Some essays

Outside (though sometimes cross-posted on) this blog are a few essays I've written about movies, art, and education, mostly.

Letters to a Young Artist (review). Here's a brief and admittedly gushing Goodreads review of Anna Deveare Smith's no-nonsense book about art and process and education.

Arts, Liberated. This piece, published in my former college's magazine, is kind of a philosophy of education and its friend, working. Sometimes I revisit it to remind myself of how amazing the students and alumni and friends I know are.

Lincoln: Compromise and the Purist Man in America. In my review of the 2012 film, Lincoln, I reflect on the unavoidable, yet ever unsettled question of how cultures can and must change, in the context of tradition, rightness, leadership, and compromise. (Someday I might get around to writing about the movie from a different angle: the role of hands and Day-Lewis' genius in embodying Lincoln.)

Book Reviews in Projections journal. I believe audiences intuitively respond to popular movies - and their surrounding elements, such as celebrity stars - in political as well as aesthetic ways. This 2009 essay discusses two books about Bollywood which deal with that idea.

When Girls Became Lions (review). In reviewing this 2014 novel about Title IX and a marathon trek to support girls' participation in sports, I highlight the book's mystery and story.

Bourne Legacy: "I really have no idea what's going on." Sometimes even ubiquitously analytical I know a movie's meaning and merit are less significant than its carefreedom. So, I analyzed a funnish movie that's happy with its nonsensical plot and uninterested in its critical potential.

Merry, with a touch of melancholy, makes for a good Christmas. Asked to write (during the season) about Christmas movies, I got a little moody. 


Subject to updates, as Life and Language always should be.

Waiting for the Vote: Secret Ballot

In 2012, I wrote a series of movie reviews to coincide with a "Faculty Film Series" I produced on Elections and Presidents at my former academic institution. Here's the cheeriest one I did.

Secret Ballot. Dir. Babak Payami, 2001.

This whole democracy business can get a little absurd . . . frustrating . . . bureaucratic . . . quixotic . . . The 2001 Iranian film Secret Ballot ponders if it beats the alternatives.

Secret Ballot is the second feature film of Iranian Canadian filmmaker Babak Payami. It portrays a day in the life of an election agent collecting votes on a remote Iranian island, accompanied by her assigned military escort. Not unlike in U.S. culture, some players in this story are eager to participate in the electoral process, some actively resist. Some are informed; most are not. There’s idealism and apathy, progress and, yet, more of the same stuff conserved.

After arriving by boat first thing in the morning, the agent and her army companion roam around the island he’s assigned to guard, in an unreliable old jeep with a map that rarely proves relevant. One of the pair’s first encounters is with a man who runs away from the approaching jeep, and so they take up the chase. Here is a man, and here is the visiting agent. It’s election day. His vote must be collected! Jeep wins out over feet in a chase, and after the man catches his breath and there’s a requisite (!) exchange over why he ran – and why they chased, in an army vehicle, with a gun – he offers his identification card, the agent provides instructions, and his vote is deposited in the ballot box that arrived, that morning, by parachute from a passing plane. He walks away. They drive on, eyes peeled for more people to enfranchise.

This ridiculous scene is laugh out loud funny, and it resonates beyond the (in this film, relatively non-specific) Iranian political context.

Our election agent is idealistic, even propagandistic at first. “I must vote. You must vote. We all must vote,” she begins, in an effort to persuade her initially resistant government companion. (First, she’s a woman. No one told him agents could be female! Second, his i.d. is under the mattress his army partner’s sleeping on, so if he votes at all it will have to be later, because he can’t be bothered to walk over and wake him up.) Over the course of the day as she meets various citizens and non-citizens who challenge her early assumptions that the task is simple and its value inarguable, the agent's enthusiasm wavers, but only slightly. “No one is forced to vote. But it’s better for them if they do,” her argument evolves.

