Cinema Democratica

All of Malcolm Gladwell in One Sentence

2011-11-26T07:12:00.001-08:00

By a series of the very sort of random accidents that lead experts to make faulty inferences, it happens that I've been listening to and reading a lot of Malcolm Gladwell lately. In search of books on CD for the long drive back and forth to my friend's cabin in North Carolina, I've fetched up at my local library, plying the non-fiction CD section and coming away with Blink, The Tipping Point, and Outliers. As an avid reader of The New Yorker, I've encountered individual essays by Gladwell on subjects ranging from Mammograms to criminal profiling. By virtue of having a mother who loves to read, I've received in the mail a collection of Gladwell's previously published pieces, What the Dog Saw. "What a person trained to analyze such patterns would conclude," we may imagine Mr. Gladwell saying about this, "is that Mr. O'Gorman is manifesting a clear intent to read or listen to all of my work, for some specific purpose or agenda." And then, if we've listened to the author via audiobook, we perhaps imagine him then taking a long, not quite stentorian breath, before adding, "But does it really tell us that? Couldn't the fact that O'Gorman has lately read and listened to a lot of Gladwell bespeak a series of outcomes driven by pure chance?"

This then is Malcolm Gladwell's life's thesis: People in the modern labor market have very specialized, intensely technocratic roles, involving the accumulation, collation, and interpretation of highly complex and noisy data. They are thence so inundated with all this data that they are prone to paradoxically flat-footed conclusions -- specifically, to conclusions that are increasingly disconnected from the messy reality they endeavor to explain. In The Tipping Point, marketing experts invest countless fortunes hoping to foreordain explosive bursts in consumer demand for products, but miss the qualitative (and therefore uninteresting-to-them) role of the hipster opinion leaders on the ground. In Blink, a Pentagon with effectively unlimited resources develops a war game -- in which flip charts and payoff matrices figure prominently -- only to be humiliated by an impish, seat-of-the-pants gunslinger who was hired to pretend to be the other side. In What the Dog Saw, oncologists pore over mammograms searching for tell-tale signs of breast cancer, then misdiagnose the patients in their charge because the flood of data overwhelms their intuitions. This is Gladwell's theology, periodically re-dressed to sell more books; this is all of Malcolm Gladwell, in one sentence: Expertise is overrated.

As a professional academician in a technical field, I am obliged to feel a personal investment in pushing back against this thesis; to pretend that this is not personal would be dishonest. But, okay, just how convincing is Mr. Gladwell's case? Is the world as unknowably heuristic as he envisions it to be, or, ironically, does the very argument he endeavors to build in tome after weighty tome suffer from exactly the flaw he keeps noticing in the thinking of all those supposed experts?

Perhaps the best place to start such an inquiry is with Gladwell's essay about the state of mammography. For it is here as in few other places through his bibliography, the author removes the gloves of intellectual coyness and strikes his target-experts a mighty blow from the hammer of his world view:

Calcium deposits, apparently, are the canary-off-the-perch inside a woman's breast. When a mammogram reveals these deposits, the job of interpreting the picture falls to a highly trained practitioner tasked with determining whether the screening process moves on to the next, more invasive level. The trouble, apparently, is that many types of calcium deposits in breasts are benign, others are sometimes benign, others aren't benign but may be so slow to do damage that noticing them would raise a false alarm, and still others are genuinely malignant but have a nasty tendency to hide behind certain types of breast tissue.

Gladwell's conclusion -- bizarrely -- is that the medical field is suffering from a flood of information, and that this flood is overwhelming its capacity to intuitively do its job.

"Would taking a better picture solve the problem? Not really, because the problem is that we don't know for sure what we're seeing, and as pictures become better we have put ourselves in a position where we see more and more things that we don't know how to interpret. ...The picture promises certainty, and it cannot deliver on that promise."

There are several levels on which this conclusion may be considered, and I'd be ignoring my responsibilities to my own convictions and my own profession if I didn't pay at least a passing service to the issue of Gladwell's own lack of requisite training. He speaks to many qualified persons, to be sure -- The New Yorker doesn't run strops, after all -- but all the while his personal education is as a historian.

He has through a combination of imposing raw intellect, abiding curiosity, and virtuoso craftsmanship, established himself as a renowned writer on highly technical subjects -- bringing to each of them a highly technical, razor-edged belief that all of us are drowning in highly technical data -- but none of this completely nullifies the fact that his own educational background excused him from the grim and gritty process of developing the informed intuitions of a technically educated person, with which that technically educated person might just do a slightly better job of sorting the expert opinions he obtains. (A trained statistician, for example, would recognize that richness of data is very often beneficial, and not deleterious, because it serves to rule in the scientific learning process by ruling other, previously accepted theories, out. Noisy data doesn't make it harder to draw conclusions; it narrows the field of available conclusions and thus makes them far more accurate. Take it from a trained statistician.)

But setting aside the issue of qualification, as we must if the matter is to be considered in anything like good faith, what of Gladwell's conclusion itself? Have we got this right? Because the current state of the mammogram is that it is fraught with contradicting signals about calcium deposits, this therefore means that all future improvements in the technology would only make the problem worse? Malcolm, really?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but in trained intellectual discourse, Gladwell has here committed what's referred to as the fallacy of the predetermined outcome. The fact that previous improvements in mammography have only clouded the issue and reduced the rate of successful diagnosis by adding noise to the data (something the author himself interestingly never quite says, by the way), it therefore follows that any subsequent improvements in mammography would have the same result, further exacerbating the current problem. Our intrepid reporter's too-much-information hammer has left him only able to see a clear cut case of not-quite-information, as just another nail: If mammography is resulting in misdiagnosis of breast cancer, it must be because mammography is overwhelming the practitioner with messy data, and that better mammography will only make that problem worse. kuh-WHACK. The good guys lost the Pentagon's expensive war game because they had too much information. kuh-WHACK. The Getty Museum almost bought a counterfeit statue because they had too much information. kuh-WHACK. A company that sells skateboarding apparel confuses the success of Hush Puppies for a general plan for selling hip shoes, by accumulating too much information. kuh-WHACK, kuh-WHACK, kuh-WHACK, kuh-WHACK.

The irony in all of this, perhaps easily overlooked, is that the error Gladwell commits in the structure of these arguments is the very one he implicitly criticizes each time he endeavors to make it. An unabashed expert and unimpeachably brilliant mind, whose knowledge of the world is nonetheless inescapably limited, has difficulty holding perspective on that limitation for long enough to come to the cool-headed conclusion that he might be in over his head. If our author had been alive during the time of Pythagoras, would Gladwell have considered a sun-centered model of the universe necessary to clean up the bizarre tracks of the planets across the sky, or would all the bizarre behaviors of the planets be just another sighing, head-shaking example of all these puffed-up people's insistence on confusing themselves with too much, too technical information?

True, the modern world fetishes information at the expense of common sense. Absolutely it does. And anyone who knows me personally knows that I am every bit as exercised about the problem as Gladwell, at least when it comes to our foolhardy embrace of pointlessly over-improved consumer technologies. In re-acquiring five or six hundred PC's every year or so, for no better reason than because the new PC's are new, the college where I work places itself at the top of the exhibit list in my own, abiding agreement with Gladwell's notion that the modern world often fetishes information at the expense of common sense.

But you know, it also often does the opposite. Increasingly, in fact, it does nothing in-between. Gladwell is right that the CIA should've been more circumspect about the photos it was amassing of the Iraqi countryside in late 2001 and early 2002, but he'd be wrong if he were to argue, as others have, that a snowstorm in May is conclusive evidence that the technocrats are wrong on global climate change, or that the current recession is proof that we should dismantle the technocratic stabilization infrastructures of the United States Federal Reserve. And if this commentary seems a bit over-revved at this point, then perhaps it's time to circle this back to the personal stake that I feel in my heart each time Gladwell over-extends what is otherwise a not entirely invalid point about our information-fetishing world.

It's not just that his thesis so brusquely rules out the possibility that the exact opposite problem might be true in each of his examples -- that mammography might actually get better with an improved picture, and not worse -- it's that in making these observations from a position of limited expertise of his own, Gladwell is contributing to an overall cheapening of the value of expertise. And worse, he does so at precisely the time in world history when that erosion of value is poised to do the greatest damage. As a (supposedly) tenured professor who still stands in front of classes full of students, I'll freely admit that most of the intensity of my reaction to Gladwell is driven by the personal sensation of being one of the world's genuinely endangered species. And being made to feel even more so by the writings of someone as clever and highly educated and intellectually curious as Malcolm Gladwell is hardly doing anything for my peace of mind about the future of intellectual thought in this world -- technical or otherwise.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

A Slightly Lonelier Lonely Planet

2011-10-10T14:42:00.000-07:00

When I was twenty-eight I moved from a rented house with a front yard and a back yard in central Minnesota, to a 1,000-unit gated apartment complex in suburban Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (Let's just pause for a second to aerate that mental image, before moving on, shall we?)

There were many things about these new surroundings that I didn't like much -- with apologies to Fort Lauderdale -- but for eight months I stuck it out down there (in the deluded hope that I'd eventually come to love a job I'd started without a stick of furniture in my office, and an apartment complex with snotty neighbors and human turds floating in the pool). During this time, I had but one oasis: I'm not proud of this, but as a newly-arrived recipient of 300-channel cable TV, I became hopelessly addicted to an hour-long television show that aired on The Travel Channel every weeknight, called Lonely Planet. ...And yes, that's how sheltered I'd been before this moment. I didn't even know that the show was adapted from the guidebook series of the same name.

Night after night, week after week, month after month, I'd stagger through the front door of my cheerless little poured-concrete cell, pile my lump of parking-garage-access-cards in a careless heap on the kitchen counter, and flip on my television -- thence to watch the impish twentysomething limousine-lefties from Australia and Scotland and Harrisonville New York traipse around in places as diverse as Vietnam, London and The Congo. "Looks like a lot of fun," I'd said to myself so many times that I began to say it out loud. "Looks like they're not too overburdened with stuff, or really in all that much danger," I thought. And then, after a pause to take another pull of beer, "You know, I could do that, too."

The next summer I quit, taping my meager belongings into second-hand boxes liberated from a dumpster behind the neighboring liquor store, and moved to Gainesville, Florida -- for no better reason than it seemed like a smart-thinking and possibly even liberal oasis, bang in the middle of a state I'd come to view as warm, in a country I'd come to view as ordered, but neither of them particularly self-redeeming otherwise. I turned thirty the following year and, in consequence, my father Kerry O'Gorman gave me a very large amount of money with which he'd hoped I might travel across Europe, and which I instead (to his certain disappointment) used to backpack my way across southeast Asia.

I was away for fifty-seven days, missing both Tiger Woods' grand slam and the crash of the Concorde, among rather a lot else. What I didn't miss, on the other hand, was Bangkok and Ko Chang and Saigon and Hue and Nha Trang and Chiang Mai and Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. I rode elephants and crashed motorcycles. I was robbed at knife-point and driven around unconscious in the back of a cab. I ate, I threw up, I kissed, I fooled around, and I made many trips back and forth to the water closet. I went to hospital emergency rooms. Twice. And if I told you that I didn't imagine myself narrating the scenery for the benefit of a Lonely Planet TV-audience at least once on every single one of those days, I'd be an even bigger liar than I am, generally.

This was, I hasten to repeat, eleven and a half years ago. And in that time very much has changed -- about me, about southeast Asia, and about the people I love. Indeed it would not be a million miles from true to say that the life I have now would be unrecognizable to that doe-eyed greenhorn who kissed his mother on the cheek at the Orlando Airport and waddled down a concourse beneath the crippling weight of his preposterously over-packed bag.

In the years afterward I changed in just the sorts of semi-unexpected ways in which people change over a period of so much time. I grew semi-disillusioned with romantic love, discovered major disappointments at the hands of those who'd been my friends, took a job teaching at the local community college, bought a house, left my job to try my hand at the university, went back to the college when the university situation proved ridiculous, published a single short-story, became more disillusioned with romantic love, said goodbye to my best friend who passed away from complications of cystic fibrosis, dabbled in a couple of minor heart attacks, got some cats, completed five full-length written manuscripts, none of which is even remotely publishable, became even more disillusioned with romantic love, signed assorted letters of reprimand being carbon-copied to the H/R department of my long suffering employers, wrote a handful of movie reviews, had a vicious and in some ways pointless falling-out with my father (with whom I have not spoken since), got sued for defamation and settled out of court despite not being even remotely guilty, re-discovered my childhood love of baseball, and watched lots, and lots, and lots of movies.

In a way it's the movie-watching that occupies us here, since in 2003, having found myself so consistently less productive with my own writing than I wanted to be, I had my cable disconnected. I've not had a television signal running in to my television in the ensuing eight years, and I haven't missed it more than a handful of times, most of them involving baseball. What I've done with my television instead, is watch movies. Lots, and lots, and lots of movies. At last count, well over 1,000 titles in just the last five years alone, an average of slightly under two-thirds of a movie per night, every night, in that time. And the thing is, you might not find it surprising that a person could grow weary of movies, but I did. No matter how much one adores the motion picture arts, it would seem, there comes a night in every film-buff's life when he just can't face another two-hour-plus investment into freshly challenging and ordeal-strapped characters. At last, earlier this semester, with all that was competing for my negative energy, I just couldn't watch another movie for awhile. I needed a break.

No worries, that: It happens that my local library is improbably well-stocked with DVDs of one-hour programs, most of which had originally aired on public broadcasting. Thus it was that, after my beloved New York Yankees were bounced from the playoffs, I found myself browsing the documentary aisle of the library's DVD archives, gently fingering the spines of Michael Palin BBC productions, episodes of The Prisoner, archaic National Geographic specials and, wait, what's this? Lonely Planet episodes.

I couldn't believe my good fortune: In one fell swoop I'd steal a much-needed reprieve from my self-imposed internment at the Schick Center for Movie Addiction, and relive one of the most joy-inspiring guilty pleasures of my adult life. Grinning un-self-consciously I tipped the entire available assortment into a hand basket and brought them home, not even bothering to feed the cats before dropping the first, randomly-selected disc into the player and pressing PLAY.

So what happens when a man who was twenty-nine the last time he saw one of these programs, watches them again at forty-one? Bad things, that's what.

It's a tautology to which we must all arrive in our time, with our own triggers, but as human beings we do, actually, get older. Televised experiences that we thought at age twenty-nine would be nothing but intrepid, story-inspiring fun, look at age forty-one not just unpleasant but needlessly so. A post-baccalaureate-aged host walks us down a long corridor in Amsterdam, turns a corner, and enters a room with four sets of stacked bunk beds, and the forty-one year old (who remembers not just the scene, but how it made him feel when he saw it the first time) lets out a literal, audible yelp. Another host buys a used car for two-thousand Australian dollars, drives it from Sydney to Adelaide, then later piles himself into a coach-class seat on the most venerated passenger train in the world because he doesn't have the money for a sleeper, and the forty-one year old (who added a neck pillow to his checklist when he saw the scene the first time) lets out an even louder yelp. Everywhere I looked, every episode, every host, every region of the world, I was reminded not of a playful youth spent savoring the joys of austerity and improvisation, but of how alienated and cranky these things would make me feel now, and -- let's be honest -- mostly made me feel even then, anyway.

And that's the thing, really: It's not that I'm so old now that I wouldn't enjoy coiling myself on the floor of an overnight train so that my seatmate can do the same across the seats; it's that I'm now too old to pretend any longer that I'll ever re-invent myself as someone who would. I watched all of those programs in the late nineties, and took the resulting trip to southeast Asia not once or twice but four times, not because I was one of those kids, but because I desperately, cripplingly wanted to be.

For my entire life I've felt the biting and self-inflicted consequences of being this stuffy, old-before-his-time-yet-simultaneously-immature grandstander who takes himself and everything that happens to him too seriously to enjoy such basic human staples as spontaneity and faux deprivation. And for my entire life I've been convincing myself, over and over again, that the next big thing I tried to fix it -- a move, a job-change, a trip to southeast Asia -- would turn me 'round the corner of becoming the person I've always wished that others would think I was: self-effacing, gregarious, unsinkably good company. Watching those programs again the other night I realized not just that I never will turn that corner, now, but that each new failure to do so has only made me crankier and harder to get along with. I'm richer than I've ever been; I've got better friends; I have a job that takes me twenty-five hours a week to do and a three-thousand title movie collection. And I'm angrier, and sadder, and lonelier, than at any previous time I can remember.

Some of this, I hasten to add, is outside of my control. It's difficult to stay entirely sunny and gregarious when the country is sliding down a steep, dark precipice into fascism, one's home electrical system has eaten $20,000 worth of stereo equipment, and one's career is being "progressed" into one great big correspondence program. But that doesn't make the sting of who I've become, when compared with who I'd thought I'd become when first I saw those Lonely Planet shows a dozen years ago, any easier to swallow.

It's not too late, of course -- it's never too late until a person lays down for good. Accentuation of the positive, here, demands recognition of the facts that (a) I'm better at staying on task and putting things away than I was in 1999; (b) I'm (slightly?) less inclined to monopolize conversations than I was in 1999; (c) I've enjoyed a small but gratifying reception as a writer of (thus far uncompensated) film reviews and political analyses and other assorted column-length detritus. I've proven that I can grow in ways I wish to grow, and I've done so by precedent.

But none of that is really the point. The fact that I am not who I wanted to be in some ways, and am in others, or that who I am isn't as nice as I'd like -- all of these are subjects for another column if not a therapy couch. The point is that, watching those same Lonely Planet programs with those same puckish young hosts again over the past few nights, I realized once and for all that, no matter what else I can learn and grow and change and develop about myself, I'll now officially never be one of them, if for no other reason than I'll never be that young. What I will be, for a few more days, is forty-one. And then, for a year after that (if I'm lucky), I'll be forty-two. And so on, hopefully for a while.

And as long as this is true, it's my responsibility -- not just to the self I am now, but to the self I was then -- to do everything, everything, everything in my power, to fulfill as many of the goals I've set forth for myself. In other words, to quit fucking around and watching baseball.

It's quite possibly the oldest, tiredest cliche in all of cliche-dom, but it's true for every moment with which we gather in our next breath on this rock: Today really is the first day of the rest of our lives. And we, and the selves we were before (assuming for a moment that we kinda like those people, and I have to admit I kinda like that guy watching those shows in that awful Fort Lauderdale apartment), deserve to see us make the absolute most we can, with what we have.

Starting right now.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

Francona's Departure Not All That Mystefying (If You've Been There)

2011-10-02T08:40:00.000-07:00

By now even baseball refuseniks like my friends know that the erstwhile Manager of the Boston Red Sox, Terry Francona, officially ceased to hold that position on Friday, September 30, 2011. The news broke less than 48 hours after his team became the first in Major League Baseball history to blow a nine-game lead in the month of September, missing the playoffs in suitably eviscerating fashion, when their star closer blew a lead over the worst team in the league and, a mere seconds later and half a country distant, the hard-charging Tampa Bay Rays won on a walk-off home run, to pass the Sox in the standings for the first time all season in its very final instant. The Red Sox players, presumably, were relayed the news of the corresponding Rays' victory literally as they strode down the dugout steps, clearing themselves from a celebration-choked Baltimore baseball stadium in which all they'd needed to do was take two-out-of-three from an Orioles team playing at a 0.350 pace. The storylines were replete with that perfect, baseball-only recipe of pluck, elan, pathos and schadenfreude. "Football is an action movie," I tell the unwilling audiences in my economics classes, disparagingly. "...Baseball is a *horror* movie." Never more so than last Wednesday night.

Indeed such well-positioned pieces for the excruciating thrill of last-man heartbreak and heroics have rarely graced even baseball -- the sport so famous for them, after all, that its only exhibit of ubiquitous literature is a poem about a Herculean slugger who can't manage the otherwise automatic feat of routinely making contact with the ball. Re-tell the poem today, and presumably for more-or-less ever afterward, and some audiences will surely presume the whole thing to be a metaphor for the bulging, even-Yankee-intimidating, 2011 Boston Red Sox. After a then-infamous 2-10 start, the team with the second-highest payroll in baseball had done what everyone knew they would and righted the ship, playing the middle 123 games on their schedule to a paint-peelingly awesome 81-42 record -- easily the best in baseball.

And then?

Well, then this muscular, stare-down juggernaut simply and unceremoniously imploded, finishing its 162-game season with a 7-20 month of September -- culminating with a 4-3 loss to the aforementioned Orioles on a night during which they'd led for basically the whole game, while the Rays (who had trailed the Yankees in Tampa at one point by 7-0), were coming back against a B-list Yankee bullpen to win in extra innings. In the last half of the ninth in Baltimore, after a tension-heightening rain delay that proves once again the extent to which God himself is a baseball fan, the Sox ran out their 97MPH-throwing (and presumably slightly lunatic) closer, Jonathan Papelbon, who got the first two outs without fanfare, bringing his floundering teammates to the two-out, two-strike brink of assuring themselves at least a one-game playoff, before surrendering three straight doubles, the last of which would probably have been scored an error on $143Million free agent outfielder Carl Crawford, had the game been played in Boston. It was a tough play to be sure, but really -- with this much on the line, at this level of professional excellence, and *certainly* at that kind of money -- the former Tampa Bay Ray superstar shoulda caught that one, folks. Point being: he didn't. The Sox lost, the Rays won, and the best team in the American League, talent-wise, rode a pin-drop-quiet charter flight back to Fenway, to clean out their lockers for the year. Mighty Casey had struck out.

But a funny thing happened on the way to a sighing, thunderstruck closure on the book about the 2011 Red Sox' collective impression of Greg Norman(1), Yana Novatna(2) and E.J. Smith(3) rolled together: The story didn't end there after all. Instead, after a day and a half of increasingly galvanized rumor and semi-anonymous speculation, the team's stoic and unimpeachably credentialed Manager, Terry Francona, called a press conference to announce that he would no longer head the team he'd guided to its first (and second) World Series Championships in eighty-six years. The man who'd single-handedly broken the Curse of the Bambino and brought the biggest trophy in baseball to the biggest baseball city in the world, was leaving. The question on the minds of sportswriters from coast to coast was the same: had he quit, or was he fired?

In some ways we'll never know for sure. Francona was at the end of his guaranteed contract with two years' of options left available. By not exercising them, the team's front office could characterize the situation as a mutual one -- Francona feeling drained and winded by the 24/7 hothouse of the Boston baseball media, and the team recognizing that even the man who broke the curse will start to repeat himself in clubhouse speeches after eight years. Perhaps it was just *time*, and perhaps everyone mutually, amicably, knew it. Certainly this is the impression that Sox General Manager Theo Epstein would have had us gather on Thursday morning, in his first post-collapse press conference, given jointly with Francona before the rumors of Francona's imminent departure were confirmed. "[The matter of the Manager's job] will be discussed with owners John Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Lucchino in the next few days, when emotions have cooled and judgment isn't clouded," he said, suggesting that the owners would listen to Francona's assessment of what had gone wrong and who was to blame, before coming to any decisions about picking up his contract options, one way or the other. Cooler heads would prevail. We're all grown-ups here.

The usually narrative-conscious Francona, meanwhile, was sounding ominously dissonant notes from a folding metal chair not three-feet beside him. "Managing this team became challenging at the end," Francona said, ominously. "I called a team meeting in Toronto [after a 14-0 *win* -- one of their few W's in September] because there were some things that did concern me," he added, ominously. "I was frustrated with some of the things that happened," he said. Ominously. Asked to elaborate, the usually narrative-conscious Francona, did: ""You don't need to have a team that wants to go to dinner off the field," he said. "You do want to have a team that protects itself and backs each other up fiercely, on the field."

Not everyone reading these words is accustomed to the empty-calorie ritual of the big-time sports press conference. "I tell my team they have to take it one day at a time," in the business, is code for, "blah blah blah blah blah." By contrast, "We know we've got the heart, and we know we've got the players, now we just have to execute," is instead code for, "blah blah blah blah blah." When a baseball manager says, "We left it all on the field tonight," he is saying, "blah blah blah blah blah," and when he says, "We're going to need quality starts from our rotation," he is saying, "blah blah blah blah blah; can I go now?" For a baseball manager -- under *any* circumstances -- to toss-out the kind of red meat that Francona was tossing, was to invite (and ultimately to receive) massive extrapolation and anonymous rumor-fanning: These guys hated each other, phoned-in their defense, were in some cases badly and increasingly out of shape, and didn't listen when they were warned. There was even talk of starting pitchers consuming beer in the clubhouse (BEER!) on days when it wasn't their turn to pitch. Francona's pleas were falling on deaf ears, and he was about to be scapegoated. Film at eleven.

Remarkably, things would get worse from there. On Friday the owners (minus principal owner John Henry, who'd curiously injured -- of all things -- his neck, in a sailing mishap), GM Theo Epstein, and Francona, met at 10 o'clock in the team's vaunted, hallowed, Sistine-Chapel-like-significant Front Offices at (say it with me) Number Four Yawkey Way. The meeting lasted for about an hour, by which time the news that Francona was leaving was all but confirmed. When he emerged for his second press conference in two days, however, Francona didn't leave the matter at both sides being ready for a fresh start, blah blah blah. He tried to. Goodness knows he tried to. But he didn't. "Some of it may be personal," he said, after thirty some-odd minutes of far more typical, time-to-move-on platitudes. "To be honest with you, I don't know... I'm not sure how much support there was from ownership," he said, somberly, arms crossed in front of his chest. "You've got to be all-in in this job, and I voiced that today," he continued. "It's got to be, everybody has to be together, and I was questioning some of that a little bit."

Not since Gus Grissom had used the word 'scared' has a press corps been caught so flat-footed or been so uncertain of exactly how to play the bombshell news that they were hearing. Francona was being fired in just such a way that the team's top brass wouldn't have to say so; Francona was leaving of his own accord, in a huff, because he hadn't had the support of the owners; Francona was preempting any scapegoating. Some stories on Friday shamelessly carried all three narratives at once. The one thing that was for sure, at this point, was that the decision would be worn by the front office, and that it was a mistake. Everyone agreed on that much.

Perhaps to limit the potential P/R damage, perhaps in the hopes of putting out the fire on the bridge, perhaps sincerely, GM Theo Epstein spent the rest of Friday and most of Saturday weaving a not-carefully-enough worded counter narrative of official surprise -- at the pace, tenor, and timing of what he would have had us believe was Francona's decision. "The ownership team asked Terry to at least wait the weekend," he said, semi-on-the-record, "but perhaps Tito (Francona's nickname) felt that, after eight years, it was time." Asked later if he'd read anything into John Henry's supposed neck injury, Francona first declined to speculate, then added that -- for the first time in his tenure -- he hadn't received a call from Henry over the entire month in question.

With this, the steady stream of competing speculations became a deluge. Just whose idea was this, anyway? Who was being the fragile ego, and who was being pragmatic about a bad situation before it got any worse? Who was scapegoating *whom*? Even today, many of the most well-respected sportswriters and sports-bloggers are painting a confused picture. Some of them have even said so openly. But there's a reason for that: Unlike me, they've never been there.

Francona wasn't fired, and he didn't quit. He had the third thing happen to him that happens to people when their bosses want them gone. He was undermined.

Not since Jimmy Johnson left the then-repeat-world-champion Dallas Cowboys has a set of tensions between a team boss and a team ownership been so well-documented. Here is the granite-countenanced, old-school Francona, picking his lineup on fifties-era hunches and the sounds of the bat-cracks during routine BP; here is the innovation-obsessed, born-again-stat-nerd John Henry -- the man who hired Bill James, the literal pioneer of baseball sabermetrics -- listening to econometrics-based arguments about wins-above-replacement and OPS+. And here, in the middle, is once-prodigy-whiz-kid and now just boring forty-something GM Theo Epstein, trying somehow to keep both the peace, and his job, at the same time.

Worse, at least from the standpoint of timing, news of the Sox' September collapse just happened to be sweeping the countryside at the very same time as a motion picture about the sea-changes taking place in the game, *Moneyball.* And folks, a movie about baseball has never, and I mean *NEVER*, been less fortuitous a development in the already strained relationship between a manager and his boss. Right up there on the screen, for all the world *including* John Henry to see, was Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing recalcitrant, old-school manager Art Howe, refusing to listen to stat-obsessed Billy Beane when it comes time to set the lineups. There is Brad Pitt, playing Beane, enjoying the miserly respect of his miserly owner in Oakland, but prevented from doing what needs to be done by the obstinate Howe. There's even a scene in which Arliss Howard plays a fellow owner trying to lure Beane away from Oakland, bestowing upon him the mantle of a first voice in a new wave of thinking about the game that will drive the old-guard crazy and rightfully so. The owner Howard is playing? John Henry, principal owner of the Boston Red Sox.

An organization with a grim determination not to fire anybody in a way that could look ugly faces a unique challenge when it decides it wants to fire somebody. In other places, where the possibility of an ugly incident doesn't faze that much, the deed gets done and that's that; everyone moves on. But in those places where the pretense of a happy family is maintained at all costs, the costs can and do get very high for everyone involved. Gestures go un-made. E-mails go un-returned. Birthday phone-calls that everyone routinely and conspicuously gets, are suddenly and conspicuously selective. Signals get sent. Reactions get calculated. ...The hope, on the part of such an organization, is that the person they wish to be rid of will get the message, and at length that person generally does get the message, though it remains the person-in-question's prerogative to stay put on principle.

My sense of what happened in Boston is pretty clear: Even when it was winning, the team wasn't being managed this year in the way John Henry wanted it to be. Perhaps this began with the 2-10 start, perhaps not, but for the second year in a row Theo Epstein's free-agent signings were washing out in Boston, and on that basis alone the otherwise long-time-Francona-friend had no choice but to undermine his colleague trying to right the ship from the dugout. Henry consulted the Bill James people, who told him Francona wasn't paying attention to the sabermetrics. Asked for an opinion, Epstein equivocated. Asked by Francona to intervene in the unraveling clubhouse atmosphere, Epstein demurred. When Francona asked Epstein to ban beer in the clubhouse -- something only Epstein, with his power to cut people from the roster, could have done -- Epstein let the message sit there in his archive of saved voice mails. Then the movie came out. Then the team started losing. Then the team lost. And then John Henry didn't hurt his neck in a sailboat accident.

And I'll bet money on that last one.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

(1) The only man in history to blow a nine-stroke lead on the back nine of the final round of the Masters.

(2) The only woman in history to blow a one-set, 5-1 lead in the best-of-three-set womens' final at Wimbeldon.

(3) The captain of the RMS Titanic.

Travel Postcard: North Carolina (PART ONE)

2011-06-24T05:55:00.000-07:00

"You're banned from going back there, do you understand me?" said a thick, British-accented voice into my telephone--a voice belonging to my long-suffering friend and colleague Harry, an accounting teacher at the college where I myself teach economics. It was the middle summer of last year.

"Yes," I said.

"--No, you don't," said Harry. "I mean it: You're banned. You'll never go back there again."

"Yes," I repeated.

"--You've consistently abused this privilege, and now you've done it for the last time. You're banned. From now on. Forever."

"I understand," I said.

"NO, DAVID, YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND," said Harry. "You *act* like you understand; you're *saying* that you understand; but you're only saying you understand because that's what a person says when someone he's just *royally* pissed off, possibly for good, tells him something, in the imperative tense, and then says 'Do you understand'!"

He took a breath.

"I'm telling you you're banned from going to my place in North Carolina, FOREVER. Do, you, understand?"

I paused. I clasped the edge of the table gently and shut my eyes. "Yes," I said.

There was hardly any point in standing up for myself with one of my closest friends this agitated and calling through a gravely I/P line all the way from Panama. I wasn't happy about being banned from visiting his place in North Carolina -- a mountainside pond with a lazy gravel loop-road and a pair of engagingly different-feeling structures cut into the hill above it, one a big comfortable house, the other a rustic little cabin -- but at that moment my chief concern was the possibility that, if I couldn't calm him down somehow, my friend might actually have a heart attack. Anyone who knows me even a little will tell you that, if ever there were a human being capable of transcending the generally euphemistic expression, "You're going to give me a heart attack," it is I -- and for his part Harry's prideful lack of exercise and his lifelong predilection for beer had left him unusually primed for just such a reaction.

But still it seemed unfair that the two of us would've slid this far down the rabbit-hole of anger and helplessness over something as trivial as a little run-of-the-mill pornography.

For some years before, as Harry took his hard-won summers off from teaching to remove himself to an equally fetching place in Panama, the two of us had enjoyed an understanding by which I would be permitted unlimited access to the North Carolina place whenever it wasn't otherwise rented, in return for serving as the property's de facto superintendent. I would string-trim the steep hillsides and cut the fallen limbs across the loop-road and make sure the plumbing was working properly and clear the submerged opening of the clever little PVC spillway he'd constructed for the dam, and in return I could stay there whenever and for however long I wished, provided nobody with money was in line ahead of me.

To this point it had all worked very well. I've often told my students that the best way to own a boat is to know someone else who owns a boat, and this improvised little saw only gets truer when the boat in question is four acres of taxed-out-of-sight clay and rocks with bad perk and a fractious, spring-fed water supply. In the fistful of years since we'd been granted the entire summer's reprieve from teaching, I'd been to the place perhaps a dozen times, to his two. I'd installed a new water hydrant when the old one had cracked from freezing, and I'd cut and removed a small tree that had fallen across the road. I'd written several bad chapters of a bad book, and almost gotten myself killed in a sudden thunderstorm on a high ridge-line between Deep Creek Campground and Clingman's Dome. I'd cooked some scandalously good steaks over a simple campfire, and downed an immodest quantity of beer. I'd slept inside with the windows all thrown wide open, outside on the deck, and down the hill in a tent. I'd even taken to referring to the place, with a certain class of non-mutual friends of ours, as "My place in North Carolina."

...This last bit surely was my big mistake.

Last summer, at the height of the mountaintop vacation season, I brought some friends up to share the experience with me. This much was harmless enough -- provided, that is, that the friends in question could be persuaded to dispense with the Eternal Struggle For Chopping Dave Down To Size long enough to heed my impassioned pleas that we must leave the entire place "hotel-room clean" when we left. Harry had already explained to me over his skype-phone that a veritable rabble of paying customers were arriving immediately after our departure to stay in the main house, where my friends were.

I relayed the significance of this news in several different grave and leaden language-choices to my friends, both before we left home and after we got there. And the friends in question reacted in that very particular festival of ways that have become a permanent feature of all my friendships: aggrieved ascent, followed by grinning, not-quite-sarcastic eye-roll at my charming insistence on taking myself too seriously, followed by a series of join-ins to help me finish the sentence in unison ("--HOTEL-ROOM CLEAN, DAVE"), followed by all other persons involved conspicuously making it a point of not actually doing whatever it is that I've said so grimly is so important to me so many times, just to prove once again who's really in charge, here.

At eleven-thirty AM on the day of our adjournment to an eight-hour drive back to Gainesville, Florida, there had been a grand-total of zero effort undertaken to leave the main house, where my friends had been staying, hotel-room clean. A dishwashing cycle was absently started at 11:45. The first of two unavoidable loads of laundry were distractedly initiated at 11:50. Floors were still to be swept. The fold-out bed was still folded-out. The television was on.

For a long interval of silence I was too apoplectic to think through exactly how big and complicated the dilemma was, here. I had asked these friends of mine to please, please, just this once, take me seriously, and do this thing, this one thing, this only thing, the one and only thing I'd made it a point to specify over dinner last night and in the car the day before and at lunch the day before, that I need you to do for me, please. And they hadn't done it. As, per, fucking, usual. ...That was all I had for it, at that moment.

