Category: Film
Culture splat (a few broad spoilers)
Challengers is a good and original movie. Imagine a 2024 rom com, except the behavior and conventions actually are taken from 2024, and with no apologies. The woman says the word “****ing” a lot, and no one treats this as inappropriate or unusual. There is bisexuality and poly. Society is feminized. Of course opinions will differ on these cultural issues, but the movie is made with conviction and so it is truly a tale of modern romance. Who in the movie is in fact the emptiest shell? Opinions will differ.
Zendaya dominates the screen — for how long has it been since we have had an actress this central and this charismatic?
Also, I quite like the new Beyonce album, and Metaculus estimates the chance of an H5N1 pandemic at about two percent.
The politics of *Civil War* (full of spoilers, do not read)
I saw the film as having very definite politics, and yes I am aware of the pronouncements of the director — ignore them! I am writing about the movie, what was on the screen.
The seceding states — California, Texas, and Florida — all have substantial Latino population segments. The core political message is that a nation cannot hold together under those conditions. The “Democrat vs. Republican” issues become irrelevant in those scenarios, and that too is part of the political message. Ethnic considerations become primary in the final analysis. And note that the separate Florida, not part of the Western Alliance, is the one state with lots of Latinos and not so many Mexicans. It is California and Texas that share the same ethno ambitions.
The key moment is the scene when they encounter the evil blond-haired guy with the big gun, and he asks “What kind of American are you?” The naive viewer expects the Socratic dialogue to shift in the direction of red vs. blue states, but no the baddie starts talking about “Central Americans” and “South Americans.” The real question has become what kinds of Americans are we indeed.
The Hong Kong/Chinese guy is shot immediately, once he announces his nationality, again a stand-in for the broader ethnostate divisions the movie is portraying.
When the two individuals shift cars, and jump from one moving vehicle to the other, that is the true portend of pending disaster, as Hollis Robbins has pointed out. Stay in your car (country)!
Of course Hollywood cannot put such a message on the screen explicitly, nor are most critics capable of seeing it. Mostly they are left wondering what has happened to the Trump vs. anti-Trump divisions they heard about on NPR.
If you doubt whether this movie is historically detailed and aware, consider how it portrays West Virginia on this civil war “next time around.” They are less interested than are the Virginians.
You won’t see much Christianity in the film at all.
Except for the black veteran, the media class are shown as selfish, elevating the scoop above all while disclaiming moral responsibility, enjoying the witnessing of violence, and verging on the psychotic. It is not an entirely favorable portrait (and yes I do know the director’s words on this).
The U.S. citizenry gets rather caught up in fighting the war, and the most positive visions are of the two fathers who retreat to their farms, again a reactionary message.
Blacks are shown as the servant class of each side in the civil war, a portrait that, if people were more aware, would be considered offensive.
So those are the politics of the movie, but with the distractions of the violence on the screen and of current culture wars, we just don’t notice how much they are pushed into our faces. I give the director credit for his guts, noting that George Lucas ripped off Leni Riefenstahl and I still like that movie too.
To be clear, those are not my politics at all, as loyal MR readers can attest. But that is not how I judge movies and this one — while definitely flawed — was still pretty good.
It’s happening, anachronistic imaginary movie preview edition
https://www.youtube.com/@abandonedfilms
For a sampler, try The Hobbit:
Via the apparently excellent Bruce Cleaver.
*Civil War*
This movie was more cinematically serious than I was expecting, and with some odd (but mostly good) 1970s vibes. It is also an interesting case study in anhedonia.
Video and grenades seem scarcer than they ought to be, even given the constraints. Good characters.
The movie works very hard not to reveal its politics to a mainstream audience, but of course they are there, you just have to squint and think a bit. No, I’m not going to spoil that one for you.
“Thirty Canadian?”
Excellent soundtrack as well. The same director also made Annihilation and Ex Machina.
What to Watch
3 Body Problem (Netflix): Great! A captivating mix of big ideas, a compelling mystery, and spectacular set-pieces like the Cultural Revolution, strange worlds, the ship cutting and more. Of course, there are some weaknesses. 3 Body Problem falters in its portrayal of genius, rendering the British scientists as too normal, overlooking the obsessiveness, ambition, and unconventionality often found in real-world geniuses. Ironically, in its effort to diversify gender and race, the series inadvertently narrows the spectrum of personality and neurodiversity. Only Ye Wenjie, traumatized by the cultural revolution, obsessed by physics and revenge, and with a messianic personality hits the right notes. Regardless, I am eager for Season 2.