They attempt to facilitate the voting experience of a truck full of heavily veiled, illiterate women, an engineer who wants to vote for God Almighty, a misinformed but highly opinionated group, and a community the agent ultimately concedes doesn’t really need to vote: they have governance enough inside their compound.

The surprising familiarity and humor of Secret Ballot, in some ways so foreign to most American viewers' situation and sensibilities, works through contrasts and tensions which create subtle comedy, reflecting the culture-particular and universal limitations as well as the promises of democracy and the law. Gender roles are key, as well as power and justice, choice versus obligation, and modern civilization up against centuries-old traditions.

Aesthetically, the visual composition and pacing of Secret Ballot complement its political narrative. The film opens and closes with long, wide shots. A couple of them are held for over two minutes. We’re more familiar and comfortable with three-second cuts (and the film includes a few of these, too, revealing the intentionality of the longer stretches). These long shots heighten the absurdity of the agent’s conceit in contrast with her social context. The situation, this civilization, resists dramatic change and pompous promises. An agent scurrying around to collect votes, confidently proclaiming the power of political representation and participation is silly and maybe impotent in the face of bureaucracy, ignorance, and even more so a sense of sufficiency in the present quotidian.

Secret Ballot doesn’t conclude that to vote is pointless or powerless, but it puts propaganda and modern energy and rhetoric in their place and tones them down. In the U.S., our elections fill with chaos and repetition, but Secret Ballot lets silence linger. Our election day (and season) is louder, so that we might miss the absurdity in the circus of it all. (Or, in 2016, if the circus is absurd enough, miss the reality of it all.) Secret Ballot subtly suggests the whole process can get a bit silly (as the agent almost literally leaves no stone unturned to get out the vote), yet we can’t help but be taken by a little of the idealism and vision anyway.

Originally posted at http://blogs.gordon.edu/facultycentral/2012/10/19/film-review-getting-out-the-vote-in-secret-ballot/. Image from official production site. As of this posting, the film is available for rent-to-screen from Amazon. 

For info on the 2009 Iranian "Twitter Revolution," see The Pew Research Center's contemporary analysis.

The Campaign: "How's My Hair?"

In 2012, I wrote a series of movie reviews to coincide with a "Faculty Film Series" I produced on Elections and Presidents at my former academic institution. Here's the crankiest one I did.

The Campaign. Dir. Jay Roach, 2012.

Love it or hate it.

There. Now that I’m done with my review of the new movie, The Campaign, I shall move on to some more interesting business at hand.

Oh, sorry. You were expecting more? Really, don’t.

The Campaign is a Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis comedy directed by Jay Roach. If you’ve seen almost any Roach-directed (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents), or Ferrell (Anchor Man, Talladega Nights) or Galifianakis (The Hangover, Due Date) -acted movies, you have a good idea of what to expect from this over-the-top, crass, stereotype- and cliché-driven story of a couple of sometimes sort of well-meaning doofuses running against each other and the system for congress.

Roach, Ferrell, and Galifianakis are each talented and successful moviemakers and performers, capable of nuanced, thoughtful, and, I would argue, culturally valuable work (see, just for one example apiece, Recount, Stranger Than Fiction, It’s a Funny Kind of Story). The Campaign is not one such product.

The story follows incumbent North Carolinian congressman Cam Brady (Ferrell) as he faces a series of scandals jeopardizing his run for reelection. Enter Marty Huggins (Galifianakis), conservative, naïve, and awkwardly lovable pawn in billionaire businessmen the Motch brothers’ (John Lithgow and Dan Ackroyd) plot to manipulate government regulations. The two campaigns one-up each other with increasing horribleness (and success) in their bids to win.

The Campaign gives us a tightly paced script built on a rhythm moving from endearing moments of empathy for underdogs to fart jokes and in-our-face offensive scenes of children describing unhealthy sexual experiences – all loud, exaggerated, and then over quickly enough that we can laugh and move on if we don’t get mired squirming in discomfort. Ferrell plays a familiar character, the cocky, popular guy who’s not as smart or together as he looks, while Galifianakis gives us his socially and physically awkward outlier who’s sometimes deeper than his shtick.