And then, gradually, a specific and tricky little wrinkle began leaking into my consciousness, and the farther inward it leaked, the more difficult a problem to solve, it seemed: Having stalled on the hotel-room-clean bit for so long, my friends had implicitly guaranteed that, after cleaning the house together, we would also be together at the trunk of the car when the time came to do the packing. I had anticipated that I'd quietly load my own belongings from the cabin while the cleaning rituals were transpiring inside the house -- thus permitting me to surreptitiously bury at the front of the trunk a moderately sized ziploc storage bag of pornography, much of it visible and instantly identifiable through the translucent-blue sidewalls of the bag, as though watching a dirty movie through one side of a pair of 3-D glasses.

Since I couldn't now pack in the absence of my friends' attentions, I couldn't now pack the porn at all. I'd have to hide it. Correction: I'd have to hide it well enough that the incoming customers of the place would have no chance of finding it. Fortunately this would be a straightforward proposition of re-stowing it someplace inside the cabin -- since the incoming party wasn't going to be using the cabin.

Thus it was, in mild but increasingly simmering consternation at the whole stolen-power-chops-Dave-down-to-size business -- as, per, fucking, usual -- that I pulled out one of the drawers in the cabin's bookcase bed, placed the ziploc bag in the bottom of the drawer, covered the bag with my own dirty laundry until the drawer was level to the top with obviously unwashed clothes, and then carefully rearranged the accent furniture in the bedroom, in such a way that this particular drawer couldn't even be opened without moving a moderately heavy end-table and the moderately heavy vase of flowers set on top of it. Then I went to the main house and did all the things I'd said a dozen times it was so important for us all to do. Then we left.

About eleven-thirty that evening when we got home, my message-light was blinking. It was Harry, asking me to call him back on his skype line, so I did. "Just want to let you know, David," he said calmly, almost absently, "that my friends will be staying in the house and cabin a little longer than they'd previously arranged, so you'll have to stay away from the place up there for an extra weekend."

Wait. What? The house and the cabin? The friends were staying in the house, and the cabin? I took a long, steadying breath. "Your friends are staying in the house, and the cabin?" I said, finally.

"Oh yes," said Harry. "Far too many of them for just the house. But it's okay if you didn't get the cabin all the way to hotel-room clean when you were up there just now, because they're going to use the cabin for housing all the kids."

My heart did a little soft-shoe on my small intestines. And if you're thinking that it doesn't belong anywhere near my small intestines, well, you're right: It doesn't. "When are they all due to get there?" I finally managed, barely above a whisper.

"Tuesday evening," said Harry. Two days' time. Forty-some hours.

"I'm going to have to call you back," I said.

"Everything okay up there?" said Harry.

"Yes," I lied, "I just have to call you back. Tomorrow morning okay?"

We agreed that I would call him back in the morning. Frantically I tried to think, but it was in that rootless, bugs-beneath-an-upturned-log kind of way that never actually gets a person anywhere. I could drive all the way up there, in the middle of the night, and all the way back the next morning -- risking an accident or a major breakdown. And anyway there was a key that I was supposed to hand-deliver to a go-between, and I couldn't very well do that if I were on the highway someplace north of Atlanta.

I could ask the daughter of a friend-of-a-friend to go over to the cabin from her place in nearby Bryson City and... well, wait a minute, that's not going to work on any number of levels, now, is it.

Or I could risk it: I could hope against hope that I'd done a good-enough job of hiding the porn, that even a cabin full of fractious young boys wouldn't root around in the drawers beneath that bed, and find it. Which seemed awfully unlikely, at that moment.

The only thing left for it was to come clean. I would tell Harry exactly what had happened, and then I'd ask him if he wanted me to go up there and get the porn, or if he wanted instead to warn the family that their impressionable young children might be about to stumble upon the mother-lode of bad influences. Stealing myself, I called him back, reaching only his skype voice-mail. "Harry," I said in my message. "I'm going to need to keep the key, and hide it up there someplace. Please call me back," I said. "It's important."

I put the phone down. I panted. I thought. Someone would have to feed my cats. It'd be a very long, very ugly drive up there, and an even longer and uglier drive back. What else could I do?

At once it hit me: Another set of friends, Randy and Kana -- a husband-and-wife team of traveling artists with whom I'd shared many embarrassed and apologetic favors over the years -- were at that moment driving back to Gainesville from Pittsburgh. If I could reach them from the road, give them intelligible directions over the phone, and if they could find their way into the cabin using the backup key that was tricky to find and even trickier to use, I could offer them the chance to overnight up there in return for doing me this biggest of embarrassed and apologetic favors.

I called. My friend Randy answered. I explained to him the whole thing. "Let me get this straight," said Randy, not yet openly cackling. "You hid the porn beneath a drawer full of dirty laundry?"

"Yes," I said.

"--And then you moved the end-table and the flower vase so that the drawer can't be opened?"

"Yes," I repeated.

"--And now you want someone to break into the place and take it out, because you still think someone's going to find it?"

"Yes," I said a third time.

There was a moment's pause while the amusement of the situation washed over my friend like an unexpected shaft of sunlight on a grey day at the beach. "You are totally, certifiably insane," he said, finally.

"No, Randy, don't tell him that," said Kana in the background. "Tell him we'll go, and then when we get there we can leave out a bunch more porn on the coffee tables and the countertops where everyone can find it!"

"Wish I'd thought of that," said Randy. "Look," he continued, "just calm down, David. You always do this. You decide certain things are going to happen, then you get yourself all carried away with these huge, long chains of consequences that are all going on inside your head."

"I guess you're right," I said.

"--And you're always way better-off just not taking any action at all," he continued. "Just stay put and everything will be fine." He paused. I heard the highway noise beneath the van. I allowed myself a small exhale. "I mean, for God's sake, David, you've hidden that porn where an FBI SWAT-team couldn't find it."

"Okay," I said and, thanking him sincerely, hung up. It was a wonderful thing, really: For that brief moment I was awash in the same shaft of unexpected sunlight he was. I'd messed up. I'd shown exceedingly poor judgment. But now everything was going to be fine, anyway. I allowed another exhale, this one somewhat less modest. Everything was going to be fine. So it was kind of too bad, really, that at that precise moment Harry returned my previous phone-call.

"What have you done," he said, coolly.

"Well," I said, stammering just a bit with this second sudden reversal. "Okay. I'm going to be completely honest with you about this," I said, "but I've spoken to someone else about it, and he thinks it's going to be okay."

"What have you done," said Harry.

"It's not a huge deal," I said. At once I realized that I didn't quite know how to continue. Verbal articulacy is a two-edged sword for me and always has been: I can say things on the spur of the moment that would come across as too leaden and too stentorian for a PBS documentary, but I can't always actually make myself understood very well, especially on-the-fly. It is for this reason, I suppose, that I've gravitated toward professional teaching. Works kind of the same way that all navymen in the world don't know how to swim. Or at least that's what I tell myself.

"It's just that," I continued, haltingly, "I didn't think your patrons were going to use the cabin, as well as the house, and so I left something in the cabin that could cause both you and I some considerable trouble if it were found."

And with that, my dear and cherished friend of a dozen years, went off in my ear like a small atomic bomb. "ARE YOU INSANE?" he bellowed. "HAVE YOU ANY COMMON SENSE AT ALL?" he screamed. I shut my eyes, wincing a little with each staccato syllable of invective. He was loud. He was profane. He was completely unhinged. It was then that I received my ban.

"Harry, I'm truly sorry," I said. And I was. "I'll make it up to you. I'll drive up there and get it."

"You're damn right you will," said Harry. He collected himself, slightly. "I swear, David, you truly are a galling little twit," he said, his British accent now thick with satisfaction and resolve. "You would have me risk losing that entire property to seizure, just so your friends don't have to watch you load your nasty habits in your car?"

Wait. What?

"Lose your entire property?" I said. "Harry, did you think I meant to say that I left drugs up there?"

"Well, I dunno, David: Isn't that what you JUST, BLOODY, TOLD ME?" said Harry.

"No," I said. "Or at least it's not what I meant," I said. There was a silence between us on the phone. Harry sounded quiet, pensive, ready for anything but calmer, now. "Harry," I began again, tentatively, "when I said I'd left something up there, and it could get us both in trouble, I meant with your patrons--not with the law."

"Oh, Jesus, David, are you talking about pornography?" said Harry.

I allowed that I was.

"Good God, David, why ever didn't you say so in the first place? I think everyone should see more pornography. What else has been going on up there; do we know if we're getting a raise this year? When's convocation?"

We spoke for another ten or fifteen minutes, completely amicably. He never formally retracted his ban, and I never formally asked him to. When the time came for me to retrieve the cabin-key, I drove to the appointed spot and it was there. We've never spoken about this whole thing again, since. I'm sure where he's concerned it would be completely un-necessary. Randy had been right, in the end, as he nearly always is (except when it comes to calculating the jet-lag between here and Tokyo, but that's another column). On this day, he'd been as right as I could ever have wanted him not to be, about anything including how to calculate the jet-lag between here and Tokyo. I'd undertaken a series of radiantly bad decisions, amplified at each turn by a self-perpetuating cycle of ginned-up anxiety until even the most obvious aspects of the thing were as invisible to me as a Klingon warship. I'd acted stupidly, childishly, rashly, and then stupidly again -- and in the end, I'd needlessly jeopardized the sanctity of one of the dearest and most important friendships I have. And all of it for no particularly good reason.

As, per, fucking, usual.

***TO BE CONTINUED***

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

On Characterization

2011-05-05T08:46:00.000-07:00

People who know me or even just know my writing will cheerfully tell you that an essay under this by-line and entitled “On Characterization” should be about as credible as an essay written by Adolph Hitler and entitled “On Peaceful Coëxistence.”

And they’d be right: In a weak moment I could perhaps make a list of the writerly sub-skills that I am occasionally able to pull off, but crafting richly nuanced and believable characters (along with, apparently, short and to-the-point sentences) would not be on that list under even the most charitably chemical-tainted of circumstances.

No, what I do are fiddly little puzzles that nobody has any reason to care about. I can do a story in which each segment is titled with the name of a different landmark from the city of Chicago, and when I show it to my local writers’ group they say, “This was a clever idea, Dave, I just didn’t find any reason to care about these characters.” I can do a complex little nesting jobby in which the omniscient narrator is revealing key aspects of the plot through a series of Mapquest directions, and when I show it to my local writers’ group they say, “Couldn’t these same things have happened to anybody?” I can do an elaborately outlined travel narrative through Southeast Asia in which the stops along the trip manage to echo the chronology of the region, from French colonization through the Boxing-Day Tsunami, and when I show it to my local writers’ group they say, “Why did you make such a fuss about how they made your eggs? Why didn’t you just order whatever the locals were having?” No matter what I’ve tried, it seems, I always end up with the same feedback. And this, you understand, has been going on for years. Something had to give.

Late last summer I pulled a book from my ancient to-read-someday pile, on the subject of developing believable and interesting characters in one’s writing—an actual how-to book, if you can even imagine such a thing(*). For the rest of that summer I read it cover to cover and took copious notes, eventually collating them into a sort of “flowchart” for ensuring that, whatever my fellow writers said about my first subsequent submission, it wouldn’t be that they didn’t believe the characters. For ten days I lugged around my battered old laptop, assiduously pounding away on that first short story in the life and times of the new-and-improved-character-writer Dave O’Gorman. I printed eight copies, passed them out at workshop with a beaming smile, and, two weeks later, was told by eight people in unison that the only thing that didn’t work about the story was that they couldn’t believe the characters. So, okay: something else had to give, apparently.

I took a semi-enforced hiatus from generating new fiction—concentrating instead on a series of film reviews, political commentaries, and a handful of commissioned assignments including a trio that I haven’t actually finished yet. But as a community college professor with summers off, I knew as last fall turned to winter and winter turned to spring that the business of working all of this out wasn’t going to leave me be indefinitely. We write, as Oscar Wilde put it, because the idea of not writing is even more unbearable. Thus it was that, having turned in my final grades at the end of last week, I sat down before a hundred-day expanse of almost completely unstructured time, and found my thoughts turning once again to the issue of why I was having so much trouble ridding myself of this particular nettlesome priest.

I decided (more or less without conscious premeditation) to journal in complete sentences about the subject, and to keep at it for as long as it took to get me somewhere: at times coaxing out tiny passages geared to specific aspects of the problem; at other times speaking to myself in the second-person, as if describing to some unseen other the proper procedures for faux-painting a kitchen. When I could bring myself to feel some sort of corner being turned, I would try again. There would be another new story at the end of all of this and, if that one didn’t work any better, there’d be another one after that. And then another. None of which was exactly what I’d planned for my summer, but none of which was going to do itself, either. I was at it for seven solid days. This is what I would seem to have learned:

To begin with there is the question of scaling the inquiry at the correct power of magnification. A book about fashioning believable and compelling characters will only prove as useful as the decision-making that led to the choices of those characters in the first place. And here, it would now seem, is where my troubles have consistently begun:

For the most part, my fiction has tended to be far too intimately connected to the incidents and travails of my own life—the old write-what-you-know saw, run amok to an extent that any reader who knows even a little bit about me already is summarily yanked from his suspended disbelief by the droning realization that I’m essentially schilling for myself. And the thing about that is, there’s no point in trying to flesh-out characters who came into their existence through such means. Read and apply the lessons from a book about believable characters with this for your starting-point and, instead of a story about you, what one ends up with is a story about a gilded you, which, depending on the audience and the specific prose, can be even worse.

More generally (and Thornton Wilder notwithstanding), writing with the explicit intention of getting one’s audience to see something in a particular light—even something not you—is inherently a losing proposition: people don’t see anything the way you want them to when they sense you wanting it, for one thing, and for another it’s not a million miles from being the exact opposite of best-practice in fiction writing, a sort of, “figure out what you want to say, and then say it really loud” convention that is doomed to defeat before the character-helping how-to authors of the world can even have a say.

I’ve been told this by others, of course, but the temptation for me has always been to dismiss this type of “workshop critique” on the grounds that workshop isn’t double-blind—and to be fair there is at least a grain of truth in that counter-argument: A story based on the contents of my own closets will be less obviously so when it’s read by someone in Pomona than when it’s being read by someone in my own living room. But that kind of reaction is also importantly dishonest, not least because it sells the reader in Pomona short. Most of us who read even semi-avidly are capable of sussing out the melodramatic over-investment that naturally flows from such questionable intimacy on the part of their author. (“I’ve decided we know each other well enough now that I’m gonna show you my poetry!”) For my part, five of my stories have enjoyed any kind of reception, and four of those are based not even remotely on anything that ever happened to me or informed any of the values and perspectives I carry around in person.

The counterexample is also informative here, though: A meta-narrative in which a cautiously successful writer and young father is trying to wrest from himself a salable piece of fiction, while continually distracted by the emotional needs of his young son, and by his own penchant for fixating on expensive golf clubs. This one hasn’t been published, but it does seem to work in that grand and elusive sense that so much of the rest of my stuff does not; yet it’s also, in a lot of ways, a story about me. I’m not a dad and I don’t play golf, but I do distract myself easily, write with intermittent capacity for self-improvement, and angst a lot about the extent to which my relationship calculus is fraught with divisions-by-zero. So what’s the difference? Why is it that this particular story-about-me seems to work, where so many others seem not to?

Universality

Not every reader is also a writer, but nearly all among us distract ourselves too easily, act with intermittent capacity for self-improvement, and angst a lot about the extent to which our relationship calculi are fraught with divisions-by-zero. A story in which the protagonist experiences those same self-doubts will have an immediacy—a currency, in both senses—that a three-hundred page southeast Asian travel narrative in which the author spends seven consecutive breakfast tableaux squawking about the manner in which his eggs were prepared, will not. The characters in a story and the basic motivations that place them in conflict simply must be universal—either in the sense that all of us have felt these same tensions in our own lives or, at the very least, know someone else who has felt them. (If I told you how much time I spend thinking about the immediate cachet of “Master Shake” from Aqua Teen Hunger Force you’d probably stop reading, but the point stands: We may not act or even think like he does, but all of us have known someone who fits the type.)

Having crafted a universal character or two, the job then becomes that of putting them in a universal situation—of crafting a tale that, in its overall premise, will echo that universality. This is of course a lot easier said than done. Indeed it might be the single-sentence reduction of the entire task of fashioning a compelling story. So I suppose it should have surprised me less than it has that so many different voices have said so many different things, about it.

Power

Most of our daily interactions, it seems to me, come down to accurately sizing-up who has the power, who thinks he has the power, and how to thread the inevitable differences between the two without resorting to fisticuffs. If the guy who on at least twelve separate occasions has told the story of an overloaded elevator in Hong Kong, turns to the guy who has expounded perhaps three times on the comparative economics of driving vs. flying, and says, “Dave, you tell that story once a week!” the choices available to our drive-vs-fly protagonist do not actually include defecating in Mr. Hong-Kong Elevator’s tofu triangles, no matter how tempting. Thus do the natural tensions of such a situation form the currency of our investment in what will happen next—they tell the story, in other words. Meaning that the narrative flows from these tensions, and not the other way around.

Broad consensus seems to exist for checking the power box through dialogue. Indeed of all the things that have been said to me (or written where I can find them) about improving one’s writing craft, no one statement has carried more tacit agreement than the principle that dialogue in storytelling must always be about the exchange of power. People do not ask and answer each other directly in good fiction: If Kevin says to Megan, “What time were we expected over there?” Megan can say a lot of things in response (“Aren’t you ever going to throw away that stupid watch?”), but in a good piece of fiction the one thing she will never say is, “Seven-thirty.”

Speaking selfishly, a fringe-benefit of deploying dialogue in this fashion in my own writing is that it would place an implicit governor on the temptation to tell too much of the backstory, since most of the power imbalance between two people is the result of their backstory/-ies in the first place. If I’m getting the power imbalances across to my readers through dialogue, then, I would seem to have left myself far less room for discursive exposition about who these people were before we all walked in on them.

So far so good, but of course a story consisting of dialogue-based power imbalances between universal characters is… well, that’s a soap opera, last time I checked. If the characters themselves and their motivations, their root conflicts, have to be universal, then the issue of how to set them in motion against each other and/or their environments in a compelling way would seem to be about imbuing them with something more interesting.

Multidimensionality

Genuine character cachet must also flow from uniqueness and paradoxes, the things that make these the people to whom this story could only have happened; they must be interestingly multifaceted. Moreover, those additional facets have to be quintessential to both the character’s identity, and the story, rather than just pasted-on to check this box. A sheriff who keeps accidentally shooting himself might be funny, but he’s still really just a sheriff—unless at the precise moment of dénouement he shoots the steel-toed boot his wife finally insisted he wear, and the bullet ricochets into the skull of the bad guy.

And you know, maybe even then, come to think of it: Paradoxes or quirks or some other form of multidimensionality that is conceived specifically to provide a narrative payoff like this are often successful, but they are successful in a formulaic, college-literary-magazine sort of way. In order for these facets to really pay off, in the sense of making a serious contribution to the form, the reader must be taken to a new level of understanding by them. Universality gets the character’s foot inside the reader’s sympathies, but dimensionality is what makes the character’s plight not just unique but important.

One of my favorite examples of this point-counterpoint approach is that of Lorrie Moore’s maestro short-story, “Real Estate,” in which an empty-nester housewife in a sputtering marriage passively agrees to her husband’s plan to buy and renovate a tumbledown mansion in the middle of a soulless housing development. Doesn’t get a lot more universal than that, surely, but when the house is infested with crows the protagonist takes up recreational pistol-shooting. All this while a young man on the other side of town displaces his rage at his crumbling romance by breaking into peoples’ houses and forcing them to sing songs. When, during his break-in to the fourth or fifth house, he hears a loud crack—as if someone had knocked something heavy from a bookcase—it is only as he senses himself losing his balance and tumbling forward toward the floor that we realize exactly whose house this is, and what has just happened. Fucking brilliant. (The dialogue-as-power-exchange box is checked, too, if you’re keeping score at home: The conversations between the protagonist and her husband are fraught with lines like, “This is the house. I can’t believe you don’t see it.”)

Keeping these paradoxes relevant is about economy, too—indeed more than any other single aspect of fiction is about economy. The oft-overused axiom “show-don’t-tell” finds its purchase in fleshing character dimensionality, since it is the attribute of story construction of which the writer is likely to be the most conscious and most agenda-driven, and thus at greatest risk of resorting to telling. We have to “get” that the characters are multifaceted and interesting, without being told that they are interesting.

In an accident report I’ve been reading, the pilot of a twin-prop flight to the Bahamas finds himself in a life-and-death emergency after one of the engines spins out and disintegrates. The landing officer in Marsh Harbour patches him through to his station director in Fort Lauderdale, who tells him to “apply best-climb power, bank to the good engine, stay calm and fly the airplane.” To which the pilot replies that he “has already done all of those things.” …Is it just me, or can you almost see the out-of-date hairdo, the mirrored sunglasses, the shag mustache? The fumbled, poorly concealed panic? I mean, gosh: all he said was that he’d already done all of those things—why is it so revealing of his character? Because it’s both compact and unexpected: instinctively we were waiting for him to say something more akin to, “Okay, is there anything else you can tell me,” not bleep-you-very-much.

Indeed if it can be accomplished, the best way to map these three aspects of character—the universality, the power imbalances, and the paradoxes—would seem to be to figure out the paradoxes even before the power issues, and let the power issues take care of themselves organically as a direct result. I am at this very moment mired in an unpleasant conflict with someone whose own eclectic backstory contributes every bit as much to his decision metric as mine does to mine, and—here’s the thing—it is precisely because of our quirky backstories that the two of us find ourselves in such protracted conflict. I never had a problem with the guy until I had a reason to know anything about how different his past experiences are from mine.

Readiness-to-be-Transformed

To this point it wouldn’t seem that all this thinking about characters has contributed much of anything new, but it is this question of sequence where it would seem that things started to get real for me in my thinking about all of this. Having built a recipe that starts with presentation of a universal character in a universal situation, layers-on paradoxes, and proceeds to dialogue that is all about power, the table would now seem to have more-or-less set itself for something big to be placed directly on it, and for peoples’ unique differences to signal the reader that not everyone will be leaving with all of his chips. The differential transformability of the key players—the acute issue that will form the pivot of the entire story—is something that would under this rubric happen not because I had set myself to writing that story, but because, at the end of the day, that’s the only thing that could happen between to these people.

This, in hindsight, is how my much-complimented story about the homeless guy came into existence inside my head. First I knew I had a main character who, despite appearances to the contrary, has a lot of universality (go for it, or keep things comfy?); then I knew what made him interesting (he can paint, he’s tender during and after the act of love, he’s improbably attached to a stray cat); then I knew with whom he’d have a set of differences (the gallery director and the girlfriend, both of whom push him in ways that accentuate his own inner uncertainty); and then, only after having understood each of those things, did I know on what basis the story would turn. I didn’t start the story out with that set of intentions, but that’s the order in which they unfolded, and that’s the order that led to the one story of mine that people like.

To instead start a story as I often have, with the narrative pivot figured out before the people to whom it will happen, and to then try to make those people interesting and believable, would seem to be to set one’s self up for failure—at least if my experience is anything to go by. My travel narrative didn’t work because the root conflict borne at the character’s heart wasn’t universal; my story about the woman who dreams of her husband abandoning her didn’t work because the power imbalances weren’t clear. My novel about the town of bad-behaving Rotarians didn’t work because the big gotcha at the end didn’t utilize sufficiently unique character traits. My story about the guy who shoots himself on the other guy’s lawn didn’t work because the characters were shoe-horned into the pivot instead of the other way around.

Commencement

The worst thing about all of this is the amount of time that would seem to have been wasted on the way. All those tedious, pretentious little puzzles I’ve been fashioning with so little success owe their existence to what seems now to have been a fundamental misapprehension about what it was that I’d been trying to emulate. Seeing how cleverly this can all work—seeing the young home-invader shot in the empty-nester’s bedroom, and knowing all at once that her pistol-shooting hobby was both immediately relevant to my interest in her, and the thing that set us inexorably on this path—I’ve been instead fumbling around with devices that appear cosmetically to be just as clever, but without actually serving any constructive purpose to the craft. Meanwhile the cleverness I’ve been admiring in my favorite stories has fit the model described here, in every case: A character with a universal concern, made economically unique through short bursts of multidimensionality, resulting in power imbalances with other multidimensional characters, leading directly to the only pivot-point the whole thing could have been leading to that whole time.

…Now all I need is a deck of cards, huh.

Dave O’Gorman
(“The Key Grip”)
Gainesville, Florida

(*) Seger, Linda, Creating Unforgettable Characters: A Practical Guide to Character Development in films, TV series, advertisements, novels and short stories. Henry Holt (1990), New York.

A "Public" Challenge to Myself

2011-03-04T07:14:00.000-08:00

Ten days of unbroken creative productivity stretch before me this morning, with no plans to travel, tackle household projects, or work in the conventional sense of fulfilling obligations having to do with my job. My plan instead, much as it would be if I were traveling to a writers' compound, is to generate creativity in all the manifold varieties that have interested me of late, from revising existing short- and long fiction, to generating new stories, to uploading movie reviews to YouTube, to finishing the mock-up copy of a new board game.

The problem is, I haven't in the past been all that adept at leveraging large blocks of un-competed-for time, into the things I'd like to do -- it's always been easier when the act of creating meant that some sort of icky-work was being given the finger. It's a very real concern, though heaven help a person if he tries to articulate it to the five-day-a-week crowd, whose retinas are likely to detach from the force of the involuntary eye-roll. Creative aspirations mostly don't inhabit enough authority to permit leaden concerns about low-productivity but -- here's the thing about that -- it's only because most creative aspirations never translate into production. At all events, what galls me already on this very first morning of the ten days, is the prospect of waking up next Monday having wasted them.

What should the goals be?

Well, it might be worthwhile to start with what they *shouldn't* be: I'd love to say, "upload ten movie reviews and re-write ten short-stories," but, c'mon, we both know that isn't going to happen. Clearly the permission I've recently given myself to flit from one, quarter-finished project to another, with utter self-indulgence, has helped to generate a lot of new material. But, equally clearly, the more ambitious things I'd like to do aren't going to wear well in the absence of an ability to sit down and tune everything else out. A happy medium between the permission to flit and the need to get "serious" would yield the most satisfying results. If only it could be found.

There are always short-stories. There are good ones and bad ones, new and old, experimental and linear. None of them will ever find their ways into even the most lightly circulated, all-on-line literary journals, if I don't polish and mail them, at some point. Moreover, in one of the creative arts' most personally frustrating paradoxes, it turns out that having a small assortment of successfully published short-stories is all but essential to those seeking introductory credibility in *completely* *different* *fora*, such as full-length fiction, narrative non-fiction, and literary criticism. Just what it is about a person who has proven that he can write a 3,000 word story about a girl being pushed around by her father, that merits the reading of his 110,000-word travel narrative through eastern Europe, I won't presume to ask. Any more than I have already. At all events, getting a few stories to the point where they might not embarrass me from someone else's slush-pile is an outlet that carries the potential of two-for-one progress.

I also want very much to continue to review movies on YouTube and, more specifically, to hone my still-clunky approach to the point that a full review can be devised, written, filmed, and uploaded in a single day. (At the moment each review takes between three and five times that much time -- a tempo that will devour everything else I'm trying to do and leave only a tiny and lightly watched YouTube filmography in its place.

I've lately been thinking about another "series" of blog columns, not unlike the countdown of my hundred favorite movies from two summers ago, this time ranking various travel destinations I've either seen, or plan to see. This is a bigger project than it sounds, though, as the countless thousands of you-must-see-this-before-you-die places out there would have to be archived more-or-less exhaustively, then somehow ranked despite the fact that I haven't seen them all, then photo-documented (largely using google images), and then, of course, written about. It's a fact I mention far too often to my ever-shrinking circle of friends that the list of my hundred favorite movies ran out to 135,000 words -- roughly twice the length of a standard trade paperback. A big commitment to make in service of something unlikely to be read even by most of the personal support network who dutifully plow through all the rest of the crap with which I've been so cavalier about cluttering-up their minds.

The full-length manuscripts are harder to face, of course, and even more so because there's more than one of them. Should a person who has in his possession a fractious first-draft of two different travel narratives, two different novels, a full-length historical commentary, *and* a textbook, really be giving himself permission to spend the next ten days flitting from genre to genre, from medium to medium? Or does such a person risk waking up fifty-five years old at the end of those ten days, and no closer to the unwavering macro-goal of conventional publication? For that matter -- with the recent news that Border's, too, will be largely disappearing over the next few months -- does the goal of conventional publication even make sense anymore, if it ever did? Will there even *be* conventional publication, by the time any of these full-length documents are truly ready for the healthy skepticism of a double-blind audience? I wish I knew: The eye-roll factor isn't small here, either, but the fact of the matter is that a decision in either direction, with respect to working on the full-length stuff, could result in a deep regret at having squandered the window.

At the other end of the legacy-vs-immediacy spectrum, what of the political blog commentaries? There has rarely been a more fallow time in which to write about the grave and rapidly deteriorating state of the political narrative in this country, but on no small level is this also the problem: I haven't written hardly any political pieces over the past -- what, year? -- precisely because the genre is so fallow with pulsating outrages that to write about any of them would cripple my humor for the rest of the subsequent day. On the other hand, of all the writing I've ever tried to do, this is the one area where, when I was doing it, there actually was an anonymous, not-doing-me-any-favors following. If ten days' creative efforts were instead to lead to ten days' copious production, and zero audience, would it really be production, or just masturbation?

This is a non-rhetorical question, and one for which I think both potential answers have merit. Creative effort for the sake of itself can be thought of as the only "true" creative effort (and the only motive that leads to good work, since it isn't hamstrung by pointless nods to some unseen "market"). The analogy that often gets made is to playing the guitar -- in that the owner of a guitar can derive rather a lot of personal satisfaction from playing only in his own company. Hence the movie-reviews on YouTube. Nobody's looking at them, and I can honestly say that I don't care: Their one-man audience likes the way they're coming out. On the other hand, few among us can say with total self-honesty that they would find themselves fulfilled after-the-fact by a creative resume that had never enjoyed the validation of a formal third party. In this respect is writing far closer to composing music than it is to playing. Sure, if I compose a symphony that no one else ever takes sufficient interest in to play, I've still made something -- at least on paper. But have I really fulfilled the goal with which I set out to ruin a hundred and twenty pages of score? Probably not.

None of these various possibilities are actually being tackled either by angsting about them, or by typing these very words of angst, of course. (Just thought I'd beat someone else to it, thanks.) Without further ado, then, here is what I consider to be a realistic, sufficiently multifaceted, and yet weighty enough set of goals, that fulfilling all or most of them over the next ten days would leave me satisfied that I'd proven to myself once again that I can, in fact, sit still and make something.

1. Final revisions of four existing short-stories. Make no mistake: That's a lot. Indeed I have often felt that the job of revising a short-story is, if anything, more taxing than the job of revising a full-length document -- since any single word that doesn't belong in a short story, or belongs but needs a synonym, or jars in any other way, will call disproportionate attention to itself. If a really good novel is a cathedral to the writer's talents, then a really good short-story is a Faberge egg. Still, they're not going to revise themselves, and I have specific-enough ideas for how to fix, and where subsequently to market, four specific titles of mine (Cat-Bus Bill, A Walking Tour of Downtown Chicago, Swisstime, and Tripticks), that dropping four-dozen envelopes in the mail on March 14 would leave me feeling like the week had been an unqualified success, even if I hadn't done so much as a load of laundry in the meantime.

2. Four new YouTube movie reviews, uploaded. The question of whether there will ever be a YouTube subscriber following for my pretentious, synopsis-heavy dronings -- about *existing* movies, you understand -- is probably at this point a settled one. But you know, I can't help myself: I just love talking about the movies I love. There's another benefit, too, quite aside from the palette-cleanse this radically different activity offers when the sound of my own short-story voice becomes more strident company than I can bear, in that it's one of the few activities chronicled on this list that is emotionally *POSITIVE*.

Most writing is dire, even when it's not being written by someone who is mostly dire in his real-world interactions, the way I am. By protecting some space over the coming days for an activity that celebrates my deep and abiding respect for the world's great filmmakers, I'll be giving myself the chance to think optimistically about all the human race might be capable of, even after destroying the Wisconsin teachers' union.

3. Completion of the board-game prototype. Only a few close friends know of the idea I recently devised for a board game -- because, of course, this is the outlet that carries with it the highest smirk-quotient. It's not quite as bad as inventing an alternative-fuel car engine in my basement, but then again I don't own a basement. Still, one of those close friends is improbably well-connected to some folks who've made a lot of money on a board game of their own devising, and anyway the chance to step away from the computer all together and play with tag-board and an exacto knife carries the thrilling appeal of a total gear-shift, *and* the chance to take for a spin my insurance policy's emergency-room deductible, at the same time.

4. Re-outline All-American Town. Of all the full-length documents I've ever created, this experimental fiction manuscript wins the contest for Most-Likely-to-be-Published, going away. There's only one small problem with that observation: In its current form, it is a self-humiliating *mess*. It needs a new plot, new attention to characterization, new characters, basically it needs to be re-written from the ground up. To do so over the next ten days would be impracticable all by itself, but to map out the plan for doing so is by no means out of reach, and best of all this too can be done without the use of a computer.

5. Final revisions to the first chapter of both travel narratives. No one who doesn't already know me will probably ever see either of my travel narratives; the genre was one of the first casualties -- at least commercially speaking -- of the internet revolution. Why would anyone pay fourteen bucks to read my bland, dishwatery descriptions of the un-exotic places I've been, when they could read someone else' s for free? Well, I don't know the answer to that one. But I can't help thinking that there is one.

Over and above those same, affirmative reasons for wanting to write about travel as with movies, both of the travel manuscripts happened quite by accident to feature prominent and intensely personal through-lines. Each of them is, in other words, the one thing that travel narrative so often isn't: A story. And if almost no travel narrative is being published anymore, the same cannot be said about narrative memoir that tells a good story. Just as revising the short-stories affords the chance to force-multiply the same time by creating something *and* advancing my bibliography, so does working on the travel narratives afford a double-whammy of scratching the itch to talk about those experiences, while simultaneously bucking a bad trend in what used to be a scrumptiously enthralling genre.

6. Final draft for my inaugural "moth" submission. A local friend of mine approached me recently about co-founding a Gainesville-area installment of "the moth" -- in which people from the community gather to read and listen to short, non-fiction accounts from their own lives, in the spirit of, say, David Sedaris. I am of course deeply honored to have been asked to share in the administrative duties of such an undertaking (indeed one could argue that nothing on this list is as potentially fulfilling as carrying-off such an event and then watching the whole thing from the front row). But over and above this honor is the prospect of dragging out from the dark recesses of my own hard-drive a series of narrative shorts I've written over the past several years for an out-of-town equivalent called "Lip Service," and seeing if a slightly less restrictive word-count might render them a little less fractious and unreadable. I'd like, specifically, to have my own selection for our as-yet-unscheduled first show, buttoned-up and in the can by the time I go back to work.

