movies?

What's the point of writing about movies? I actually don't know what to say about them most of the time. I'm less interested in talking about them than I was in the past. It's sort of a matter of having a private experience. I feel sorry for film critics sometimes, the really busy ones, because they have to make a judgement and put it out in the world without much time to reflect. That's fine with movies that don't mean much to you, but the really good ones, the ones that really touch you...well, I haven't wanted to write about those.
For example, Once Upon a Time in the West (OUTW) is a movie I first saw in high school, and over the last decade have had an evolving relationship with it. You and a movie together make a dynamic system, and I would hate to have to pin down some definitive opinion about a movie that matters to me. I would actually enjoy writing about OUTW now, after all these years, and craft a nice essay about it, but it would be less of a review and more of a personal reflection on the movie and what it means to me.
In a different way, I would like to write an essay about Breaking Bad, which is a show I absolutely worshiped for the first three seasons, after which it rapidly fell in my favor and never recovered. Because I ended up not liking it I'm much more ready to write about it.

What I want to do on this blog is write about whatever, and yet leave title "Writing About Movies". You know. Whatever. First of all, fuck the way other people write reviews. It's not that it's bad, it's just not what I'm trying to do. I don't do this to impress people (anymore). And maybe I don't give a shit about spoilers.

Now, some brief comments about Gone Girl. It's fantastic. It starts with really shitty, slick dialogue that's typical of the beginning of a thriller where the writer really doesn't care about the way people interact in normal situations but nevertheless needs to write a few normal scenes in order to provide context for when shit gets fucked up. Even so, those scenes are compelling because David Fincher is such a precise, confident filmmaker, you watch the shitty dialogue and be like "what the fuck, it's still good, because David Fincher." But as the story goes on and twists around, it becomes something totally different. I like when that happens. In a typical mystery story someone gets killed and then everyone's like "Who's the murderer?" and then the whole rest of the movie is trying to figure out what happened, and the conclusion is when the murderer is revealed, and that's what the story was about. But if the murderer is revealed in the middle of the story, or the beginning, the story must become about something else, some theme or relationship between characters, and it also provides the opportunity to try and understand the character of a murderer, beyond a stereotypical confession speech at the end.
The ending is very thought-provoking. Amy plays the media so well that all the holes in her story get swept aside because of overwhelming sympathy for her victim story. People outside the mainstream may question the veracity of her story but they'll always be marginalized, like 9/11 truthers, because the story has become so entrenched in the culture. Nick has no chance to tell the truth now, it's too late, she won the public's opinion.
I can't wait to see it again.

old journals

I've been going through some old journals from the last year, and some parts of them are insightful and coherent enough that I want to share them on this blog. Here is one of them.


October 12, 2013


For a long time I've wanted to live perceptively, open. Marijuana and, in a dark and metaphysical way, mushrooms, gave me new kinds of perceptions which cast a pall on my "regular" perceptions, made my everyday experience seem insufficient.
I looked for movies that offered perceptual openness.
Was my interest in Zen related to this? Certainly Vipassana was. My FOVA [Foundations of Visual Art, a class I took my sophomore year of college] stuff was so much about that. My life-size nude self-portrait, inside/outside, my half-baked first idea for an independent project, which was something about drawing my entire visual field.
When I was able to get more productive it was from loosening up on this perceptual intensity. Images, as I'd see in a comic book. More traditional, imaginative, as opposed to perceptual. I was working from established art, as opposed to the wilds of "pure perception." It's like the difference between normal exhalation and the deep exhalation needed to blow up a balloon. I was struggling to master the deep blow, and was barely breathing. That's like a creative process that roots deeply into your life, your perceptions, your relationships, your memories, your beliefs. But I learned to lighten up and just make things. It became less about me, and the Art had a momentum of its own. But in a way I was limiting my aims.
What informed my cartooning? I rarely drew from life or reference material.
There was a sense of balance of elements in an image. I felt like I was arranging stock elements on a flat space: a guy, a tree, the sun, a dog; each of which I rendered to a standard of sufficiency, as opposed to accuracy. I just wanted to get the point across. I want you to know it's a dog, and the dog is doing a certain thing, and is in a specific relation to the other elements in the image.