Shogun (Hulu): Great meeting of cultures. Compelling plot, based on the excellent Clavell novel. I didn’t know that some of the warlords of the time (1600) had converted to Christianity. (Later banned and repressed as in Silence). Shogun avoids two traps, the Japanese have agency and so does the European. Much of it is in Japanese with subtitles.
Monsieur Spade: It starts with a great premise, twenty years after the events of “The Maltese Falcon,” Sam Spade has retired in a small town in southern France still riven by World War II and Algeria. Clive Owen is excellent as Spade and there are some good noir lines:
Henri Thibaut: You were in the army, Mr. Spade?
Sam Spade: No, I was a conscientious objector.
Henri Thibaut: You don’t believe in killing your fellow man?
Sam Spade: Oh, I think there’s plenty of men worth killing, as well as plenty of wars worth fighting, I’d just rather choose myself.
Yet for all the promise, I didn’t finish the series. In addition to being set in France, Monsieur Spade has a French cinema atmosphere, boring, long, vaguely pretentious. There is also a weird fascination with smoking, does it pay off with anything? I don’t know. Didn’t finish it.
It’s happening, music and video edition
OpenAI released a Music Video with Sora
it's puzzling i dont think ive ever seen anything quite like this before pic.twitter.com/8OzUVuQmFL— nano (@nanulled) April 2, 2024
What I’ve been watching
1.” In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon,” a two-part special on MGM+. It’s time to admit that either he or Bob Dylan is the greatest songwriter in American history. At four hours I was never bored, and there is plenty of coverage of Simon today, and also his wife. My main gripe is they don’t say just how good an album Hearts and Bones is, rather they only mention it was a commercial failure.
2. The Miracle Worker, Amazon streaming, an old Arthur Penn movie, black and white, about Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller. There is plenty to object to about this movie, including some dramatic clunkiness and a variety of stereotypes, including (but not only) about the disabled. Nonetheless the best scenes are amazing, most of all when Anne and Helen “have at it,” in extended fighting sequences, without dialogue of course. They are some of the most powerful and best acted scenes in Hollywood history. Kudos to Patty Duke most of all.
3. You Can Call Me Bill, currently in theaters. At first the viewer thinks this movie is terrible, and in a way it is. A 90-minute monologue of William Shatner? Yet as the narration proceeds the tale becomes ever deeper. Yes, he seems like this corny guy with no taste, but repeatedly you end up asking yourself whether your own philosophic musings are actually much better than his schlock. Unclear! And he was so productive. He just loved to act. Did he ever know the difference between his good and his bad work? Was there a difference? And how is it that he, now well into his 90s, stayed far more vital and alive than just about any of you are going to manage? Recommended, provided you are willing to sit through the spills and turns and winces. Those are indeed the point.
4. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. If nothing else, this movie illustrates the Solow model that the capital stock is indeed costly to maintain. It also shows there is a Laffer Curve when it comes to monster fight scenes, which apparently are no longer scarce.
Pacific Heights: A Movie Ahead of Its Time
Pacific Heights is a 1990 movie starring Michael Keaton, Melanie Griffith, and Matthew Modine. Conventionally described as a “psychological thriller,” or a horror movie it’s actually a Kafkaesque analysis of tenancy rights and the legal system. The movie centers on a young couple, Drake and Patty, who purchase a San Francisco Victorian with dreams of fixing it up and renting several of the units to help pay the mortgage. Their dream turns into a nightmare when Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton) moves in and exploits tenant protection laws to torment and exploit them.
Hayes moves in without permission and without paying rent and he changes the locks. It doesn’t matter. When Drake (Modine) shuts off the power and heat, Hayes calls the police and the police explain to Drake:
What you did is against the law….turn the power and heat back on and apologize because according to the California civil code he has a right to sue and most likely he will win. If he’s in, he has rights, that’s how it works.
A lawyer later adds “He’s taken possession so whether he signed a lease or paid money or not he’s legally your tenant now and he is protected by laws that say you have to go to court to prove that he has to be evicted but the net effect of these laws is to…slowly drive you bankrupt and insane.”