What to make of such a list? Well of course the first thing to make is a pretty-big laugh, since there's no real way that all of this could even remotely be tackled in a mere ten days. But as those who harbor equally insistent compulsions to make things outta nothing would know, a funny thing happens when one makes lists like this with an explicit awareness at the outset of just how impossible it will all be: It ends up not mattering, as long as the list serves as a continual reminder that, as ever, the clock on the wall is ticking.

I've never been good at losing track of time; indeed the inability to do so often gets squarely in the way of... well, everything else. But lists like this one offer another of the happy media this column seems now to have really been all about. Yes, there are all these things that I'd like to do, the list reminds. Yes, there is less and less time to do them in, even now. But no, that is not itself sufficient reason to waste any more, spinning in the sand about how much has passed and how little is left. After all, nothing will get crossed-off by fretting over how it could possibly already be eleven o'clock on the morning of the first day. Or, by the time I've spell-checked this, eleven-thirty. Nothing will get crossed-off by fretting over that, either.

Wish me luck, everybody.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

The Key Grip Goes New York

2011-02-23T06:04:00.000-08:00

For loyal readers who may have missed it -- all five of you? -- this past weekend I was asked to report from Gainesville's four-day experimental film festial, FLEXFest, for Cinespect.com. And I am here to tell you that the experience of writing 1,000-or-so words about a ninety-nine hour, sixty-five-title, juried film festival, was not only deeply gratifying, not only fully immersing, it may well end up being one of those milepost moments in a person's life. Certainly it is fair to say that I have not yet recovered my day-to-day equilibrium, and might not for some time.

It began with my recent decision to transition some of my film-review efforts to YouTube, and thence to credit the locally owned and suitably smart video rental store here in town, Video Rodeo. Since the store also has a Facebook page, posting copies of the reviews there seemed a logical way of introducing my love of good movies, my desire to support the business, and my appetite for listening to myself talk, all at once. What I hadn't fully appreciated was that the store's founder and proprietor, Roger Beebe, is also the eleven-year director of FLEXFest -- and that in such capacity he would shortly be contacted by Cinespect for ideas about who in the local area might be interested in scrawling a few words about the festival. Beebe graciously ignored my proclivity for, as someone recently put it, "structures so deep they'd give Noam Chomsky wet-dreams," and passed-along my name. After which I quickly became the dog that chases cars, and had just caught one.

To this point even the idea of attending all ten events of such a gathering would have stretched the limits of my capacity for digesting clever sensory input and keeping it all straight inside my fractious head. There would then of course be the question of a passably-done composition about the thing, turned in on short deadline. And by short, you understand, I mean significantly fewer than twenty-four hours.

But a funny thing happened on the way to being completely overwhelmed by the breadth of such a task: Instead of feeling overwhelmed, I felt enthralled -- exhilarated, even -- to an extent that had not been my privilege since attending a writers' workshop in New Smyrna Beach eleven years ago. I'd gone in expecting the one-word takeaway to be "unmanageable" and come out with something more akin to "liberating." The act of getting up Tuesday morning and confronting an un-graded pile of economics tests was nothing short of surreal: it was as if I'd been away from my normal self, not for four days but four years.

I'll leave the actual reporting on the event to the Cinespect article; since they've been gracious enough to take a chance on me, I'm not here going to undercut their readership by paraphrasing what I saw in, or how I reacted to the jurors, the venues, the individual films. But the long and the short of the matter is that disappearing into an unlit warehouse for four days, absorbing everything that some of the quickest-witted filmmakers in the world are up to, and putting something together about it that would be legible and only thirty- or forty-percent overweight vs. the requested word-length, will stand near the pinnacle of my list of memorable experiences for a long, long time. It's been years since I've been surrounded by so much excellence in such a creatively stimulating genre, or felt so included in it by my unfailingly gracious hosts. It could be years 'til I feel such things again.

And that, I guess, is the point of my column this morning: When such experiences grace our lives, they forgive a little bit of self-celebration (I hope), but they also deserve a moment's pause. Whatever I end up doing this weekend, or the next, or the one after that, it won't be anything nearly as special as the project I've just shared a tiny little role in and from which I've taken so much satisfaction. People often comment on how rarely we see the grand and fulfilling high-points of our existences as they are happening, how we can only really appreciate them long after the fact. Well, I see this one; I see this one for exactly what it is. And I couldn't be more grateful, for the having of it, or the seeing, either one.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

Product Review: Konica-Minolta Magicolor 1600W color laser printer

2011-02-05T10:01:00.001-08:00

Back in the early 2000s, the last time I needed a printer, I consulted over the phone for long weeks about it with my best friend -- the man who built my current PC, on which these very words are being written -- who repeatedly spiked the various models I'd been floating past him, regardless of name brand, source of my own interest, functionality or reputation. In exasperation I eventually asked him (not without empirical precedent) if he wasn't just shooting-down every candidate in order to be a pain in my ass, whereupon the other end of the phone-line went uncharacteristically and thoughtfully quiet for a moment. "No, Dave," he finally said, "it's just that every model you suggest is in the kind of price-point that it should come equipped with a hostess in a pencil-miniskirt, pushing a drink trolley past your desk every few minutes. You seem to have decided you're going to spend a thousand bucks on something that will work no better for your needs than one that costs something more like a tenth of that much money."

After some further discussion about reliability, print volume, uses, etc., my friend finally convinced me to drive to my nearest big-box office retailer (about a thousand feet from my house, if it comes to that), and spend a hundred dollars on an HP Laserjet 1012. In the years since, that printer performed flawlessly: nary a single paper-jam or smeared page-proof along the way to generating not one or two but five complete, full-length fiction- and non-fiction manuscripts, for nobody to read. It's a bit melodramatic to say, but not a million miles from true, that every bad book I've written in my entire life I owe in some small measure to the advice of that curmudgeonly, beloved, and now gone forever best friend of mine, who passed away from complications of cystic fibrosis in the spring of 2007. (I'll stop mentioning this detail in my apparently unrelated stories about other things altogether at some point, I suppose -- if for no other reason than it won't be possible to keep bringing it up after I've joined him.)

Of course nothing lasts forever in this molded-plastic-and-printed-circuit-board junk store that is the world of modern consumer technology, and while the HP printer itself never did evidence any signs of getting tired, the combination of increasingly fractious after-market toner vendors, and a sudden interest on the part of yours truly to print a few things in color, led me with a deep sigh and a heavy heart to conclude last Christmas that the time had come to say farewell to yet another of my de facto Buddhist shrines to the life and love of my best friend. As you can tell from reading this, it wasn't going to be easy.

Then again, after digesting a few cursory user-reviews on the web it became apparent pretty quickly that it wouldn't have been easy anyway: Know those machines out there in big, middle-of-the-aisle displays at WalMart and Best Buy? The ones for seventy- or fifty- or in some cases even thirty bucks? You know, the default choices for non-professional home users these days, the color inkjet "all-in-one" with the handy little SD-socket and the flatbed scanner/copier platform at the top, made by Canon and HP and Lexmark? Well, unless the users who've bought these and written about them are all either hopelessly ignorant or part of some mass-conspiracy to slur the once-noble titans of the printing game, the machines themselves are all... well... shite, if you'll pardon me for saying it.

I'd planned to read a dozen user-reviews each for middle-end all-in-one machines by each of the names with whom I'd have expected to have a good experience, and each time I found myself not needing to continue after the second or third write-up. One person would say, "Well, this one is good for what it does -- which isn't much," the next person would say, "I got it to install but it never printed anything," the third person would say, "You have to send a single page at a time, because it jams every time it tries to grab a second sheet on the same print-job," and then the fourth person would say, "DO NOT BUY THIS HUNK OF CRAP; IT WORKED FOR FIVE MINUTES AND THEN GREEN SMOKE STARTED POURING OUT WHICH KILLED THE FAMILY DOG." This happened with the Canons, which surprised me; it happened with the Lexmarks, which stupefied me; it happened with the HP models, which left me literally staring at my monitor with my mouth hanging open and my hand on top of my head.

Some people out there might think it's silly to put this much stock of credibility into the collective feedback of a group of unseen strangers who might not all have any business trying to buy and install a printer in the first place, but by way of justifying my resulting circumspection I should here confess that I am, more than any other single negative-descriptor that suits me better than I'd like, an absolutely zealous consumer satisfaction Nazi. Most people choose to major in economics because they can't bear the idea of messy explanations for bureaucratic red-tape; I chose to major in economics because I couldn't bear the idea of the faceless automatons in windowless conference rooms, sitting around all day trying to figure out how to force us all to buy stuff that they already know won't do what they're saying it does, on the wrapper. When most people buy something that fails to do what it's supposed to, they make a note and shake their heads and try again; when I buy something that fails to do what it's supposed to, I spend the next thirty-six hours watching movies in which people murder someone and get away with it, taking notes.

The difficulty this particular failing presented for me in the present context is self-evident: There simply didn't seem to be anything out there -- anything, out there -- for a person to buy if he wanted to print more than a page or two before feeling he had no choice but to google-bomb the make and model-number with incendiary diatribes about what a hunk of junk he'd just bought. Even the buyers' wizard on CNET.COM -- a usually functional if not always last-word-worthy set of fixed-alternative questions, culminating with a single recommendation -- repeatedly suggested the same particular all-in-one color inkjet, made by Canon, regardless of which options I chose along the way, and which gets less than 2-1/2 stars out of 4 for its user-review aggregate on their very website!

Add to this the problem the stealthy detail that the all-in-one jobbies tend to yield shockingly low page-totals before needing new cartridges (and the implicit hell that finding the new cartridges would surely be, despite all those wall-to-wall glass display cases of cartridges you and I have both seen a hundred times), and it was clear that my search was going to have to bring me a little farther afield. To wit, if I wanted a reliable machine -- even if that was all I wanted -- I was going to have to look at a color, laser printer.

So, having resigned myself to color laser printers for my search pool, I then proceeded to check all the usual on-line-merchant suspects for machines ranging in price from... five to nine hundred dollars! After all, if a color inkjet all-in-one for seventy bucks was a big, fat, do-not-buy, then surely the only reliable solution out there was going to cost at least five or ten times that much money, n'est-ce pas? I mean, it's not like I hadn't been right about this very same logic once before, no? ...Oh, wait: I hadn't been right about this very same logic once before; I'd been dead wrong, about this very same logic, once before. The difference being that this time there would be no irritable and periodically profane friend to all but literally slap me out of it.

In the end the story came to a different resolution through something a lot closer to blind good-luck. Having found a $600 printer that looked promising, I began reading the user reviews for that model and, mercifully, the second one I read had been written by someone who in his first paragraph said that he'd liked that machine, but could see no reason to prefer it for home-office use over another machine that could be had with a little snooping for a sixth as much money. It wasn't until I'd actually divided $600 by six in my head that I realized how profoundly I'd almost just let the memory of my deceased friend, down.

Enter the Konica Magicolor 1600W -- a non-wireless, non-duplexing, twenty-page-per-minute yawner that, when asked to print in full color, drops down to five.
It's bigger, heavier, and less functional than its principal target market has probably gotten used to expecting out of its products, to be sure. A two-employee consulting business with a studio office overlooking the used records store at Fourth- and Elm is quickly gonna want its money back. But here's the thing about all of that: The fucking thing works. And for this target market of one, that's the non-cinematic equivalent of having me at hello.

Out of the box the Konica makes an immediate impression. It's both self-serving and probably at least to some extent revisionist of me to say so, but I do feel as though I've gotten to the point in my own consumer experience -- not without some negative examples -- where I can tell more-or-less immediately whether I'm going to be happy with something, based on the vibration I get from the thing while I can still hear the UPS truck pulling into traffic on eighth avenue. Arcam makes good stereo source components, period. Integra makes good receivers. Dared makes good amplifiers. Signal makes good stereo cables. Salk makes good speakers. Panasonic makes good TV's. Some of these things might be less likely than their competitors to thrill you, but none of them are going to leave you wondering how you could have been so stupid. Add the Konica Minolta 1600W to the list. From even before the styrofoam ears were safely hidden from the cats, it was going to be a good fit.

The pictorial instructions for unpacking and installing the machine are a little excessive (must, not, throw, metal, transit, screws, in, the, regular, garbage) , but I'd rather that than the opposite, of course. There is a corresponding manual, but it is rendered utterly redundant by the tediously over-detailed cartoon strip that comes folded-in on top, which is fine by me. The point being, I was connected and printing non-test-pages in under five minutes after signing for the box. And a lot less can be said of many, many, many other printers out there in the hundred-dollar price point. What am I saying, a lot less has been said of many, many, many other printers out there in the hundred-dollar price point.

Since the overwhelming majority of my own print requirements (at least for now) would seem to be of the monochromatic variety, my first big experiment with the Konica was to put it through the trickiest job I could anticipate needing it for in this category--one in which the black-and-white formatting associated with documents like hotel receipts and so-on should appear cleanly on the same page as basic, legible text. And folks, not only was I impressed with the job the Konica did--I was impressed to an extent that didn't immediately seem physically possible.

Whereas the same pages printed from the HP had faint-but-detectable gray "footprints" around logos and other cut-and-pasted graphics on these text pages (e.g., if a piece of mock letterhead had a picture of a legal scale centered at the top, one could detect a blocky under-mat around the scale when the page was printed), the Konica seems somehow -- inexplicably, unless there's something about all of this that I don't understand -- to know that the fuzzy matting surrounding the image doesn't actually belong in the document, and instead the image itself is printed as crisp and clean as if it were the next letter to the right of the mailing address. Obviously there is much about such matters that I don't understand, but this doesn't change the fact that the Konica was able to effortlessly accomplish something for me that had heretofore been completely impracticable.

As impressed as I was with text, full-color printing was, if anything, even more arresting, with less false contouring and better rejection of jaggies than I get when viewing the same image on my plasma television! From photographs to color brochure designs and back, it is clear to me after even a few short trials that all but the most heavy home-office users will be nothing short of fully satisfied by the all-color performance of this almond-colored little sumo wrestler and its slow, moderately noisy, but unimpeachably serviceable output.

The ideal user for this machine -- well, the ideal user other than a crabby and self-alienated and as a result largely friendless-old-coot-before-his-time like your present columnist -- would seem to be the scholastically minded seventeen year-old about to leave home for the toughest school that would have him- or her as a student. Indeed I can't really even look at this printer, much less use it, without transporting myself to a dimly-lit dorm room someplace: It's three-AM and six nervous, dirty-blue-jean wearing kids are standing in an uneasy semicircle around the precocious group-leader, who only just let slip that they don't actually have to walk the flash-drive with their project on it all the way to Kinko's now that the buses have stopped running. Meanwhile the guy who hasn't been one of those kids in more than half his lifetime now may sit over here, on the other side of town, pounding-out bad fiction and even worse narrative memoir, and never once have to worry about any of the tree he's killing for no good reason getting stuck inside his equipment and screwing-up his whole print job.

If it's true that I'm the sort of guy who flips a lot further out than most when things don't do what they say they will on the wrapper, then perhaps the upside of this failing is that, in some specific ways, consumer products have an oddly lower standard to live up to, in earning my esteem. An object that says, "Dave, I'm the newest whiz-bang thing, and I've got the opening-night jitters to prove it" is not going to last in my house (not least because the Polynesian burial ground over which my house's fractious electrical supply was apparently built will only eat such a product and spit it out before I've learned to hate it for my own personal reasons, anyway). But a product that says, "Dave, I will sit here, inconspicuously, un-inspiringly, and do exactly that which you expected when you read about me before buying," is the product that will have my allegiance -- if not my still-broken heart, since that is locked away someplace else -- forever.

A word or two of caveat are also in order, here. First, a few users out there have reported some performance quirks with this machine, but it would seem after a little digging that those users might be having most of their troubles as a result of running non-laser-quality paper through this bad-boy, which strikes me as a bit pointless anyway. (In for a pound, and all that.) A user who splurges on a ream of name-brand, high-visibility bright, laser-printer paper, would appear unlikely to have any problems with quirky performance whatsoever.

Second, the power consumption of this machine is anything but Al-Gore-friendly. In my house, with my house's Amityville electrical system, the Konica causes a pulsating dimming of the lights even when it's at idle. But the amusing thing here is that, in a left-handed way, this trait actually saves power in my own usage, because it inspires me (or perhaps I should say terrifies me) into toggling the Konica all the way off when I'm not printing.

Third, and most important, if you have cats as I do you will very much want to close both the paper feed-tray and the output slot after every use, since both of these are the flimsiest aspects of the overall design, and will unceremoniously snap off -- greatly complicating any subsequent printing processes -- the first time an innocent kitty-cat mistakes either one of them for a viewing perch at the top of your home-office rig. And this would, I'll have to admit, seriously cut into one's impression of the machine's overall rugged build quality.

I'll post a follow-up review after I've gotten better-acquainted with this guy, but the initial impressions simply could not be any more favorable. Readers in the market for a new printer may, as far as I'm concerned, buy the Konica-Minolta Magicolor 1600W with absolute confidence that what they're being promised is exactly what they'll get. And if they're anything at all like me, that's more than enough satisfaction of expectation to ensure that they won't be disappointed. Unless you need wireless (a buying group that includes a grand-total of nobody, admit it) or forty-page-per-minute printing (in which case you wouldn't be reading this), it would seem impossible to buy this particular printer and wish you'd gotten a different one instead.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

Movie Review: Tron Legacy (2010)

2011-02-03T06:25:00.000-08:00

Those among us who are old enough would seem to have entered into some kind of mass self-deception about the original Tron, released to a yawning public in 1982. The computer-generated effects were flat, sterile, and fraught with optical-print errors, and the storyline managed to be abstruse and superficial at the same time. What the original Tron did have was a completely, enthrallingly original look. All of which begs the question of how a group of Disney filmmakers might go about selling us a highly evocative sequel, to a movie whose only attribute to begin with was its visual originality? Well, the short answer is: they would do it badly.

Garrett Hedlund is Sam Flynn, the rebellious twenty-something son of Jeff Bridges’ software developer Kevin Flynn, who when Sam was little abruptly disappeared. After some bizarrely unimportant preliminaries about corporate bad-guy-ism, Kevin’s erstwhile partner informs Sam of a page he received from a disconnected number. Sam traces the number to Kevin’s basement lab, and the room-sized, high-voltage laser pointed conspicuously at the chair in which Sam now sits. Presently Sam presses the wrong button—or is it the right one?—thence to find himself scanned into the program, captured by electronic sentries, and forced to compete in a series of gladiatorial competitions, known as the games.

There follow fifteen minutes of suspenseless, characterless whiz-bang nonsense, all of it fraught with roughly the same edgy anticipation it takes to open our milk duds and steal another peek at our phones. Having bested all comers, Sam is hauled before the grand and power-lusting Clu, an arch rival created by the elder Flynn in his own image and played by a computer-reverse-aged Bridges—though not, we notice immediately, reverse-aged to the point of the original picture. Tasked by Kevin with perfecting the game grid, it happens that Clu has interpreted this order as a war on all that is beautiful and non-sterile, planning in consequence to destroy both father and son, along the way to making his escape into a reality imperfect enough to have spent a hundred and seventy million bucks on a hunk of mostly 2-D gibberish like this one.

But before Clu can have his way with Sam, the younger Flynn is busted out by the beautiful Cora, played by Wilde, who whisks him away to meet daddy dearest at his laughably 2001-like mountaintop exile, itself invisible to Clu and his minions because of its location outside the limits of the program! Who knew that high-desert terrain existed at the periphery of computer code, or that computer-programmed vehicles could go there, provided they come equipped with big, knobby tires? For that matter, why is dad so apparently startled to see Sam, despite the fact that the newly cleaved portal to the outside world is plainly visible from his balcony?

At all events, with our trio of variously reluctant heroes at last united, we may be forgiven for presuming at least the brute-force coherency of an urgent call-to-action. What happens instead, is that everyone sits around talking. Cora catches Sam up on the tedious backstory while Kevin, separated from his son for decades, sits in the corner and meditates. Sam goes to his room, Cora ultimately joins him there, and they talk. Kevin snaps out of it in time for dinner, and then all three of them talk some more, Kevin unloading on Sam a bouillabaisse of Zen/Taoist nonsense more aptly suited to an NFL-lineman who’d misread the cliff-notes.

Okay, that last bit was unkind, but if the line, “Doing nothing’s underrated” works as an ethos in real-life—and it might not—I’d have at least thought we could all agree that it isn’t going to work for the middle hour of a movie. “What’s it like outside?” Kevin asks Sam, ten minutes after the last non-reviewer has left the building. “Rich gettin' richer, poor gettin' poorer,” is Sam’s suicide-temptingly adequate response. Wasn’t this supposed to be a Disney film? In 3D? Come to think of it, why am I still bothering with these stupid glasses?

By the time our un-involving characters find their way to what we already sense will be a flimsy and one-dimensional climax, the corny and undramatic gotcha feels less like a petty theft of ticket money and more like a mercy-killing. Well, you can almost literally hear people thinking. At least it’s over.

Still I’d be remiss if I did not point out the ease with which I managed to distract myself from the enduring of this heaving mess, by concentrating instead on the wall-to-wall gratuity of delicious young actresses clad in scandalously form-fitting lycra. Throughout our dreary cyber-triptick we are regularly and mercifully visited by Olivia Wilde or Beau Garrett, their outfits so tight that a bored audience can amuse itself guessing what they had for breakfast. Just why Disney is so consistently attached to projects involving so much racy sex-appeal is a topic that has been done to death already, but whatever the reason I’m sure there are far less hygienic ways for a fractious nine year-old boy to discover, on a rainy Saturday, that he is, without remorse, a heterosexual.

The Key Grip gives Tron:Legacy one bald head out of five. Mostly for the lycra.

Movie Review: Revanche (2008)

2011-02-03T06:20:00.000-08:00

Friends of mine will tell you that I’m “too plot driven.” And while I’m not even really sure what that means, I do have a clear enough idea to know that it’s an awfully faint way to challenge someone else’s taste in movies, especially when the person in question counts among his favorites such atmospheric gems as Tsai Ming-Liang’s What Time is it There and Gus Van Sant’s Gerry. Never mind: expecting the story-aspect of a film to work is just about the last transgression for which I’m planning an apology. If I am to be guilty of expecting a self-supporting narrative, by all means let’s pay the nickel fine and have it over with. The sooner some of us can get back to soaking-up a narratively enthralling tunnel of suspense, like this one.

Johannes Krisch is Alex, the hardscrabble ex-con whose job as a Viennese brothel bouncer entangles him with the beautiful and indentured Ukrainian prostitute Tamara, played by Potapenko. When Tamara’s situation at the brothel becomes unsustainable, Alex decides to pay-off her debt by robbing a bank located near the farm of his estranged grandfather Hausner, played by Johannes Thanheiser—thence to lie low while the heat dies down under the pretense of chopping granddad’s copious stash of firewood for the coming winter. Meanwhile Ursula Strauss is Susanne, early middle-aged, long-time churchgoing friend and through-the-woods neighbor of Hausner, struggling to build with her husband a comfortable family-life for themselves, with decidedly qualified success.

When Alex’s ham-handedly opportunistic robbery goes just as terribly wrong as a person might have imagined ahead of time, he finds himself holed up at Hausner’s farm for reasons far more serious than a trifling fifty thousand euros—a poison-laced isolation made all the more unbearable by the recurring pop-in visits of the unsuspecting Susanne, who plays it chatty and informal with the new houseguest, despite Alex’s openly impolite self-excusals to chop more wood.

When at last Alex finally confronts Susanne with the news that he does not welcome the further disruption posed by her vicarious company, matters abruptly take a turn that would surely have knocked all of us ten-inches back in our chairs, even if we hadn’t known the other, up-till-then-larger reason to cringe at Susanne’s arrestingly heterodox response.

What follows is a third act in which no one discloses the only thing that someone else needs to know—a series of misunderstood exchanges raising the anxiety like the counterweight on an elevator to oblivion. Even at the moment of denouement, we realize at a stroke that the critical exchange is being perceived completely differently by each of the parties to it—the two characters participating, and us.

Writer-Director Gotz Speilmann is no stranger to delicate balancing acts of narrative tension, as in his 2004 Film Movement selection Antares, but here with Revanche he outdoes even himself in stretching our capacity to endure our awareness of things of which the characters on the screen are unaware. In ingenious service of this objective he chooses a sporadically de-saturated color palette—thus allowing us to find our players sympathetic without being likable, by rendering them in brushstrokes that are beautiful without being pretty.

The cinematography, too, is a conscious nod to this tricky needle-threading, with a series of camera-cuts so rapid and without explanation at the film’s outset that Susanne’s and Alex’s stories aren’t at first obviously even coherent, let alone related—followed at the critical moment by a seamless transition to the very opposite photographic style, with desperately long takes featuring camera-pans so slow and overloaded with latent anticipation that we find ourselves wondering if the character in question will still be there to make their next bad decision when we arrive.

The end result is a narrative-driven masterpiece that even a pooh-pooh’er of narrative will surely never forget—our sheer exhaustion of a sort not just grateful for the end of all that ringingly taut discomfort that has come before, but laced with the deep and abiding satisfaction that comes from knowing just how masterfully has our route been plotted along this low-current, intimately personal, E-ticket thrill ride of dread.

The Key Grip gives Revanche five bald heads, his highest rating.

Movie Review: The King's Speech (2010)

2011-02-03T06:13:00.000-08:00

William Shakespeare had a lot of problems. He had to write astonishingly good poetry and prose, or starve. He had to be funny, compelling, romantic, historically credible, sometimes all at once. But of all the challenges confronted by the Bard, surely the highest was that of how to tell a story about royalty in such a way that his everyman-audience could give a damn. Fortunately for the rest of us, the everyman-audience for whom he was writing was galvanized by a commoner’s lustful appetite to see the overambitious brought low. Shakespeare’s currency, in other words, was comeuppance.

What then to make of Tom Hooper’s film about the eventual World-War-Two-era British monarch George the sixth, and our instant connection with that stammering, insecure, quintessentially reluctant royal—a man so under-ambitious that he was all but physically thrust onto the throne by his brother’s abdication? Well, the short answer is—everything.

Collin Firth is Albert—Bertie to his closest family and the friends of whom he has none—at the film’s mid-thirties outset the Duke of York, younger brother of Edward, son of George the fifth. He stammers. He stammers so badly that at the 1936 European Cup, he is unable to continue. In times previous the solution would’ve simply been not to speak. But now Britons, like their cousins across the pond, have been swept-up in a sugar-high addiction to the just-invented mass communication tool that threatens to wreck Albert’s cozy anonymity, radio.

Helena Bonham Carter is Elizabeth, the stoic-but-not-stuffy wife and duchess whose mission to find the expert who can help her husband is clearly driven by the mundane desire not to see him any-more-humiliated. After a series of false starts, the quest brings her to the disarmingly negative-spaced office of one Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush, a quirky Australian retread whose passionate insistence on egalitarian informality immediately sets all involved—including us—to wondering just how this is going to work.

After some obligatory posturing Logue takes the job, at least to the extent that his patient will permit the indignity of administration. Thence do their meetings careen across a galaxy of mutually cautious transactions, with Firth’s Albert somehow regal and indignant without being inaccessible, and Rush’s Logue somehow confident and assertive without being cheeky. Bit by bit, at times almost imperceptibly, Albert makes progress.

All around him his dream of passing into historical obscurity is much less imperceptibly falling apart. Even before his father the King has passed away, the nascent British tabloids have begun feasting on the decidedly un-regal romantic interests of Albert’s older brother Edward, played by Guy Pearce—the man whom, in Shakespeare’s time, this whole business would surely have been about. Worse, or at least just as bad, is Edward’s self-evident lack of conviction regarding the rising threat of totalitarianism on the continent. “Ah, Heir Hitler will sort them all out,” he mutters over his shoulder, in one particularly telling and no doubt tonally authentic moment of unbecoming candor.

With the final outbreak of war, even Edward himself realizes he is too compromised and abdicates—whereupon Albert finds himself George the sixth, quite literally at the very moment that his subjects, far and wide, need to hear him speak clearly, lucidly, and firmly inhabiting his capacity as the head of a now mortally imperiled state. It is not obvious that he can do this. Neither is it obvious how Britain will literally survive it if he does not.

If the power-embracing and ultimately self-destructive Edward and his love-interest Wallice Simpson stand as anachronistic prototypes of the Shakespearean royal, then surely the unfussy genius of Tom Hooper’s film lies in just how perfectly the would-be-alien plight of George VI strums the sensibilities and dramas of the modern bourgeoisie.

All of us doubt ourselves, true enough. All of us from time to time find ourselves asked to do things we are fairly certain that we cannot do. All of us sometimes fail, and when we do, all of us turn to our closest loved ones for our foundation of support. But what connects us so profoundly to this peerless film is the other thing that happens. The thing that happens next. The thing that happens when all of us—from the cubicle worker in Pamona to the King of England—look inside ourselves, urgently, hopefully, not quite sure what we will find, and discover there a small, gently turning crystal of potential, its facets glinting in the light of our resolve.

The Key Grip gives The King’s Speech five bald heads, his highest rating.

Movie Review: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)

2011-02-03T06:07:00.000-08:00

Not long ago I asked a friend of mine to pore over a printout of my entire, roughly 2000-title movie collection, in search of omissions that risked leaving the collection incomplete. And you know, I could’ve said that the very definition of a friend is someone who would agree to do such a thing—but really the very definition of a friend is someone who would even pretend, to agree to do such a thing. This friend returned to me in less than two weeks with a list of perhaps a hundred missing titles, the top-left corner of which was reserved for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. “It’s the only film I’ve ever watched,” he explained, that the moment it was finished I pressed PLAY and watched it all over again without a break.” And now so it is for me, too.

Sam Rockwell is Chuck Barris—yes, that Chuck Barris—the sixties-era game show producer and eventual host who claims with evident sincerity in his “unauthorized autobiography” that he was also a contract killer for the CIA. His early TV-producing aspirations unfulfilled, Barris is approached by the dark and mysterious Jim Byrd, played by Clooney, who persuades him that the very implausibility of a game-show host doing CIA wet-work is what makes Barris so perfect—the quintessential “guy-we’d-least-suspect.”

Chuck reluctantly agrees, ultimately teaming-up with equally eccentric colleagues Patricia, played by Julia Roberts, and Keillor, played by Rutger Hauer—the former of whom quotes Chaucer as foreplay and only beds her colleagues if they’ve first hidden the microfilm in the… um… appropriate recess, and the latter of whom solicits his fellow assassins to photograph him at the moment of dispatch, and whose default dinner-order is a green salad with no dressing.

Rockwell plays the supposedly gun-totin’ game-show host at his word, artfully gracing his fatalistic acceptance with a semi-permanently affixed disbelief that makes the entire movie, since only by not quite accepting that this is all happening to him, can his character sell us that perhaps it really it is. Meanwhile the life for which Barris is known takes off equally unexpectedly—with the Dating Game and other voyeuristic schmaltz-vehicles proving smash TV-hits.

Everything in Chuck’s young-to-middle life seems to be clicking, save for his ostensibly cavalier but practically troubled partnership with Drew Barrymore’s Penny, the unsinkably affectionate hippy chick whose intermittent companionship ties Barris down in the very ways they’d agreed to avoid, not least for her ignorance of precisely how Chuck is paying the bills. When a mole inside the assassin corps threatens everyone’s survival, Barris must shelve his multilayered emotional conflicts, along with his life-taught instinct to selfishness, just to have the fighting chance everyone is counting on, for him to save the day.

Of all the astonishing aspects of this film, and there are far too many to chronicle here, perhaps the most arresting is the fact that each of the movie’s complex scene-segues is accomplished entirely in-camera, with no CG, blue-screening, or other form of visual effect. Barris abandons his spot at the back of an NBC tour and shows up from the opposite wing dressed as a page and giving a tour of his own, and the whole thing is nothing more than a manic quick-change and a race behind the set. Barris draws from Penny’s banal kitchen-chatter his inspiration to pitch The Dating Game, and the blink-of-an-eye scene switch is handled by placing Rockwell on a turntable. Of all the brilliant craftsmanship that Clooney brings to the direction of this amazing picture, it is the scene-shift-in-camera idea that proves the most inspired, delivered so inconspicuously and in so many different guises throughout the film, that it’s unlikely most of the audience even notices.

Of course gee-whiz camera trickery is no substitute for a compelling overall narrative, and Clooney’s interpretation—and Rockwell’s performance—of Charlie Kauffman’s typically elaborate screenplay are both perfectly-paced and as consummately professional as any of the grand old hands of filmmaking. And all from an actor playing his first-ever lead, and a director making his first film. The bastards!

The Key Grip gives Confessions of a Dangerous mind five bald heads, his highest rating, and places it in position number ten on the list of his hundred favorite movies of all time.

Movie Review: Hopscotch (1980)

2011-02-03T05:59:00.000-08:00

With the benefit of hindsight it would seem that, in order to make a good spy-caper movie, the first thing one needs is society’s inclination to invest an evening thinking about spies. I don’t know about you, but the most recent movie I’ve seen about international idea-traffickers was Billy Ray’s Breach—a 2007 film whose absence of a backdrop of cold-war-style paranoia left me feeling fidgety and un-engaged. So yes, context played a role in priming the potential of a Carter-era jab at hapless government secret-keepers. Then again, potential isn’t worth a hill of shredded documents if the resulting picture fails to deliver on its promised resonances, and Hopscotch hits nearly every note.)

Walter Matthau is Miles Kendig, the anachronistic CIA field agent tasked with preventing western secrets from leaving the west through Munich. When at the outset of the film he catches red-handed his opposite number Yaskov, played by Herbert Lom, Kendig decides of his own initiative that recovering the microfilm is enough, and lets Yaskov go. His enraged department head Meyerson, played by Ned Beatty, summons Kendig to Langley and reassigns him to a desk. Instead Kendig—after a creative switcheroo to cover his tracks—disappears to Salzburg and the company of old friend and intermittent canoodle-partner Isobel, played by Glenda Jackson. There he hatches a plan to write a tell-all memoir and circulate it simultaneously to all the major intelligence bureaus of the world, one chapter at a time.

What follows is one of the great and clever chase narratives in all of cinema—with our hero chagrining his erstwhile colleagues, east and west, as-much-with his globetrotting elusiveness as his whistle-blowing candor. All with his young protégé Cutter—played by Sam Waterston—and reluctant old friend Yaskov in hapless pursuit. At each stop along an intercontinental triptick, Kendig flourishes the completion of his next chapter with progressively brazen revelations of his own whereabouts, only to have worked-out his escape with progressively shrewder and more hilarious stylistic flair.

It is for this reason that Hopscotch turns out also to be an unwitting celebration of nostalgia for a world driven by paper documents, and all the intrepid lateral mobility that has disappeared right along with them. Kendig hands a fake passport to an Austrian border guard, and at least one member of his 2011 audience bemoans living in a time in which the same stunt would end the movie in its first reel. Kendig masks his non-compliance with his boss by switching two sets of paper personnel records, and at least one member of his 2011 audience wishes that the H/R department of his local community college was run the same way!

In the end, though, the simple genius of writer Brian Garfield’s story is that our swelling sympathy for Kendig can itself hide in such plain sight, with moments of his near-capture bringing genuine, squirm-in-the-seat urgency because of, rather than despite all the comedic set-pieces and playfully romantic repartee that has come before. In this investment we are aided inestimably—just as Kendig is—by Jackson’s remarkably un-self-conscious Isobel, written just lightly enough that we infer a long and star-crossed backstory between the two, without knowing exactly what has kept them apart or even, once we think about it, whether perhaps Isobel might have come to know and so deeply care about our hero while working for the other side.