I couldn't plan. I was liberated by having no plan. That only worked because I was working in a form, comics, which I knew intuitively. Each line I drew was inseparable from the entire story, further lines.
My comics drawing did not express a particularly inspiring vision. What of it was I proud of? What did I seek, find, satisfy? While not visually spectacular, there was a kind of vision, a perspective of the world that I was proud to indentify with. My minimalism was insightful. Stripping away inessential things. That's something that's always annoyed me in comics: the disjunction of the image with the idea. The ides only requires half as much rendering, or perhaps is even entirely ill-served by the image. I strove for a unity of image and idea, and felt like I hit the mark almost every time. That required a kind of judiciousness, knowing well what the comic was not.

Guardians of the Galaxy

Pretty fun movie. I was impressed by its comic-bookiness. The ending devolved into a rather generic comic-book-action-movie overblown chaos, but most of it before that was interesting visual ideas and strange, charming characters. I liked Bradley Cooper's voice acting for Rocket because it didn't sound like Bradley Cooper; he's actually a good cartoon voice actor who inhabits a character. The main character wasn't terribly interesting, but he was amusing and muscular enough to hold down the fort while the other weirdos circled around him. My favorite character was Drax. His mixture of intelligence, honesty, stupidity, and violence was compelling and hilarious.
What do I actually want to say about this movie? It was inventive and funny and the characters were good, and the graphics were good too. I read an article saying the success of this movie has established Marvel as a brand now, like Pixar. Now it's not Captain America who brings the audience in, it's Marvel, and they can do almost anything they want now. Sounds good to me. I think Disney's acquisition of Marvel is the best thing that ever happened to Marvel. More money is flowing though the Marvel brand than ever before. The warehouses of paper content that have been made at Marvel can now be turned into gigantic, popular spectacles, which is all they creators ever wanted, of course.

Game of Thrones (spoilers)

I watched a couple episodes of the fourth season of Game of Thrones this week. Here are the circumstances. I saw some stupid ad on the sidebar of a site, and it had a picture of Peter Dinklage with the caption "The 10 Most Shocking TV Deaths". I was pissed and figured the death of Tyrion had been spoiled. My friend told me something really shocking happened at the end of the fourth season that had people really upset, so I assumed it was that. I decided that I'd waited long enough, if I care about not getting spoiled I should watch the show now.
So, I streamed it, which is really easy. I watched the first episode and was reminded why I don't like Game of Thrones. It's corny and pornographic. The violence is fascinating in its explicitness, and of course grotesque. But what strikes me the most is the emotional remove the show has from its events. The environment is mythical, but it doesn't have the weight of myth. It's escapist. It has a kind of cynical sentimentality that turns the whole thing into a spectacle. Everything is sex or violence, and occasionally tragic violence.
I didn't care enough to sit through all the season's plot mechanics, so I skipped to the second to last episode (because cable shows always put the climax in the penultimate episode of the season) and lo and behold, it was like I hadn't missed anything. They set up the battle between the wildlings and the Nightwatch in the first episode, and then paid it off at the end, yet I could tell everything in between was vamping. So, that episode was all big action, and it was good as a big action scene. Then the tragic death of Ygritte. It is impressive the cynical tragedies that are set up. Then the next episode was all blah blah, and it end up Tyrion didn't die. I wasn't spoiled after all. The thing about the show is that it's not that good. It's all spectacle and tragedy and that's it. It's not funny, it's crude. It's not touching, it's sentimental. The most it succeeds at (exceedingly though) is to create protagonists and kill them, and leave you in the void for a while while the narrative finds another anchor. That contingent storytelling is impressive because you truly don't know what's going to happen, when anyone could die at any moment. It's an interesting narrative effect. For me it's nothing more than that.