The script offers one relevant, contemporary reference after another (clear nod to the billionaire Koch brothers’ underwriting of apparent grass roots politicians, easily swayed masses, empty rhetoric) and running sight gags (out of control politicians competing to kiss babies, anti-hero so dumb he can’t work a doorknob).

All maybe true, but not at all insightful or particularly creative in treatment. A bumbling idiot might be funny in contrast with his surroundings and situation if the bit reveals some insight into self or culture (see Mr. Bean at the Olympics). But it offers little when it’s just a repetition of gags in the context of redundant juvenile taboo-breaking.

Full disclosure demands I admit Meet the Parents is on my most-hated-movies-I’ve-ever-seen list and I didn’t find The Hangover (or – controversially! – its gender counterpart Bridesmaids) enjoyable. The most interesting thing I noticed about The Campaign was this R-rated film ran attached previews for Nickelodian and Disney produced movies, appealing to the under-17 cravings in its audience at an over-17-rated movie. The Campaign doesn’t aspire to leave us reflecting or conversing, but Roach, Ferrell, and Galifianakis give us what their previous box office numbers (and the frequently LOL’ing audience I saw the film with) have voted for many terms over.

It’s a presidential election year, and a little exploitation of the current cultural happenings can’t be all bad. There are quite a few politically themed movies out there that take us a little deeper than The Campaign attempted to go.

(From original 2012 post; included here for context. This fall’s Faculty Film Series goes there. I’ve selected from dozens of great options four films on the theme of Elections and Presidents, including some familiar and some less known, some serious and some sometimes silly. Over the course of the semester, we’ll go to 1970’s U.S., 2000’s Iran, and a couple settings in between, to enjoy creative, thought- and conversation-provoking film treatments of democracy in action (and comedy). Join us for screenings and conversation beginning with Iron Jawed Angels. This contemporary dramatization of the last days of the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S. reminds us what it cost in the past for us to vote in the present.) 

Originally posted at http://blogs.gordon.edu/facultycentral/2012/09/06/film-review-the-campaign-as-election-fodder/. Image from official movie site.

Pay attention: The Imitation Game

In all its density - and that is a good and unexpected thing here - the Alan Turing film The Imitation Game provides a visceral awareness that time sometimes is literal torture. While great minds - and compassionate hearts among them - work ubiquitously, frustratingly, yet even progressively toward cracking codes to save the world, a tank rolls over a helmet, parents put their children on London's trains to send them, unimaginably, away from bombs that fall, and fall, and fall.

There's an old Michael Been/The Call song that cries, "When will America become America?* When will the home we love mean freedom for everyone?" It, in the sentiment of Psalm 40, I guess, is so much truer and weightier a proposition than John Lennon's "Imagine there's no heaven, no hell, no country, nothing to kill or die for, it isn't hard to do."

Maybe it is easy to imagine peace and justice and borderless, colorless, people living for today. But it's empty of conviction because there is death and killing and torture, there's hell at least here and now. While Britain's smartest cryptologists build a computer and start from scratch every morning in trying to figure out what the Germans are saying about their plans to attack the Allies, the Germans attack the Allies, the British starve, the U.S. sends food, the food gets bombed to the bottom of the ocean. While the smart, even compassionate thinkers think and test some more.

While we read books and have meetings and make statements (write blogs) about our dreams for the world to live as one... While we debate whether #blacklivesmatter needs more leadership or (imaginable) goals, my friend's son, my student's brother, get stopped by police because they're black. While we hold national evangelical denominational "conversations" or bring special speakers to campus to train us to love and "provide safe spaces" alongside iterating apologetics for traditional, unambiguous sexuality doctrine, a young man feels what a person can't feel for long, thinking about killing himself. A woman, with anger and confusion borne of betrayal, disentangles herself from her faith.