There are, it must be said, a series of narrative and continuity problems in Hopscotch, at least one of which pulls-out from the movie every friend and colleague with whom I’ve watched it. But surely it must speak volumes for the undiluted joy of this picture that I’ve departed far enough from character not to let this bother me. Films, it would seem, were more easily fudged in 1980 as well—a lesson the aspiring movie aficionado would be advised to keep in mind, the better to embrace a quirky, underrated cinematic gem like this one.

The Key Grip gives Hopscotch four bald heads out of five.

Movie Review: True Grit (2010)

2011-02-03T05:52:00.000-08:00

I confess at the outset to having never disliked a Coen Brothers film. From their 1987 debut Blood Simple through such triumphs as O Brother Where Art Thou, and culminating with last year’s exquisite masterpiece A Serious Man, the Coen brothers have always seemed to have all the answers, even for questions the rest of us might not have thought to ask. This being said, True Grit struck me as something of an underperformer—at least when measured against such lofty standards.

Haley Steinfeld is Matti Ross, the sage and precocious teenaged daughter of a man killed by his hired hand Tom Chaney during a cattle-drive. Despairing of the likelihood of independent justice, Ross seeks out the one-eyed, alcoholic, amusingly matter-of-fact Rooster Cogburn, played by Jeff Bridges. Ross intends Cogburn to track Chaney into Indian territory with her in tow—despite the fact that Ross herself is only fourteen years old. But before they can depart they are joined in the search by Matt Damon’s Ranger LaBoeuf, tasked with apprehending and extraditing Chaney to Texas for a completely different crime.

A series of fragile partnerships form and disintegrate among the three, in due course airing a wide array of mutual antagonisms. Above all is the deportment of Josh Brolin’s Tom Chaney, whom Cogburn stands to benefit from killing for Ross, and whom LaBoeuf stands to benefit from bringing back alive to stand trial in Texas.

The western genre is at its root a linear one: good guys are good; bad guys are bad; people ride their horses in straight lines and shoot straight when they get there. For this reason I’ve always found myself most impressed by westerns that are unafraid to take big chances—and this is where True Grit lets its audience down: Make a list of the six things that you suppose might happen to our unhappy trio out there on the wrong side of that river, and you’ll pretty-much end up right. Contrast this with, say, Unforgiven, in which the would-be hero is an unremediated mass murderer, his ersatz ring-leader is a lying braggart, and the chief rival is driven from town while the hero is off-camera with the flu.

Everywhere chances for such complexity exist in True Grit, they pass unexploited. Some might argue that the Coen brothers were constrained by the remake-status of the project, but this only removes the question to the wider theater of why they chose this particular movie to remake in the first place, and anyway doesn’t excuse many of the specific choices they made. Even the cinematography felt surprisingly clamped-down and unimaginative, with two of the scenes in the supposedly boundless Indian Country pretty obviously taking place in the same back corner of some sagey woodland, shot from opposite directions.

None of which is to say that this film shouldn’t be seen, since skipping it would deprive the film-lover of one of the great leading performances in recent memory in Hailey Steinfeld’s Matty Ross. Confronted with a script in which her character’s knee-jerk reliance on bookish repartee could easily have devolved into caricature, Steinfeld instead brings a warmth and multidimensionality to the role, contrasting the rigid dialogue with emotive gestures and child-like expression. The effect is to snap us back each time to Ross’ youthful status, galling us with our own parental instinct to see her delivered to safety, with or without the vengeance for which she’s traveled so dangerously far from home.

I began this review by confessing my admiration for the Coen brothers, and so at the end it seems fitting to acknowledge the trap that such admiration brings, in elevated expectations. The problem here isn’t that True Grit is not a good movie, as much as it is a good movie, crafted by virtuoso hands. And in a world cohabited by films like Inception and The Departed and The Day the Earth Stood Still, a good movie that could’ve been better is surely a good problem to have.

The Key Grip gives True Grit three bald heads out of five.

What's the Matter, Can't You Take a Joke?

2011-01-09T07:11:00.000-08:00

I don't enjoy writing about politics. During the run-up to the 2008 Presidential election I did rather a lot of it -- and a few people might have said that some of what I was producing wasn't all that bad -- but on very, very few of those occasions would I have described the activity as a labor of love. (Live-blogging the actual map on election night stands out as the exception that proves the rule, here, precisely because the topic about which I was writing was an exception that proves the rule: The good guys, on that night, were winning.)

Mostly the act of writing commentary about our present era from a perspective on the political left has felt less like a gleeful celebration of the promise of representative government being enjoined by an informed electorate -- and more like drawing the short-straw of trying to write a compelling narrative about a mismatched bowl game in which it is already understood that the entire coaching staff on the losing side will immediately be fired when the game is over. Except for the existence of high, occasionally life-and-death real-world stakes for the rest of us. Yes, that's more like it: A mis-matched football game, in which those of us seated in the stands have all wagered our lives' savings on the team everyone was predicting was going to lose before kickoff. We know how it's going to end, and it's going to end badly for almost everyone.

Indeed it is so not fun to write about politics from the left in this country that, on more than one occasion, it has actually given me chest-pains. I write about politics anyway because, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the idea of not writing about politics is often even more unbearable. January 9, 2011 is one of those times.

In case you've been living underwater since yesterday afternoon, one Gabrielle Giffords, along with twenty other people, was shot outside the entrance to a Tuscon-area supermarket. Ms. Giffords is the representative from the eighth congressional district of Arizona, and she was shot while meeting with constituents. Of the twenty other people shot, six were killed -- including a Federal judge and a nine year-old girl. Ms. Giffords herself was struck in the head and suffered a bullet wound that traveled all the way through her brain and exited the other side. Reports on her condition at this hour are still mixed: It appears likely that she will survive, though it is far less likely that she will ever truly recover. The alleged gunman is already in custody, after bystanders are reported to have tackled the individual as he attempted to re-load. The suspect's name is Jared Lee Loughner and he is twenty-two years old. After executing a search warrant into his home and automobile, law enforcement officials discovered an extensive collection of writings about the threat to freedom and democracy that is posed by excessive government control -- in language that could pass for the script of Glenn Beck's next radio broadcast.

Giffords has represented a Tuscon-area district that voted for McCain in 2008 and, after casting a vote in favor of the health insurance reform bill that past last year, won narrow reelection over a Tea-Party sponsored candidate in the 2010 midterms -- a juxtaposition that had not escaped the attention of highly placed and typically vitriolic opinion leaders on the black-hearted right. And here we come to the point of today's comment. It happens that Sarah Palin's political action committee, the SarahPalin PAC, recently published a map of the United States which targeted twenty congressmen and -women who fit the same political description as Ms. Giffords: Democrats who represented districts that had voted for McCain, and who subsequently voted in favor of health insurance reform. ...But when I say targeted, you see, I mean that the map in question actually placed gun sights over the areas of the country that these people represent. Let me just repeat that: Sarah Palin, folks, the woman who wants to be your next President, published a map that included gun sights drawn over the locations represented by nineteen other Democratic congresspeople, and Gabrielle Giffords.

As chilling as this is (and let no one attempt to suggest otherwise), it also serves as an excellent example of something else that too few people are talking about these days, it seems to me: the wave-of-the-hand dismissals that are being brought to such chains of causality by the right wing's rank and file. Having invested themselves in a world view that operates on an embrace of simplicity for the sake of itself, to an extent that a candidate for President can lose an election on the grounds of suggesting that he'd meet with people and have conversations before deciding, the Joe Everyman constituent on the political right does not now want to have that seductively vapid world view compromised by the obvious dot-connections between Sarah Palin's gun sights, and Gabrielle Giffords' gunshot wounds.

Forced to address the connection at all, they smirk their smug, bully-smirks, and ask you why you didn't realize that the Palin ad was intended to be taken as a joke. Far from serving as conclusive proof of the fulminating, pro-violence, anti-constructive agenda of the right, the linkage between Sarah's obviously (?) tongue-in-cheek map, and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, is instead proof somehow of your thin skin.

It wasn't that long ago that I was asked semi-publicly by a husband-and-wife duo how it was that I'd become so unreasonable when it comes to politics. This, you understand, from a couple with whom I'd once enjoyed a close friendship but who, in adulthood, have like so many other people surrendered all semblance of basic reason to the right wing hate machine's siren-song cocktail of xenophobic religious bigotry, fear-mongering about excessive government interference, and laughable disinformation dressed up as open-minded impartiality. Two weeks before the wife of this couple asked me how it is that I could have changed into someone so unreasonable in the years since we'd known each other, the husband in this couple had referred to Glenn Beck -- the man who said on his nationwide broadcast, "You know, I'm seriously thinking about killing Barack Obama" -- as a journalist.

Of course, if we've learned anything over the past two years it is that the country gains nothing through the engagement of such people. Inviting their preferred politicians to participate in the writing of important legislation, and incorporating their suggestions, only threatens the facile diorama if it is reported that way by their mass-market spokespeople of hate, and so it doesn't even get mentioned. Instead it's "Obamacare," and the people who voted for it in pro-McCain districts get to wear gun sights -- if not on their persons, then on the places where they live.

Few people with whom I've discussed this want to admit it, but if the countless Republican ideas that were incorporated into the eventual health-insurance reform bill were to have no beneficial impact on the rhetorical tone of the extreme right -- if the bill ultimately passed could, as a result, end up being a virtual carbon-copy of the one proposed in 1994 by The Heritage Foundation, in response to the proposals being advanced at that time by the Clinton Administration -- then really, folks, the notion that constructively engaging a pair of foam-at-the-mouth religious nut-jobs about the A-to-B connection between Palin's poster and the Giffords shooting is a fool's errand. It's contrary to the best instincts of those of us on the left, but it's also true: Informed debate with these people is now pointless.

What then remains? What remains is a renewed commitment to Democratic ideals (sparing the pointless compromise for some other epoch in which both sides are once again prepared to negotiate in good-faith), coupled with a far more proactive commitment to messaging both the accomplishments those ideals have produced, and the ghastliness of the alternative, to the supposedly undecided but actually there-for-the-taking independent vote. It's the subject for another column at this point, obviously, but personally I am of the opinion that independents were largely ignored during the first two years of the Obama Administration, in two important senses: The ridiculousness of the right's characterizations of the President's agenda were never proactively countered with equally effective messaging about the truth (an old story with Democrats in high places, alas), and the compromises being offered to that agenda were targeted at mollifying the hardened right, instead of being offered so as to sound reasonable to the people in the low-information middle. In the case of health insurance reform, this produced a bill that carries less appeal to them, with no upside for people like Gabrielle Giffords.

As painful as it may be, as against-type as it may be, Democrats are going to have to cede the idea of speaking to Republicans as if there were any room left in this country for earnest, good-faith dialogue about the issues of the day, because there isn't. Painting gun-sights on the home towns of elected officials is the conclusive evidence of this -- the in-this-case-literal smoking gun. But more to the point, a decision to let go of the time-honored tradition of one-way good faith on the part of Democrats will free those officials, and the messaging resources that have been wasted in the effort, to point out far more effectively and far more comprehensively to the low-information voters in the middle that the threat represented by handing-back power to the gun-wielding religious nuts on the other side is larger now than it has ever been in our country's history. In other words, the next time one of those swaggering bully fascists from the Drudge Report smirks at us and asks us, "What's the matter, can't you take a joke," the answer we give in response -- thinking first of Ms. Giffords and the long and arduous rehab that probably awaits her -- should be a resounding, "No."

Dave O'Gorman
"The Key Grip"
Gainesville, Florida

Movie Review: Fat Girl (A Ma Soeur) (2001)

2010-12-30T06:48:00.000-08:00

Since Catherine Breillat’s 1975 writer-director debut, A Real Young Girl, the recurring theme she’s been conspicuously single-minded about is the stripping of our hegemonic social morays, the better to confront us with them—especially when it comes to questions of feminine sexuality. So many of her films revolve around the emergent physical identities of adolescent girls on beachside holiday with their families that one cannot help but presume a certain measure of the autobiographical in her work—though, for Breillat’s sake as much as for our own lasting peace-of-mind as her audience, I certainly hope that storytelling craft has trumped historical accuracy in the resulting pictures. There is sexual assault in Breillat’s films, there is manipulation, there is incest. There is an occasional murder. In many of them our young female lead arrives at a disposition that we might charitably describe as unconventionally empowered.

All of her films are thus challenging to watch, but it is with Fat Girl that Breillat’s unflinching and slow-panning creative voice at last finds its tricky harmony with the difficult subject matter, resulting in a finished product that manages to be fully enthralling without feeling prurient, methodical without feeling labored, and, most importantly, tied-up with the red-ribbon of unexpected denouement that manages to be stunningly arresting without feeling stridently dissonant or gratuitous.

Reboux is Anais Pingot, a stout if not exactly morbidly obese twelve year-old, trapped in the resentful wake of her glamorous parents and even-more-glamorous fifteen year-old sister Elena, played by Roxanne Mesquida. As ever in Breillat’s films, the family hires a seaside villa in the south of France for the summer, whereupon Elena becomes infatuated with Fernando, a college-aged Spaniard played by Liburo DiRenzio.

In short order Anais finds herself stranded at the far side of the girls’ shared bedroom, thence to bear involuntary witness to every imaginable outlet for Elena-and-Fernando’s disequality of previous experience. The middle act of the film thus unfolds as an unnervingly passive-aggressive contretemps, with Elena’s displaced self-hatred by day followed abruptly by her saccharine and abruptly over-sentimental pleas for her little sister’s complicity at bedtime. We understand at a stroke that Elena is invoking a time-practiced spell on her sister to get what she wants, here: plucking Anais’ heartstrings like the access-code on an ATM. The scene in which Elena attempts to quiet Anais’ tears by force-feeding her, directly across the kitchen table from their impassive mother and father, is but the tamest specimen from this exquisitely and pitch-perfectly uncomfortable second act.

None of which is what gets people talking about this incredible movie and keeps them that way, of course: Rather it is that thunder-striking final vignette that crystallizes the manic, pissed-off genius of the director’s creative vision—an episode about which any more said would spoil the whole experience of the film. It is and forever will be, we understand at once, the event in Anais’ life that gathers all those voyeuristic wayposts into something far more obviously a journey—elevating the already memorable experience of the thing into the club of that rarest of ugly ducklings, the not-just technically, but emotionally superlative motion picture.

The Key Grip gives Fat Girl five bald heads, his highest rating.

Dave O'Gorman
(The Key Grip)
Gainesville, Florida

Equipment Review: The Denon DVD-2930ci

2010-12-23T09:47:00.000-08:00

If you've read a single AV-related post of mine, in any venue, then you know without my having to say so that the biggest problem-area in my system hasn't been the DVD-player. Neither has it been the amplifier, the television, the speakers, or the cabling. What it has been, is an inscrutable bug somewhere in my electrical system. I've installed dedicated lines, common-mode chokes, isolation transformers, even improvised additional AC-cord shielding using dryer duct. I've replaced speaker wires and interconnects and the romex in the wall. I've tried everything. Nothing has worked. Thwarted in my efforts to diagnose and solve the problem, I've resorted to more-or-less living with it: experimenting with different configurations in my rube-goldbergy power filtration scheme until the recurrence of the issue was reduced to acceptable, once-a-month levels.

I needed to say this right up-front today because it goes a long way to explaining how I ever got to meet the Denon DVD-2930ci in the first place: Were it not for this weird problem with my electricity (whatever it is), I'd still be the proudly contented owner of a Sony NS3100-ES that is now chugging away in the home of a close friend without incident. I would almost certainly still be the proudly contented owner of its bigger brother, the NS9100-ES -- had the same bizarre issue not compromised its performance in precisely the same way. As high-end machines for the enjoyment of conventional DVD's go, the Sonys are improbably hard to beat in nearly every respect. They do some things very well and other things better than any other player I've ever owned. But here's the thing: all the DVD-players I've ever owned, do at least some things better than any other player I've ever owned, and all of them have either immediately or eventually exhibited nagging issues that "forced" me into trying something else.

This, I believe, leaves me in an unusually advantageous position to comment on each one -- as if someone were telling you about his current tube amplifier after having worked his way through... well, all the others. The Denon DVD-2930ci, then, is the conventional DVD-player I review here because, after brief stops at Sony (the aforementioned 3100 and 9100, sequentially), Oppo (the 980H), Marantz (the DV-7001) and Pioneer (the DV-79 Avi), the Denon is the machine that I have "ended up with." At least until my house eats it.

Thinking Out of the Box

I bought my unit new-in-the-carton from an Ebay seller and straight away I was impressed with its compact, weighty build philosophy. The front faceplate is understated without being severe; the remote is thick and heavy and thoughtfully arrayed; the profile of the machine is low without going all the way to that awkwardly self-conscious, credit-cardy slim that seems to be so popular with so many vendors these days, but which always leaves me feeling like best practices are being sacrificed for trendy cosmetics that are sure to look as dated and silly ten years from now as the high-gloss silver chasses of the mid-seventies.

Rear-apron connectivity includes the predictable HDMI, optical and coaxial digital, and legacy video outputs, as well as both two- and five-channel analog audio ports -- the last of which is an absolute necessity in my rig, powered as it is by a discrete analog multichannel tube-integrated amp (the arrestingly good Dared DV-6C, about which much more anon). Connection was straightforward, though the needlessly close placement of the six multichannel audio sockets left me with the customary anxiety about having compromised the circuit integrity of the piece before I even got to play with it.

There is actually no really good reason for these sockets to be as close together as they tend to be on the rear aprons of home entertainment equipment: If you've had as many top covers off as I have, then you know that on the inboard side of these connections the circuits for each channel disperse to all corners of the board. Why, then, do I always have to wonder if my thicker-by-design RCA hozzles are cracking the shells of the interconnect hubs before I've even heard the first note of sound through each new machine? (I warn you not to respond casually: If you can answer that one, I'll next be asking you why control-W, which can easily be typed instead of shift-W, is the signal to my computer to discard fourteen pages of unsaved typing by closing my active fucking browser window. I digress.)

Life in Hell. Complete with Owners' Manual.

After connection, of course, the next step was to power-up the machine and put both myself and it through the aggrieved gauntlet of initial setup menus -- aided as usual by a badly written and needlessly over-stylized owners' manual. After the standard, excruciating preliminaries about what a power cord looks like and where to put the batteries in the remote control, the next four pages -- labeled "Making the initial settings" -- proved, on lengthy further review, to be nothing more than a fussy sub-table of contents (e.g., "HDMI Audio Setup: HDMI Speaker Setup: Channel Level: Test Tone: Front LCH: 19").

As ever in this maddening contemporary world of if-you-mind-this-happening-then-you-must-be-the-Unabomber, a simple and inexpensive beta-test of the usefulness and understandability of the manual would've saved me a far larger dose of frustration on the customer end of the bargain. Then again, I would seem to be the only person to have noticed that our most frequently-used piece of consumer electronics is also the one we can't try before we buy it, and once we do buy it we can't get rid of for two whole years at a time -- so I suppose when it comes to consumer advocacy I've got bigger fish to fry than clamoring for an occasional double-blind experiment to see if anybody can read their owners' manuals. Point being, of all the bad owners' manuals out there, the Denon DVD-2930ci's was one of the worst -- surpassed only in its technocratic inscrutability by that of the Sony's, and surpassed in pointlessly fussy layout by... well, nobody's, really.

Much ado about nothing? Yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't ya. So did I. It was only after I thought I'd completed the lengthy setup process that I realized that this particular frustration, in this particular instance, was anything but academic. Indeed the frustration I had with this particular manual would in the end very, very, very nearly result in my having to box the entire unit up and resell it:

The trouble began with the fact that, for reasons apparent only to the manufacturer, the Denon DVD-2930ci is shipped from the factory with the HDMI output completely disabled. This means that spending half an hour on your hands-and-knees, hooking everything up the way you have a half-dozen times before, will reward you with a rich, sprawling, fifty-inch-diagonal plasma screen of nuthin'. To turn on the HDMI output, it happens, you must re-read the entire manual twice -- once to verify that you haven't missed a conspicuous step on account of your own haste, and a second time to find, in four-point type, the words "Upon Purchase" next to the place on page twenty-nine where the manual describes how to toggle-off the only video output that anybody on the planet ever uses. Then, just to make an evening of it, you have to reason-out that "Upon Purchase" means that this setting is the factory default. As for just what was so terribly deficient about the term "factory default," or why it would occur to anyone, anywhere, that defaulting an upconverting DVD-player to output video that isn't upconverted, I won't presume to ask.

Moreover, the act of toggling the HDMI output to the common-sense "on" position isn't even available, after having invested all this time and frustration into discovering the problem there. Instead the user must choose between "HDMI-YCbCr" and "HDMI-RGB," a distinction that not only doesn't serve any technical necessity, but which I for one can't really seem to accept as factually possible. Correct me if I'm wrong about this, do, but it seems to me that component is component, RGB is RGB, and HDMI is -- well, HDMI. Not only have I never seen a user-option that would conflate two of these three formats together into some freakish human-centipede-wannabe like this, I don't actually get how such a selection is even supposed to be practicable, let alone decided-upon by the user.

The manual, of course, says absolutely nothing informative about the decision, but in this case at least the folks at Denon are in good company: All owners' manuals are bad these days, and all DVD-player manuals are bad in this very peculiar way. They all manage to take four pages explaining how to use patch cords to hook the thing to a TV and an amp, and ZERO pages explaining what the results would be if I toggle some third-level-sub-menu setting between "Linear-PCM" and "96kHz Direct," or some other inscrutable but ominously important-sounding gibberish. As is always the case, I ended up skipping the first eleven pages of the manual and then guessing about the only video-related setting that could even hypothetically make any difference. And there's no excuse for that, either.

Life in Hell. Complete with Owners' Manual. Part II.

If this had been where the Denon's setup hassle ended, the shame of this preposterous set of inside-baseball decisions on the design table would've redounded to the company's shame for a very long time indeed. But regrettably my colorful evening of grappling with this machine's frightfully bad user interfaces was only just beginning, as I noticed immediately when I started playing the first DVD and realized that I didn't have multichannel sound.

It happens that if you connect the DVD-2930ci via the multichannel analog audio outputs, and then slavishly follow every single step in the owners' manual for making this connection work, not only isn't there any sound output from the center and surround sockets, but the setup menus don't even allow the user to skate to the appropriate sub-page to fix the problem! Instead, when the user finds the option to adjust multichannel sound output, he attempts to scroll to that choice and discovers that it is "grey'ed": the remote just skates completely over the entire sub-menu and directly to a lower option called "compression." (Since that's something we all need more of in our audio these days, apparently. You know, I was just thinking that what I'd been really missing in my DVD sound, is more compression.)

It went on this way for the better part of two hours: I, in increasingly profane exasperation, consulting the manual again and again, then skating over the only sub-menu I wanted; the machine stoically responding with still more, non-downmixed, two-channel sound. For the length of a feature presentation, I tried switching and un-switching every other setting I could think of, then went back to the manual and re-read the same eleven passages for the eleventh time, then cursed loudly enough for the neighbors to cover their childrens' ears, then started all over again.

Finally, as a last resort before boxing the whole thing up and getting rid of it, I retreated to the friendly confines of the internet discussion fora -- there to discover that the exact-same problem had been exasperating a veritable can-can line of other would-be happy customers, over and over and over again, dating across the entire four-year history of this product's existence. And the thing is, some of their posts were completely un-responded, meaning they'd either figured out the solution on their own, or spent the entire period of time between then and now without analog mulitchannel sound from their analog-multichannel-capable DVD-player. Products in my particular household have been thrown against walls and stomped up and down on, for less.

It turns out that, *after* having (1) toggled the HDMI audio off, (2) toggled the sound from two-channel virtual surround to discrete multichannel, and (3) selected "direct" mode to disable the digital sound-output circuitry altogether, the customer must *THEN* switch the HDMI sound output (which has, you understand, already been utterly de-activated in three different ways, on three different setup screens) from multichannel to two-channel. You read that right, folks: Your completely dead HDMI sound signal has to be two-channel in order for your only live sound signal to be anything else, with this machine.

There is, I perhaps don't have to say, absolutely, no, reason, for this much trouble. If the analog output sockets were active by factory default, it wouldn't hurt a thing in the digital domain. And even if it did, toggling the HDMI sound to the off position (even once, much less three times), should surely be enough of an indication that the user expects to hear something through the analog connections.

More to the point, the owners' manual says *N*O*T*H*I*N*G* about this. I had to find out for myself, more-or-less completely by accident, by reading a dozen blind threads on different discussion boards until at last finding the solution, authored by someone else who discovered it completely by accident. But really, I shouldn't complain this much: After all, it had only taken me a total of four hours of slowly unraveling consumer satisfaction before I found a piece of information that could have appeared in boldface capital letters on the same page as the multichannel connection diagram. How silly of me to complain.

Impressions (Upon Emerging from Hell).

When I'd finally calmed down enough to actually play with it, the Denon DVD-2930ci exhibited several other interesting -- if less maddening -- quirks of personality that in total make it by far the most distinctive of the various models I've tried, from disc access to menus to picture to sound.

The spin-up time and time-to-menu-access of this machine are both noticeably unhurried (this, you understand, coming from a past and satisfied owner of the notoriously lethargic Sonys). On more than one occasion I inadvertently canceled my own instructions to the machine by hitting the same button twice on the remote, thinking I'd missed the infrared bulls' eye the first time. If the amateur review literature is any indication this bothers people far less easily agitated than myself, but my personal ace-in-the-hole in this instance is that, unlike most of the other things I've ranted on about in this cranky little trope, I don't actually give a shit about slow menu-access times. I've had such bad luck, on so many other fronts, that these days I'm pleasantly surprised when my disc media spins-up and plays *at* *all*. Indeed, pretentious as it may sound, I'm actually inclined to derive a certain vicarious, upper-crusty satisfaction from the wait -- as though seated in an expensive restaurant and in no hurry for the waiter to finish pouring the taste-sample of that Sauvignon Blanc he's just recommended. Still it should be said that long wait-times are frustrating for many would-be customers of this product, and I'd have to count myself among them if the wait were any longer than it is.

The HDMI video output, which I tried first at 720p YCrCb and then toggled to 720p RGB just to be sure, was surprisingly laid-back, almost muted-looking. For this, though, I had a fun and easy solution: I've always used the "cinema" presets on my Panasonic TH50 plasma, designed to suffuse the image in that faint hint of gauzy, cellulosy blush we've instinctually come to expect from our movie-going experience. But with past machines this effort has, unbeknownst to me, been actively canceled by those other players' tenacious insistence on bludgeoning every last black pixel until it has bled its last drop of black into the outlines of the figures on the screen.

The Sonys were particularly noteworthy in this regard: With the Panasonic set at all-neutral, the picture output from the 9100 was edgy-sharp to the point of being nerve-wracking; with the 3100 it was almost comically so. The Denon, it would seem, opts for a much quieter output philosophy -- the difference being analogous in some ways to that of the hyper-fidelity of every last microphonic detail emanating from McCormack or Linn or Bryston audio gear, on the one hand, vs. the more "musical" disposition of, let us say, Naim or YBA or McIntosh.

Had I not nulled-out the TV settings I would not have preferred the Denon's picture. But I did, and so I do. With the TV set at +13 sharpness (on a scale of -30 to +30), and +15 for picture (on the same scale), I found that the Denon could play nice on the tiniest details and still not distract me with that fatiguing, look-ma-no-hands vibe I'd always gotten from other high-end conventional DVD players.

The brightness, I should also mention, I left set at a jaw-droppingly-low minus-7. That's because this is the one and most-important trick to getting the most out of one's home-entertainment system: The factory-default brightness settings on TV's are preposterously too high, the better to compensate for the possibility that any one specimen ends up the floor-model in a seizure-inducingly over-lit retail showroom. Turn your brightness down as low as you can without having to strain to see the images in a day-for-night movie scene, and in the long-run your improvement in satisfaction will outstrip all but the most expensive of electronic upgrades. Everything about a home theater looks and feels better when the blacks are black.

What is the Frequency, Kenneth?

The counter-point to all this rosy, laid-back picture quality turns out to be the sound, which is as forward and intense as I'd be personally be able to tolerate. Adjusting the trim levels helped a little, but the catch here is that, as with several other players in its class, it is not possible to adjust the Front-Left and Front-Right trim below zero dB, so the only other choice is to over-rev the center- and surround channels and then turn the whole thing down at the amp -- yet another pointless design oversight that can easily (indeed almost has to) lead to distortion on particularly complex passages, especially when someone in the center of the frame is shouting over something noisy happening off to one side.

After about an hour of experimentation with several tricky source materials (the opening battle scene of Star Wars Episode III is an especially good pace-putter-througher), my summative impression was of a unit whose picture personality could be almost infinitely toyed and teased and prodded until everything was just so, and whose sound quality manifestly could not. Indeed if my Chirstmas wishes come true and I am granted both omnipotence and a time machine, then you make take it as read that, after murdering the team of pimply-faced twentysomethings who farted-out the instruction manual, the ability to trim the front channels below zero-dB is the first and perhaps only thing about this player that I would change. Then again, turning down the volume on my Dared DV-6C will also reduce the likelihood that Jim Salk suffers an unexplained, telepathic stroke, so I don't really consider this a major drawback, either. At least not yet. If the audio begins to sound brittle and fatiguing because of the higher levels, we'll only know that later. But it would be a pretty big problem with no fix.

And in This Corner....

As I said before, none of the high-end conventional DVD players I've owned have been without their curious foibles or their curious advantages. The Sonys took the cake on functionality by a factor too large to mention, mostly on account of one simple little thing that they do so much better than everyone else that it serves as a constant source of amazement to me that nobody has copied them: stored break-points. On a Sony-ES machine, one can remove the DVD from the player, place it back in a few days later -- even after having viewed other material -- and the machine will remember and resume playback at the precise moment where you stopped viewing the program. No other machine I've yet owned, including the Denon, can do this. They all store a break-point, but only if I don't open the tray. The instant I do, it's gone.

Curiously, the Sony is also the standard-bearer in backup compatibility -- a fact that would surprise anyone who's ever read ten sentences about Sony's relentless campaign to make it impossible for any of us to enjoy our source material, as a result of its shamelessly fascistic pursuit of an ever more-restrictive set of copy protection protocols, collectively called the DRM. By some bizarre logic, the same company that produces media I can't take with me anywhere, also produces the machines that will play any grunge-copied backup of some one-dollar Malaysian ripoff, without so much as hesitating at the dual layer-break. No other machines I've owned have come close in either of these two columns of the checklist.

But the Sonys, as previously mentioned, are harsh. They produce a harsh picture and, though the 9100 is better than the 3100 in this second regard, they both produce a harsh sound, as well. Some of this, it should be said, may be the result of a lack of double-blindness on the part of your intrepid reviewer: Sony products have to me *always* had an over-detaily, unsubtle, brittle feel to them, ranging from their at-the-time almost garishly crisp triniton line of TVs, to the TA series of audio separates, and back to their current generation of scalding-hot flat screens, I've always had the feeling that Sony's output philosophy was, if not too cute for its own good, then certainly too heavy-handed-technical, evoking recollections of the steak that Jeff Goldbloom ran through his teleporter in the 80s remake of The Fly: Everything's there except the only thing that matters, somehow. Yes, I've liked every single Sony product I've ever owned. But I've loved a grand-total of zero of them.

Worse, the mysterious problem I continue to have with my home electricity led to a bizarre side-effect in the Sony machines that has never reproduced itself with another machine in my house, or with either of my Sony's in their new homes. Periodically, and always at the same moments in the program material being played, the Sony's would issue this extremely shrill high-frequency "bang," a sort of CD-skip-on-steroids, leaving me to sit bolt upright for the next several minutes, waiting for the first symptoms of tweeter damage to manifest in my Songtowers. When this happened not just with personal backups but with retail copies of movies, I knew that the problem with the Sonys was serious and impossible to fix for as long as my house was doing whatever it does to everything I bring in here, and got rid of them. Neither unit has ever made the "bang" in its new home -- one of which is just a few blocks away.

The Marantz DV-7001, bless its heart, was fated to last less than a week -- either because of whatever is wrong here on Saturn-3, or because the particular used specimen I bought through Audiogon was defective from the get-go. At all events, the picture would work fine for about fifteen minutes at a time, then go completely black, and then, when it returned, would be all different shades of pink. Mind you, this player among all of them was the lone candidate for a suitable CD-audio-playback deck, richer and less textured than my beloved Arcam CD-23 but also (wait for it) more musical. But under such sub-optimal circumstances I don't think it would be fair to comment about the Marantz in further detail. Except perhaps to observe that this isn't the first time I've bought something with the Marantz logo and had it cease to function properly after a notably short period of time. Again, we might blame this on the house. We might not. I am increasingly resigned to the fact that we will probably never know.

Oppo certainly has a lot of friends in the amateur review literature, and it deserves them. After a nasty experience getting my 980H to play *any* of my personal backups without a bizarre and totally unacceptable herky-jerk, I wrote a scathing review of the experience and, *after* I'd done so, the company offered to buy the unit back from me for the full price that I had paid -- this despite the fact that I hadn't purchased it from them in the first place. They were classy about everything, and in hindsight it shames me that I tacked so hard-negative about my initial experiences with a scrappy little company that's doing a heck of a job competing with the big boys.

On retail DVD's, the tiny little Oppo clearly and easily stole the show, striking an improbably unceremonious balance between the razor-edged defiles of the Sony and the no-hurry-to-get-there Denon and Marantz. All of that being said, the initial experience doesn't disappear just because someone at the company was nice about getting you out of its consequences. If you own a lot of personal backups, and unless something big has changed in the three years since I owned an Oppo, you probably want to look elsewhere.

Which brings us to the Pioneer, a surprisingly terrific all-around unit from a company I haven't been able to take seriously since the first time I was invited over to a fellow high-school kid's room to listen to his rack system. Everything the DV-79 does, it does well, and that's not a small assortment of things. It's an adequate if not thrilling music machine; its access-speed and menu functionality are both well above average; it puts out a great and easily adjustable picture.

The problem I had with the Pioneer is that, while it does a lot of things well, it doesn't do any one thing better than the other machines I've tried. Its sound is great, but not as good as the Marantz. Its picture is great, but not as good as the Oppo. It plays personal backups better than the Oppo, but not as well as the Sony. And -- here's the thing -- the Denon, at least to me, at least so far, is slightly to significantly better in every single category, with the possible exception of access and menu times that, as I've said, I don't really care about, anyway.

So, Wait: You're Keeping the Denon?

In a word, yes.

The wildcard left un-discussed in all of this wasted bandwidth is that the DVD-player I use in my home entertainment system has to be grimly, almost preternaturally reliable, so as to spare me the cackling derision of the set of asshole friends I keep foolishly inviting over. Something stops working in the ordinary rig, the owner gets up from his chair and figures it out, no harm, no foul. Something stops working in my rig, I am savaged about it for *months*.

Well, if initial-but-still-scientific impressions are anything to go by, not even the Sonys measure-up to the Denon in this regard. My long first night of experimenting with this machine (once I could get it to work at all, ahem, ahem), was characterized by a stout, take-all-comer's vibe from the thing. In all the discs I tried, from all the sources, I couldn't get the Denon to skip, choke on a layer-break, *or* display any house-specific behavioral anomalies such as bangs or skips or (thank God) all-pink screens.