thoughts on Gödel's incompleteness theorems

I've been trying to understand Gödel's incompleteness theorems for over seven years. A few months ago I really dug in and understood the mechanics of the proof. But what does it mean? This is a frustrating thing about modern mathematics. Hermann Weyl complained about this very thing, that verifying every step in a proof does not necessarily lead to insight. I get how Gödel's proof works; I can lead you through the coding of sentences into numbers, the simple though long process of defining the analog within arithmetic of deduction within the formal system, the construction of the sentence which "refers to itself," and the ensuing double-contradiction from assuming that sentence is provable or its negation is provable. Yet I remain unsatisfied. What does it mean about the nature of numbers, and formal logic?
I have certain intuitions about it. There's something about the meanings of negation, universal quantification, and the combination of the two, that needs to be explicated. There's something about how logic tries to go "beneath" arithmetic and fails in that attempt; I think that you can't reduce one to the other, and that both are co-present before the embodied subject (my Merleau-Pontyian, hermeneutical best) who has the freedom to creatively interpret one in terms of the other, and neither has a true primacy over the other. There's something about infinity, and giving it a finite symbol, and acting like it's somehow contained in there while at the same time reasoning with it purely as a symbol (which is obviously self-contained and finite).
I keep thinking about it and I should probably stop for now. Push too hard and the gears grind. Rest, let your unconscious knit the brain into a new shape
It's similar to my frustrated resignation to the proof that √2 is irrational. I know that if it were rational you could reduce the fraction it to least terms and either the numerator or denominator would be odd, but then you show how for it to be the square root of 2 both must be even, and that makes a contradiction. But why? Numbers overflow the bounds of certain reductive methods we have to think about them. Maybe it's truly mysterious. But I want a better answer than that. There's some assumptions within logic, perhaps the static nature of classical logic, and that the language of logic needs to be separate from its domain of discourse for excluded middle to hold, and then Merleau-Ponty's idea of the body as a sensing-sensible which finds itself as a thing among things as the condition of possibility for sensibility, and perhaps the undecidable sentence of Gödel is such a sensing-sensible which disrupts the assumptions of classical logic. But I can't work it all out without what mathematicians derogatorily call "hand waving." Some day I'll come up with something.
Playing one brooding Austrian off another, allow me to quote Rilke at length:

 Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.  Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating. There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!

more about Fargo (spoilers)

As I said, I liked Fargo a lot. One thing was circumstantial; I didn't start watching until six episodes had been released, and I watched all six in rapid succession. That’s the way to watch this show. It has some of the most unsatisfying episode endings I’ve ever seen. If you don’t have to wait a week to see the next one, it’s not so bad. But after that sixth episode I had to wait, and that diminished the viewing experience.

Also, the show changed after the sixth episode. At the end of that one, Molly gets shot by Gus, the eternal fuck up. Up till that point the show had been frighteningly cold-eyed about its characters, in a Game of Thrones way, where you half expect  the most sympathetic character to be the next to die, in the worst way. But the follow-up on Molly’s gunshot was so lame. She wasn’t mad at Gus. The bullet “passed right through her,” and she was back at work in like a couple days.

Jesus, as I think about it now, Molly SHOULD have died. After that point in the show she did nothing. She recovered, was horrified that Lester somehow framed his brother while she was out, and then she made that poster of the connections of all the characters, which her boss made her hide. Then she married Gus, got pregnant, and did nothing for the rest of the show except lurk after Lester, and finally get promoted to chief in the finale for being “right for the job” (we were told that in the first episode), and for making that sweet poster (three episodes before). Imagine the pathos if Gus had killed her! That  would have been so much better!

My point is, the nihilism of the show let up after that sixth episode and revealed its soft little heart. I for one was disappointed. I’m not a groupie for Game of Thrones but its diabolic mission to slay and rape every sympathetic character makes for suspenseful television. Fargo seemed like it was going that way. The violence in Fargo was genuinely disturbing, and it crescendoed in the sixth episode with the brutal murder of that spray tan guy Chumpf. It was hard to watch, because it was so unfair.

Anyway, I wanted to say good things about the show. Um. I liked the acting, across the board, except for Martin Freeman. He has no emotions, ever. One could say that’s just the character of Lester, but one would be wrong about that. Martin Freeman never has any emotions. A better actor could have made Lester a more compelling character. I can’t think of someone off the top of my head, but William H. Macy is a sufficiently obvious example from the movie.