Benedict Cumberbatch's Turing says, you have to pay attention, listen. "Are you paying attention?" The Imitation Game is a war movie with palpable representation of war without gore. We've seen the severed limbs blown off before. We've lingered and illustrated war violence ad nauseam in other movies. "Do you know why people like violence?" Turing asks more than once (pay attention). "Because it feels good." It's satisfying to see it on a screen (for far fewer, to see or enact it in person). "When you take away the satisfaction, it becomes hollow." We see the effects of personalized violence in The Imitation Game in Turing's complicated face when his body is in the process of chemical castration (what a euphemism; pay attention - is he a man or a machine). In other movies, we've seen that violence on screen as a hero's held down by multiple white-coated attendants, administering electric shock. None of that satisfaction is here. We have to look right at him in his own space, his home, his ongoing agony of being, beyond the immediate moment of enacted violence. And that violence is hollow. He's been waking up with this for days, months. We don't see it in its neat, graphic moment. Instead, we see what months (oh, more) of brokenness, being broken, look like in his face. Harder to look away and (self-satisfactorily or even progressively) rage against the machine in that moment (though I rage). In The Imitation Game, "war efforts" intercut with war, and violence tortures a person way beyond a moment or a scene. Time conducts all wounds.

Sometimes we need to see the violence in explicit immediacy. We need to see it when it's shocking, somehow shown new, as the unimaginable but undeniable hatred, dehumanization, physical violence and fear on the bridge in Selma. In The Imitation Game, the shock is in jolting attention to the fact that working everyday on cracking a code occurs as everyday casualties repeat. While we're working on policy and rhetoric and, yes, on understanding so that we can stop violence, we will never act justly and love mercy fast enough or finally enough to save the world. Listen, look.




----------------
* Cf., Rufus Wainwright's out-of-patience "Going to a Town" - "I'm going to a town that's already been burnt down. I'm so tired of America," yet still, "I've got a life to live, I've got a love to give..." Critical loyalty to an institution or society clashes anger and assertiveness with ongoing failure (and, yes, progress).

Melancholy merry

via 2010.

Snowmen, reindeer, decorated trees, singing carolers ... and a desperate man staring at his own gravestone in fear and anger. Ah, Christmas. 

Yes, a man confronted with his own death on a dismally cold night, and we watch, again, as the television plays that favorite holiday flick. We snuggle in close with loved ones on the couch, sipping eggnog, with piles of presents nearby waiting to be unwrapped, and recite the film's lines — because we can.

Some of the best Christmas movies are more than a little melancholy. Certainly, all good stories include challenges and obstacles giving the protagonist's journey toward her goal some rise and fall. But, good grief, shouldn't the movies we consume in this most wonderful time of the year be a little more full of peace and joy? Couldn't they feature a few less ghosts, or at least not confront us with suicide attempts right off the bat?

I'm a fan of Christmas. I say let's stretch it out, invite it in, celebrate Christmas early and often. I welcome its bustle, its lights, its gifts and songs, travel and cheer. But, I resonate with Charlie Brown when he tells the good doctor Lucy that the holiday brings its share of trouble.

Like Chuck, Ebenezer Scrooge and George Bailey, I also know the busyness, loneliness and financial and relational stresses that can come in the confusion of Christmas. So, I appreciate the role these movies play in acknowledging this truth.

After all, the story of Christmas, as Linus reminds us in "A Charlie Brown Christmas," is infused with not only the mundane but also the exceptionally difficult. It is, remember, a story about immigration, taxes and death — as well as miraculous life.

In fact, the inclusion of death along with birth in popular Christmas narratives runs throughout history. The Christmas ghost story predates Dickens' mass popularization of it in "A Christmas Carol," and its essence informs "It's a Wonderful Life."