Might it be possible that this rush of satisfaction is attributable to the fact that, of all the players listed here, the Denon is the only one I purchased brand-new and received in a sealed box? Yes. Of course it is. And this admission, coming as it does at the very end of such a long and turgid write-up, must surely be taken into front-line consideration by anyone considering the purchase of one or more of these devices. Thing is, it's also the one attribute of this entire experience that I cannot go back in time and control. If I could, I'd probably start with buying a different house.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

System:
Denon DVD-2930ci DVD player (reviewed)
Arcam CD-23 CD-player
Dared DV-6C multichannel tube-hybrid integrated amplifier (review forthcoming)
Panasonic TH50PX60U plasma television (720p)
Salk Songtower QWT's, front left and right
Linn Trikan center channel
Totem Mite-T surrounds
Element Cable speaker wire
Control Audio CTRL-1 RF-shield-grounded interconnects
Signal Cable AC cords
DaleTech MI-1500 isolation transformer (for the amp)
AudioCircle DIY "Felix" common-mode choke (for the sources)
APC H-15 AC-line conditioner (for the TV)
Dedicated AC-line

Source Material:
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
No Country for Old Men
OldBoy
The Return
Night On Earth

A Few Minutes About Andy Rooney

2010-12-20T05:59:00.000-08:00

Over the past few days I've been engaged in a facebook discussion-thread about the ongoing usefulness (or not) of Andy Rooney and his weekly comment at the conclusion of Sixty Minutes. I of course had my own immediate thoughts on the subject, but the deeper the discussion went the more inclined I was to think a little more carefully, and to that extent a little more comprehensively, about the man, the career, and the present usefulness of both.

To begin with I read his Wikipedia page -- and found it significantly more interesting than Andy Rooney himself typically is, at least lately. Born on January 14th of 1919, he graduated from Colgate and was promptly and summarily drafted in the early summer of 1941, whence he became a correspondent for Stars and Stripes, and, the following year, one of the only six non-combatants to fly in the very first U.S. bombing raid over Germany. He has later admitted that he was in those days opposed to the U.S. involvement in World War Two (as were a lot of other people in the early stages -- most of them ironically Republicans, who used to be full-throated isolationists instead of hypocritically saving their xenophobic bigotry for neighbors a little closer to home).

The compelling bit here is that his view of the war apparently was changed by the sight of a concentration camp -- interesting because the camp in question would have to have been liberated, implying that many of the turgid and jingoistic pieces he'd written about our gallant fighting men would have to have been things he didn't himself believe. That he did it so well is the sort of cornerstone-of-reputation that many writers continue cashing with mediocre nonsense for the entire rest of their lives.

He was hired to work for CBS in 1949. That's not a typo. He's had the same employer -- at least in terms of the principal conduit for his celebrity -- since the early days of the Truman administration. That he thinks of himself primarily as a syndicated columnist and a television personality on the side, serves as a sort of "all-you-need-to-know" comment about the man's personality: proof on a sample of one of his peculiar and yet maddeningly simple formula for success, bringing a no-nonsense tone and diction to what would otherwise be a silly and pointless-sounding denial of anything he himself finds disingenuous or exasperating, from child-proof pill bottles to the nation's preference for weekly television comments over syndicated columns.

It is of course this unique recipe that, in earlier days, earned him such high regard from so many corners of the often fickle and ambiguous vox populi americanus. His "Three Minutes or So With Andy Rooney" was devised in 1978 as a summer break for the then-wildly-popular "Point/Counterpoint" segment that had always run at the end of Sixty Minutes, but Rooney's commentaries became such an instant smash-hit over those three months that he was granted the space on alternating weeks for the following season, and the season after that the network dropped Point/Counterpoint altogether.

In the years since, he has aimed the fire-hose of his withering lack of patience at everything from the burning city of our pointless and ginned-up invasion of Iraq ("Someone, I guess it's President Bush, has to tell us what we're doing there; I don't think any of us know"), to the burning building of scandalously under-engineered car bumpers ("these days car bumpers don't protect anything except the profit margins of automobile parts suppliers"), to the incense candle of the feminine preference for a shoulder bag ("does every woman in the world *really* need a small suitcase to carry around with her wherever she goes?").

My personal favorite segment of all the countless thousands he's done -- and nearly everyone you ask would have one, and nearly everyone's would be different from everyone else's -- was his eulogy for Harry Reasoner, after Reasoner had died of lung cancer. Yes, he waxed choky-hyperbolic: he ran a clip of a previous segment he'd done about the word superstar ("of the four regular correspondents at Sixty Minutes, two are and two aren't"), but the most affecting moment of the piece, and for me of Rooney's entire television career, was when he explained that Reasoner had already had one of his lungs removed from the consequences of smoking, and still could not bring himself to quit. And here, at least, the recipe he used to talk about how this made him feel was something a lot more familiar, at least to those of us who've lost someone close to us from smoking -- anger at the person for not quitting, mixed 2:3 with anger at the cigarette companies for designing a product it would be that impossible to quit.

In the years since, Rooney has committed several important and lasting transgressions against an evolving popular consciousness that he has seemed almost willfully incapable of evolving *with*. His first major kerfuffle came in 1990, when he lumped-in "too many homosexual unions" on a list of over-indulgences that could cause premature death. He was suspended without pay, more-or-less "of course," but the real tragedy for Rooney's legacy, if not his career, is that Sixty Minutes' ratings fell so far and so sharply that the network abruptly ended Rooney's suspension prematurely, thus arming the previously apolitical Rooney with a lack of circumspection about his unique capacity to hurt people with his words.

Since almost the very moment of his quietly sanctimonious reinstatement he has displayed an inability to sense when his own opinions are about to diverge far enough from the common norms of social discourse to cause a problem. In 1994 he complained bitterly that the death of Watergate mastermind and Cambodia-bomber Richard Nixon had somehow been "overshadowed" by the suicide of Nirvana lead-singer Kurt Cobain (even though Cobain's death had done no such thing, and even though, let's face it, it probably *should* have). Since then has mused that depression sufferers might benefit from swapping their copious remaining years of life for his less copious ones, and more recently said, about Major League baseball, "I know Babe Ruth and Lou Gherig; these days all the players seem to be named Rodriguez," the latter an especially difficult car-crash to watch him drive himself into, since this is after all the same man who in 1948 was arrested for sitting at the back of a segregated bus.

So, yes, it's easy to dismiss the man as a sore-headed, homophobic old coot with an enthrallingly comprehensive lack of empathy, precisely because that's what he's become in these last few years -- but he's also just about the only television commentator who went public with a total lack of concern over the Monica Lewinsky affair from the very beginning. He is also one of the few people at CBS who dared to point out that Dan Rather was reading what had been placed in front of him regarding the '04 Bush / National Guard scandal (and to that extent that the persons really responsible for crashing the bogus story had gotten off scot-free). His dispatch of Mel Gibson in re The Passion of the Christ is a pretty big deposit in the bank-of-good-faith, at least to me.

His atheism -- which is supposed to have come to light in 2008 -- has been utterly self-evident to those of us who've been retaining his comments on the subject over the years, dating at least as far back as an interview he did with Tim Russert in the mid-1990s, whereupon Russert asked Rooney what happens when we die and Rooney, without hesitation or fanfare, responded, "nothing." If anything has come to light more recently, it is his total lack of patience for the role of organized religion in polarizing a credulous public, again not without room for admiration on our parts. I guess the point here is that he still has a lot of friends. He deserves them.

All of that being said, he's also about to turn ninety-two years old, and, worse, he is one of a literally dying breed of great men for whom the signature event in their lives rendered them largely unable to put the past in the past and move on. And this, in the end, is the under-exposed angle of this matter: Not knowing who Kurt Cobain is, or why anyone should have wept at the news of his suicide, is if anything a poor barometer on just how out-of-touch a person in his situation can be. The man's not out-of-touch because he doesn't know who Kurt Cobain is; he's out of touch because, given not only his age but his peculiar experiences, he can these days be nothing else.

To try to give this a little perspective, I set out to make a list of all the things that have happened in this world just since Mr. Rooney turned thirty years old, in January of 1949, and which by that measure we might reasonably expect Rooney to think of in some way or other as "new." By the time I was done the list was even longer than this column, but here is just a smattering of the wide galaxy of human events that Rooney is left with no choice other than to think of as mere interrogatives in the broad arc of history.

The first Boeing 747 made its maiden flight when Andy Rooney was already forty-four years old. The first moon-landing happened when he was fifty. When the first Space Shuttle lifted off, Rooney was sixty-one, and when the Challenger exploded, he was sixty-seven. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched when Rooney was seventy-two, and by the time the Columbia disintegrated on reentry, he was eighty-three years old. JFK was shot in Dallas when Andy Rooney was nearing his forty-fifth birthday. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated when Rooney was forty-nine. When the Munich Olympics slayings took place, Rooney was fifty-three. The Jonestown massacre happened when he was fifty-six. Oklahoma City happened when he was seventy-three, and at the time of Columbine he was seventy-nine.

When Elvis Presley played the Ed Sullivan show, Andy Rooney was forty-four years old. Nixon's trip to China happened when Rooney was fifty-three, and the fall of Saigon happened when he was fifty-six. When the Cosby Show debuted, Rooney was sixty-five, and when the first episode of The Simpsons followed-suit, he was already seventy-four. Andy Rooney hasn't just lived, but can no doubt actively recollect, a world without wireless telephones, personal computers, battery-operated radios, imported Japanese cars, and even Interstate Highways. The high-bypass turbofan (jet) engine was perfected for commercial use when Rooney was already thirty-eight years old. When synthetic rubber came along, he was thirty-one. I could, it would seem, go on and on and on.

None of this is automatically to suggest that Rooney should be banished without further cause from his position near the pinnacle of popular comment. Or perhaps it is. Hegemonic rules of thumb, as Mr. Rooney himself knows only too well, have a nettlesome way of being also uncomfortably valid. (This is, after all, how they become hegemony in the first place.) The test then becomes whether the hegemonic rule in question is fair or not. Forcing blacks to sit at the back of a bus is unfair -- so much so that the hegemonic rule merits confrontation by protest, leading to arrest. But easing to the sidelines of opinion leadership a person whose own sense of the contemporary is irretrievably out of date is, alas, not. After all, for contemporary opinion leadership to function in society's best interests, it must first of all be *contemporary*.

This is the reason that Mr. Rooney must now resign or be gently excused from both his syndicated column and his segment at the end of Sixty Minutes -- not because of any particular thing he has said or admitted he fails to appreciate, but for all the things that his years alone prevent him from saying, or appreciating, that the rest of us need to hear from the hegemony-stripping curmudgeons who fill our Sunday evenings with thoughtful tropes about the absurdity of the world around us. When the curmudgeon himself becomes the absurd, it would seem, the spell is broken and the exercise no longer benefits the world being commented upon. And the sad truth that Rooney represents behind his hand-made desk is that years alone are enough to effect that very result.

Dave O'Gorman
"The Key Grip"
Gainesville, Florida.

2010 Is Not 1994. Unless it Is.

2010-04-12T06:15:00.000-07:00

There's lots of talk these days about some early indications of a coming bloodbath for the Democratic Party in the 2010 midterm elections, and a lot of that talk--somewhat understandably--involves parallels to 1994, when the party lost control of both houses of congress in the aftermath of a contentious battle to reform the health care system in this country. Just as many things are different this time, however: from the dearth of Democratic retirements (at least so far), to the absence of a Somalia-like misstep by the President on the foreign-policy side (at least so far), to the fact of his election by a popular majority of the country--a counter example to what most people don't remember was the original cassus belli the extreme right-wing brought to their hatred of Bill Clinton: In a plurality-take-all system at the state level, he'd comfortably amassed 270+ electoral votes while over six in every ten people were industriously voting for someone else. Not this time.

Most of all, there is the glaring difference that the Democrats this time actually *passed* their health insurance reform effort, and (somewhat less importantly when it comes to electoral strategies, I'm afraid) the bill they passed is a far more politically conservative effort than the one they failed to pass in '94, anyway. Indeed the gist of the thing--increased access to care through the establishment of exchanges, individual mandates, and regulation of the industry's capacity to deny coverage--were also the main talking-points of the counter-proposal to Clintoncare that had been authored by The Heritage Foundation in '93. Having just passed a Heritage Foundation look-alike, then, it would seem unlikely that the Democratic Party could be routed in November of '10 for dragging the country too far to the left. The parallels to '94, as I've been arguing in various political aggregator fora for weeks, simply aren't there. The Democrats should be a in a far, far stronger position than they were in April of 1994. But here's the thing: Because of these differences, they should also be in a far stronger position than they are, too.

There's no point raging at the dying of any light, of course, and raging against one that has been raged against since before I was born by everyone and Will Rogers, is doubly un-productive. But the position in which the Democrats now find themselves is really nothing short of stupefying. Everywhere I look, in fact, I cannot help but feel the uneasy sense that the Democrats are in the process of once again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The stimulus bill passed last spring (you remember, the one that was derided as socialist and profligate, yet consisted of over 50% tax cuts?) has begun to work after precisely the sort of time-lag predicted by professional economists, and the methodology behind it has been (once again) validated as a matter of settled paradigmatic fact, negating the willfully counterfactual drivel that has tumbled from the mouths of the Palinites regarding the supposedly ineffectual policies of the New Deal. That bill passed without a single a Republican vote, and now that they've spent a year poking holes in it on fallacious grounds as it continued to quietly do its work (while they dragged the health-care debate out to its maximum duration through Senate filibuster), the Republicans are brazenly now pivoting to a charge that the President has frittered-away time on a contentious health insurance fight instead of--get this!--concentrating on the economy.

The health insurance reform bill itself, meanwhile, does none of the things that were suggested it was going to do by the same people who called it socialist as well. And yet those people keep banging away about it as if they lived in a parallel universe. I recently found myself in a two-weeks-long flame war on Facebook with a friend-of-a-friend who insisted, over and over again, that the parallel to the '93 Heritage Foundation proposal was a delusional fantasy on my part, dismissing link after link as beneath his time to either read or counter-cite, on the basis of this bill's supposedly self-evident inconsistency with the guiding principles over at Heritage. And finally, when I found the link that truly settled the matter, he disappeared. There was no "well, it's not as similar as you make it out to be, Dave," no mealy-mouthed grumblings about how the circumstances were the difference, no faint about how Heritage was hoping their own bill wouldn't pass, or some-such: He just flat-out disappeared. There simply was no comeback. The bill we just got done passing, is, not, a socialist, takeover, of, the, health, care, system. Period. And still, in other venues, they keep at it.

All of this should make for some pretty strong Democratic bargaining leverage with the American people. Nobody likes it when a political movement turns shrill, and people especially don't like it when that negativism is inconsistent with the reality on the ground. Just ask Newt Gingerich, who predicted a sixty-seat Republican majority in the House after the Monica Lewinsky matter, and whose bitter slash-and-burn strategy about a matter that most people honestly didn't care about one way or the other very nearly lost the Republicans their control of the body, and did eventually cost him the Speakership.

So why isn't this 1998 all over again, instead of continuing--alarmingly--to poll like 1994? The equalizing factor is the same one it always is: While Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have been making policy and presuming the self-evidence of the lies being told by the other side, what they haven't been doing nearly as good a job of, is MESSAGING.

Tell some of the most incendiary trolls in political news sites that the stimulus was over 50% tax-cuts, and they scream denials back at you... until you post a link that proves it, and then they abruptly vanish for days at a time, and come back wanting to talk about something else. Tell some blow-hard facebook nobody who's used to spitting-out Glenn Beck nonsense that the Heritage Foundation proposed something not unlike what we just passed, and he embarrasses himself insisting that it isn't true until you've blugeoned him with so many references that he finally reads one of them... and abruptly vanishes, too. But in order for this to happen, you have to actually do some of this telling.

The elected Democrats in Washington, it would seem, are in the process of instead making the same mistake they always make when they're in power. They assume that the absurdity of the things being said about them is its own counter-argument, and they don't respond aggressively enough. George McGovern spoke about it not too long ago. The '72 Nixon campaign was saying things about McGovern that were so outrageous that the Democrats feared the charge of "stooping to their level" by responding, and chose not to. As a result of which (with a little bit of help from Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, of course), they got clobbered.

And this, folks, this is the alarming parallel to both 1972 and 1994. There are far too many smart people on the left who are assuming that the passage of the main component of their legislative agenda, and the absence of a plague of locusts descening instantly aftwerward, will serve as a de facto response to the gibberish nonsense still being spewed out by the Republicans. And in this country, as Democrats should know only too well, there is no such thing as a de facto response to gibberish nonsense. If Democrats continue to make the same mistake now that the health insurance reform bill has passed, they're going to have huge swathes of the country going to the polls in November believing that it's a socialist takeover of health-care, even though it already isn't, and they're going to get clobbered by the same boring, lying liars who've done it so many times before.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

Drunk on Power or Just Drunk?

2010-04-02T08:31:00.000-07:00

Alert and loyal reader Bill S. points out that the first sentence of my last post is pretty doggone silly. Next time, maybe one more proof-read?

That's all I've got right now, folks; you've earned the time off.

Oh, Nate, You Know I Love You, But We Have to Talk

2010-04-01T06:03:00.000-07:00

I would like to hope to like to think that my rivalry with Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com could be three things that it might today be something closer to zero of, at least the way I've conducted myself so far. I'd like to hope to like to think, specifically, that it could be respectful, jealousy-free, and constructive -- at least to the extent that it might elevate the quality of the work of at least one of us. Indeed it would appear that some of my blog commentators have missed the frequency with which I've said complimentary things about Mr. Silver and his site -- something I've done often. He deserves them.

But the current post on his site, penned under his by-line, is, well, just nutty, frankly.

The article, written by a guy whose credential as a political analyst was secured for all-time by using an elaborate and econometrically rigorous model to correctly predict forty-nine of fifty states in the 2008 Presidential election, argues that there is no proof of the widely savored rumor that the extreme right wing in this country is hurting its own cause by refusing to fill out its census forms. To prove this, Mr. Silver posts the current national average for already-returned forms at the top of a data-table -- about 50%, so far -- and then lists the return rates of all twenty-one states that have voted Republican in the three most recent Presidential elections. Some of these states, as he notes, have higher census return-rates than the national average; others have lower ones.

And then? Then, Mr. Silver -- who, let's face it, is self-evidently a better econometrician with a hangover, a migraine, and a concussion than I'll be on the best day of my life -- does a very, very, very curious thing: he averages the return-rates of all twenty-one of those states, with positively no regard to differences in their populations. And this, folks, this is supposed to be the smoking-gun proof that the red-state-refusal hypothesis is unfounded. To consider just how sloppy a statement this is on his part, one needs to know just which states are being over-represented in his average and which ones are being under-represented, and by how much. The July 2009 estimate for the population of Texas, for example, is 24,782,302. At a 44% response-rate to the census mailing, Texas is lagging 6% behind the national average -- considerably more than the population of an entire congressional district in this country, indeed closer to two district's worth. Arizona, meanwhile, was estimated in 2008 to have a population of 6,500,000 people, and is running at 48%, which means it's currently shorting itself by 130,000, which may not be a full congressional district's worth of people yet, but still ain't chicken-feed. Georgia, with a population estimate of 9,829,291 in July of 2009, is running 5% behind the national average, shorting itself 491,464 people, which happens to be inching right up to being as much as the entire population of Wyoming, which gets equally-weighted credit in Mr. Silver's analysis for being 3% ahead, as Georgia does for being as far behind as Wyoming's projected total.

In all Mr. Silver's analysis shows that the red states are actually running behind by a total of almost 1,500,000 people -- or roughly the entire populations of North and South Dakota put together.

And the thing is, folks, this is just a current "tally," it isn't even extrapolated to the mail-deadline.

Listen, I allowed a little too much personal envy of to cloud my discourse on the subject of what the very smart people over at FiveThirtyEight are accomplishing with their site -- especially when one considers that, first, it isn't a zero-sum game, and, second, even if it were, it can't be won by someone who takes a year off from playing -- and I got deservedly spanked for it. Mr. Silver and his team did a positively superlative job of covering the shocking absence of a McCain ground offensive during the 2008 campaign: it was a Peabody-worthy effort on their part, in the highest, grandest traditions of gumshoe journalism. Since then his coverage of the political strategies behind health insurance reform have been consistently incisive, often witty, and sometimes poignantly predictive of the drama's next chapter. He's a great writer, and a great economist. A pro in a world of hack amateurs, doing a peerless job of trying to keep the fractious liberal blogosphere on-task.

...But in an era in which every single statement of fact is carefully scrutinized by the (factless) other side for even the slightest hint of book-cooking, the fellow among us whose angle is nailing-down the numbers simply must be held to a higher standard than this most recent article. He knows better.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida.

The Even Bigger Republican Suicide to Come?

2010-03-28T06:25:00.000-07:00

A veritable mountain of mostly bizarre political news has transpired across this great country of ours in the year since my last political commentary. From the arresting spectacle of Sarah Palin's dazzlingly incoherent resignation speech, on the occasion of her inexplicable departure from the Alaska Governor's office, to the openly infuriating spectacle of a pro-life, pro-gun Senator from Montana placing himself in charge of framing the debate about health care reform. And though I've been as busy as ever with competing demands on my time, I'd be lying if I said that the reason for my silence through all of this was any more complicated than the absence of enough heart to face it all, in print.

Much of this past year I spent personally expecting the Obama Administration to finally abandon its efforts to pass a major health care bill, and then to reap the consequences of same at the polling stations in 2010 and, perhaps, even 2012. All of that is over now, thanks to three indefatigably persistent individuals -- without any of whose efforts the health insurance reform just passed would still be flopping its dorsal fins on a committee-room table in the bowels of the Senate somewhere. Perfect sense, really: A tough legislative effort with broad scope and sweeping consequences, teeters on the brink of dying a dozen times over, and is ultimately dragged across the finish line thanks to the dogged efforts of a tiny handful of people. Except for one small problem: The three people deserving of all the credit, in this instance, are Scott Brown, Jim Bunning, and Jim DeMint -- all of them, of course, Republicans.

Scott Brown.
The man who was told he had no chance whatsoever to rise from his lowly status as a first-term Massachusetts state senator and seize the United States Senate seat left vacant by the heartrendingly poignant passing of Ted Kennedy (on the very precipice of seeing his own lifelong dream finally fulfilled), ignored all the pundits who told him the state would never give Teddy's seat to a Republican, ignored all the fractious in-fighting attendant to a chronically minority party in a party-machine state, ignored the polls that showed him, at one juncture, over thirty points down to the Democratic nominee (state Attorney General Martha What-The-Christ-Was-Her-Name-Again-I've-Already-Forgotten), and, thanks to a season of Republican fear-mongering about the Democrats' sixty-seat majority and what they were doing with it, plus a few strategically placed gaffes on the part of Ms. Already-Forgotten, came from almost literally out of nowhere, and won -- bringing the always more-cohesive and message-disciplined Republicans to the crucial threshold of 41 seats, in the Senate.

Giddy with the delight of the legislative implications for this stunning upset, noted political columnists from the right-wing began openly chuckling, if not actually thumping their chests. On January 20th Fred Barnes wrote a piece for the Weekly Standard entitled, "The Health Care Bill is Dead." Toward the end of the piece, he wrote, "The health care bill, ObamaCare, is dead with not the slightest prospect of resurrection. Brown ran to be the 41st vote for filibuster and now he is just that. Democrats have talked up clever strategies to pass the bill in the Senate despite Brown, but they won’t fly."

Quite aside from the fact of Mr. Barnes' amusing inability to hyphenate compound verbs like "talked-up," there is the odd dissonance of Mr. Barnes having predicted the demise of something that had already passed both chambers of Congress -- albeit in very slightly different forms. Far from dead, in fact, the bill had received in Scott Brown's victory precisely the kind of this-or-nothing exigency without which it had been paper-cut to pieces by the gun-nut-Democrats on the center right, and the (equally wrong, by the way) FireDogLake crowd, on the extreme left. Brown's victory, and Mr. Barnes should have been comfortably smart enough to realize this, empowered Nancy Pelosi to go to her fractious left-flank and say, with unquestionable credibility, "If you don't vote for the Senate's admittedly more conservative version of the bill, there will be no bill."

Lacking such leverage on her part, we would still be talking about pushed-back deadlines for Mr. Obama's trip to Asia. The first round of thank you's, then, go to Scott Brown, for helping us get this deal done by changing the optics of the bill's end-game in a direction that allowed it to actually, conceivably, ever, actually, end. We were never going to get a Public Option with the way legislation gets made these days in Washington and, more to the point, it was never obvious exactly what holding-out for the Public Option was going to accomplish, anyway. Scott Brown took this Will-Rogers-no-organizaed-party bullshit and put it in proper perspective for the Will-Rogers-bullshitters. It slapped them hard across the face. They deserved it. But more to the point, it got the thing seriously rolling for the very first time.

Jim Bunning
Mr. Brown's victory in Massachusetts would of course have meant nothing if the hate-inflamed rhetoric of the Republicans in Washington hadn't gone a step too far (or was it about eighty yards too far?) in the personage of a certain Senator Jim Bunning. For those unfamiliar, Bunning is at the best of times a cranky and often overtly incoherent old coot -- even by Republican standards. A man who in this instance applied his consistently un-astute sense for political opportunism to the bad polling numbers for the health care bill, and came up with the brilliant idea of ignoring his own party leadership to launch a one-man filibuster against a completely different, popular, and macroeconomically essential jobs bill. The sound-bites arising from this bizarre decision looked temper-tantrum'y enough, even before Mr. Bunning threw a reporter off an elevator, called him some AM-radio names, and then, just for good measure, gave the reporter and his colleagues in the press corps the finger.

"The Republicans have chosen to give America the finger," came the immediate response from the suddenly clever Democratic message-machine. And it worked. Approval ratings for the Republicans in congress -- already lower than either their Democratic counterparts, or the President -- took the kind of nosedive usually reserved for fuel-starved Mesherschmitts over the forests of Belgium, and suddenly the most articulate and credible Democrats in Washington could appear un-conflicted on the Sunday talk-shows without fear of being painted as cartoon characters in their upcoming election campaigns. Meanwhile Mitch McConnell, who'd already previously tried to get Mr. Bunning not to seek reelection out of fear that his undiagnosed but self-evident dementia would inspire him to do something just this stupid, with just this lack of warning or sensitivity to the party's larger messaging, was left in the uncomfortable position of trying to explain why the senior senator from his own state doesn't want people to have jobs -- instead of explaining how a bill that mandates personal insurance coverage could possibly constitute "a government takeover of health care." The second round of thanks, then, goes to Mr. Bunning.

Jim DeMint
Once upon a time, before any of this -- before Max Baucus, before Joe Lieberman, before Bart Stupak -- there was an idea. A relatively tired idea, a relatively facile and one-dimensional idea, but in American politics these particular strikes against an idea are rarely deal-breakers. The idea in question was, "If we Republicans can defeat this health care bill, it will badly weaken this President in all the same ways that it badly weakened Bill Clinton in 1993 and '94." Lots of Republicans thought it, and lots of Republicans made the mistake of saying it, though goodness knows it didn't seem like a mistake to them at the time, since it played so well to the base of their own party, and anyway it seemed for so much of the last year like it was so inevitable, thanks to all the help they were getting from Baucus, Lieberman, Stupak, et. al.

No one was more vocal, or at least more memorably vocal, on this subject, than Jim DeMint. Speaking in mid-July to one of the numerous front-groups for the insurance lobby that had been ingeniously camouflaged to look like rank-and-file concerned citizens, this one cleverly called "Conservatives for Patients' Rights," Mr. DeMint said, "If we're able to stop him on this, it will be Obama's Waterloo. It will break him." In making such an incendiary and willfully counterproductive remark, a statement that at the time served only to further galvanize his own side, Jim DeMint equipped the President with the sort of in-case-of-emergency-break-glass argument he could use in those last, fateful meetings with the most persuadable but not yet persuaded members of his own congressional caucus: The Republicans would react to the bill's defeat with the same kind of schoolyard bully celebrations, and the same associated electoral momentum, as they had in '93-'94. And during the final few days leading up to last Sunday's House vote, the President argued just that. And it worked. Indeed it is fair to say that without this frame -- without this unforgettable incarnation of the argument that Republicans would fare so much better in the '10 midterms if the bill were to fail -- the critical handful of wavering Democrats in the House would surely have fallen the other way. The last, biggest round of thanks, then, goes to Jim DeMint.

Defeat
No sooner had the whip-count become evident than some of the more thoughtful and circumspect Republican columnists began to opine about the extent to which the GOP's all-in strategy to sink the bill had been suicide from the very beginning -- none more eloquently, or with more arresting consequences for himself, than former Bush speechwriter David Frum, who lamented that the party leadership had caved to its own extremist base, and whose reward for such provocative self-honesty was forced dismissal from his $100,000/year salary at a conservative Washington think-tank. "It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November," he wrote, chastening those from his own party who would celebrate the presentation of a legislative hammer with which to drive the nails of midterm messaging. "[B]y then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the health care bill will be reaching key voting blocs." But more to the point, he argued, "So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This health care bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for [this legislative defeat] now."

What made Mr. Frum's column so inflammatory to certain members of his own party is that in substance it argued that a better strategy for Republicans would have been one rooted in the original principles of shared-power governance, instead of holding the line on the kind of all-out obstructionism that has played so well to the grassroots donors who in these tough economic times have kept the conservative think-tanks solvent. "This time," he wrote, "when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none." The Republicans had been hoping for an Obama Waterloo, and what they got instead was their own Ardennes. Their own, extremist-fueled, under-powered counteroffensive that, through sheer force of numbers alone, was doomed to failure before the first shot was fired.

Implications
Frum's column has attracted the kind of viral attention it deserves among political junkies of all stripe, but the fact that Mr. Frum lost his job for saying what he said is of course the real story here -- in that it highlights the extent to which the extremists among them have hijacked the otherwise delicate and professional job of crafting platform strategy. It's a job for grown-ups, in the end, and when the fulminating partisans take it over with their checkbooks, disaster always follows. Just ask Walter Mondale. Just ask Barry Goldwater. Just ask George McGovern.

Today, after a generation of hate-wing radio and cable entertainment dressed as news, the people making the opinions that lead the future direction of the Republican party are the people who gave rise to all of this infrastructure of hatred by following the direction of the Republican party. It has gone from an institution whose talking-points are crafted by William Buckley, to an institution whose talking-points are being vetted, gong-show style, by folks like Sarah Palin. And just as David Frum has noted, it may still net them some small gains in the '10 midterms, but as a long-term strategy it has so far been nothing short of self-destructive. But the real sign of trouble for the Republicans is that now, with the extent of this extremist takeover now too deeply rooted in donor-dollars to easily undo, it will be next to impossible for the policy leaders in their midst to reverse course -- as evidenced by the self-evidently, jaw-droppingly bad idea of turning around, the moment health care finally passed, and immediately calling for its repeal.

The repeal agenda has the same exact superficial sexiness that the defeat-at-all-costs agenda had in the first place: It puts elected Republicans on friendly footing with the crazies writing the fifty-dollar-at-a-time checks. But it also has, if this is indeed possible, an even greater downside, insofar as the most attractive elements of the legislation are easily framed by Democrats as the targets of would-be repealers. Just look at this excerpt from an e-mail I recently received from the Florida Democratic Party, the trigger for which was the filing of a court case by current state Attorney General and Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum, contesting the individual mandate:

"...Bill McCollum isn't alone. Governor Charlie Crist and former Speaker Marco Rubio are also some of the loudest members of the repeal caucus of the Republican Party as they fight to appeal to extreme right-wing voters in their Senate primary. We know that McCollum, Crist, and Rubio are fighting to:

* Take away health coverage to 32 million Americans
* Re-open the Medicare Part D 'donut hole' for 565,000 Floridians
* Raise taxes on 216,000 small businesses in Florida.
* Allow millions of Florida children to be denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions

We need the resources to ensure all Floridians learn of their schemes...."

Notice how inconspicuous the word "repeal" is in there? No: The message the Democrats are going to run on in the fall is, "The Republicans want to take away coverage, raise taxes, and open a donut hole in Medicare." If the policy defeat the right-wing just suffered in Washington ended up being their own Ardennes, with this kind of framing the repeal effort will be their Iwo Jima. They will get absolutely clobbered if they allow this case to be made against them by continuing to push for repeal. The low-information set will hear about young people getting tossed off their parents' policies, denials of coverage for preexisting conditions, taxes, donut holes, and, by golly, by the time November comes around, half of those low-information voters will think the Republicans started the whole thing. And, most deliciously of all, at this point -- with the Frum dismissal as the canary tumbling from its perch -- it seems apparent that they have no other choice but to keep hammering this issue anyway, because the small-donor extremists simply won't let them quietly concede defeat, and move on.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

Renewed Call for Submissions (w/explanation)

2009-06-24T07:40:00.000-07:00

You may recall that I recently published a column in which I invited regular readers to submit their own movie reviews for inclusion in these pages. Well, it turns out that the e-mail address I was using for that purpose was set to forward to my old domain-name at the account I regularly use, and accordingly any such reviews have neither bounced nor showed up on my end. (I guess they go to Bermuda when that happens, or something.)

The problem has now been corrected and so I'd like to take this opportunity to once again invite regular readers to submit their own reviews, via e-mail, typing the words MOVIE REVIEW in the subject line and making sure to include whatever by-line they'd like me to use, at the top of the body of the message. Please type all reviews in the body of the message (no attachments), and please accept my apologies if you've already done all of this work once already.

Cheers.
-The Key Grip.

The Complete List In One Installment

2009-06-20T06:24:00.000-07:00

As previously discussed, my dear friend and unconditionally supportive colleague Richard Dickson has been chronicling our journey in bullet-list form. Here, then, is the complete list from 100 to 1, all together in one column. (Thanks, Richard!)

100. Bottle Rocket (1996). Wes Anderson.

99. The Sweet Hereafter (1997). Atom Egoyan.

98. Three Days of the Condor (1975). Sydney Pollack.

97. Ben Hur (1959). William Wyler.

96. Dirty Pretty Things (2002). Stephen Frears.

95. Rocky (1976). John Avildsen.

94. Sling Blade (1996). Billy Bob Thornton.

93. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). Sergio Leone.

92. The Station Agent (2003). Thomas McCarthy.

91. The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Jonathan Demme.

90. Das Boot (1981). Wolfgang Petersen.

89. The Verdict (1982). Sidney Lumet.

88. Citizen Kane (1941). Orson Welles.

87. Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989) Steven Soderburgh.

86. Mystic River (2003). Clint Eastwood.

85. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). Robert Altman.

84. Punch-Drunk Love (2002). Paul Thomas Anderson.

83. The Hunt for Red October (1990). John McTiernan.

82. Gozu (2003).Takashi Miike.

81. Good Will Hunting (1997). Gus Van Sandt.

80. Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Woody Allen.

79. Casino (1995). Martin Scorsese.

78. Scent of a Woman (1992). Martin Brest.

77. Trois Couleurs: Rouge (1994).Krzysztof Kieslowski.

76. Breaking the Waves (1996). Lars Von Trier.

75. Miller's Crossing (1990). Joel and Ethan Cohen.

74. Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Godfrey Reggio.