What makes Pacific Heights a horror movie is that the tenant’s rights laws depicted are very real. Here’s just one example of thousands from NYC:
NEW: New York City homeowner gets arrested after changing the locks on *her own home* after it got taken over by squatters.
Never do business in New York.
In NYC, anyone can simply claim "squatter's rights" after 30 days of living at a home which isn't even enough time for the… pic.twitter.com/xkcfYM9l7u
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 19, 2024
As I wrote on twitter “Decades of anti-landlord legislation has created a moocher-class of squatters who steal homes and then call the police on the owners.” Moreover, even today such laws continue to be added to the books. A bill in Congress, for example, would prevent landlords from being able to screen tenants for criminal records.
All of this has been exacerbated recently by COVID laws preventing eviction (some of which remain but which acclimatized some tenants to not paying rent and contributed to court backlogs), court backlogs and the greater ease of finding unoccupied houses using foreclosure data, death announcements, Zillow and so forth. In extreme cases it can take decades to evict a squatter who uses the law to their advantage.
Returning to Pacific Heights, what the movie gets wrong is the second half where Patty (Melanie Griffith) extracts revenge against Hayes. A less cathartic but more accurate ending would have had the couple exhausted with the complexities of tenant law and the court system and finally giving up when they realize that the law is not for them. Instead, they pay Carter Hayes a ransom to leave their own home. Of course, Drake and Patty choose never to rent to anyone ever again.
What is wrong with movies these days?
Here is one bit from a longer and very interesting essay by Vicky Osterweil:
This kind of audience-condescending premise-forward literalism is not just in the narrative and scripting, it’s in the acting. The actors of Dune 2 almost all speak in that tedious whisper-growl that stands in for profundity, a vocal-style also popularized by Nolan, in Christian Bale’s portrayal of the caped crusader in 2005’s Batman Begins. I believe that if a movie features a bunch of good actors and all the performances are flat and dull, as is the case in Dune Part Two, where even Florence Pugh, Lea Seydoux and Josh Brolin lack all charisma, it is ultimately a reflection on the director (and the script), not the actors.
Worth reading the whole thing, though I think it is quite wrong about Russian constructivism in the visual arts, which is a far more diverse tradition than the author lets on.
*Dune 2*
From the get go it is far too self-consciously portentous, with nary a bit of humor to lighten it up. It feels more like an adaptation of memes from gaming than a cinematic version of a novel, much less a living, breathing movie. And exactly what is the moral stance we are supposed to hold on the war anyway? I love Hans Zimmer but his score is not in the emotional service of anything meaningful.
By objective standards the visuals are quite good, but in The Age of Sora they no longer seem so creatively cutting-edge either.
The crowd mostly seemed bored, and I saw a lot of people looking at the time on their phones. Was there any line from the movie that anyone is going to repeat?
Battery technology seems especially advanced in this world.
In terms of expressing the power of cinema, or captivating the viewer with a sense of magic, I’ll take that Robert Bresson film about the donkey any day of the week.
If you read the major reviews carefully, a lot of them feel the same way, though understandably they don’t want to crush Hollywood’s future economic prospects in the bud.
The commercial impact of Sora
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
The more clear and present danger to Hollywood is that would-be viewers might start making their own short videos rather than watching television. “Show my pet dog Fido flying to Mars and building a space colony there” is perhaps more fun than many a TV show.
Sora and comparable services will lead to a proliferation of short educational videos, internal corporate training videos, and just plain fooling around. Sora probably will be good for TikTok and other short video services. It is not hard to imagine services that splice your Sora-constructed videos into your TikTok productions. So if you’re doing BookTok, for example, maybe you put a battle reenactment in the background of your plug for your new book on the US Civil War.
Perhaps the most significant short-run use of these videos will be for advertising — especially internet advertising. Again, there is the question of how to integrate narrative, but the costs of creating new ads is likely to fall.
More advertising may sound like a mixed blessing. But ads will almost certainly be more fun and creative than they are now. Watching ads may become its own aesthetic avocation, as is already the case for Super Bowl ads. These ads also might be targeted, rather than serving a mass audience. If your internet history suggests you are interested in UAPs, for example, perhaps you will see ads with aliens telling you which soap to buy.
And to close:
At the most speculative level, the success of Sora may increase the chance that we are living in a simulation — a computer-based world created by some high-powered being, whether a deity or aliens. Is that bullish or bearish for asset prices? It depends on how you assess the responsibility and ethics of the creator. At the very least, our planet Earth simulator seems to be able to generate videos that last longer than a single minute. Beyond that, I cannot say.
