handful_ofdust (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
handful_ofdust) wrote2009-09-08 09:16 am
handful_ofdust) wrote2009-09-08 09:16 am
Three Days On
So, yeah: Labour Day. On which there was labour, but not that kind. I spent the long weekend, predictably, doing little except the usual round of chores and Cal-looking-after. Made a few notes, thought about various shit, saw some films (Green Lantern: First Flight, Ed Brubaker's Angel of Death (starring Zoe Bell) and State of Play, if you're wondering). According to my list, I'm now up over 161 books read in 2009, so at some point I should probably post a list of the best stuff thus far, with brief annotations. "Should", ha ha.
But today is also Day One (and only, per week) for Cal at Senior Kindergarten, which means I really need to get my ass in gear and lay some pipe before I have to go ferry him over to Surrey Place (then rush back here and lay more pipe, etcetera). Time's a-tickin'.
Oh, man. Where's that damn Tommyknockers machine that lets you simply dream an entire novel in beautiful first draft prose when you need it, anyhow? As I recall, it also heated your water, and maybe made you coffee at the same time. Screw you for teasing me, Stephen King.
But today is also Day One (and only, per week) for Cal at Senior Kindergarten, which means I really need to get my ass in gear and lay some pipe before I have to go ferry him over to Surrey Place (then rush back here and lay more pipe, etcetera). Time's a-tickin'.
Oh, man. Where's that damn Tommyknockers machine that lets you simply dream an entire novel in beautiful first draft prose when you need it, anyhow? As I recall, it also heated your water, and maybe made you coffee at the same time. Screw you for teasing me, Stephen King.
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It held me through the last third of A Beautiful Mind, which I thought really fell apart. I've only seen him in a handful of movies, but he definitely deserves his reputation.
and Helen Mirren using her own accent always rocks--I also like that her character, the editor, has a classic Thatcher-era Brit tabloid journalist's obsession with not The Truth so much as What Effin' Sells, Dunnit?
Okay. Just for Helen Mirren, I'd see it.
(I also like how Ben Affleck is very much relaxing into being A Character Actor Who Happens To Be Surface-Handsome, rather than A Leading Man. It fits him far better.)
I am all for character actors. Recommend me something he's in; I think it's entirely possible that while I've kept decent track of Matt Damon, I may never have seen Ben Affleck in any role beyond Good Will Hunting and Dogma, which is probably unfair.
(Also remind me to tell you about They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), of which I saw the first half last night on TCM. I thought of you while I was watching; unless it disintegrates utterly in the second hour, it's one of the nastiest and most matter-of-fact films noir I've ever seen, especially for postwar Britain: it's like Get Carter two decades too soon. Trevor Howard, Griffith Jones. The latter as a cool and vicious black-marketeer called Narcy, short for Narcissus. Like I said, I thought of you.)
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In that case, may I recommend Hollywoodland in which he's a character actor playing a leading man trapped in the role.
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Cool. Thanks!
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As for good Ben roles--I'm personally fond of his turn in Changing Lanes, with Samuel L. Jackson. You think it's going to be a complete rip-off of something like Michael Douglas's Falling Down, where a buttoned-down dude snaps for Big Life-Altering Socio-Economic Reasons! and starts shooting people, except with differently-flavored racism. But no, it's tricksy, and considerably less easy than that...and Affleck, as Jackson's chosen scapegoat/adversary, is half the reason: A guy who, on some level, knows he's done wrong, but is too invested in his own image as "a nice guy" (and the privilege that mask affords him) to risk doing anything about it.
On the Matt-and-Ben tip, meanwhile, have you seen their merciless skewering of their own public personae in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back? Jesus GOD, is it funny. (The rest of it's pretty funny too, but Matt and Ben's demented Method For Dummies backstage rituals and the few snippets we see from Good Will Hunting II: Hunting Season are the parts I'm always quoting.)
Also: They Made Me A Fugitive sounds great. I'll look it up in my Noir histories, see what pops.;)
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I can see that.
but even that wouldn't be enough to make me watch A Beautiful Mind, I'm afraid, which has the Oh-Gemma-no one-two punch of higher math and glamorized insanity.
Well, I can't do anything about the higher math, but for the first two-thirds of its runtime, the film is not glamorous; hence my frustration with its final act. (I am going to leave aside the issue of fidelity to the actual life of John Nash, because I can't speak to it at all—I suspect that the story smoothed itself out as it went along, so that the earlier scenes are more or less fact and the later myth, but I have done no research whatsoever to support this claim.) I have a lot of respect for the initial conditions of the script. It immerses the audience in Nash's delusions without romanticizing them past the point where they are revealed as such—significantly, the first time our viewpoint widens from the first person, so that we can see the empty spaces Nash is shouting at, the unlocked gates and condemned windows that reveal that no one lives at the drop-box address at all—and presents its protagonist's eccentricities with a similar candor, so that even in retrospect we cannot tell what was an early warning sign and what was merely a red herring; it makes the case not that his genius presaged his madness, but if anything the ironic reverse, that his profession and its environment quite effectively camouflaged the onset of his schizophrenia, because if you're a high-stakes mathematician who not infrequently consults for the Pentagon, hell, yes, people expect you to be paranoid and peculiar, and this was already someone for whom social skills were a pointless exercise at best. And it doesn't feel the need to contrive sympathy somehow for Nash when he's in full-bore conspiracy mode—he's terrified, bristling, his office tacked full of string and photographs and newspaper clippings and his head whirling with threatening agents and Soviet spies, and he is not at that moment a particularly nice person; there is an acute pain in these scenes that has nothing to do with the tormented artist and everything to do with someone who has snapped from reality and can do nothing to stop himself even as he senses, vaguely, that something is wrong. And so we can watch a person on the screen, not an archetype thrown up from the collective unconscious of Romantic literature; there is a care for the small sticky details over the great upsweep of story, and I finally realized that's what goes down the drain completely at the end of the film.