73. Crash (2004). Paul Haggis.

72. The Usual Suspects (1995). Bryan Singer.

71. Buffalo '66 (1998). Vincent Gallo.

70. Noi (2003). Dagur Kári.

69. High Noon (1952). Fred Zinnemann.

68. Mulholland Drive (2001). David Lynch.

67. Gone With the Wind (1939). Victor Fleming.

66. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). John Ford.

65. Gettysburg (1993). Ronald F. Maxwell.

64. The French Connection (1971). William Friedkin.

63. Lawrence of Arabia (1962). David Lean.

62. Casablanca (1942). Michael Curtiz.

61. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Irvin Kirshner.

60. Apocalypse Now (1979). Francis Ford Coppola. (Edit: Corrected editor's previous typo "Coppolapa." Argh.)

59. Last King of Scotland (2006). Kevin Macdonald.

58. Apollo 13 (1995). Ron Howard.

57. American Beauty (1999). Sam Mendes.

56. The 400 Blows (1959). Francois Truffaut.

55. Princess Mononoke (1997). Hayao Miazaki.

54. Airplane (1980). Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker.

53. 8-1/2 (1963). Frederico Felini.

52. To Kill a Mockingbid (1962). Robert Mulligan.

51. LA Confidential (1997). Curtis Hanson.

50. When We Were Kings (1996). Leon Gast.

49. Alien (1979). Ridley Scott.

48. Empire of the Sun (1987). Steven Spielberg.

47. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Milos Forman.

46. Remains of the Day (1993). Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (screenplay). James Ivory.

45. Time Out (2001). Laurent Catent.

44. M (1931). Fritz Lang.

43. Distant (2002). Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

42. The Godfather (1972). Francis Ford Coppola.

41. Songs From the Second Floor (2000). Roy Andersson.

40. The English Patient (1996). Anthony Minghella.

39. A Bridge Too Far (1977). Richard Attenborough.

38. Elephant (2003). Gus Van Sant.

37. Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005). Miranda July.

36. O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000). Joel and Ethan Coen.

35. Lost in Translation (2003). Sophia Coppola.

34. Ran (1985). Akira Kurosawa.

33. Stalker (1979). Andrei Tarkovsky.

32. Chinatown (1974). Roman Polanski.

31. Brazil (1985). Terry Gilliam.

30. The Lives of Others (2006). Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck.

29. The Conversation (1974). Francis Ford Coppola.

28. Saving Private Ryan (1998). Steven Spielberg.

27. Scenes From a Marriage (1973). Ingmar Bergman.

26. Michael Clayton (2007). Tony Gilroy.

25. Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001). Alfonso Cuaron.

24. Kitchen Stories (2003). Brent Hamer.

23. Forrest Gump (1994). Robert Zemeckis.

22. Catch Me if You Can (2002). Steven Spielberg.

21. Broken Flowers (2005). Jim Jarmusch.

20. Dr. Strangelove (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) (1964). Stanley Kubrick.

19. Yi Yi (A One and a Two) (2000). Edward Yang.

18. The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). Abbas Kiarostami.

17. Layer Cake (2005). Matthew Vaughn.

16. Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulin de Montmartre (2001). Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

15. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Ang Lee.

14. Trois Couleurs: Bleu (1993). Krzysztof Kieslowski.

13. Gerry (2002). Gus Van Sant.

12. City of God (2002). Fernando Mierelles.

11. Cast Away (2000). Robert Zemeckis.

10. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002). George Clooney.

9. What Time is it There? (2001). Tsai Ming-Liang.

8. Oldboy (2003). Chan-wook Park.

7. Fight Club (1999). David Fincher.

6. Snatch (2000). Guy Ritchie.

5. The Five Obstructions (2003). Lars Von Trier.

4. Unforgiven (1993). Clint Eastwood.

3. Pulp Fiction (1994). Quentin Tarantino.

2. The Return (2003). Andrei Zvyagintsev.

1. The Godfather, Part II (1974). Francis Ford Coppola.

Stay tuned for a guest column featuring someone else's complete (if un-numbered) list -- and some fresh reporting on a host of additional titles that your intrepid author has taken-in since the commencement of this project.

-The Key Grip.

At Long Last! The Five Greatest Films!

2009-06-17T15:51:00.000-07:00

Well here we are, folks: The five finest movies I've yet seen. I know it’s been a long wait; I hope it will have been worth it. Goodness knows it has been for me. And I know I've said it before, but the job of separating the titles on this list into classes like this was easily the hardest part of the entire project. For this last installment I’d hoped to end up with five—exactly five—titles without which I wouldn't be able to live in a hotel in Cambodia, and with which I could. The problem was all those other titles, running as far down the list as the twenties and thirties, that could just as easily have made the final-five.

I feel particularly bad that my "No, young American, you may only keep five" list does not include Snatch. Ditto Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Fight Club, What Time is it There, Old Boy, Cast Away, Amelie, The Lives of Others... you know what? I feel particularly bad that my only-keep-five list doesn't have every single other movie on the whole list. But Snatch was an especially difficult film to put sixth—perhaps the longest single hesitation I experienced over the entire span of the project.

As I look back over the entirety of this list, the temptation also to lament the absence of some specific title was always there, droning away in the background like an un-tuned radio playing at the back wall, though almost always this second form of unease was mitigated by the implicit need to pull something else off—the obvious self-check that keeps such an exercise from unraveling into a series of breathlessly announced revisions to the bottom twenty, over and over again. This being said, I do rather intensely wish that I’d found a spot in the eighties or nineties for Lars Von Trier’s dreamy, post-apocalyptic meditation on the perils of obsessive police-work, Element of Crime.

It is comfortably one of my hundred favorite movies, and by that measure alone, according to the ground-rules I’d set for myself in the first installment of this project, it should’ve been included. Moreover, it occupies a slightly different space from others of my favorite movies to have not made the list, e.g. The Way of the Gun, Defending Your Life, and Used Cars—films whose inclusion would’ve resulted in a complete-with-eye-roll dismissal of the whole compilation.

Element of Crime, as it happens, could easily have been defended as critically worthy; I only left it out (and this confession makes it unique, I think) because of how unanimous has been the negative reaction it’s garnered from family and friends. If Paths of Glory didn’t quite make the cut, I have credible, intellectually defensible reasons why other war movies and other Kubrick movies and other completely different movies belonged in front of it. The same sorts of things could be said about Fitzcarraldo. The same sorts of things could be said about The Passenger. The same sorts of things could be said about Go. But, really, Element of Crime should’ve held at least a low-level position on a list so pre-celebrated for its disavowal of peer pressure. It may well be my only regret, now that the project is over.

Fortunately things worked out in such a way that I am able to toss a pretty steep consolation prize to Lars Von Trier, without having had to explicitly compensate at all: the inclusion of another of his films—his third on our countdown—in the fifth-best-movie-of-all position. Without further ado, then, here are the Key Grip’s choices of the five greatest movies I’ve yet seen:

5. The Five Obstructions (2003). As an impressionable young man coming of age in the late 1960s, Lars Von Trier had occasion to view the celebrated short film of fellow Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth, The Perfect Human. And, as only happens to a fortunate few among us, Von Trier left the screening of that single, barely twenty-minute film, comfortable in the certainty with which he would be dedicating the rest of his life to filmmaking. There would be no careening from one silly project to another, no unfocused muddle from which he could claim status as a “late bloomer,” no squandered energy. Von Trier saw that scrappy little movie by Leth, and knew not just what he wanted to do, but who he was.

Naturally that kind of critical-moment influence conveys a pretty big debt of gratitude and so, when Von Trier arrived as a maestro filmmaker in his own right in the early 2000s, he set out to find his muse and inspiration—only to discover that Leth had undergone something not unlike a nervous breakdown several years earlier, quitting the European film scene and exiling himself to a rented villa in, of all places, downtown Port Au Prince. (One may imagine Von Trier’s facial expression on hearing the news: the pause, the dangled lower jaw, the averted stare, the open palm placed atop the head.) Clearly this kind of ending for Von Trier’s hero and de facto mentor wasn’t going to do at all.

Leveraging his own not inconsiderable clout to maximum effect, Von Trier persuaded a production company to finance the rounding-up of Leth for a series of five re-makes of The Perfect Human—each of them to be discussed in advance with the filmmaker in Von Trier’s shockingly austere and cluttered Zentropa flat, and each of them to be made in accordance with a set of restrictive guidelines (obstructions, if you will), conceived extemporaneously by Von Trier—as a means of stimulating Leth’s recently bored and undernourished artistic voice. Leth, to his credit, agrees.

The two men circle the real issue in their assorted meetings, of course, meandering through their discussions in a palpably strained ballet of light-hearted banter and sincere challenges, some of which lead right up to the ragged limit of words being exchanged—a fact that only heightens the pathos of the difficulties both men are facing: Leth to construct these re-makes without embarrassing himself; Von Trier to mentor his mentor without upsetting the delicate balance of professional admiration and differential authority that drives any cross-generational creative discourse. In each instance, the obstructions brainstormed by Von Trier are regarded as totally impracticable by Leth—in many instances the elder filmmaker literally refuses to abide by the conditions so articulated, at least at first—but of course this is the impossible-to-miss point of the whole thing, especially since each new version with which Leth returns to Zentropa is even more astonishing than the one before: The creative process abhors a vacuum.

This being said, Leth may hardly be blamed for his initial resistance to many of the ideas proposed by Von Trier—among them that he create a version of The Perfect Human in which no single shot is longer than twelve frames, or about a half a second. Other thrillingly sadistic notions to flit through Von Trier’s head during those artistic hazing rituals in his apartment include a requirement that all visuals be animated in some way, that the unanswerable questions posed in the original film must somehow be answered, anyway, and that Leth travel to the most horrific place he can imagine—then convey the horror of the place without actually showing it on-camera. At the conclusion of each meeting Leth adjourns shaking his head, convinced anew that the film cannot possibly be made, and at the beginning of the next meeting it turns out, somehow, that the aging and controversial Danish director has managed to outdo himself once again.

It’s overwrought to suggest this about most cinematic efforts, but it would be dishonest of me not to say right here in black-and-parchment that The Five Obstructions literally changed my life. Many of my finest pieces of writing, and those of the semi-formal writing group to which I belong, have flowed from an adaptation of Von Trier's and Leth's exercise. For one short-story I recently published I challenged myself to craft a full narrative from the first line of a randomly selected documentary transcript, and found myself trying to work a text out of the sentence, "There are seven empty beds in the room because seven of the people they brought here last week are already dead." In a recent group exercise, the circle to which I belong struggled to conjure individual tales from the line, “body of water.” In another, as yet un-published story of mine, I tried to evoke the imagery of various Chicago-area landmarks without actually setting any of the vignettes of the story at the landmarks in question, or perhaps even in Chicago at all. Another group project was inspired by the idea of standing in the shower thinking about the difference between Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker. Many of these efforts were the best work that the persons submitting them have ever shown in our circle. And all of it thanks, more or less directly, to The Five Obstructions.

That folks who watch the movie with me pick different favorite obstructions from mine is a fact that took me a long time to understand as something other than a challenge to my own expertise and my own creative intellect. And only now that I’ve typed that does it look like a pretty steep confession, but there it is: I have a favorite of the five obstructions, and, for a long time, when other people had other favorites it made me feel insecure. What was wrong with me, that I couldn’t see the flaws in my own choice? Nothing, as it turns out.

A roomful of five smart and creatively minded and bright-future-wearin’ glitterati (or, a roomful of four such people plus me) will result in five different choices for favorite obstruction, not in spite of our assorted creative insights, but because of them: Show a split-screen film in which there appears a briefcase with no explanation, crumpled money in someone’s hand with no explanation, and a long shot of the back of someone’s head as he gets off an elevator, with, no, explanation, and someone in the room will say, “that one didn’t do it for me,” and someone else will say, “ooh, it sure did it for me.” My friend Bill is drawn to the obstruction in which no shot may be longer than twelve frames, because under such a rubric only the most delicate brushstrokes are available with which to paint the whole story of the characters—and the resulting film becomes an exercise in economy. Me, on the other hand? Economy??? Not so much. No, I’m fine with not knowing the characters that well, as long as I get the chance to knit my brow over why we spent so much time watching the back of the briefcase-dude’s head. And never mind the fact that Leth, all on his own, was able to come up with all five of these, fabulously different, genuinely remarkable templates for our own creative voicing. Never mind that he's not just better than any one of us, but better than all five. Never mind that.

I haven't written much fiction lately, but whenever I'm tempted to try a band-new story from scratch, I always toss in my copy of The Five Obstructions and watch it with a legal pad and pencil in my hand—not for the inspiration to generate text, but for the inspiration to generate obstructions. And folks, if you can find a film that has had, and will continue to have, that kind of over-arching effect on an entirely separate sphere of your own life, make sure the film in question has a spot kept warm for it near the very top of your own list of the greatest movies you’ve ever seen; that’s all I’m saying.

4. Unforgiven (1993). Easily and un-controversially the greatest western ever made. Easily and un-controversially the greatest Clint Eastwood-directed movie. Easily and un-controversially the greatest Clint Eastwood-starring movie. And, to top it all off, one of the least allegorically circumscribed narratives in all of motion pictures—a movie in which bad guys come in all shapes and allegiances, and sympathy for a character manifestly does not guarantee that they will do the right thing when the critical moment arrives, or even that our sympathy for them will withstand the test. This, in a nutshell, is Unforgiven: the western so superlative that for well over a decade afterward the industry didn’t even try to produce another western; they just threw up their hands at the impossibility of following this act and gave up.

It’s a swan-song in more ways than just this, too—with its unflinching deconstruction of the bad-guy romanticism that had sustained the western ever since Eastwood himself first road a horse across an abandoned gravel quarry somewhere in northern Italy. There is no rightful vigilantism in this one, no senselessly murdered family to avenge, no crooked army captains to thwart as they pilfer gold from Spanish convents to finance the western campaign of the Civil War. No, this time the grim realities of the wild west come through loud and clear and unencumbered by our identification with some bloody-but-just cause. This time it’s all heavy lifting, from the unpleasant business of sleeping outdoors and riding horseback through a pelting rain, at one extreme, to the shocking self-realization that comes from taking the life of another human being for the first time, at the other.

Eastwood is William Munny, a reformed gunslinger whose wife has died, leaving him the sole and aging parent of two small children on a failing farm somewhere in the Midwest. When a prostitute is savagely attacked and scarred by ranch-hands in faraway Big Whiskey, her comrades pass the hat to raise a bounty for the lives of the culprits, and word of the reward eventually makes its way across the sea of grass to Munny’s mud-clogged stockyard—where he is trying in vain to separate pigs and mostly wallowing in filth when he gets the news. Matters aren’t so simple as a ride across the prairie to plug the bad-guys, though, since the bearer of this information is “The Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett), a young man who, despite having very obviously never engaged in any such exploits before, demands to be taken along and to split the dough.

After a series of vignettes (equal parts’ hilarious and stomach-sinking) in which Munny endeavors to re-learn his dormant outlaw skills, he prevails on The Kid to bring along Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), Munny’s lifelong sidekick and consigliare, and to trust Munny and Logan to make the big decisions of the venture despite having learned of the whole thing from him. The major obstacle in the trio’s quest now shifts focus from getting along and working together, to dealing with the no-firearms-allowed town of Big Whiskey and its cheerfully sadistic Sheriff, Little Bill (played by Gene Hackman, who’d turned down the same part when the script was shown to him by another director almost twenty years earlier).

At all events, the name of the game with this one is the fidelity with which it portrays things that heretofore have been defied for a set of values that they never really had. When Little Bill confronts a separate ad-answering gunslinger, English Bob (Richard Harris), and his sycophantic biographer (Saul Rubinek) we are to understand—at a stroke—that the real confrontation is between the eastern-establishment’s sophistry about the libertarian glamor of the lawless West, and the far baser and less poetically just reality they’ve been trying to deny. Is it any wonder, really, that Little Bill savagely beats English Bob (and tries to goad him into committing an action that would justify murder in self defense), or that the biographer who had heretofore taken every self-authored account of Bob’s exploits at his word is given a front-row seat, then left to wonder exactly who it is he’s been following around?

Meanwhile, in another daring choice, Munny, Logan and The Kid aren’t even in town for the brutal dispatch of English Bob, but are instead holed-up in a barn somewhere while Munny recovers from, of all things, the flu—contracted as the three men rode through bad weather to get there. In no other western I am aware of does the rival gunslinger receive his comeuppance while the “heroes” of the story aren’t even on the screen, and here once again we find ourselves not jarred by the inconsistency with previous examples, but welcomed home by the narrative’s far greater believability, just as we do throughout: from the fickle self-empowerment of the women, to the not entirely unsympathetic ranch-hands (who as they are stalked for assassination out at their ponderosa seem far less menacing—more like pathetic, really), to the surprising and box-challenging multi-dimensionality of the supposedly vicious lawman, whose own efforts to build a house from scratch have thus far resulted in something that would look far more comfortable at the dark end of a carnival midway. Even the regret that descends over our three outlaws as they carry out their grim business is noticeable after-the-fact for its near total absence from earlier pictures. “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man,” Munny tells The Kid. “You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.” An observation to which The Kid can only respond by getting drunker--as surely the rest of us would, too.

At every turn Eastwood’s directorial hand is laid in just the right folds, with just the right pressure, to strum the moral complexity and gritty hardships of the narrative without waxing so atonal that the resulting film is impossible to take. The soundtrack (much of it composed by Eastwood himself) plays the counterpoint to all of this anti-western messaging, delicately evoking Peckinpah and Leone with quietly sentimental passages, stinging the quiet ride across the prairie in classical guitar, while the landscape itself (actually eastern Alberta and not the American high plain) is scoped by cinematographer Jack N. Green with a conscious nod to the paradox in which these people have found themselves—a setting, and a life, both big and spacious and full of promise (dare we say, beautiful?), but by the very form and character of that spaciousness, also a gigantic prison of tightly bounded and unsympathetic choices.

In the end, as we know only too well must happen from the opening moments of the picture, Munny’s simple desire to keep his past in the past proves no match for the stark brutality of the circumstances he’s ridden himself into—and when that awareness comes to him with full force, in the shocking twist that befalls the later half of the film, we understand perhaps even before he does exactly what he will do about it, and why. “My name’s William Munny,” he calls down the dark and empty main street, “I’ve killed women; I’ve killed children. And now I’m gonna kill you.” Many, many westerns have tried for this very note, the rage-fueled if momentary disavowal of principle, at their big and bloody and carefully choreographed dénouements, but none of them—none, of, them—have ever hit it as right as this one. Three other films will score higher, but no other film is as perfectly universal to its own genre. You watch Unforgiven, you have seen all the westerns you need ever see.

3. Pulp Fiction (1994). When it was first released, Pulp Fiction’s assorted receptions among the people who saw it formed a stark dividing line—mostly across generations. People either loved this movie to the point of recommending it to strangers on street-corners, or hated it to the point of begging close family and friends to ignore the hype and do themselves a favor—and the two camps were to a first approximation the same size. Fifty years from now someone will make a similar observation about this astonishing work of undiluted genius, and folks aren’t going to believe it. Indeed they can scarcely be brought to believe it now, so total is the transformation that has been wrought—by this movie—on the very fabric and ground-rules of American pop culture.

Quentin Tarantino’s playfully fractured narrative about the lives and times of suburban LA’s seedy underbelly (“I hope Jimmy’s ass is home, ‘cause Marcellus doesn’t have any other partners in 818”) is wound as tight as a clock spring, yelp-inducingly violent, lush with profanity and coarse sexual innuendo, peppered with stars, and acted, framed, directed, and edited to within an ace of literal perfection—but none of these things are what make the experience. What makes the experience, and what makes it so sumptuously enthralling that I can’t go more than a few weeks without re-watching the picture, is Tarantino’s (fleeting?) gift for the hilarity of gangster-deadpan badinage, some of it only hilarious once the stunned shock of all that profanity and bloodshed can be shunted to a more desensitized sphere of consciousness.

“Ain’t nobody allowed to kill anyone in my store, except for me or Zed,” is but one example of the sort of line that, for some people, takes a second trip through the movie to thoroughly appreciate. “Oh, I’m sorry baby, I had to crash that Honda,” is another. “You have any idea what my father went through to get me that watch? I don’t have time to go into it right now, but it was a lot,” is a third. “You know what’s bothering me right now? It ain’t the coffee in my kitchen….” is a fourth. And I, like the IMDB quote page for this movie, could go on, and on, and on. Essentially every line of dialogue in the entire picture is spot-on, unforgettable, and its own little jewel of either comic hilarity, scalpel-like social comment, or both—to the extent that, these days, starting a scene from the movie among close friends will earn not the completion of the scene by those friends, but the laughter that should have followed from the scene’s completion, with the ten or twelve lines of dialogue in-between rendered utterly implicit. No movie since Caddyshack has enjoyed the same iconic durability of stand-alone reportage, and Pulp Fiction brings the added benefit of being an engrossing dramatic tale with happy- and unhappy ends for some of the least expected characters in it, to boot.

Tarantino has sworn repeatedly that his casting decisions have nothing to do with rescuing self-marooned acting careers, but if he’s lying as shamelessly as I think he is, the crowning achievement in his ability to confidently reach for the improbably out-of-circulation talent must surely be the choice of John Travolta as Vincent Vega—the short-fused and cynical bag-man for local heavy Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames), and the closest thing to a protagonist that this utterly fragmented saga will permit. Bouncing his coolly vicious menace off colleague Jules Winfield (Samuel L. Jackson), low-end supplier Lance (Eric Stoltz) and his wife Jody (Rosanna Arquette), Marsellus’ wife Mia (Uma Thurman), and one-man cleanup crew Winston Wolfe (Harvey Keitel), Travolta shows us with hair-raising understatement a casually homicidal lieutenant of the drugs-and-shady-dealings rackets, by turns newly arrived from Amsterdam, argumentative for argument’s sake, disinterested in thematic restaurants, adoring of his lovingly restored Mustang, reluctant to entertain the boss’ wife, an impeccable dancer, lamentably trigger-happy, un-self-consciously addicted to heroin, and, above all, ready to escalate any difference of opinion to the point of bloodshed, at the all but literal drop of a hat. ("Jules, you give that nimrod fifteen-hundred dollars, I'm gonna shoot him on general principle.")

Meanwhile Bruce Willis is Butch—the dive-agreeing and over-the-hill prize fighter whose father bequeathed a family heirloom to him from inside a Vietnamese POW camp (the aforementioned watch, delivered to Butch in childhood by fellow POW and captivity-survivor Cptn. Koons, played by Christopher Walken), but who when fight-night arrives decides to skip the dive and must then somehow beat it out of town with his helplessly naïve and doddering girlfriend Fabienne (Maria De Mederios). There is also the tale of would-be-café-hold-up artists Pumpkin and Honey-Bunny (Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer), whose chosen café to hold up is patronized at that very moment by a class of customer that will prove far more than the duo had quite bargained for (“I been through too much over this case already to just hand it over to your, dumb, ass”), of Jimmy (Tarantino), the unwilling host of a delicately tight-spotted Jules and Vincent (“When you two came pullin’ in here, did you notice a sign on my front yard that says ‘dead nigger storage’?”), and of Brett and Roger, the aspiring double-crossers, soon to experience the sum and substance of Jules’ bible-quoting wrath (“Hey you, flock-of-seagulls: wanna tell my man Vincent where the case is hidden?”).

Oh, there are also (second-viewing?) uproarious scenes involving near-fatal drug overdoses, twist-dancing contests, jokes that fell flat on pilot TV-shows (“some of them get picked and become television shows; some of them don’t get picked and become nothin’; she was on one of the ones that became nothin’”), a disquieting exposé into the goings-on in the basement of a Compton-vicinity pawn shop (“fetch me the gimp”), Julia Sweeny as the daughter of exurban LA’s car-crushing tycoon (“So, what’s with the outfits: are you two going to a volleyball game after this, or something?”), a poignantly unruffled exchange over the cleaning of a crime scene (“What the fuck am I doin’ on brain detail; you an’ me is switchin’!”), and on and on, through the night into the chill dawn air of such Tarantino-childhood stomping grounds as Redondo and Englewood and Toluca Lake. (“Where’s Toluca Lake?!?” “It’s just over the hill, man!!!”)

It may take more doing for some people than perhaps it should or would with other great films, but the fact remains: to have found Pulp Fiction’s peculiar rhythm of ghastly carnage and comedic timing is, as if in one of those shaft-of-light moments from other movies, to realize all at once just how brilliant and unique this movie really is. “I watched it again on your advice,” a friend of mine said to me a year or two after the film came out on video (a friend who’d told me how much he’d hated it the first time), “an’ normally yo’ ass would be as dead as fried fuckin’ chicken right now,” he continued. “But you happened to pull this shit while I’m in a transitional period.”

…And just like that I knew I’d scored another convert.

2. The Return (2003). Like so many of its own characters and the culture from whence they hail, Russian filmmaker Andrei Zvyagintsev's feature-length directorial debut is mystifying, deliberative, brooding and difficult. That which is not said is every bit as important as that which is; no one is any more or less honest than a particular situation suggests for itself; and grim dignity is held in the face of all comers, and at all costs. Make no mistake, please: this is. Not. A light-hearted picture.

In just the first of innumerable daring choices in this one, we join the lives of the two main characters—teenaged brothers Andrei and Ivan (Vladimir Garin and Ivan Dobronravov)—bang in the middle of what, in some other film, would be the defining plot-point: a challenge by the other kids of their seaside neighborhood to dive from the top of a navigation tower at the end of a long breakwater. Ivan, the younger of the two brothers, cannot muster the courage to jump but, in a moment that will hold dominion over much of what follows, also refuses to climb down and thus admit his failure. Instead, after long moments of increasing exasperation from Andrei, the elder brother departs with his friends, leaving Ivan crouched Indian-style on the floor of the platform. And there he will sit—disgruntled, intransigent, and utterly forsaken—until at last his mother climbs the ladder to beg him to come down, presumably several hours later.

As I said, this is the film’s opening. The following day, the two brothers are playing with some of the same riffraff and, after some hazing about the navigation tower, they decide to race home—whereupon they are greeted at the front door by their mother, who holds a silencing finger to her lips because their father is asleep. No big deal, presumably... but for the small problem that their father hasn’t been seen by any of these people for twelve years, and hadn’t announced that he was coming. Indeed the boys are so thunderstruck by this turn of events that they clamor to the attic to retrieve the only photograph they have, carefully scrutinizing it as a way of verifying that the person sleeping downstairs (Konstantin Lavronenko) really is him.

Without a first word of explanation for where he has been, why he has come back, or what his ongoing intentions might be, the father announces at the dinner table that he will be taking the two brothers on a fishing trip, and early the next morning bundles them into his car and drives off. The boys quickly discover that this version of their long-remembered father is curt, inexplicably ill-tempered, and implicitly authoritarian, but also prone to afford them numerous privileges (wine at the dinner table) that they have heretofore not had, as a result of which it doesn’t take long for the preexisting alliance between Andrei and Ivan to start to fray at the edges, with Andrei reveling in the attention of his long-absent male role model while the younger and less trusting Ivan continues to feed his own simmering unease.

We are meant to understand at some indeterminate point in their journey that the car ride to this fishing spot is taking far, far longer than it should—not least because the boys and their mother live at the sea—and that there seems about this older fellow a strangely specific purposefulness in reaching one particular spot in the vast immensity of interior Russia. Along the way they encounter wallet-stealing hoodlums, a stuck wheel, a pretty waitress, and an intermediate fishing spot that seems, to Ivan at least, perfectly serviceable. But at all events the driving source of tension inside that car is strictly coming from inside that car. “If he is our father, then why did he leave us?” Ivan asks Andrei in their tent on night at lights-out time, to which Andrei responds, stoically, “Get some sleep, squirt.”

Other movies to make this list have enormous turns-of-plot in them (Usual Suspects, Fight Club, Oldboy), and other movies to make this list are playfully un-answerable mysteries (just who did write the pink letter to Don Johnston in Broken Flowers? What was in that briefcase that Jules and Vincent had to retrieve?), but I know of no other movie that includes both such devices—let alone includes either one of them so seamlessly and so un-self-consciously. Moreover, the twist is the mystery—they inhabit a coincident space in the film’s universe, goading us in just that very special, stirring way that only a great unanswerable, Lady-or-the-Tiger mystery can, without the slightest hint of how the question will be posed, or when it’s being posed, almost until the final credits have started scrolling up the screen. The boys and their father will, in fact, make it to the chosen fishing spot their father had in mind for them all along, that much I can say. But they won’t all be fishing when they get there, they may not all be coming home, and not everything that will be suggested out there in the remotest reaches of the Russian countryside will ever be answered to the audience’s satisfaction.

So many people who've written about this film have made it a point to slip-in a mention or two of the word "Tarkovsky" that it feels to this author like something not a million miles from a burden on the young and cleverly self-empowered Zvyagintsev, especially since his work is so very different. Where Tarkovsky was always about long dialogues, Zvyagintsev is much more likely to be about long silences. Where Tarkovsky finds fascination in how light can turn to shadow, Zvyagintsev's chemistry is vastly more fluid: happy moments turn unhappy—and the other way 'round—with far less warning and none of Tarkovsky's signature finality. In a Tarkovsky film, when another character decides to hate you, you have a nemesis for life. In The Return, when another character decides to like you, you'd better cash it in right then and there.

Shooting with a total budget of less than $500,000, Zvyagintsev found himself having to milk each scene for what was there beneath the surface, rather than to splash the place with lots of film-burning expositions and evocative but difficult-to-compose wide-shots. Instead the film seems almost to whisper its truths to us—the quietly menacing score and the tightly circumscribed points of view telegraphing the need for full participation by the audience. Fortunately the acting talent makes this job easy on us, with a believability and a stirring personal edge that will leave even the most cynical student of the art form curling involuntarily against the armrest of his chair.

Interestingly, nearly all of The Return is shot with indoor lenses, despite taking place outdoors—rendering the entire picture in a suffused, icy-blue light that infects even the most innocuous of vignettes: a palpable, visual metaphor for the unresolved emotions with which the boys must grapple, oscillating between their need for this man and all that he represents, and their unadulterated fear of his unpredictability and strangeness. And always, the droning questions: Why did he leave; why has he come back? “Was it out of love,” Dobronravov muses in the trailer’s voice-over, “or to punish us? To teach us to be men? Or was it for some other reason?” You’ll have to watch for yourself to decide—and even then you probably won’t.

1. The Godfather, Part II (1974). I toyed with the idea of deferring the announcement of film-number-one for one more column. But then I remembered that one of my longest-suffering friends here in Gainesville predicted that this film would occupy our top slot when I uploaded the very first entry in the series—so to put it off any longer would’ve robbed the matter of any of its suspense, anyway, at least for him and the fellow readers he knows. Never mind: We’ve all waited long enough to talk about the single most amazing work of motion picture art that has ever, or will ever grace a screen.

The greatest movie ever made is, of all things, a sequel—the second chapter in the saga of the Corleone family, with flashbacks to the power-amassing glory days of a young Vito (played at top-of-his-career perfection by Robert De Niro) juxtaposed in just the right meter with the long and gritty descent into abject isolation that comes with son Michael’s (Al Pacino) assumption of absolute power. Populated by a galaxy of players too wide and with too many complex interrelationships and allegiances to exhaustively summarize here, The Godfather Part II is, in the end, a picture about the costs, in particular the self-poisoning influences, of a life spent at the pinnacle of organized crime: The constant fear for one’s own safety and that of one’s family, the periodic need to collaborate with odious adversaries to attain a larger objective, the careful management of the need for loyalty against the need to seem gracious and accommodating.

In Vito’s story, the execution of his father and older brother by the local mafia don in Corleone, Sicily, prompts the young boy to escape on a steamer to Ellis Island, from whence (after a customs’ official has committed the obliging mistake of swapping his home town for his surname) he eventually offs the don of Little Italy and, at a stroke, assumes the job of running the New York City underworld. Meanwhile in Michael’s story, resumed thirteen years after the chronology of the first film, the family has moved west to a sprawling compound on Lake Tahoe, there to oversee the transition of the Corleone empire from narcotics to gambling.

After celebrating the First Communion of his son, Michael and his wife Kay (Diane Keaton) survive an attempted hit, prompting Michael to leave the compound for safer surroundings—entrusting to consigliare Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) the well-being of those he must leave behind. Eventually Michael meets and chats-up one Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg), an unprepossessing but, make no mistake, Darth-Vader-powerful crime boss in his own right, to work out the terms of a partner-sharing arrangement that will see Roth turning a blind eye to Michael’s penetration of Las Vegas and Havana, in return for a share of the proceeds. While in Havana, however, Michael begins to doubt the permanence of the Battista regime against the insurgent communist guerrillas, and demurs on the making of any lasting commitment to the sprawling nightclub scene that defined Cuba’s capital city in the late 1950s.

At precisely the same moment as the old regime is being overrun in its own city, Michael pulls just a little too hard on the thread of that leftover question of who’d been trying to kill him in Tahoe, discovering in the process that he has been betrayed by his own brother, Fredo (John Cazale), who ultimately confesses that Roth is still trying to destroy Michael by having him scapegoated as the principal target in a US-Senate crackdown on organized crime. Having bought a Nevada Senator by implicating him in the death of a prostitute, and with the benefit of Fredo’s tips, Michael is able to sidestep the investigation—thanks in no small part to Tom Hagen’s discovery that the star witness against them, Frank Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo), has a brother living in Sicily, whom Hagen brings unexpectedly to the hearing room on the day that Pentangeli is supposed to finger the don.

But the magic of the film comes when, with all the principal threats to his safety and livelihood now effectively neutralized, Michael finds himself unable to exhale a much-deserved sigh of relief, instead choosing to exact ever crueler and ever more calculated reparations from those who have wronged him to lesser and lesser degrees—from Pentangeli, whom Hagen convinces to commit suicide in the bathtub of his safe-house, to Michael’s wife Kay (unforgiven and un-divorced, after admitting to Michael that she’d gotten an abortion while he was in hiding), to none other than Hyman Roth himself, whom Michael dispatches his capo to shoot and kill upon his return to the United States, despite the fact that Roth is dying, about to go to prison, and will be heavily guarded and almost impossible to kill. “Mike,” Tom Hagen implores, “it’d be like trying to kill the President.” And then, after a pause, “You’ve won, Mike; do you wanna wipe everybody out?” A question to which Michael, staring straight ahead—perhaps no longer even sure of the loyalty of Hagen himself--replies, “No, Tom. Not everyone. Just my enemies.”

The denouement that occurs at the conclusion of the picture is at once eerily evocative of the one that concludes its predecessor, and yet utterly un-self-conscious and sincere, too: yes, the resolutions of the two films follow the same track; no we aren’t bothered in the least by this fact, since this particular resolution is the only one to which such characters, leading such lives, can channel their own narratives. Indeed not a single element of this enormous, heaving, 200-minute odyssey calls even the slightest attention to itself, from the exquisitely self-alienating opulence of the Corleone compound, to Carmine Coppola’s palpably menacing score, to the selfless contributions of a cavalcade of A-list Hollywood acting talent, many of whom had no choice but to shelve their own typically scene-stealing personas to play both literal and figurative underlings to Michael and Vito, as we switch back and forth between their parallel rises to the pinnacle of their family profession. Perhaps not surprisingly, a whopping four separate actors were nominated for supporting-role Oscars (with De Niro winning in what may yet be the least suspenseful envelope-opening ceremony in the history of the sport), and the film itself waltzed away from the 1975 proceedings with nods for Best Picture, Best Director (Francis Ford Coppola), Best Screenplay (Coppola again), Best Score (another Coppola), and Best Set Decoration (Tavoilaris, Graham and Nelson).