There is much more at the link, interesting throughout.
My view of *Casablanca* (with spoilers, but you’ve seen it already?)
Paul Wall asks about my Casablanca comment:
Henrik Karlsson asks
What is a good book or film that charts the trajectory of a profoundly healthy and transformational relationship?
Twitter link here. Well people? Popular romances don’t count, try to get as close to “the canon” as you can.
I found this question difficult. GPT-4 listed a bunch of inappropriate, not actually so wholesome answers from Victorian literature, and then for a film cited Her (bravo to that actually, but still not a good answer). A Beautiful Mind made that movie list as well.
I rewatched Casablanca lately on a large screen, and concluded that Rick was wanting Ilsa to suffer as much as possible.
Can you do better?
My Conversation with the excellent Ami Vitale
Here is the audio, visual, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Ami Vitale is a renowned National Geographic photographer and documentarian with a deep commitment to wildlife conservation and environmental education. Her work, spanning over a hundred countries, includes spending a decade as a conflict photographer in places like Kosovo, Gaza, and Kashmir.
She joined Tyler to discuss why we should stay scary to pandas, whether we should bring back extinct species, the success of Kenyan wildlife management, the mental cost of a decade photographing war, what she thinks of the transition from film to digital, the ethical issues raised by Afghan Girl, the future of National Geographic, the heuristic guiding of where she’ll travel next, what she looks for in a young photographer, her next project, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: As you probably know, there’s a long-standing and recurring set of debates between animal welfare advocates and environmentalists. The animal welfare advocates typically have less sympathy for the predators because they, in turn, kill other animals. The environmentalists are more likely to think we should, in some way, leave nature alone as much as possible. Where do you stand on that debate?
VITALE: It depends. It’s hard to make a general sweeping statement on this because in some cases, I think that we do have to get involved. Also, the fact is, it’s humans in most cases who have really impacted the environment, and we do need to get engaged and work to restore that balance. I really fall on both sides of this. I will say, I do think that is, in some cases, what differentiates us because, as human beings, we have to kill to survive. Maybe that is where this — I feel like every story I work on has a different answer. Really, I don’t know. It depends what the situation is. Should we bring animals back to landscapes where they have not existed for millions of years? I fall in the line of no. Maybe I’m taking this in a totally different direction, but it’s really complicated, and there’s not one easy answer.
And:
COWEN: As you know, there are now social networks everywhere, for quite a while. Images everywhere, even before Midjourney. There are so many images that people are looking at. How does that change how you compose or think about photos?
VITALE: Well, it doesn’t at all. My job is to tell stories with images, and not just with images. My job as a storyteller — that has not changed. Nothing has changed in the sense of, we need more great storytellers, visual storytellers. With all of those social media, I think people are bored with just beautiful images. Or sometimes it feels like advertising, and it doesn’t captivate me.
I look for a story and image, and I am just going to continue doing what I do because I think people are hungry for it. They want to know who is really going deep on stories and who they can trust. I think that that has never gone away, and it will never go away.
I am very happy to have guests who do things that not everyone else’s guests do.
My Conversation with Rebecca F. Kuang
Here is the audio, video, and transcript, here is the episode summary:
Rebecca F. Kuang just might change the way you think about fantasy and science fiction. Known for her best-selling books Babel and The Poppy War trilogy, Kuang combines a unique blend of historical richness and imaginative storytelling. At just 27, she’s already published five novels, and her compulsion to write has not abated even as she’s pursued advanced degrees at Oxford, Cambridge, and now Yale. Her latest book, Yellowface, was one of Tyler’s favorites in 2023.
She sat down with Tyler to discuss Chinese science-fiction, which work of fantasy she hopes will still be read in fifty years, which novels use footnotes well, how she’d change book publishing, what she enjoys about book tours, what to make of which Chinese fiction is read in the West, the differences between the three volumes of The Three Body Problem, what surprised her on her recent Taiwan trip, why novels are rarely co-authored, how debate influences her writing, how she’ll balance writing fiction with her academic pursuits, where she’ll travel next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why do you think that British imperialism worked so much better in Singapore and Hong Kong than most of the rest of the world?
KUANG: What do you mean by work so much better?
