heat

the master criminal versus the master cop! one super funny thing in "high tech" movies is the nearly constant gibberish as dialogue. no time is actually going to be taken to explain some intricate stock trading deal, so instead there's this nonsense chatter spoken with great solemnity. it reminds me of this game we played in drama class in which one pretended to be an Expert on wine or insoles or whatever the fuck.

the movie's super beautiful, and the final scene with the light going nuts bcause of the planes landing (is that really what happens in airports? stunning) and so the shadows shifting and mucking up their positions as they edge around, i mean, what a gorgeously tense set up. 

there's basically one good idea in this movie and it knows it so it repeats it like 8 times, and that is that if you're a master criminal you gotta be ready to drop anything and everything in 30 seconds. the corollary's that the cops chasing them gotta have a similar willingness, and so there's this lonely kinship between them. there's lots of 3rd rate poetic moping about lost love because mr. super cop is too wrapped up with the wicked people and the dead. the action sequences are thrillingly intricate; it's beautiful watching people do things perfectly. anyway. not much.

blade

my landlord's wanted me to see this movie. he thinks it's the real shit. i'm kind of amazed how normalized torture is in action movies. blade straight up tortures at least two people in this movie, and, in the movie, it's a necessary, even hilariously righteous thing. he burns one guy's entire body, and when he later refers to him as mr. crispy, it's super funny. and the guy's a vampire, so it's cool. but that's incredibly insidious.

the bedrock of legitimating torture, of improbably making it funny, is the assurance that it's happening to a truly evil person. (there are some radically terrible people who love concocting hypothetical situations to try to argue that it could be cool to torture people, but that's some next-level appalling shit)
so long as you're fighting vampires (or soviets, muslims, nazis etc.) there's no other side to the argument because it's certain they'd do the same to you, and that their moral-vacuum-ass has no right to rights. this kind of thinking leeches into the real world, however, and before long you've got enhanced interrogation and everything is terrible.

blade hasn't aged so well because CGI blood-glooping has really come a long way since 1998. the opening scene with the club in the meat club is a fantastic idea, and it's just like slaktuset (sp?) in stockholm, where everything smells a little like sausage, so that touch made me really happy. the idea of vampires as nighttime clubbing leches is great, though there is one truly bizarre scene in a bar with lots of asian businessmen and asian women singing like little school girls that i guess just tried to hammer that point home. it's great that it stars a black people; there's lots of sci-fi racial tensions; talk of "half bloods;" the villain calls blade an uncle tom because he says he's not a vampire. all the interracial relationships get violently axed. meh

amadeus!

what a fucking good movie! it's the best argument for atheism i've come across in years. the shots of him using the pool table as a desk, rolling the ball around the sides of the table as the rhythm for his work is MARVELOUSLY PROFANE. so fucking good. and watching the agony of god's most faithful servant.

mozart himself is kind of a simple character, but i guess that's what the movie asks of him. be a "bawdy imp," as the summary on the back puts it, and god's mouthpiece—just a thing to most perfectly enrage saliere, or whatever his name is. moz's wife's actually kind of a good character; her voice is so weirdly familiar somehow.

i mean, apart from that, it's got pretty good tunes. i didn't realize opera used to be a good time. i saw the magic flute once and it was an unspeakably boring experience.

bel-ami

i think it actually depressed me. it made feelings feel fake and made me afraid i was like duroy. it's a book about all the good things that happen to this super evil fellow. not even evil; he's like felix krull, the protagonist of the thomas mann book. he made me remember a quote from that book: "happiness is sated pride." that's all duroy is. not evil as much as empty of anything beyond callow desires for "wealth" "power" "fame." evil doesn't exist, anyway, there's just ambition without thought. aha! that's it!

notable in this book: passion for a woman is tantamount to rape. there are like a dozen scenes in this book where he straight up sexually assaults people, but it's okay because the women are only TRYING TO FIGHT HIM OFF because of their modesty and desperate self restraint. the book's super relevant for the modern world on that front—she wants it, she just doesn't know it, is holding herself back, etc.

apart from that, there's insider trading, newspapers as mouthpieces for financial interests, journalism as sex stories sprinkled with politics.

it's also that same thing that's in every story about the world from that time: spicy feudalism. everything's inherited, and people are what they're born, but "the prostitutes are the way to the top" and a night looking good in some rented evening dress and being able to drop the name tiberius and you can be a king. also, debts. always have so many debts. also having a fantastic mustache; 100% of the sensuality in this book centers on duroy's upper lip hair.

more on the fucking bridge on the river kwai

so i've realized that the part at the beginning when they allude cryptically, conspiratorially, to the brits's surrender, is the point on which the whole movie's founded. watching kwai is a 3 hour argument for the ludicrousness that the little fools depicted with japanese people could ever have captured the stoic, infinitely noble british soldiers. but there they are, POWs.