But for all its arresting size and sweeping scope, The Godfather Part II is, in the end, a “family portrait” picture, albeit the most atypically mesmerizing family portrait ever conceived. Michael is a big man with big reach and big ideas for how to use it, yes, but what makes people like him, we gather through the seemingly effortless storytelling craft of Puzo’s novel and Coppola’s adaptation, is the interactions he carries out within the family: The petty grievances, the wayward siblings, the dejected head-shake at the news that a sister will be marrying someone of low character, the lifelong adherence to doing what’s right by those with whom he shares blood. I mean, let’s face it: They don’t call these outfits “mafia” (literally, “my family”) for nothing.

Along the way to this point I was tempted to drop-in several whole scenes from the various films we've been discussing, courtesy of YouTube, and nearly always thought the better of it. The films must stand as complete works, for one thing, and it's unfair to the director's vision for another--like eating the icing off the top of a chocolate cake and throwing the rest of the cake away. But here, at the end of our long and amazing ride, I must make an exception to include a link to what is, beyond a shadow of doubt, the single most powerful and affecting scene in the history of motion pictures. On the commentary track Coppola says that they hadn't even expected it to snow. Well, I guess that only proves that this is obviously God's favorite movie, too.

...And, just like that, we have reached the end of our long and exciting journey through the Key Grip’s choices of the hundred greatest movies of all time. Just like that, it's over.

This project would not have been possible without the encouragement of several local friends and non-local well-wishers, and for that I am truly grateful. I hope that those who’ve been cheering all of this on don’t feel either swindled by any lack of critical heft to the final entries, or let down by the meandering prose, either one. Goodness knows the whole thing would’ve been impossible to finish without the benefit of a constant awareness that someone out there was logging-in to check for a next installment.

Special thanks are due to a certain Michael Patterson and his wife Gretchen who, on the occasion of a visit to the part of south Florida where I was living at the time, asked me what my favorite movie was and, to their immense and enduring credit, didn’t laugh me out of my own car when I said Apollo-13. (Though, really, Apollo-13 is still a pretty fucking-good movie, people.)

Special thanks also to Bill Stephenson, whose embrace of the entire exercise included several unilateral mentions of where things stood in general, and of how many of the listed movies he had- and had not seen, in particular. Ditto Richard Dickson, who has not had as many occasions to comment face-to-face, but who’s been dutifully chronicling the list, sans commentary, for eventual bullet-pointing in some future column. My mother, naturally, has spent long- or short segments of every morning for a month, either scanning in vain for the next chapter along our journey, or devouring every last word (and somehow missing the fact that on many occasions fifty or sixty of them at a time came rushing straight at her without a period to break them up).

I hope that some among my few remaining readers will take it upon themselves to contribute a review or two of their own—not just because I think it would be a lot of fun to upload someone else’s thoughts about some other movie that escaped mention in these columns, but also because the movie in question may well be something that I myself have not yet seen. Just send me an e-mail with the review typed into the body of the message, and I’ll be tickled indoor-lenses-blue to publish it, here.

Above all, thanks for reading: Thanks for commenting; thanks for wondering what’s next; thanks for sharing this experience with me even in some small and un-perceived way. It’s been a hell of a month, sitting here on this end, thinking more-or-less continually about all my favorite movies. It’s been thrilling, at times more than a little daunting, sometimes downright scary. But we’ve made it through at last.

…Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go watch all hundred of these flicks again, back-to-back, and then go to bed for about a year.

Dave O’Gorman
(“The Key Grip”)
Gainesville, Florida

The 100 Greatest Movies (Part Twelve: Films 6-10)

2009-06-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

It's been the thick-end of a month (what am I saying; it's been a month) since we started down this path together, and frankly I'm not sure exactly when the lightning struck the monster's EKG leads and it began walking around the lab and smashing the furniture. I suppose something not unlike an apology is in order: I never imagined that the task of listing, and speaking briefly about, my so-far hundred favorite movies, would've taken this much time or this much bandwidth. On the other hand, how many aspiring writers get to have this much fun without buying a single stamp?

But enough of self-reflection and self-aggrandizement; we've waited too long already. Here are the Key Grip's choices of the sixth- through tenth greatest movies he's yet seen.

10. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002). Not all that long ago I printed out the full inventory of my movie collection -- in about five-point type, mind you -- and handed it to a friend of mine with the directive of reading the entire list, column-by-column, and returning it to me with a supplemental list of films that were "missing" from it. And you know, I might have said here that the very definition of a true friend is someone who would actually do such a thing, but no, really the very definition of a true friend is someone who would even feign doing it: someone who would accept the printout from you and not laugh in your face at the very suggestion. To then turn around, less than two weeks later, and return a list with over two hundred thoughtfully considered additions written on the backs of the pages, is nothing short of unforgettable. Never mind the fact that he still hasn't paid me for a really nice pair of speakers that started out belonging to me and which are now mounted in matching recesses in his living room.

I mention all of this because of something even more special that happened as a result: Having assembled his list of suggestions using pen-and-paper, my friend had left the top-left space on the first page of his ideas, blank. When I asked him what the blank was doing there he explained that all the myriad titles that had popped into his head as he pored over my inventory had one crucial thing in common -- namely that they weren't the, single, solitary, "Oh my God, you have to watch this one right now" movie that, by itself, would justify the entire exercise. So we put the list down between us and talked it over. For the next three hours we sat together in his living room, thinking about movies, drinking his scotch and petting his dogs and eating his cheeses and listening to my speakers.

We talked about different directors, different genres, different countries, different epochs, until at one, otherwise unremarkable moment in the discussion, I said of a particular picture, "Oh, I watched that one twice in a row" (meaning that I'd watched it, taken a day or two off from movie-watching, and then watched that same title again). It was at this moment that my friend snatched-up his list and, in that coveted, top-left spot, wrote the words, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. "It's the only movie I've ever watched," he explained, "that, as soon as it was over, I let the credits roll all the way through, and when the DVD went back to the menu I just pushed 'play' and watched the whole thing all over again without getting up."

And now so it is for me, too.

In this, George Clooney's directorial debut, Sam Rockwell is Chuck Barris -- yes, that Chuck Barris -- playing absolutely straight the bizarrely implausible double-existence that Barris claims, in his "unauthorized biography," to have been living for most of his adult life. For it is Barris' assertion that, while he was busy inventing and producing (and eventually hosting) game shows, he made ends meet by moonlighting as a contract killer for the CIA. You read that right, folks: The creative "genius" behind The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, The Dollar-Ninety-Eight Beauty Pagent, and The Gong Show, claims steadfastly to have spent much of that same era doing wet-work in foreign fields for the United States government.

That Rockwell plays the part with full-immersion deadpan is only part of the magic of the picture, though it is certainly a big part -- pulling us down into the nefarious underworld of the international assassin by at first himself disbelieving the sagacity of his would-be recruiter Jim Byrd (played by Clooney), and thus setting for the film the marker against which our own disbelief can be checked and pruned and nurtured into something like acceptance, right along with him. No, we think to ourselves, this isn't really happening; this is too unbelievable. And then we look at Rockwell's face, and in it we see Barris, thinking, "No, this isn't really happening; this is too unbelievable." After which, of course, we'll believe anything that Goerge Clooney wants us to.

As I said, this is only part of the film's success: What Rockwell can't carry on his own and must instead defer to Clooney's implicit brilliance, is the enormity of the transition in American pop culture and her place in international affairs that was unfolding at the same time as all of this personal-level intrigue. And Clooney, for his part, delivers with just the sort of confidently understated discourse for which he's become so famous as an actor -- from intentionally black-and-white footage of a Sputnik-era Rockwell, riding shotgun on American Bandstand (to be sure that Dick Clark didn't take payola), through the momentarily speechless surprise on the part of a Vietnam-era Rockwell who returns from a hit-job to find that his girlfriend has painted the walls of their apartment in sunflowers and moonbeams, to the matter-of-fact cutaway shot of a Rockwell screening a pool of late-seventies game-show contestants, in a corduroy leisure suit.

The ensemble of cleverly off-kilter fellow assasins only further enhances the picture's credibility, since it is implicitly so much easier to believe that the flawed and unbusinesslike Barris might fit-in with their roguish likes. There is Olivia (Julia Roberts), a gorgeous and anally fixated quoter of Chauser, and then there is Keeler (Rutger Hauer), a German-born wash-out who insists that Barris take photographs of him in the act of making all his hits and who, in one improv moment that got the cast and crew laughing so hard they had to wrap for the day, orders "a green salad, no dressing" in a restaurant. Meanwhile Chuck's "daytime" life as a game show producer is circumscribed by his sixties-esque antimarriage to Penny (Drew Barrymore), who loves Chuck too much to quit the explicitly non-commital relationship that she'd first suggested on the occasion of their decision to live together.

Charlie Kauffman's unusually linear and non-cutsey screenplay is intensely aware, before all else, of the gentle stripping-away of Barris' shock, both at the unanticipated success of his game-show-producer life, and at the unanticipated aplomb with which he dispatches his iron-curtain targets when the TV-cameras aren't looking. Before our very eyes Barris progresses from someone horrified to the point of nervous, toss-off joksterism at the idea of killing another human being, to someone who's not only good at it but seems in fact to revel in it; from someone leaping up and down for joy at ABC's decision to buy a single season of The Dating Game, to a gum-chomping, sunglass-wearing, half-a-pitch-ought-to-be-enough Hollywood television producer.

Of course, as Kauffman seems to know from personal experience (and to come back to repeatedly in his various involvements in assorted films), it is only when these veils of improbability are lifted from our acceptance of a situation that things can begin to truly go wrong. For Barris, this will mean not just life-threatening intrigue and the prospect of on-air self-humiliation, but a crisis climax in his never-healthy relationships with Penny and his long-deceased mother, to boot.

That there is room for so much in this picture without the finished product feeling busy or cluttered or unresolved is a testimant to Clooney's previously untried directorial instincts. In Barris' surreal and madcap game-show life there is comedy in abundance, some of it the kind of funny we don't often associate even with comedies, and yet there is also room for an improbably incisive comment about the dirtiness and fickle fortunes of the business, too. When Barris is confronted for his lowest-common-denominator opportunism at the Playboy mansion by one of the bunnies, we sense not the hilarious irony of the situation -- the sort of easy-way-out that a less confident director making his first movie would have chosen -- but instead Barris' private self-doubt, and with it the extent to which the bunny's criticism hits him below the belt. There is room, in other words, for us to embrace Barris as not just a charismatic and entertaining figure, but also as a sympathetic one: a fact the film exploits to maximum leverage when his moonlight world starts to go very, very wrong.

In an even more ambitious decision for a first picture, all of Clooney's visual effects are handled "in camera," meaning that there are no CG or cutaways or any other devices that would enable the cast to do what's happening on the screen without actually doing it. Instead they must, somehow, do it all. When Barris steps out of line at an NBC studio tour and, a breathless moment or two later appears from the oppsite side of the screen as a tour guide -- complete with the appropriate attire for the job -- that isn't some neato pixel-based card trick being pulled in some dimly lit office in Sedona ten weeks after principal photography. Oh, no: That's Sam Rockwell, rushing behind the backdrop to frantically change costumes and still arrive at the opposite wing in time to hit his mark. When Barris is listening to Penny describe the torture of listening to a jabbering date, and then the camera pulls back to reveal him pitching The Dating game to a roomful of television executives, without a cutaway, the whole effect is handled on a turntable, together with just a little inventive use of line-of-sight misdirect, wide- and tight angles, and a clever pot-down of the production sound at just the right moment to conceal the cast's instant switcheroo. For this reason, even if for none other, the film makes for an unusually strong re-watch.

Ultimately, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind works on so many different levels, not so much for the escapism with which it so artfully and so believably recounts to us the tale of a man whose life is so different from ours, but rather for exactly the opposite reason: because it tells us so much about ourselves, and how we deal with the unusual and often under-appreciated costs of success. Getting "good" at something you never imagined yourself doing -- to the point of being indispensable at it -- is, of course, it's own set of traps, and maybe it takes a guy who never even wanted to produce game shows, much less kill people for the CIA, to teach us that lesson.

"There comes a moment in every man's life," Rockwell tells us in grim voice-over during the film's opening, "when what you could end up being, gives way to what you have been. You didn't write a great novel; you weren't an astronaut; you didn't cure cancer. That's a bad moment." Here it is, the principal source of conflict in the movie, hiding in plain sight barely two minutes in, and still we only come to realize that's what we've been grappling with -- its resolution what we've been leading toward, this whole time -- at the very end. And all from an actor of whom you've probably never heard, and a director who'd never directed, before. The bastards.

Oh, by the way, there's a really nice Linn Kairn preamp on Audiogon right now for a thousand bucks. ...What's that, you ask? Do I think you should buy it? Gosh: Lemmie think....

9. What Time is it There? (2001). Many of Taiwanese writer-director Tsai Ming-Liang's pictures belong on a list like this one for their sure-handed dispatch of narratives so starkly reductive in content -- so difficult to imagine working, on account of how little there is to them -- that other directors would have run screaming from the pitch-session. But only one of his films is also polished enough in craft to hold dominion over a mainstream audience.

Kang-sheng Lee is Hsiao-kang, an out-of-the-suitcase watch vendor whose chosen spot is along the banister of a pedestrian flyover at a busy Tai'pei intersection. Shortly after Hsaio-kang's father dies, he is approached by beautiful Shiang-chyi (Shiang-chyi Chen), who wants to buy Hsaio-kang's own watch, off of his own wrist, because its dual-zone display will be perfect for her upcoming trip to Paris. "You shouldn't buy anything of mine," Hsaio-kang tells her over the din of the traffic just beneath them. "I'm in mourning: it's bad luck." But Shiang-chyi doesn't believe in all of that superstitious stuff, and doggedly persists with several follow-up telephone calls, until eventually Hsaio-kang relents and sells the watch to her.

What follows is a carefully balanced metronome of Shiang-chyi in Paris, alternating with Hsaio-kang in Tai'pei, neither of them completely over their chance encounter and its unfulfilled potential. While Shiang-chyi endeavors to have an enjoyable time in Paris, she continually returns to the whereabouts and condition of her watch -- which seems to have an annoying tendancy to go temporarily missing in various, progessively less probable locations in her hotel room. Hsaio-kang, for his part, awakens on the first morning of Shiang-chyi's trip, with the twin, inexplicable compulsions to change every time-piece he encounters to Paris time, and to watch and re-watch Truffaut's The 400 Blows, over and over again in his darkened bedroom.

Though clearly minimalist in its form and execution, there is much more to this one than a casual, gabby viewing would at first suggest -- from a major jolt of comedy at the expense of Hsaio-kang's mother and her vaguely dim-witted insistence on fulfilling the Buddhist customs surrounding the potential reincarnation of the dead, at one extreme, to the arresting heartbreak with which Shiang-chyi realizes the most important lesson of her trip, at the other. The all but post-apocalyptic disintimacy of modern city life, the inadequacy of our coping mechanisms for dealing with loneliness, the embarrassment of unrequited first affections, and the bizarre affect with which persons in mourning can sometimes act-out, each theme addressed by Liang is meted out at just the right dosage, with just the right timing, and with just the right subtlety, that their universality can be preserved through the skein of a pair of undeniably and specifically foreign cultural backdrops. There are also the compelling inquests into the hidden costs of family dysfunction, homophobia, the role of fear in how we structure basic human interactions, and the nature of trust. All this from a movie in which nothing is supposed to be happening, and in which very little actually does.

Perhaps not surprisingly, French influences are manifest -- from Bresson to Tati -- with the absurdist melodrama of such ubiquitous disintimacy articulated through Liang's coolly surreal directorial style, force-multiplied through a perfect symbiosis with the cinematography of Benoit Delhomme. Most significantly, the camera never pans in What Time is it There, but instead traps the acting talent in something not unlike a "cage" of visibility.

These self-alienated creatrues are, we gather almost subconsciously from the filming style, clamped down by their own set of choices: each scene running to its own agenda, as if without their say-so, and crackling at its conclusion with a new, poignant comment on the currency of relationships. "What are you looking for?" an older gentleman asks Shiang-chyi, in English, while the two of them sit at opposite ends of a park bench in a Paris cemetary. "A telephone number," replies Shiang-chyi, momentarily brought up from the rifling of her own purse -- whereupon the older gentleman (Jean-Pierre Leaud, the same actor who as a child starred in the leading role of The 400 Blows, and this time apparently playing himself) hands her his telephone number.

If the movie itself is a series of telling comments on the nature of human interrelationships in the post-millennial world, then so too are the recurring classifications to which it is often and somewhat implausibly assigned, from "comedy" (the scene involving a cockroach and a giant koi is worth the price of the rental, alone) to "romance" (despite the fact that the two leads are located in two different parts of the world for the overwhelming majority of the film). To this extent, perhaps Tsai Ming-Liang is revealing not so much his French directorial influences as his Scandinavian ones, having produced a film that opens with the death of a father-figure and proceeds through bad luck, heartache, robbery and prostitution, and yet still can be considered a romance, and/or a comedy, by at least some of the people who've commented on it. Perhaps we're all turning Scandinavian, in the end: Finding romance in situations that involve thousands of miles of separation; finding comedy in situations involving dead fathers and petty crime. At all events, What Time is it There is one of those few pictures that may be sat through a half-dozen times and still enjoyed, as if for the first time, for what else it offers.

8. Oldboy (2003). There are people who will tell you that the Korean film industry has in the past decade come into its own as a force to be reckoned with in the motion picture arts, and that’s a bit of a shame because, really, what those people mean is that director Chan-wook Park has come into his own as a force to be reckoned with in the motion picture arts. Beginning with his “vengeance trilogy,” Park has directed essentially every noteworthy Korean movie to earn inclusion in this supposedly pan-national burst of cinematic creativity and importance. But nowhere is his rarefied entitlement to inclusion among the best filmmakers of any time or place as fully on-display as with his statement picture, Oldboy.

To say that this film sets a new standard for Asian suspense-thrillers is to engage in droll understatement—from its willfully and enthrallingly inscrutable first reel, through its seamless integration of the classic, why-did-they-pick-me suspense narrative (in a style evocative of the mid-70s conspiracy flicks coming out of Hollywood), to its totally comfortable deportment of the main character’s self-taught virtuosity in the martial arts.

It all starts with the sight of main character and eventual hero Oh-Dae Su, being held in a police substation for public drunkenness. After perhaps ten or fifteen minutes of jogging in place with this scene, the lead acting more and more unruly at the hands of his semi-dismissive captors (okay, Chan-wook, we get it: He’s an asshole), Oh is ultimately released, whereupon he is abducted from a phone booth by persons unknown, and taken to a nondescript room in a nondescript building—something not unlike a hotel room—and ultimately held there, against his will, with three meals a day and a monthly haircut, for the next fifteen years.

Just as inexplicably as he was taken, after spending fifteen years adopting and honing just the sort of semi-effective coping mechanisms we might expect from someone in such a predicament, Oh-Dae Su is just as inexplicably released. Eventually he finds himself confronted by a stranger who hands him a cell phone and a wallet full of cash. “Don’t bother asking,” the stranger says, dolefully, “because I don’t know anything.” In due course the phone rings and, after the obligatory who-is-this routine, Oh-Dae Su learns that he has five days in which to figure out the mystery of his captivity, after which his captor will disappear permanently and with him any hope of answering the riddle.

Of the many fascinating challenges that Park manages to surmount so effortlessly in this breakneck-paced action flick, is how to deal with the question of Oh’s contrition for all the many wrongs he has committed, and which among them might have been the one serious enough to merit a fifteen-year revenge sentence. Naturally, none of the thousands upon thousands of ill deeds he has been chronicling in the clean, spiral-bound writing tablets with which his captors kept him stocked in captivivity is the ill deed for which he has been held—and to that extent the misdirect that they represent for the audience could be dismissed as a fairly standard, again-1970s-style plot device. But instead of leaving the matter there, the contrition that they represent itself comes to serve as a sort of background hum of self-recrimination and self-doubt in Oh-Dae Su’s rage-filled quest to understand his captivity.

He’s lost so much, during those fifteen years, as it happens: His captors have, while he was dutifully leaving fingerprints all over the room’s dishware, framed him for the murder of his wife (a murder which presumably they themselves have committed); his daughter is living with a host family in Scandinavia, where she is old enough now to be enrolled in college and presumably to barely remember her supposedly murderous dad. And yet, through all the I’ll-find-you-if-it’s-the-last-thing-I-do invective, through all the marvelously choreographed and cheerfully disturbing violence, through all the compulsion to learn the truth, Oh-Dae Su’s puzzlement is transmitted to us by actor Min-sik Choi with just the right inflection to have us understand that a part of him suspects he may have deserved everything he got, and that in consequence he may actually regret some of those things he’s done.

Left to stew in his own juices about all of this, Oh might have imploded beneath the palpable oppression of so much unknown and probably unknowable, but from the very outset he is assisted by a comely, eccentric, and only slightly over-eager young femme, whom he meets after losing consciousness from a fever in her sushi bar. When he comes-to in her apartment, she has read all of his journals, and appoints herself at once as his confident in solving the mystery. It is with the gentle prodding of this equally befuddled and intrigued applicant that Oh is able to marshal the fortitude to keep up the search—discovering along the way that he is a thinking, feeling, living, breathing human being capable of far more complex and self-sustaining impulses than ordinary puzzle-solving revenge. “Who’s she?” One of Oh’s childhood friends asks, early in the pursuit of the answer to his imprisonment. “Ah, a little girl who cries too much,” he answers, half out of the side of his mouth—but with just enough implicit validation lurking in the undercurrents of his voice that we understand at an instant his semi-fatalistic acceptance of her, and just where that acceptance is likely to lead.

Many reviewers speak (rapturously or otherwise) of the breathless pacing of this film, and of its remarkable continuity through a steep assortment of tonal signatures. But in my research I’ve found few references to the skillful handling of Oh’s progression, over the course of his five-day time limit, to a much more grown-up stance in his dealings with other people than he’d had before his captivity—the great irony of which, of course, is that it took fifteen years of solitary confinement for him to recognize the extent to which his sociopathic selfishness had been isolating him from everyone else all along. This progression, catalyzed by all of that soul-searching in all of those journals, is so poignant and so noticeable precisely because it is so ingeniously understated, thus standing it off in such stark relief to Oh’s jaw-set determination to find and brutally dispatch the person who forced him to look inside himself so intensely and for so long.

We sense that Oh realizes, on some level, the extent to which his newfound warmth and consideration (when they’re allowed to hold primacy over his martial-arts-driven pursuit) are a form of letting himself be changed by this unseen nemesis—a form of letting him “win”—and without a doubt the most clever and unexpected takeaway from the entire picture is the finely tuned inner conflict that this evinces in Oh, dialed-down by Choi at Park’s direction, all the way to the quietest facial cues: He’s a better person, “despite” not wanting to be. Indeed, by the time Oh finds himself in the lavishly post-modern penthouse apartment of his erstwhile captor and would-be murder victim, the answer to the great riddle of Oh’s captivity almost doesn’t matter anymore.

Except it does matter, of course: we want to know, and so does he. And when at last the truth is revealed to him, when Oh finally knows the real story, the foundations have been laid for one of the great twist endings in the history of modern movies—a twist better executed, easier to digest, and more summative of all that has come before than that of any other movie-with-a-twist to make this film-ranking, from its top to its bottom. Indeed, pictures with twists this momentous to the underlying story almost never work, since they cause the act of having absorbed all the preceding narrative to feel like wasted energy. Not this time. This time the twist serves the movie, instead of the other way around, and with it comes the sudden realization that the picture we’ve been watching this whole time is not just different from the one we thought we were watching—that much is relatively easy—but indeed far, far superior to the one we thought we were watching, too.

7. Fight Club (1999). “The first rule of fight club is, you do not talk about fight club. The second rule of fight club is, you do not. Talk. About. Fight. Club.”

Of all the movies that I’ve had difficulty in persuading friends and family to watch, Fight Club is without question the toughest sell of all. For too many people there’s just no explaining-away that bracingly self-defining and by that measure wholly unfortunate title, since images of Clint Eastwood being French-kissed by a baboon and duking it out for the affections of Sandra Locke almost have to flit through a person’s mind—and this sort of imagery couldn’t be farther from what this film is about than if Chuck Palahniuck had titled the book from which it is adapted The Taming of the Shrew, instead.

In leaden, appropriately sarcastic voiceover, Edward Norton narrates the tale of his own, nameless character: a thirty year-old insurance adjuster so numbed by his soulless job that he vanquishes his insomnia by bawling his eyes out at support-group meetings for the terminally ill—despite the fact that there’s nothing actually wrong with him. But then his cozy arrangement is disrupted by fellow imposter Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), an impoverished but bold-action-taking woman who waltzes politely in on a testicular cancer meeting (“technically I have more of a right to be there than you do; you still have your balls”). After which, of course, the reflection of Norton’s own dishonesty robs him of the pleasure of feigned despair.

Once again lacking an outlet for his need to feel something in this world, Norton’s character gravitates into the orbit of one Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a remorseless seize-the-day type who brings Norton in on his, shall we say, atypical living arrangements—an abandoned house so dilapidated and decrepit that, each time it rains, the two men must wade into knee-deep water in the basement to unscrew the master fuses from the power panel. Over a pitcher of beer at the local watering hole, Norton confesses his despair at the anonymous destruction of his own apartment, and Durden in turn suggests that the two of them recover their senses of what is- and is not important in this world by fighting each other in the parking lot. The idea works so well that they start to make a habit of it—their antics eventually attracting an unexpected crowd of equally self-alienated yuppie men, clamoring to “be next.” In no time at all, Durden and Norton have devised a regular meeting schedule in the bar’s basement and entitled the whole thing, wait for it, now, “Fight Club.”

And, okay, yes: there is footage of men hitting each other in this movie. Yes, some of that footage is intensely graphic and possibly even disturbing. But where most narratives that begin with such a premise would unfold in the direction of ever bloodier, ever higher-stakes fights, fight after fight after fight after fight, until Durden and Norton found themselves in some sort of all-encompassing battle-royale over their respective futures—serves instead as the point from which this movie is only really getting started. For between Norton’s breathless self-liberation at work (“Is that your blood?” “Some of it, yeah”) and Durden’s progressively nihilistic “homework assignments” for the rest of the group, ultimately the form and purpose of these gatherings begin to morph into a sort of anti-consumerist manifesto both vastly more socially relevant and vastly more disturbing to ponder. “We’ve all been brought up to believe we’ll be movie stars and rock musicians,” Durden tells the group during one of his many impromptu Nurenburg rallies in the bar basement. “But we won’t. And we’re starting to realize it; and we’re very, very pissed off.”

One of the recurring critiques of this picture is the direction it leads next—though it’s worth considering the paucity of other avenues down which it could possibly have led, given what has happened up to now. Either these men will keep hitting each other in the face forever (plausible but not much of a story), relinquish their newfound dream of gritty self-empowerment in a bourgeois culture (not very likely after their first real taste of blood), or, the only other option really available to them, take things to the next level: a level at which commissioned artworks in corporate HQ-plazas are defiled, entire collections of VHS tapes are degaussed at the movie store, and, in an eerily prescient escalation given the date, explosive charges are planted in the basements of buildings.

Thanks to Fincher’s high comfort level with any number of crazy-sounding film techniques (he got his start making music videos, after all), at each turn the visual style of the film is dark, comic-book-impossible, and rippling with energy. But above all, it is amoral. Durden takes what he wants, whenever and wherever he wants it (though he would argue, it is only that which he needs), Norton’s narrator makes no bones about wishing ill of Marla Singer (to the point of declining her request to come and get her after an overdose of pills), and Singer herself sees no particular quandary in signing for the meals-on-wheels of deceased neighbors in her apartment building. Everywhere one looks in this picture he finds someone consciously refusing to abide by the same social contract as the rest of us, even when first blushes have lulled us into thinking that perhaps they are. To cover what few expenses he has, for example, Durden turns out to be an expert high-end soap maker—a job that doesn’t sound all that lacking in moral clarity until, that is, one realizes that the tallow he’s using as his main ingredient is rendered from bags of fat that he’s been pilfering after hours from a nearby liposuction clinic.

That there are no rules here, as far as we can see, is of course the whole appeal of the thing, nihilism in its most redactive. With all the trappings of the struggle to get ahead stripped away from the lives and times of these bright but no-longer-concerned-with-getting-ahead misfits, they find themselves free to exact whatever pleasures and satisfactions they wish from the wider world—and never mind what would happen if the rest of us were clever enough to follow-suit. Indeed so little concerned are these people about what would happen if the rest of us were clever enough to follow-suit, that they actively recruit the rest of us to follow-suit, and in some of the most cleverly oblique ways possible, not least by picking fights with total strangers (including a priest, for goodness’ sake) as a way of expanding the club’s membership.

Director David Fincher has at this point brought us two entirely different movies, though each of them with just his very peculiar stylistic flair—all impossible fly-through shots and full-immersion effects that, in lesser hands, would pull us so far out of the experience that we never really made it back. So what does he do now, at an hour and twenty minutes in? Why, he gives us a third movie, of course, by springing on us the sort of unsuspected twist that makes that at the end of Oldboy look linear and circumscribed by comparison. Indeed the twist here is so significant, and makes for such a sea-change in one’s perception of the events leading up to it, that Fight Club is actually an improved experience, rather than a diminished one, the second time through. M. Night Shyamalan has been trying for just this sort of thing his whole career, but with the benefit of Pahlanuik’s novel as his stalking horse, Fincher nails the very didn’t-see-it-comin’ vibe that Shyamalan so wishes for, so consistently, on his first try at such material and only his second motion picture director-credit overall.

The Dust Brothers’ soundtrack is everything a soundtrack for near-post-apocalyptic anti-yuppie nihilism ought to sound like (you supply the imagined music here, and you've pretty-much got it), and the supporting cast—not just Carter but Meat Loaf, Richmond Arquette, and David Andrews—hit every last one of their marks flawlessly. But it’s hardly an accident that the principal commentary track for this one consists almost entirely of Fincher, Pitt, and Norton, talking about the strange reactions the movie garnered from the critical community upon its release. This is their film, the three of theirs, and the reactions it got were just exactly those we’d only be fools to hope for if we’d set ourselves the task of telling the same story: An odd mixture of dismissal, outrage, and purse-lipped unease at the extent to which, for all its hair-raising visual effects, Fincher’s statement is at once so oddly intimate, so universal, and, by that measure if none other, so plausible.

6. Snatch (2000). Was 2000 the single greatest year in the history of motion pictures? Well... 1974 is going to be pretty tough to beat, ever. But with the dizzying assortment of its own movies to have made our list so far, y2k certainly gives '74 a run for its money.

The chronologically second of the Guy Ritchie / Matthew Vaughn / fractured narrative gangster movies (book-ended by Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, on one side, and the aforementioned Layer Cake, on the other), Snatch is unquestionably the pick of the litter, first and foremost because it is the only one of the three that steadfastly refuses to take itself seriously—indeed is most often found, at your local rental store, with the comedies. And it certainly is—though it is also so, so much more, that the classification, to me at least, has always felt like something of a slight.

In the A-story, Jason Statham and Stephen Graham are “Turkish” and “Tommy,” two east-end London characters who split their time between managing a slot-machine parlor and a stable of (illegal) bare-knuckles boxers. When Turkish dispatches Tommy and their top-card fighter Gorgeous George (Adam Fogerty) to a gypsy (“pikey”) campsite to acquire a new camper (“caravan”) from which to operate their business, the pikeys double-cross the pair -- after which George challenges the head of the pikey clan, Mickey (Brad Pitt) to a bare-knuckles boxing match, and is promptly knocked out cold by the wiry and indefatigable gypsy.

Trouble is, Turkish has already booked George for a fight with one of the many improbably successful fighters under the management of a certain Brick Top (Alan Ford), himself far shadier and far more menacing—indeed comfortably homicidal—than Turkish and Tommy could ever hope or want to be. Just how our pair of heroes, now with no caravan and no boxer with which to fulfill their commitment to the terrifying Brick Top, will get out of all of this is for a time at least anyone’s frantic guess. Until, that is, they hit on the supposedly bright idea of hiring the pikey to take George’s place (and George’s fourth-round dive) in the rigged fight, instead. I mean, gosh—what could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, in another part of east-end London, pawn-shop owners Sol and Vincent (Lenny James and Robbie Gee) have been hired by Boris the Blade (Rade Sherbedgia) to knock-off an illegal bookie’s office and steal the briefcase being carried by compulsive gambler Frankie Four-Fingers (Benicio Del Torro) because it contains an eighty-four carat diamond, stolen the previous week in Amsterdam. The two pawn brokers enlist the aide of getaway driver Tyrone (Ade), who turns out to be so immensely oafish and overweight that it takes him whole minutes to get into and out of the car, and who, as an added bonus, can’t drive more than a few feet without slamming on the brakes or hitting something, either. As one might expect by this time in the film (we’ve already seen these three characters behaving in ways that, shall we say, are far from thoroughly competent), much goes awry at the bookie’s—though it’ll be a while before they learn the true nature of their problems, namely that the office in question is owned by none other than Brick Top.

This is to say nothing of the myriad cast of ancillary and thrillingly eclectic characters in hot pursuit of either the diamond, the pikey, Turkish and Tommy, or some combination thereof. There is Avi (Dennis Farina), who’d hired Frankie to steal the diamond and bring it to New York, and who must now grudgingly fly to London to try to find him and it; there is Boris the Blade himself, whose failure to obtain the diamond from the hired pawn brokers lands him in hot water with his own contacts back in Amsterdam; and then there is Bullet-Tooth Tony (Vinnie Jones), hired by Avi at the behest of Doug The Head (Mike Reid) to locate Frankie when Doug himself cannot.

With the breathless pacing, near-slapstick cinematographic devices (including the use of literal title cards for introducing the dramatus personna at the film’s outset), and the sumptuously self-fun-poking musical stings clobbering us over the head with how ridiculous everyone’s being, Snatch pushes hard on the envelope of the short-attention-span, “MTV” style of film conceit that has made other, lesser films (e.g. The Fifth Element) so palpably unbearable to sit through. But the most surprising bit—or perhaps, for those who’ve seen Lock, Stock and/or Layer Cake, the least surprising bit—is that the tale being told in this movie is in its fundamentals a linear and imminently digestible one, and by that measure the manic cinematography, the cheesy score, the shotgun camera work, serve not to pull us out of the film but instead to pull us farther in. Whereas The Fifth Element is what a sci-fi movie would be if it were made by MTV, Snatch is what MTV would be, if it were made by people who gave a shit. And that’s a big difference, folks.

Indeed it is really nothing short of astonishing that, somehow, director Guy Ritchie and script supervisor Matthew Vaughn manage to spin their unwieldy and polymorphous tale into something credible and understandable, manage to bring the complex facets of the story together at just the right moment with a hilariously improbable and at once instantly believable coincidence. But they also manage the far more subtle and refined challenge of coaxing us into a trance of comedic sympathy for all these should-be villains, until eventually not a single figure in the tangled fabric of our story is regarded with anything other than a downright acrobatic suspension of disbelief, and almost all of them with unqualified goodwill.