COWEN: Singapore today, per capita — it’s a richer nation than the United States. It’s hard to think, “I’d rather go back and redo that whole history.” If you’re a Singaporean today, I think most of them would say, “We’ll take what we got. It was far from perfect along the way, but it worked out very well for us.” People in Sierra Leone would not say the same thing, right?
Hong Kong did much better under Britain than it had done under China. Now that it’s back in the hands of China, it seems to be doing worse again, so it seems Hong Kong was better off under imperialism.
KUANG: It’s true that there is a lot of contemporary nostalgia for the colonial era, and that would take hours and hours to unpack. I guess I would say two things. The first is that I am very hesitant to make arguments about a historical counterfactual such as, “Oh, if it were not for the British Empire, would Singapore have the economy it does today?” Or “would Hong Kong have the culture it does today?” Because we don’t really know.
Also, I think these broad comparisons of colonial history are very hard to do, as well, because the methods of extraction and the pervasiveness and techniques of colonial rule were also different from place to place. It feels like a useless comparison to say, “Oh, why has Hong Kong prospered under British rule while India hasn’t?” Et cetera.
COWEN: It seems, if anywhere we know, it’s Hong Kong. You can look at Guangzhou — it’s a fairly close comparator. Until very recently, Hong Kong was much, much richer than Guangzhou. Without the British, it would be reasonable to assume living standards in Hong Kong would’ve been about those of the rest of Southern China, right? It would be weird to think it would be some extreme outlier. None others of those happened in the rest of China. Isn’t that close to a natural experiment? Not a controlled experiment, but a pretty clear comparison?
KUANG: Maybe. Again, I’m not a historian, so I don’t have a lot to say about this. I just think it’s pretty tricky to argue that places prospered solely due to British presence when, without the British, there are lots of alternate ways things could have gone, and we just don’t know.
Interesting throughout.
When Rick won’t give Laszlo the letters of transit, and Laszlo asks him why, Rick says “I suggest your ask your wife.” In essence he is forcing Laszlo to force Ilsa to confess to their earlier Paris affair in as humiliating a way as possible. Ilsa has to tell not only of the affair, but that she promised Rick eternal fealty, and treated Rick so badly that he now would be so vindictive.
When Ilsa visits Rick in his room that one night toward the end of the movie, he “takes” her again, and gets her to fall in love with him again, or so it seems. But is Ilsa only acting, and playing to Rick’s vanity to get the letters of transit? You can debate that point, but either way Rick seems happy enough to sleep with her on that basis. That is one of his ways of humiliating her again, and it enables him to be psychologically free enough to let her go in the movie’s final scene.
[Interjection: I view her recurring attachment to Rick as real, and her love for Laszlo as somewhat daughterly, and that she is self-deceiving throughout with both men. That said, what she most loves about Rick is that she can partake in the relationship without having to be known, without having to be anybody at all. She and Rick, as a couple in ordinary life running errands at the Five and Dime in Cleveland, probably would not do so well. Ilsa is a woman who never has found herself and is somehow always in transition, always on the run. It is no surprise she attaches to two men with broadly similar tendencies.]
At the movie’s end, Rick gives Ilsa back and insists she leave Casablanca with Laszlo. What a hell their marriage is going to be. Stuck in America, where neither has much to do, though he lives for his work. Laszlo now knows she loved Rick more, knows she just fell for Rick again and slept with him the night before (women willing to prostitute themselves is a recurring theme in the film), and knows she has been lying to him in various ways throughout their relationship. Ilsa knows these things too, and now knows that Laszlo knows. But what really is Laszlo’s choice or Ilsa’s choice other than to proceed? They end up playing the roles of puppets in Rick’s little planned charade.
Rick gets to wander off with Louis (“this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”), into the Free French garrisons in the desert, facing struggles but also enjoying a true freedom, including a freedom from Ilsa because he humiliated and punished her so much, and because that punishment will be so enduring. He had been waiting around in Casablanca to punish her, and now he really cannot punish her any more. Life can go on.
If you recall the scene where Rick helps the young husband win at the roulette table, so his wife doesn’t have to prostitute herself to get exit visas, we know that the more sentimental side of Rick regards such prostitution as an ultimate humiliation, not as a mere transaction to be digested in Benthamite fashion and then forgotten.
A more Benthamite Rick might have been a happier and better-adjusted guy.