We watch these holiday favorites and listen to Christmas tunes to get in the mood, implying that the season resists its own "proper" sentiments somehow, and needs a little nudge.

Yet it's not just happy feelings we seek and repeat as yuletide traditions. Featuring — and legitimizing the worldview of — an almost interminably depressed and socially challenged little boy, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" is one of the most successful and long-running annually repeated shows on network television. And more than a dozen versions of "A Christmas Carol" play at nearly all times on some channel in the weeks before Christmas.

These movies are not only about Christmas, but have become a part of the Christmas ritual itself in American culture. Many of us have our long-established rules and timelines, certain settings and ways in which we repeat our engagement with a familiar popular text. For multiple generations this has included watching "It's a Wonderful Life" on NBC on Christmas Eve.

Watching someone watch this movie for the first time is a gift in itself. It delivers when it shouldn't. The movie is old, black-and-white, scratchy and (let's face it) a little socialist-leaning in the season of Capitalism Gone Wild. But this is, perhaps, one of the keys to its success, its relevance and power. Christmastime epitomizes its source religion's paradox. In the language of Christianity, we are "caught in between the now and the not yet," between being Scrooge and a reborn George Bailey, tinged with cynicism and yet full of hope.

Eventually each of these popular treatments of our seasonal moods gets around to the Christmas spirit in the end. Although Scrooge's change of heart seems full and lasting, I always imagine he faces some lingering effects of his prior personality. Tiny Tim's leg is not healed. George Bailey's friend floats him a line of credit, not an outright gift of millions, suggesting his days of working hard at the Building and Loan are not over.

And Charlie Brown, well, he doesn't become Snoopy. But in keeping with the fundamental Christmas message of incarnation — that is, loving others so much that one sacrifices power and comfort to be fully present with them — each of these "darker" Christmas movies actually achieves the Christmas spirit.

They help us picture togetherness, even in the tangible context of brokenness.

Ebenezer Scrooge makes time to be with his family. George Bailey's neighbors come to his rescue. And Charlie Brown's friends meet him halfway between austerity and excess, bringing about the miracle of the perfect Christmas tree and party.

So this holiday, as the lights on the tree brighten and dim, and the shows come on, may God bless us, every one, with a little merry, without banishing the melancholy.

Paul Newman was not my grandfather

He was like a grandfather to me in some of the ways my two biological grandfathers were, and some they were never.

I did not meet any of the three men I've called "my grandfather" for most of my life. I knew them only through stories -- told to me, read by me, imagined by me -- and through pictures, still and moving.

It's silly, I guess. And a little bit true. Friends who've known me since I was a teenager, or since I was in college, or since I was just out of college. . . when did I grow out of my adopted grandfather Paul? . . . referred to Paul Newman as my grandfather. And I did love him and respect him. But he was not my grandfather.

My brother called me while I was meeting with a student in my home this morning. The only reason I took the call and interrupted our independent study class time was because I feel like we're all sort of experiencing heightened sensitivity to being available and connected to each other now, almost three months after my dad died while four of the five of us were relatively unavailable and disconnected -- out of the country and away from my mom, who right now herself is out of the country and out of communication for a couple of weeks. He asked if I'd heard the news. When I didn't respond like he expected or hoped I would, he transitioned into it: "Paul Newman." "Oh, did he die?" He'd just heard on NPR and called me. I said I hadn't heard, but I knew it was coming. Then I went back to work. It was providential that he called then, and that I, after initially silencing the phone to put it away, decided to take the call, as later in our session I brought up a news site online and would have been confronted with the headlining words and image, and I don't know how I would have responded with my student there to news that my sometime-someway grandfather Paul Newman had died at 83.

I met Paul Newman through the medium of my family's little TV set and late-late-night programming in 1984 or 1985, in the living room of our house in Kota Kinabalu. I met him once or twice at sleepovers with my friends LuAnne and Lois and Alex and Christa. I grew to love him alone, as I'd stay up late when my brothers and parents had gone to bed. I have no idea why Malaysia TV -- we had two channels when we first moved there, three by the time we left the country, sharing time and airwaves between programming in four languages: Malay, Chinese, Tamil, and English -- played 1970's and 1960's Newman flicks around midnight.

