a saint.
Yeah, yeah, Billy Bob Thornton gets marginally better at the end, and the movie has some misfires (midget jokes, really?), but you couldn’t pick a better mascot for the end of likability and relatability as prerequisites for main characters.
12. Gone Baby Gone
The closest entertainment (other than ‘The Wire’) to grapple with the surrender of our inner cities. The urban experience in the ‘00s has been depicted as a problem that only social workers and SWAT teams are equipped to solve. ‘Gone Baby Gone’ exposes the slow-motion avalanche of failure in America’s inner cities, and how the ‘solutions’ from inside and outside only make the problem worse. In a decade where cities became stand-ins for coolness, ‘Gone Baby Gone’ reveals the deep dysfunction and cornered-eel sociopathy underneath the ‘urban’ pose that overtook our radios and TVs.
13. Half Nelson
As much as the ‘heroic teacher’ genre needed to be blown up in particular, this movie is also a good argument for the end of the role model generally. The idea of looking up to a specific person as a model somehow seems really … ‘80s now. The ‘00s taught us that everyone is fallible. The paparazzi ruined the celebrities, the courts ruined the sports stars and the press ruined the politicians. ‘Half Nelson’ is about how our inspirations leave us lonely, and how we should never follow our heroes home.
In an effort to consolidate all things bloggy and potty (euw)...I'm moving most of my blogging activity, posting of items and all general stuff to:
But that doesn't mean I'm abandoning this space. At least...not entirely. I'll try to crosslink updates and of course, I need to keep this account active to keep an eye on you hooligans.
becoming reacquainted with this band:
Swiss Ban Building of Minarets on Mosques
How fucking neutral of you.
Of 150 mosques or prayer rooms in Switzerland, only 4 have minarets, and only 2 more minarets are planned. None conduct the call to prayer. There are about 400,000 Muslims in a population of some 7.5 million people. Close to 90 percent of Muslims in Switzerland are from Kosovo and Turkey, and most do not adhere to the codes of dress and conduct associated with conservative Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia
So this is completely pre-emptive. Or, to put it another way, paranoid and racist. If radical Islam is a problem in your country, how is banning minarets gonna solve it? Would banning steeples have prevented the Oklahoma City bombing? Should Belfast have outlawed four-leaf clovers in the '80s?
You gotta love this part:
The Swiss Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but the rightist Swiss People’s Party, or S.V.P., and a small religious party had proposed inserting a single sentence banning the construction of minarets, leading to the referendum.
In other words, we recognize the principle of non-discrimination, just not when it applies to actual people living in our country.
Denmark pulls this shit all the time. This year, right-wing parties have proposed banning the niqab (the only-the-eyes-showing burqa) in public, which would apply to less than 100 people in Denmark, and banning judges from wearing the Muslim headscarf, even though there aren't any Muslim judges in Denmark.
There's a difference between a problem and an issue. Integration of immigrant populations, for example, is a genuine, complicated problem that needs to be addressed by adults. The kind with ideas, and expertise. Radical Islam, on the other hand, is an issue. We only talk about it in hyperboly and hypotheticals. We ban shit that no one is even doing. We legislate on our worst Chimpanzee instincts. We make posters like this:
The people who made this poster, and this ban, aren't interested in integration, or constructive solutions to the problems they actually have. They just want to complain that the world isn't the same as the one they grew up in, and punish their minorities for being in their streets and in their shops.
I mean, how else do you explain a law that, even its most strident supporters have to admit, will only radicalize Muslims further? You've only got four minarets in your whole country. Sheesh.
The fact that 60 percent of Swiss voters approved this is Freedom Fries-caliber embarassing. I hope the left wing politicians in Switzerland are working on some sort of collective Cringe Sorry Our Bad proposition for the next election cycle.
I just came back from seeing 'Precious':
Not since ‘The Birth of a Nation’ has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as ‘Precious [..] Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken), it is a sociological horror show.
Black pathology sells. It’s an over-the-top political fantasy that works only because it demeans blacks, women and poor people.
That's Armond White, a (black) movie reviewer for the New York Press, who seems to think that all movies about black people should have an immaculate protagonist, an unthreatening premise and a triumphant denouement.
I usually roll my eyes at this shit. Armand White is a known cinematic asshole, always the first to jump on a contrarian bandwagon. He spends most of his review attacking Oprah, Tyler Perry and the movie's director, Lee Daniels, as 'media titans' and 'a pathology pimp'. I've been reading his reviews for years, and he always pulls this shit where he judges every movie primarily on its political message. Its actual content and quality-- how honest it is, how compelling it is -- always come second.
Then I saw 'Precious'.
Fuck. Did it have to be a bucket of friend chicken that Precious steals and binges on? Did her mother have to have lines like 'I only leave the house when I'm playing my numbers?' There are scenes, especially in the first half and particularly the one where her mother scams a social worker for a welfare check, that feel like they were written by an Appalachian militia.
