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.