I saw "Harper" and "The Drowning Pool," possibly "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Buffalo Bill and the Indians." I think I saw "The Towering Inferno," maybe "Cool Hand Luke" and "The Sting" in this time, but I don't know in which country, what home, I ended up seeing most. Maybe I only saw "The Drowning Pool" and "Harper" in Malaysia. But I know I saw each more than once, in the dead of night in our tile and rattan living room. I remember each scene, the melodramatic staging and interactions, the deadpan sarcastic delivery, the beauty of the face, eyes, actor, character, man.

Back in the States, I checked out "Hud" and "The Verdict," "The Left Handed Gun," "The Hustler," and most of the rest. I saw "The Color of Money," and eventually Newman's non-present Oscar win. Sometime in high school I saw Newman's 1958 "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," and then I saw it again at least once a year for the next probably 15 years. By the first scene, I was in love.

But I was in love with him as my pretend adopted-grandfather. When did I decide that, because I'd never had a chance to meet either of my grandfathers, both dying of heart attacks young, years before I was born, I should get to create my own in a currently living figure I never visited, talked to, knew? When did I begin to relate to him the way I related to my grandpa Luther, Dad's dad of whom he'd tell so many inspiring stories that I knew him to be the spitting image of Atticus Finch?

My grandpa Luther W. Cobbey was a multiply-decorated war hero from WWI, a lawyer in the deep south in a time of deep racial divide and oppression, a generous, reconciling, well-respected man who modeled for my generous, humble, much-loved and respected father what it meant to live with others with integrity. My dad told a story of the response of blacks in the Tampa community to his father's funeral which I always pictured as the scene in "To Kill a Mockingbird" when Rev. Sykes says to Scout, "Stand up, Miss Jean Louise, your father's passing." My grandpa John Newgard, my mother's dad, was less present to me in my childhood because my mother is less of a storyteller than my dad. But I knew he worked hard, did the grocery shopping, made an ice skating pond for my mom and her sisters and brother in the cold Minneapolis winters.

Somewhere along the line, I came to know, and seek to know, all this and more about my grandfather Paul Newman. I thought he made a great grandfather figure for me, a generous, vibrant man, made up in my mind of the personalities of his intense, funny, sharp film characters, the narrative of his charity, his visits with David Letterman, his racecar addiction, his long-lasting marriage, his tragic loss and larger than life donations, and his own-personness-outside-of-the-celebrity-system vibe -- while one of the biggest celebrities over five decades worth of fame.

I knew, funnily enough, he didn't become a grandfather until much later than many of his generation, with his children producing only two (non-imaginary) offspring to give him that special relationship I imagined him filling for me. I was in my mid-20's by the time my grandfather Paul became a grandfather himself.

I knew his birthday was Australia Day, January 26, and I still note it every year.

Paul Newman was one year and just under a month younger than my dad.

I watched them age together. The sagging, blotching skin, the fading blue eyes, the loss of hair, the feebling of build and movement. I wondered, earlier this year, when he was in the news as ailing, what it would be like for me when Paul Newman died before my dad.

But then, he died three months after him. And I'm still not sure what it's like. I know that I am sad for his wife and his five children and two grandchildren in ways that I know more intimately -- the sadness -- than I did before. I'm sad for those who knew him through time and conversation and touch. I know that I am sad that if I ever have children, they will know their grandfather Max only through stories the way I knew my grandfathers, real and imagined.


I have a book-length study of celebrity death in popular culture that I always believed I'd finish and publish before my dad died, even when my academic commitments took me in a whole other direction. I could apply a series of theories and systems of analyzing and predicting the public response to today's news. But, if you came here looking for a moral of the story, some insight into culture and society, or something funnier than me calling an actor a year younger than my dad my grandfather, I will disappoint. It's just me, still grieving my dad, and mourning Paul Newman, who was but also was not my grandfather.