'Precious and her mother share a Harlem hovel so stereotypical it could be a Klansman’s fantasy,' White writes. 'Fuck!' I thought, watching Precious's mother force-feed her a plate of pig's feet as retribution for forgetting the collard greens, 'he's right!'
Imagine watching a movie with an all-Native American cast, where the first 45 minutes were just characters sitting around an evergreen-wooded trailer saying things like 'I sure do love this firewater!' 'Let's make money selling roman candles!' and 'Let's scam the white man by opening a casino!' As much as I hate to admit it, that's the sort of cringe I got watching 'Precious'.
Look, I'm a left-wing, overthinky homosexual living in Denmark, for pagan-ritual's sake. I don't know any more about the black experience in Harlem in the 1980s than I do about the Welsh experience in Australia in the 1870s. I do know stereotypes, however, and the way they get used as ammunition. It's genuinely unsettling to see them in life size, at 24 frames per second.
I fully admit that cringeyness, and Armond White's anger, come not from the movie itself, but from its failure to fulfill its obligation as Blackness Ambassador or whatever to the rest of the country. It is essentially us going, 'Egads, what will the white people think?!'
This reaction is incontrovertibly bullshit, I know. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously. Majorities do form their opinions of minorities based on culture. Depictions do matter, regardless of who's doing the depicting.
Minority groups spent the better part of last century fighting over the quantity of representation in mainstream culture. Now they're fighting over the quality of that representation. And that's OK.
I would be pissed if a mainstream, critically acclaimed movie depicted gays as meth-fueled promiscu-yuppies (and pissed-er, if I'm honest, if it was written or directed by heterosexuals). But at the same time, I get frustrated when the gay experience isn't depicted in all its complication and ugliness. We deserve to be just as nuanced as any other decadent, unbreeding population group.
In my mind, minority representation on film needs to be judged only on its verisimilitude. I can take welfare queens and teen pregnancy when they're in the service of something that, overall, feels true. As far as I'm concerned, 'Precious' fails not because it makes black people look bad, but because it's two dimensional and Paul Haggis-y.
Armond White sees the mother character -- an almost unadulterated cinematic monster -- as a blow against black people. I see it as a blow against art. Any character who literally throws a baby on the ground is no more representative of black people than Freddy Krueger is representative of Dutch-Americans.
Neither 'Precious', nor any other minority-themed film, is going to be the inspirational squeegee that finally wipes the last scum of bigotry from American society. It will be a great thing for America, and the movies, if we stop expecting them to be.
One of the most fun things I did in Sydney was go to a poetry slam. I'm not really into poetry (other than a brief Leonard Cohen written-word phase that coincided with my first week at secular summer camp), and I don't really know anything about it. Most of the poets gave the impression that they learned everything they knew from watching 'Slam'.
At the end of the night, we got the bright idea to attend the next week and read something up front. We ended up not going (due to a scheduling conflict with pilates. Yes, we are granola-sipping arugula-monsters), but I ended up writing something, so I thought I'd share it here.
To the girl I pretended to have a crush on in eighth grade
To the girl I pretended to have a crush on in eighth grade:
I’m sorry I pretended to like you.
In hindsight, it was a bad way to get your boyfriend to notice me.
Your name was Emma Something.
You looked like the fifth Abba.
Not that I knew who Abba was in eighth grade.
You were from the Midwest, and had a smile as wide and unnoticed as Montana.
You weren’t as popular as your hair color or breast size would suggest.
Your late-stage puberty made the straight boys uncomfortable.
I thought you were fabulous.
Not that I used the word fabulous in eighth grade.
I imagined us reading magazines side-by-side on couches at a ranch.
You would look over at me in the firelight
and grimace.
But, like, a happy grimace.
I decided to notice you so no one would notice me.
What’s the deal with Emma Something?
I asked a girl you weren’t really friends with.
Chosen for her likelihood to interpret and rebroadcast my inquiry.
On Tuesday a circle of girls terminated their conversation when I walked by.
It was working.
On Wednesday a boy said, ‘you like her, huh?’
But I mostly wanted to talk about your boyfriend.
I put your yearbook photo on the inside cover of my notebook.
As inconspicuous as a skyscraper in a hayfield.
I made sure to protest one time too many when accused.
Suddenly I was the pervert instead of the sissy.
It was ingenious.
Not that I knew what ingenious meant in the eighth grade.
Not long later, I stopped seeing you in the halls.
Even though I knew the routes your boyfriend took to all his classes.
You were avoiding me.
The next semester we were assigned to sit next to each other.
I left my notebook in my backpack.
I tried to talk.
I said, ‘Where are you from?’
You said, ‘Oh God.’
I’m sorry I pretended to have a crush on you in eighth grade.
Maybe we could have been friends.
Instead we sat, silent, next to each other.
You didn’t look over at me
though you definitely grimaced.