the drama of the movie, then, rests on the gradual role reversal. the brits can't help helping their pathetic captors to a point where their colonialist zeal, their compulsive need to bring civilization to the "natives," is tantamount to treason against their own soldiering.  but it doesn't matter in the end. the ultimate fact of western power crashes the schizophrenic party, and everyone's rightful position is restored.

it's a brilliantly assembled movie, remarkably taut for something so big and sprawling, and it's beautifully shot. it's also, you know, abominable.

the bridge on the river kwai

rage built in me bodily watching this movie. it's a celebration of colonialism, racism, and following orders. it's a soaring story of gentlemanliness and RULES in war. this movie takes place in world war two, by the way.

it's difficult for me to imagine anything more evil. the premise is that british POWs are put to work to build a bridge. the japs can't get them to do it properly, however. the movie succeeds outlandishly in making the ineffective administration of a POW camp, of failing to get people to work well on projects that would facilitate the murder of their compatriots, a mark of dishonor and failure.

i can't remember the last time something disgusted me so completely. the fundamental dishonesty of it, the lionization of british colonialism (think of all the bridges they built for india! what beautiful contributions!) makes me want to turn off my head. the british commander muses at one point, atop the beautiful bridge he's erected, "i love india." oh my god i need to go for a walk. this movie came out in 1957. maybe the world's different now. i don't think so.

in reading reviews of it people argue it's really about the lunacy of following orders, of the mania for discipline. but the fact is that the colonel comes within a hair of having everything go perfectly. in the end, it's really that he's gone more than a little bit crazy when he stops a fellow british soldier from doing his duty. if he did everything EXCEPT that, literally everything would've been perfect within the cinematic logic of colonialism and triumphant british power. hey, whether it's good for the fatherland or not, the brits just can't help saving the world. the contradictions ultimately dissolve themselves thanks to military might, anyway.

not like those japs every coulda won. the basis of the movie is japanese incompetence so outrageous that brits can't help getting into moral quandaries trying to help them out of their pathetic state, except it doesn't even matter because it's not like britain'd ever lose this war anyway—note the story at the beginning of how they became POWs: some obscure, bizarre insistence from their higher-ups  that they surrender, not their own failure. as if.

fuck, i mean, i thought a lot of these issues got resolved in La Grande Illusion like 20 years earlier. THERE'S a fucking war movie. there's your gentlemanliness in wartime.

at the beginning i was rooting desperately for the japanese to machine gun every last whistling white man.

scenes from a marriage

well! that was fun! i honestly have nothing to say about this movie. i don't really know what i just witnessed. i think i'm too young, too straightforward, too unburdened to get a grip on this movie. i literally have no idea what they're talking about in that last scene or two, but it sounded bad. the key question i've got coming out've it is how much is it about the two of them together in particular? are they recreating this shit more or less everywhere and this movie's just about THEIR relationship? i mean, is it a stupendously terrible coincidence that they're together and that they mighta done okay with somebody else? i'm struck by the idea that one could get endlessly stuck in ONE PARTICULAR terrible relationship because it's somehow irresistible. yo, why do people do shitty things for years on end? that's the question. are they sane people who just happened upon another sane person with whom they fit together diabolically perfectly, or could this only happen to people predisposed to lunatic behavior? whatever. it's not what i'm like, at any rate. i'm easy breezy and easily bored and virtually devoid of nostalgia. healthy!

knicks

dear god i hope the new york knicks win tonight. if they win i feel happy and it's so nice to feel happy. they're playing the indiana pacers in indiana. the chief concern is scoring. the knicks haven't scored much against the pacers because there's this enormous guy named roy hibbert who's masterful at simply putting his body between a new york knick with a basketball and the hoop. he moves his feet, sticks up his arms, and makes everything horrible.

pacifism

was just listening to an infuriating this american life episode that ran in the run up to the war in iraq. they were debating the reasons for and against. the scariest best argument for the war was that saddam hussein'd eventually get a nuke, and with that nuke he'd be able to take over the world. he'd bully other countries to bow to his will with the threat that he was crazy enough to nuke them if they didn't, damn the consequences. therefore, we had  to depose him before he'd have the craziness AND the nukes to deter us from intervening with his shit.

this is a powerful argument.

how much does it cost to produce a nuclear weapon from scratch and ignorance?

how many people would die in the war to overthrow him and its aftermath? (one interesting thing whenever one talks about nukes and war is that nuclear weapons are an instant, certain, horrifying calculation whereas a war can be the siege of stalingrad or a "cake walk")

the guy making the Crazy Saddam With Nukes argument invoked intelligence saying that saddam imagined himself filling the vacuum left by the soviet union, counterbalancing US power. this seems a strong argument for saddam being crazy, but a hilarious for US policy makers to freak out about, no? iraq in the run up to the war was a poor country with 30 million people and a pretty broken down army.