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Seriously, I would almost recommend you watch A Beautiful Mind up to the point where the montage starts and then turn it off. It might be the most fascinating turn in the entire story and the film clearly has no interest in it: the years between the point where Nash realized that he was mentally ill—that he could not reason his way out of schizophrenia, because his reason itself was faulty—and the point where it began almost not to matter, because he found intellectual ways to distinguish the real from the delusional and trust in his choices, even if he could not make himself believe in them. That's, what, the early 1960's to the late 1980's? We see them in little snapshots, invariably Nash on-campus at Princeton, or his son going off to school, or his wife leaving for work (which she seems to have done decade after decade to support them); these scenes are a way of indicating time passing, but not change. We don't see the support structure Nash creates around himself, or asks others to create, or their effects on his daily life. We don't see the places where the structure breaks down. We don't see how his behavior adapts, or does not adapt, to the changing cultural tectonics—when the Cold War ends, what does that do to his delusion of being recruited to break Russian codes? Is his hallucinatory roommate still stuck on D.H. Lawrence? As Nash becomes aware of new children's books, does the roommate's equally hallucinatory niece appear to read them? There is a fascinating scene in which his wife admits frankly that most days she doesn't love her husband; mostly she feels trapped, stressed, guilty over these feelings and then resentful of her guilt; but as her husband is learning to look at the world and trust in its reality, she makes herself look at her husband and trust that he is still, somewhere under his meds and his muttering, the man she fell in love with. That's so much more complex than the usual wide-eyed unconditional support, it deserved more exploration—the minutiae and messiness integral to any life, especially a life one hopes to present as art. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that Ron Howard agrees with me. The last third of the movie never falls into Love of a Good Woman Cures Mental Illness, thank God (it's more like Love of Serious Defense Mechanisms, Also, Checking with Non-Schizophrenics to Make Sure That Guy from the Nobel Committee Actually Exists), but it's much too close for comfort; and it treads distinctly over the line of the crazy genius mythos that the film had avoided so successfully for two hours. Fine, Nash won the Nobel Prize. That's no excuse to compress thirty years of his life into some affirmative cliché. And after such an unsentimental, occasionally uncomfortable character study of a man who happens both to be a brilliant mathematician and a paranoid schizophrenic, it depressed me.
That was way more than I meant to write about A Beautiful Mind. I think essentially it's worth watching for Russell Crowe, but only if you are willing to stick your fingers in your ears and hum through the home stretch. There is also Paul Bettany, but if you really want him and Crowe, that is why God made Master and Commander.
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I'm with you on Dame Helen, though...she makes anything better.
I am looking forward very much to her Tempest, although I maintain it was totally unnecessary to change the genders.
You think it's going to be a complete rip-off of something like Michael Douglas's Falling Down, where a buttoned-down dude snaps for Big Life-Altering Socio-Economic Reasons! and starts shooting people, except with differently-flavored racism.
I just want to point out: that is an awesome sentence.
A guy who, on some level, knows he's done wrong, but is too invested in his own image as "a nice guy" (and the privilege that mask affords him) to risk doing anything about it.
Right: it's on the list.
On the Matt-and-Ben tip, meanwhile, have you seen their merciless skewering of their own public personae in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back?
I have not! My familiarity with Kevin Smith is limited entirely to Dogma and the clips from Jersey Girl that appeared in This Film Is Not Yet Rated. Look, I'm very good with pop culture from several centuries ago . . .
Also: They Made Me A Fugitive sounds great. I'll look it up in my Noir histories, see what pops.;)
If you see it before I get the chance (wedding, chaos, etc.), I demand a full review!
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Don't get me started on directors who change characters' sexes without a really good reason. Especially because most times I noticed it, it led to thinking 'Gosh, these two characters are clearly attracted to each other, single, and from the same socio-economic background - why oh why don't they act on it - maybe because in the original script they were both guys?"
Seriously, I used to think the directors were being homophobic but eventually I decided they were just too clueless to notice subtext.
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That film gets quoted with surprising frequency around my house. "Let's go back up to my office and talk about this like two reasonable beings." — "Why is there a watermelon there?" "I'll tell you later." I think it was my introduction to John Lithgow, Christopher Lloyd, and many other notable weirdos; I saw it at an impressionable age.
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Had to get that out of my system.
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I really should hunt that one down and buy it. With all of my imaginary monies.
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. . . do you still have a copy?
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OTOH, I do note that eyeweekly.com still has a back-log of 211 of my reviews available for casual viewers. That just ain't one of them. (Inspector Gadget, is, though!)
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It's playing tonight on TCM at 3 AM (EST), if you wish to give it a look.
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The other half of Rook--his outsized physicality and his voice--comes from a young Clancy Brown. What I like about Clancy is that he can convince you he's a "good guy", but he also simply looks like he could crush your head--not that Russell can't convince you he's "good" per se, but since I'm going with Ben Wade as my general template, I know damn well that Ben can't. He won't even try.
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I'm sure he's convinced people who've only known him for a short period of time before anyway.