Extra Credit Movie Madness

You may be wondering what I learned today. So I will tell you.

The question: how long does it take to film one single-block chase scene for a Bruce Willis movie?



The answer: ALL DAY AND COUNTING!

I thought it was loud when I left for work this morning after about an hour of the tireless, polite, Hollywood crew repeatedly filming a motorcycle weaving through fake traffic


. . . (complete with fake cop cars) on the road below my windows.



I came home from the office TEN HOURS LATER to the same scene in repeated rotation, this time filmed by two helicopters.


Both flying right outside, I mean right outside my window.



Over and over again.



I feel for the extras who've been wearing these stupid clothes and walking on the same spot for nearly 12 hours.



I feel for the motorcycle stunt drivers. (Okay, so that's a reflection of my flowery blouse in the photo, but if you squint you can see the tough guy on his extrasuperspecial loud bike in the bottom of my shot.)


But mostly I feel for the fake drivers who've been moving their cars forward ("ROLLING!") and backward ("RESETTING!") over the same half a block all day.

I don't need to tell you the catties are traumatized.

Not so the people in my neighborhood, including this young man staked out on top of my dumpster, enjoying the view. I tossed in some cat poop on my way to the office this morning.



Tomorrow: filming includes a burnt-out city bus and prop trash in my parking lot on the other side of the building. I was relieved to find my (deeded, in my name) parking space unblocked and free for me to park when I arrived home.




That's a wrap!

(Except it's not. Poor little guy downstairs has just yelled "Rolling! Action" for what must have been the eleventy billionth time for today! I attended three multi-hour meetings and changed massive quantities of curriculum while these dudes shot one short scene. What monotony, movies! Who wants to finish writing my dissertation about the Indian versions for me now while I take a nap?)

Live Blogging the Oscars

Okay, not really. I mean, yes, I'm typing this while the Oscars are on, but I'm not really going to post throughout. I mean, I'm hoping it'll be over pretty soon anyway.

But did you see the special award given to Art Director Robert Boyle?

He's 98 years old.

And his voice is as strong as anyone I've ever heard. (Way stronger than mine!) Could he have had "work done" on his voice? How in the world is he this strong at 98? Also, I love that when old men get dressed up for something like the Oscars they wear a scarf. I'm a fan of the all day indoor scarf. What a classy man and classy moment.

Oh, and what a great acceptance speech from the director of the first film to win an Oscar from Austria (I guess if you don't count Sound of Music).

Can I just say that nothing this evening has made me want to see the movie Enchanted which I guess I missed last summer. I do like Kristin Chenowith, though.

And how can you not like John Travolta dancing up to his presentation.

And wow. Did you see Jon Stewart just bring the winner of Best Song back out after she'd been played off so she could make her speech?! This is like the feel-goodest Oscars ever in the history of the world.

It was probably about 10 or maybe 15 years ago that I stopped rehearsing my acceptance speech that I'd been practicing since the beginning of time. But the greatness of the Oscars didn't fade with my one-time dreams. Sometimes they're dull, awkward, or worse. But always they celebrate and show what is so undeniable about movies: their power, intricacies, intertwined produced-ness and reception... The way movies are made by so many different people, with so many different layers. The ways they picture so many layers of truth from blood to hope (from old to young, from wrong choices to mistakes to remorse to atonement, epic to quotidian).

Okay, I'll stop. But, seriously.

{{Hugs}}



Oh! The Coens again. Remember the time I almost took a job as their personal assistant but I went to grad school in Ohio instead of moving to NYC to work with them? Aw well, I probably wouldn't have graded nearly as many papers or served on nearly as many committees if the chips had fallen another way... And what about Buddy and G? Who'd have cuddled with them?