Anyway, I wanted to say good things. I liked the jump-ahead in time in episode 8. I liked Lester seeing Malvo in Las Vegas, and seeing Malvo play a completely different character. That whole set up at the start of the ninth episode, showing Malvo as a dentist, and Stephen Root’s character, and then his shocking execution of all of them in the elevator. Hell yeah. I liked the first episode a lot. (Except for Molly bringing the paint cans to the dead sheriff’s wife. That was a bit much.)  I liked how Malvo scared Gus at the end of the first episode. Hell yeah. I liked the music, how it suggested the original score but was actually different. I liked the heterogeny of the story structure. One could call it sloppy structure, and perhaps it was, but it was fun. I liked the story with Stavros, largely because Oliver Platt’s acting was fantastic. He found the briefcase of money from the movie and the moment he prayed to God for help, and then believe that God is real. Fantastic! I’d believe it too! Then he puts the money back but fish fall from the sky and kill his son. What does that mean? He yells to heaven, “But I put it back! I put it back!” Questions about God, justice, evil, and the show took an ambiguous stance on those moral questions. Evil and injustice happened constantly in the show, yet also there were miraculous occurrences. What is morality in such a world? Where is God in this situation? These questions were approached with both sensational violence and the light touch of humor, my favorite combination.

Oh, it was good fun. That's all.

Fargo (spoilers)

Last night the first season of Fargo ended. I really, really enjoyed the show, despite several imperfections. In part because I'm such a Coen brothers fan, I found the whole thing inherently interesting. Possibly the best cinematography I've seen on TV.
But, to the complaints. The last episode had a structural flaw that left a bad taste in my mouth. The opening sequence where they say "This is a true story" went like this: Fade from black. The camera moves languidly along tread marks in the snow. Fade out. Fade back in. A toppled snowmobile. Fade out, fade in. A vast stretch of snow, dramatic, jagged mountains in the background. Fade out, fade in. There is a rough hole in the ice, large cracks radiate from all its sides. The camera descends toward the dark water of the hole and fades to black. When it fades back in, we find Lester Nygaard where we left him last episode, in a very different time and place from the ominous snowfield. What was that mysterious opening sequence? Then the events of the episode happen, blah blah, Lester fights with Malvo and survives, Malvo is killed by Gus, and Molly hears the tape of when Lester called Malvo, which means she finally has him dead to rights. Show's basically over. Slowly fade to the indistinct blue-white of snowy ground, and, what's that sound? A whining motor. The camera pans up from the ground and hurtles along from the perspective of a speeding snowmobile. A title tells us we're in Glacier Park, Montana, two weeks later. Cut to: Lester on the snowmobile.
Goodbye all tension or surprise regarding the conclusion of the show and the fate of the main character. I watched the following two minutes not in a state of thoughtful and emotional engagement, but with frustration and disappointment. The problem is this: Lester is not an interesting character. We don't care about him, nor are we supposed to, except with a kind of detached curiosity. Because of his sins (and the fate of his alter ego Jerry Lundegaard in the movie), punishment is a foregone conclusion, death being the most obvious possibility. So the fact that he dies carries no weight in itself. At best, the way he dies could end the show with a bizarre or ironic commentary; but all thought was stultified by the spoiler opening. With no thought and no emotion, what you have is a flat ending to an otherwise great show.
The technique of spoiling the end is not an inherently bad one, but it requires a situation with more emotional involvement. Imagine this: the show begins the same way, with the cryptic sequence of snowmobile and hole in ice. The episode plays out. Fade to white snow, sound of snowmobile, camera hurtles through Glacier Park. Cut to: Molly on the snowmobile. What? No! That can't be! We saw the crashed snowmobile already, the person-sized hole in the ice...is Molly going to die? No! Now, whatever happens, we watch it rapt, saying no no no! This works because we like Molly and we can't believe she dies until we see it.
Even a similar thing would work if the character who died wasn't a good guy and their death wasn't tragic in the moral sense. Consider the death of Gus in Breaking Bad. Gus was the enemy and had to die. Yet Gus was such a fantastic character that you could basically spoil the fact of his death and it served to engage the audience even more. As Gus walked from his car to the retirement home to meet Hector, he was filmed in slow-motion, close-ups, to music appropriate for a climatic Western gunfight. That sequence was nothing except a goodbye to a character we love, not because he's good but because he's a great character. We didn't know for certain, plotwise, how things would turn out for him, but with that cinematic salvo as he literally did nothing but walk into a retirement home, we knew.
I have more to say about Fargo. I'll try to come back and say some good things about it.