following the CSWN logic, saddam's not plausibly going to occupy these other countries with military might because he's got his own restive population to deal with—he's a dictator. rather, it posits a kind of bank hold-up scenario, no? "gimme this oil field and that port etc or i'll nuke you!" a la hitler with the czech republic, except very disproportionate and asymmetrical and trading almost entirely on craziness because apart from nuking somebody, or threatening to, there's oddly little he'd be able to do as pretty much every country in that region's got a respectable military, and even if they didn't, iraq just didn't have the resources to occupy its neighbors.

and i'd argue that if a country with evil ambitions DID have the resources that they're being provoked, a la japan and germany in world war two.

if the war was a "cake walk" and iraqis settled into beautiful democracy then there'd really be no argument. "freedom" and peaceable prosperity's clearly better for everybody than an evil dictator. but any halfway decent dictator has, by definition, totally messed up their country's prospects for returning to easy breezy liberty. dictatorships rely on empowering and thereby implicating a minority or two at the expense of everybody else, and then keeping everything else together with violence and terror. this is difficult to unravel, to bring back to liberated normalcy. think of the alawites in syria.

the dictatorships of poor countries devoting outrageous sums to military expenditures, or nuke development, are doing so to make it dangerous to topple them and to have a chip in negotiations for aid and the lifting of sanctions that've inevitably been imposed.

working at this call center

it's a physically horrible place full of ugly people wearing ugly clothes eating food that smells horrible  sitting in uncomfortable chairs.

the polls on approval ratings and such, by the way, are courtesy of minimum wage "data collection specialists" reading verbatim endlessly redundant and insultingly simplified questionnaires to people over the phone, tirelessly clarifying whether someone really "approves" or "disapproves" of "public schools." one can't talk to the person in any meaningful way outside of the words listed on the screen so as not to risk subtly biasing them. it's a job crying out for automation—if only we could celebrate the coming of the robots and not mourn for the loss of all manner of shitty work for wretched people because we've got a market economy in which people have to punch themselves in the face for a wage.

the surveying is kind of interesting though.  my first night's was about political issues for wisconsinites. their age, religion, means, stance on gun rights/control, immigration, borrowing, tax cuts, public schools, charter schools, etc. people's opinions on this stuff is remarkably piecemeal. i mean, i just talked to 5 people for about 20 minutes each. but the sheer lack of "ideology" in 'em, as in, some kind of coherent world view, was kind of amazing. the people i surveyed to seemed to see the world through the prism of What They Need In Their Little Life. something was either helping or hurting their household budget IN THE MOST IMMEDIATE SENSE, and that was the singular grounds for judging it. it was like government programs were an extension of their shopping list.

this was cheering and also kind of horrifying. cheering because people aren't ossified in some duped conception of the world, dogmatic about what something is. they just judge it on how it affects them. everybody was stoked on tax cuts. people laughed out loud when asked about tax cuts. i mean, fucking of course! that means my taxes are lower and that i personally have more money. i'd be curious to know how that reflexive response has changed, or not, over the years—whether everybody's always been so coarsely self interested. a big part of that, doubtless, is poor people who simply need more money, and the desperate obviousness of a tax cut cannot but appeal to them. can't fault them.

but there's often no ideology, no big picture, no vision. there's the simple insistence that government be the big version of your small life, something to pay for things you need and nothing else. the biggest abstraction i imagine somebody'd stand for, a thing deeply apart from their own life, is a good ol' war, and even that is probably connected up with their kids or their family history, is good jobs in the community and so forth. this leads to a lot of inconsistencies and silliness. there are a lot of minds to be won in this country, and they don't put up much of a fight.

this all reminds me of sarah describing campaigning for obama in iowa. she said people there basically said "make me an offer." they wanted something for themselves, for their state, for their support. this seems reasonable enough, what with pork and winning federal dollars for your state, and so forth. but it's a pretty insane idea in the end, and a very small minded one.

other notes: everybody's gotta swab down the keyboards and phones with rubbing alcohol before the shift. people are often yelling "pass the alcohol" which is funny but i guess it's happened too much now. people are treated like children, told to sit in their seats, told how to sit in their seats, told when they can go on break. you can go to the bathroom whenever you like, but if you take your cell phone it's cause for immediate dismissal. no cell phones in the bathroom. the computer times how long you've been away from your desk. the job pays $7.50 an hour. ALSO—how, statistically, do pollsters account for survey respondents being people who'll spend at least 15 minutes on the phone going through a survey? how does that not hopelessly skew the results toward the politics of people who are losers? is the loser demographic representative of this nation as a whole?