The humor of the thing is deep, abiding, and ubiquitous—from Pitt’s indecipherable accent (so indecipherable that the subtitle track reserved specifically for his lines eventually gives up on the exercise about three-quarters of the way through the picture, instead placing strings of question marks at the bottom of the screen), to Tyrone’s all but willful inability to do the only job he’s been hired for, to the recurring (and incidentally mostly un-scripted) antics of the gypsies’ dog, who crops up in many of the different storylines for at least as long as it will take to bite one of the actors in real life. ...And then on re-watch, it turns out that many of the gags are even funnier, including some that aren’t apparently gags at all, when accompanied by the commentary track.

In lesser hands all of this laugh-out-loud funny would represent its own kind of trap, of course—since there comes a time in the lives of all these people when, if you’ll pardon the pun, the gloves must come off, and the serious business of extricating ourselves from all the intrigue must be taken seriously. And it’s no secret that most filmmakers who try such a maneuver fail, either because the antecedent comedy is rendered unfunny by the eventually serious subject matter, or for just the opposite reason: because the comedy works so well that the getting-serious part is impossible to swallow.

That Ritchie and Vaughn can play both sections of the orchestra simultaneously with this picture, and with such high command of the art form, is one of the great gifts to the modern moviegoer. They have made in Snatch a movie that is at once thigh-slappingly funny and a surprise to find mixed-in with the comedies in the local movie store. They have made in Snatch a movie that it as once fabulously complicated in its narrative, and at once instantly accessible as a basic tale of flawed but basically good guys extricating themselves from tricky situations. They have made, in Snatch, the eighty-four carat diamond of heist movies. If you have not seen it, you must see it tonight. You must see it right now.

So there you have it, folks: the five movies that the Key Grip would have to agonize over leaving out of his suitcase at a border crossing beyond which he was only allowed to take five other films. When next we visit this project, we’ll be finding out at last what the five films to remain in the suitcase, would be. It would have been a big moment if anyone were still watching—but it’s not a small moment even as it is. Ten years ago a close friend and his wife asked me what my favorite movie is; ten years later, in just a few short days, I’ll have a straight answer for them.

Stay tuned….

The 100 Greatest Movies (CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS)

2009-06-08T07:47:00.000-07:00

Most of the comment traffic that I've received so far on this project has been off-forum, and a lot of that has been to suggest movies that haven't yet (and now, of course, probably won't) make the list. So I'd like to take this opportunity to invite anyone interested to submit to me a write-up of their favorite film or films.

If you think you'd like to do one or more reviews for this project, I would suggest that you e-mail them to me with the subject line "MOVIE REVIEW," and the review typed directly into the body of the e-mail (for obvious reasons I will demur on opening any attachments). Don't worry about hypertext linking to the trailer, I'll take care of that part -- as well as reserving the right to exercise some editorial oversight for content, tone, length, and readability. ...Which is to say, you might look forward to having a seven-sentence paragraph turned into a one-sentence paragraph with thirty-eight commas in it? I'll try to control myself.

Submissions should run between three and ten short paragraphs, opening with a few general words about what made the film so important to you, followed by a middle section reserved for plot synposis (easy on the spoilers, if you please), and concluding with some discussion of the larger creative choices -- cinematography, set design, directorial oversight, soundtrack -- that had to work in order for the film to work. Sign the bottom of the e-mail with the exact by-line that you would like to appear here, regardless of whether that is also your name, also your blogger-ID, etc., and be sure to indicate if you've cross-posted the review to your own blog, so that I can link to it.

I don't know if anyone will take me up on it, and I don't promise to run every review submitted by every person who does, but it's fun to imagine this becomming a far more interactive discussion than it has been so far, along our way to the Key Grip's choices of the ten greatest movies he's yet seen. At the very least, maybe other peoples' discussions of their favorite movies will introduce me to some new titles to try for myself.

I'll be watchin' for 'em.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

The 100 Greatest Movies (Part Eleven: Films 11-15)

2009-06-06T17:18:00.000-07:00

As mentioned at the conclusion of the last installment, we've entered special territory with these last remaining spaces, in that no film to be discussed from now until the project's conclusion will have escaped at least momentary status as a candidate for my number-one favorite film of all -- a realization made especially poignant for this particular installment, seeing as how the five films described below will find themselves on the wrong side of the "top ten" cutoff. Of course the whole rush of excitement -- and whatever gleeful controversy might yet be kindled -- from an exercise like this one, comes from the messy and ultimately impossible business of sorting these precious jewels into something not unlike an absolute hierarchy. We can't all be first. And so, numbered as usual, here are The Key Grip's choices of the eleventh- through fifteenth finest of his first 2,000 critically watched films.

15. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). I was planning to start this entry by saying something sympathetic about how unusually challenging it would've been for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to pick the Best Picture of 2000, what with all the astonishingly superlative movies that came out in that single, charmed year. ...And then I remembered that the film they did pick was Gladiator, and suddenly I didn't feel so sorry for them anymore. Meanwhile, Ang Lee's only film to make our list at all finds itself nursing a fourteen-spaces-from-the-top nosebleed, and all is well with at least this tiny little corner of the film-evaluative universe.

Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh are Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien, lifelong colleagues near the end of their useful careers as sword-wielding protectors of Governor Yu, administrator to one of the Qing Dynasty's largest and western-most districts, and himself the proud keeper of the "Green Destiny," a sword of unusual prowess and almost mythical cache in the eyes of his subjects. When the sword is stolen and Li Mu Bai's kung fu master is killed by minions of the infamous Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-Pei), Li and Yu Shu Lien must strike out into the breathtaking west-China landscape to avenge the murder and recover the sword.

Explained that way, this could be just about any martial arts picture of the past thirty-five years -- let's say, for the sake of argument, oh, half of Quentin Tarrantino's beta-tape collection, altogther. But the thrillingly remarkable thing about Crouching Tiger is that these tried-and-true elements of Asian martial arts cinema form the mere jumping-off point (literally?) for a plot so much richer in both complexity and empathy as to leave the unsuspecting viewer feeling all but intentionally misdirected.

The beating heart of the film (and of the book from which it was adapted) is the cleverly inventive conflict faced by Yu Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai in their dealings with the young and impetuous would-be courtesan, Jen Yu -- a comely young femme who at various turns should be their protege, their sweetly adored proto-daughter, their quarry in a high-stakes pursuit for truth and justice, their mortal enemy, and their only real vessel for confessing the honesty of their own feelings for each other, and who yet eludes any, and all, of these nice neat boxes into which they repeatedly try to fit her and her exasperating exploits. Jen Yu, it happens, may or may not actually have stolen the sword, herself, and may or may not be intending its possession as her calling-card to throw off the oppressively malevolent tutelage of Jade Fox, under whom she's been secretly and semi-willingly a pupil ever since her forced separation from a mongol lover who'd stolen her heart after taking her hostage as a teenager when the Governor's court was crossing the high desert.

Over the next two hours the three kung fu warriors, Yu Shu Lien, Li Mu Bai, and Jen Yu, will pause between sessions of the breathtaking swordsmanship and (physically impossible but somehow instantly credible nonetheless) aerial martial arts displays, to ruminate over a galaxy of complex moral and existential dilemmas, from the consequences of admitting a forbidden love, to the perils of choosing the wrong mentor, to the very nature and point of close, unconditional friendship--ultimately disarming even the most cynically dis-believing martial arts rejectionist among us, in favor of the simple immersion in the universally enthralling characters and their could-happen-to-anybody problems.

Ang Lee's direction is typically conscious of tone and composition, inspiring his actors to explore the depths of their own capacities for subtle turns of attitude, over a more clamped-down, this-happened-then-this-happened interpretation of the somewhat different-feeling book by Du Lu Wang (adapted for the screen by Hui Ling Wang). The cinematography is lush and epic without seeming turgid, the high-China triptych is worth the price of the rental alone, the wire-work is instantly (if unexpectedly) believable, and the mostly cello-led score, composed by Tan Dun and played with just the sort of arresting virtuosity one might expect from Yo Yo Ma, fills every spare corner of its own space in the picture without once intruding on anyone else's.

It's been said that there are really only a very small handful of "stories" in the world: The getting-home story (Das Boot, O Brother Where Art Thou, Apollo-13, Saving Private Ryan), the learn-to-love-before-you-miss-it story (Good Will Hunting, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Amelie, Punch Drunk Love), the proving-one's-self-to-one's-self story (Rocky, The Verdict, Scent of a Woman, gosh, even Silence of the Lambs), but frankly I know of no other single picture that dares to tackle this at-once ubiquitous and yet so prickly question of what, exactly, one does when one's affection for a young and roguish colleague is placed in direct conflict with one's duty to serve the larger good. Many of us have been there, our unflinching desire to see the younger colleague prosper as we have before them -- an impulse perhaps reflective of a certain measure of ego-tainted superiority on our own parts but sincere and well-intentioned nonetheless -- brought into stark and hand-wrung relief by that young colleague's impetuous insistence on his or her own set of rules and principals. But to set out to write a book, or make a movie, about this idea is little short of unique as far as I know. And this is to say nothing of the exquisitely delicate and understated portrait of Li Mu Bai's and Yu Shu Lien's exquisitely delicate and understated love, for each other.

That all of this dense and fallow material can be crafted to fit into a two-hour container, together with the classic martial arts storyline of a stolen sword and the vengeance with which it must be sought out and returned, is the sort of accomplishment that few other filmmakers have ever seriously dared, and no one else has pulled off, ever. The kung fu, the sword wielding, and the impeccably choreographed many-against-one set pieces are, of course, vastly superior both in ambition and polish to anything that's ever been attempted in a martial arts picture before, and it does the movie no disservice to comment on these elements for the peerless standard-bearers that they are. But the shame of the thing is the expectation that so many of my friends have brought to the picture: that all they'll be watching is a bunch of people in flowing white robes, floating impossibly amid the thin ends of building-sized bamboo chutes and kicking each other. For this reason it's been another of those tough sells, to get friends and family to sit still for this one. The loss is theirs. Indeed I've been imagining many feedback scenarios once this entire project is complete, but the very first one I heard inside my head, before I uploaded the first installment, was of someone logging-in to say, "How could you put Crouching Tiger anywhere other than number one?" Tough question to answer, in the end: It may well be the single greatest motion picture ever made.

14. Trois Couleurs: Bleu (1993). When last we paid a call on the "three colors trilogy" of Krzysztof Kieslowski, it was to discuss Rouge -- the film whose theme was to be that of "fraternite," or brotherhood. At the time I hinted that Kieslowski's take on each of the three themes of the French tricolor would be importantly askance, but it is only here, with Bleu ("liberte"), that we may appreciate the full effect of his genius eccentricity with respect to interpreting the mottoes associated with each color.

Juliette Binoche is Julie Vignon, the young and jet-set-gorgeous wife of a symphonic composer who has been commissioned to write a work commemorating the unification of Europe, to be played in fourteen simultaneous locations, in fourteen countries, on the occasion of the ratification of the Maastrict Treaty. But before Julie's husband can conduct a single note of the performance he and their daughter are killed in -- and Julie herself barely survives -- an unusually empty and pointless car crash, leaving Julie independently wealthy and without any particular desire to move forward with her own life. "And what is it that you will do?" an apartment agent asks her in his office, when she presents herself in search of a quiet flat somewhere in Montpelier. "Nothing," she replies, simply. Then there is an understandably pregnant and awkward pause, before the agent adds, "Absolutely nothing?" "Absolutely nothing," replies Julie, just as simply as before.

In a premise that might remind readers of the story of Fin McBride in The Station Agent, Julie's attempts to seclude herself behind a wall of inactivity are met with higher-than-expected levels of pushback from the social fabric that surrounds her. By turns she finds herself confronted by a tabloid journalist who accuses her of having secretly written all of her husband's works, a former colleague of her husband's who confesses his own long-standing sexual obsession with her, a downstairs neighbor whom the tenant association wishes to throw out on grounds of rampant promiscuity, a mother in the late stages of dementia, a secret lover of her late husband, even a family of mice living in the closet.

Naturally Julie's dismay at all of these uninvited intrusions into her would-be hermit existence is nothing short of palpable, but the unforced brilliance of the film is that she also stands rock-like against every unexpected turn, dispatching each item on this improbable checklist with a dexterity born of equal measures' cold pragmatism and devil-may-care denial -- just as we might expect of a smart young woman who had a bright and drippingly self-confident future, and who'd suddenly lost it all, in real life. She makes significant gifts to improbable recipients, dismisses other peoples' concerns for her and her state-of-mind, and, throughout, speaks in the staccato bluntness of someone who's not likely to be worrying about cultural propriety any time soon.

Of course life may not leave her up there in that fifth-floor apartment to stew in her own solitude, either -- even as she pulls-out ever larger and larger stops to try to ensure her privacy -- but herein lies what surely must be the point of our director's otherwise inexplicably down-beat choices in characterizing what we all think of the virtuous ideal of liberty:

To make a movie about freedom, it would seem, Kieslowski endeavored to define exactly what that would mean, down to the specifics (in my mind's eye this might even been done with pen and paper), beginning quite obviously with a protagonist who would never have to worry about money, and to that extent there would be no reason not to envy her. But when Kieslowski looked down and saw how much blank space would be left on the page below that simple fact, the question must quickly have gotten a lot messier.

To be truly free, of course, a person must be free from concern -- free from family to worry over, free from anxiety about the future, free from the consequences of, well, really anything whatsoever. And the only way to be that free, of course, is to have none of the comforts we associate with a happy, well-adjusted adult life. "You want freedom?" our maestro director seems to be saying. "Well, then, here: Slow down, there’s no traffic behind you; take a good, hard look."

13. Gerry (2002). Our second minimalist picture in a row is the final entry for director Gus Van Sant, and without question one of the most controversial movies to make this list, anywhere on it from top to bottom. Make no mistake, this is a movie that is ruthlessly, nay venomously despised by whole ranks of mostly considered movie aficionados, and not without their own type of justification -- for during no less than eighty percent of this feature-length picture there is, to a first approximation, nothing happening on the screen whatsoever.

Matt Damon and Casey Affleck (the two of whom co-wrote the screenplay with Gus Van Sant) play two lifelong friends, both named "Gerry." Almost from the very outset we are let in on the fact that they use the name as an affectionate verb for having just messed something up in an avoidable, usually painfully absent-minded way. "I thought you'd Gerry'd the rendezvous," one of them might say to the other, or "I was going to bring you that, but it turned into a total Gerry."

The brilliance of this deft little piece of characterization cannot be overstated, for it is with this one implied inside-joke that we in the audience understand a universe worth of backstory -- all double-ordered deliveries of pizza, empty-handed party arrivals, and forlorn waiting in airport gate lobbies for the friend who's waiting equally dolefully at the rental-car counter. At the film's outset we see them driving a battered old Mercedes (unquestionably Van Sant's favorite mode of transportation; there are no fewer than six of them in the three movies discussed in this list), to a scenic nature trail somewhere in the dry and sagey intermountain west, perhaps the Wasatch.

They park the car and get out, strolling amiably along the trail and talking about such walked-in-on-the-middle fare as one Gerry's astonishment at the inability of a Wheel of Fortune contestant to solve the puzzle, and the other's recent performance in a role-playing computer game. This amiable but rudderless banter continues for several long (and semi-famously improvised) minutes -- at one point Damon even stops to have a pee against a fallen log, with no directive from the script: he just had to go -- after which the two decide that the best thing for a pair of well-established mistake makers to do, in a wilderness preserve in the middle of the high desert, is to get off the path and take a short-cut. After which... well... after which either nothing happens, or everything happens, depending on whom you ask.

Van Sant has said on many occasions that he drew his inspiration for this and many of his other contemporary works (including Elephant) at least in part from the high guru of post-modern minimalist cinema, Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr (Family Nest, The Outsider, The Prefab People), and it certainly shows. Never one to have fashioned pictures whose narratives hurried us along, Van Sant in his later years has evolved into a sort of mainstream-Hollywood equivalent of the European avant-garde movement, with achingly long takes, a total absence of foley sound, and virtually no plot-points with which to crutch the holding of our interest.

The gasp-inducingly gorgeous landscape is framed to maestro perfection by cinematographer Harris Savides, reaching deep within the highest play-it-as-it-lies traditions of his craft, the fickle light and weather serving as a droning reminder that these two young men -- boys, really -- are into this matter far deeper over their heads than they are capable or willing to admit. Meanwhile Arvo Part sweetens the broth just that little bit with a hauntingly beautiful and appropriately reductive score, both in its complexity and its playing-time. Indeed most of the film consists entirely of uncircumscribed production sound, with no musical accompaniment and, more to the point, nary a line of spoken dialogue.

This is what we notice most palpably, at least after having found ourselves already deeply frustrated by compounded errors in decision-making (some of them obvious to us even before-the-fact): It's not bad enough that these things have happened, now we must endure the force-multiplying agony of the two Gerrys' collective unwillingness to rationally de-construct or for that matter even really acknowledge their predicament. It is not true that Gerry and Gerry do not speak during their long and increasingly harrowing trek across the wilderness; they just don't talk about -- at least in anything like a macro-constructive fashion -- the only thing they should.

Most people will not have the resolve or the desire to sit still for the lengths of time necessary for, or be willing to feel so un-entertained by, the taking of what is supposed to be a work of entertainment, and in consequence very few among us may connect on anything like a profound level with this mysteriously intoxicating and eerily terrifying film. Indeed most people will give up on it long before its startling (and yet thoroughly genuine and un-gimmicky) conclusion. But that's too bad, for it is somewhere in all the deep rough of all that internet piffle about whether Van Sant, Damon and Affleck were playing some sort of elaborate joke on the motion picture industry (they weren't), where the flawless diamond that is this picture truly lies. There is no magic punch-line to the question of what this movie is about; there is no "about." There never is, at least in the real world. Things happen. Old friends go to wilderness-preserves to hike trails together, stop to have a pee, and opt for short-cuts.

As any of my friends will surely tell you, I’ve never been one to pass at the opportunity for self-inflating pomposity about much of anything. “You talk around the house as if you were constantly being interviewed for a PBS documentary,” is how one former girlfriend put it, in words that have yet to be improved upon. But in this one matter I’ll have to insist, snickering eye-rolls be damned: Anyone who watches this movie with me will be asked to commit in advance to doing so in total, goose-bumped silence. Thanks to the peerless efforts of all involved, we’re out there with Damon and Afleck as they pull their Total Gerry—and the only way the experience can be appreciated, is to give one’s self to it totally: To. Be. Out. There. With. Them.

12. City of God (2002). The first time I looked up the running-time on this picture on IMDB and found it listed there as two hours and ten minutes, I didn't believe that it could possibly have been that short—but that's a compliment to this sprawling multi-narrative about the desperate lives of a group of young men growing up in the deepest slums of Rio. Indeed I can think of no higher compliment to pay this epic-of-the-first-order film, adapted by Braulio Mantovani from the novel of the same name by Paulo Lins and directed by Fernando Mierelles. How Mierelles could have managed to immerse his audience in the tales of so many disparate characters, so completely and so sympathetically, and not rush anything or leave any threads twisting in the credits, all in just a few heartbeats over two hours, struck me the first time I watched it as such an unfathomable triumph that I had to put the disc back in the tray and fast-forward through the last scene to check the counter for myself.

Alexandre Rodrigues is "Rocket," the undeniable early-teen protagonist in this dozen-character effort (all of whom are played, as is Mierelles’ custom, by people cast directly from the streets of Rio). Indeed it is Rocket’s abiding dream of becoming a newspaper photographer that makes the picture, serving as it does as a saccharine-free substitute for his allegoric (if obvious) wider dream of escaping the ‘hood to a grown-up life that is clean and well-adjusted and happily middle-class. As we follow Rocket through a childhood fraught with third-person violence, petty crime, desperate choices, unrequited love, and eventually a terror-stricken gambit to flee, our journey crosses paths all but incidentally—just as it would in the crowded barrio of the title—with a host of far shadier and far more comfortably underground figures, some as young as Rocket; some, disturbingly, much younger.

By far the most shamelessly menacing and by that measure charismatic of Rocket's multitude of antagonists and would-be friends is Li’l Ze, a childhood companion whose preferred coping mechanism for the stranded choices before them at that younger age was to commit a stunningly pointless set of crimes—even by grown-up standards—thus setting himself on the path of becoming the barrio’s most hardened and cheerfully homicidal drug dealer, and the self-proclaimed boss of all the nefarious goings on in the neighborhood. Then there is Carrot, Li’l Ze’s counterpart, who wears his good-guy-of-the-neighborhood boss routine for as long as Li’l Ze will let him keep up the artifice by holding his own malevolence in check to avert a war.

Keeping the two of them separated is the assumed task of Benny, an improbably gawky redhead who walks and talks and dresses like a bourgeois kid from the suburbs, but who manages just enough pot-smoked edge, at just the right moments and in just the right places, to steal Rocket’s girl as an incidental trophy along the path of asserting himself as a trusted confidant and peacemaker between the bosses. As long as Benny is alive, Carrot and his rival manage to coexist in an uneasy truce out of shared respect for their common friend—with Rocket, still visibly smarting at Benny’s assertion of his primal entitlement to the object of Rocket’s love, swallowing his resentments and lobbying Benny for the chance to catch the competing gangs in action for a scoop photograph that could garner some professional notice for him at the city’s biggest daily newspaper (where he works, during this time, as a mere delivery boy).

There is also Knockout Ned, who earned his moniker with a small-time boxing career, but who when we meet him for the first time is a ticket-taker on a bus line. After Benny is accidentally killed and the gloves come off between Li’l Ze and Carrot, Li’l Ze takes a shine to Knockout Ned’s fiancée and humiliates Ned in front of her, then comes back to commit even more ghastly wrongs against Ned and his family, after which Ned transforms himself before our very eyes from a straight-laced voice of reason, into the self-appointed consigliare of Carrot’s suddenly and brutally violent gang.

And yet with all of this going crash all around us, our point-of-view keeps stubbornly returning to the tale of unprepossessing little Rocket, snapping photographs with his battered, second-hand camera, and ducking around corners to escape the line of sight of his erstwhile friend and now cold-blooded enemy Li’l Ze. In a lesson for all of us, Rocket checks his ego at the door of the newspaper in order to patiently, methodically cultivate relationships with the people he most wishes to emulate—fulfilling arrestingly mundane errands for them, right there on screen, while Carrot and Li’l Ze and Knockout Ned and the rest of the neighborhood rabble are cheerfully trying every trick they can think of to see each other brutally murdered.

But Mierelles isn’t satisfied with the Herculean parameters of the tone-poem he has thus far set for himself; quite the contrary—all that has gone before is merely the substrate upon which he plans to grow his most affecting social comment of all. For, it transpires, Rocket’s big break at the paper comes in the form of a single, stolen snapshot of Li’l Ze and his gang in the red-handed act of committing the singularly most brutal of all their myriad crimes, and thence paying-off the police to keep from answering for it.

The warning-shot being fired across our bows could not be harder to miss if it were painted on a bed sheet and hung out a neighborhood window: People don’t make it out of the barrios of Rio, we are intended to worry to ourselves right along with the palpably distressed Rocket, who realizes what he's done only after his snapshot turns up above the fold of the newspaper’s front page. No, we think to ourselves, people almost make it out of the barrios of Rio. And then, at that precise moment, they must be taken down by those who wish such happier endings for no one.

That the fourth and most complex act of this enormous film may- or may not fulfill our deepest sinking sensations about poor Rocket’s innocent dream of escaping his unhappy surroundings, and that we don’t know which it is to be until the movie’s final, stunningly unexpected moments, is the sort of takeaway after which it will be very difficult for new arrivals to this picture to suspend disbelief enough for clearing the flaws of any other film, from any genre, for quite a good long while, afterward.

11. Cast Away (2000). "Please tell me that your number-one favorite movie of all time isn't going to be something starring Tom Hanks," a friend of mine recently pleaded. To which I say, okay, I won't: My number-eleven favorite movie of all time will do nicely.

Pardon my redundancy, but it really does surprise and puzzle me that people manage to bring so much bile to their opinions of Mr. Hanks and his work. There is no one as versatile, no one as instantly sympathetic, no one who can act as well without acting at all, anywhere in Hollywood, as Tom Hanks. “How did you do the near-brawl scene in the space capsule for Apollo-13?” a young interviewer once asked him, to which he replied, “What do you mean? The line was, ‘We’re not going to go bouncing off the walls for ten minutes because we’ll just end up right back here with the same problems,’ so that’s what I said.” Except, of course, that if you and I had read the line, it would’ve sounded like someone reading a line, and when he said it, he was at that moment Jim Lovell, desperately tying to hold-together his warring crew, telegraphing to us the unmistakable reality that their descent into squabble would signal the end of the emergency’s survivability, right then and there.

This time Hanks capitalizes on his thicker-than-water friendship with Robert Zemeckis to pursue what ends up having been a personal fascination of his and a promise to himself of very long standing. “Bob,” he asked Zemeckis in an out-of-the-blue telephone call in the late 1990s, “what would it really be like to be stranded, completely alone, on a deserted island? I mean, what would it really be like?” “That’s a good question,” Zemeckis replied, “let’s find out, and make a movie about it.”

Hanks is Chuck Noland, a relentlessly type-A business go-getter who lives and eats and breathes his job as a systems’ integration manager for Federal Express. Tasked with the (believably specific) job of turning around any of FedEx’s foreign transit hubs, whenever and wherever they start to slip, Noland spends his life six weeks at a time, in places as different from each other and as far from his home in Memphis as Rio, Moscow, and Kuala Lumpur. He’s blunt, he’s curt, he’s obsessed with making things easier and more profitable for his employer, and at the film’s outset he’s forty pounds overweight. Not a fiber is out of place, in other words, in this instant backstory of an IBM-meets-Genghis-Khan corporate swashbuckler—despite the fact that Hanks is playing against both type and inherent personality to an extent that most other leading actors would scarcely consider trying.

Meanwhile Helen Hunt is Noland’s love interest Kelly Frears (her last name chosen as a conscious hat-tip to admiring well-wisher Stephen Frears, who at one point even offered to put some of his own money into the making of the picture). Kelly, it transpires, is a nearly finished Ph.D. student at the University of Memphis, staring at a future that seems at a crossroads and, in consequence, finding herself gun-shy about committing to a man who has given so much to the obviously primary love of his life, FedEx. When Noland asks Frears to marry him, she responds, simply and poignantly, “I’m terrified.” Fair enough, thinks Noland, who tells her to keep the un-opened ring box until he can return to her for New Year’s Eve. “I’ll be right back,” he calls over his shoulder, as if in afterthought, on his way to the plane.

And even if you haven’t seen the movie, you know what happens next: The FedEx plane aboard which Noland is hitching his ride to Malaysia ditches in the tractless mid-Pacific, hundreds of miles off-course after having deviated around a thunderstorm (and no, by the way, I won’t make any references to current events here, out of respect). The next morning Noland awakens, still in an escape raft, to discover that he has washed up on an island with no visible neighbors, no signs of human life, no fresh water and no obvious food source. All he has, at least at first, are his wits and his unflappable determination to work all of this out.

Escape proves impossible, thanks to a surf-boiling reef that encircles the island, whereby the risk of further injury at the hands of an impulsive mistake is communicated to the audience in a single scene at once imminently predictable and edge-of-the-arm-rest terrifying, at the same time. Everything—from the unseeing ship that passes along the horizon, to the mud-choked puddle from which he must drink at one especially low moment, everything about the situation—seems to be a conscious head-thump by the Gods Of The Fully Appreciated Present. Indeed, as if there wasn’t already enough pathos surrounding this karmically gotcha’ed middle manager, it turns out that he also has an abscessed tooth--its own nasty infection quietly festering into a soon-to-be-unbearable knot on the side of his jaw, perhaps the size of a gumball.

In due course, Noland surmounts the myriad challenges he faces—recurring and otherwise—to forge for himself something not unlike a routine, though it is of course a routine born of the precise opposite of all that has governed his existence to this point: a world without clocks, paychecks, beepers or bosses. A world, in other words, without any of the manufactured (and ultimately hollow) forms of validation with which Noland has been comfortably avoiding his relationships up to now.

I won’t tell you how long he spends out there on that island, but suffice it to say that it is not a short while; indeed it is long enough that, after a brilliantly handled transition, we see the “after” picture of him, bearded and sun-browned and, we notice with an involuntary startle, shockingly under-weight. The filmmakers, it transpires, shot the first half of the film with Hanks having intentionally put on a significant spare tire, then adjourned from the project for eighteen months (during which Zemeckis was making What Lies Beneath), while Hanks went on what must have been a life-shorteningly dangerous crash diet—the second of his career in service of a film role, after Philadelphia. And to think: there are still people who will roll their eyes if you try to say something good about the guy.

Quite aside from the masterful dispensation of any number of fascinating logistical considerations (How does one store fresh water, even when it rains? Where’s the food coming from? What of dentistry?), Noland’s gradual descent into deeper and deeper levels of acceptance of his situation is the brilliantly painted and easily missed thrust of the middle hour of the film—a transition emphasized by his insistence, at the beginning of his ordeal, on “sorting” the few FedEx parcels that have washed up on the island with him, to a self-steeled, bit-lip determination to open them and make some use of their contents, later on.

As for the packages themselves, it happens that the filmmakers sat around a table and brainstormed a list of the most self-evidently useless things a person could possibly find inside them, forwarding the resulting inventory to a survivalist training firm in Colorado—which in turn managed to cobble together the very uses for them that we in the audience then witness Noland gradually figuring out for himself. Every item in every package was written into something useful on the counsel of the survivalists after having been chosen for its uselessness. With one notable exception, that is.

The most famous package-content is, of course, the volleyball Noland inadvertently paints in his own blood and, finding the image of a face in the resulting stain, befriends as his surrogate for a conversation partner—the ubiquitous “Wilson” of all those countless parodies that have been made since nearly the literal moment of the film's release. This was not the junior-writers’ idea, but rather what just might be the happiest and most consequential accident of serendipity in Hollywood history: The head writer for the project, William Broyles Jr., was actually enrolled in a survival school on the Mexican beach for five days, for the purposes of getting the true feel of the thing--eventually finding himself befriending and talking to a discarded volleyball that had washed up on the beach near his improvised shelter.

Had this not happened, Cast Away might yet have turned out to be a supurlative film—might even have made the list of the top-100--but surely would not have announced itself as the almost indescribably letter-perfect accomplishment it turned into, since it is this budding relationship (never mind the quote-marks; it really is a relationship) between Noland and Wilson, that propels the back half of his terrible imprisonment on that island, culminating with a climactic moment on the high seas that will leave even the most macho and pathos-wary filmgoer a blubbering gob of jelly. You don’t have my permission to cry, at that particular moment in this particular film: You have my solemn imperative to do so.

Zemeckis, too, is the right man in the right place and time to make this picture work—knowing without having to be told (by his long-time friend with the original idea) that this is a picture in which the lighter the directorial hand, the more believable the moment. “Camera’s gonna be on sticks,” Hanks once parodied Zemeckis for having said, meaning that there would be no cutesy hand-held bullshit or clever split-screens or any other devices that work so well in pictures for which an otherwise unbelievable situation needs them in order to be believed. Instead everything that exists in this film is in service of making this situation so matter-of-fact believable that we cannot help but believe it: The cinematography captures both the arresting beauty and inescapably imprisoning vibe of that nondescript little island (it’s actually part of an island in Fiji, with the rest having been CG’d away), and the clean lines of Chuck’s situation there on the beach are, even at the time, a palpable juxtapose with the messy entanglements to which he is trying against all reasonable hope, to return. Even the score doesn’t come in until the picture is over half finished.

Still, I am obliged to mention one other thing that needed to happen the way it did for this film to surmount so many other worthy projects and claim such a high slot: The company for whom Chuck Noland had unknowingly given away so much of his life had to be the real-life FedEx, with its real-life planes, its real-life color scheme, its real-life job titles, its real-life hub in Memphis. The premise would still have worked if Chuck had been employed by First Amalgamated Global Shipping (except perhaps for the logo on the airplane tails?), but at all events it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well. …And what, exactly, did FedEx require, in return for total use of the company images and logos and unconditional access to its Tennessee headquarters? Nothing. No creative control, no financial commitment, no product-placement. Absolutely nothing. “I’m sure you’ll take good care of us,” real-life CEO Fred Smith told Zemeckis, even before he was informed that space was being reserved for him for a brief (and appropriately wooden) speaking part in the film.

I am pleased to own exactly one article of movie memorabilia (this seems just the right amount for an avid lover of movies who wishes not to bury himself and his net worth under a litter-pile of Hollywood flotsam) and I am even more pleased that this one, single article of film memorabilia happens to be a copy of the shooting script for Cast Away, autographed by both Tom Hanks and Helen Hunt. Does that mean that this particular choice of potential number-one film, should have been assigned the status of number one? Perhaps. But something tells me that Hanks and Hunt and Zemeckis will forgive me, on account of the sheer weight of my enjoyment of, and fascination with this picture. Ten other movies will score higher slots, but no movie in my entire collection has been watched more often, or shown to a wider assortment of friends.

Oh, and by the way: BEST. TRAILER. EVER. PERIOD.

And so to the top ten movies in my film portfolio. It's a bittersweet moment—considerably more so than I'd expected it would be—since from this moment forward, none of the other films we've discussed, including these five, will own such unqualified status. Forgive me if that sounds overwrought, but it won't be as easy as you might think for me to publish a next entry in this column that says, in effect, "The Lives of Others is not one of the top-ten movies of all time." Because it is, of course: They all are. That's what makes this whole exercise so difficult and so stimulating.

Stay tuned…

The 100 Greatest Movies (Part Ten: Films 16-20)

2009-06-01T14:56:00.000-07:00

Our job eighty-percent complete, the “fun part” stands before us now, with the chronicling of The Key Grip’s twenty favorite movies. Let’s not waste any more time getting started.

20. Dr. Strangelove (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), (1964). Movies that contain a single iconic image or monologue have an unfair burden in the competition for new audiences, in that many people who haven’t seen the movie have seen the image or the monologue and filled their own movie in around it, complete with their own expectations about what the rest of the film is going to be like. This is bad enough when the iconic image is so consistent with the rest of the picture that people feel they don’t “have” to see it anymore (which see, Alien), but the real trouble begins—people really start short-changing themselves—when the durable takeaway from the film is wholly non-representative of the rest of the picture.

Such is the case with Slim Pickens’ unforgettable, unintentional, un-regretted, but entirely out-of-context ride aboard a recently-dropped nuclear bomb near the conclusion Dr. Strangelove—a vignette parodied so many times that, upon recently showing the original to an erstwhile girlfriend of mine, she suggested that the filmmakers were copying someone else. And friends, neighbors, well-wishers, if you hear me say nothing else in these pages, hear me say this: The rest of this movie is nothing like that image, whatsoever.

Adapter-director Stanley Kubrick (yet another supreme talent whose achievements will be scandalously under-represented in this list, if only by a factor of one other movie for which there just wasn’t quite enough room) channels the best inspirations of some of the finest directors to precede him for this hilarious social commentary on the absurdity of the Cold War. From Fritz Lang to Truffaut, Kubrick salts appropriately obscure nods to some of the best choices for characterization and framing at his disposal, borrowing mad scientist Rotwang from Lang’s Metropolis, and the notion of the unseen, through-the-window gunfire from Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player--together with countless other examples that have established this picture as a favored re-watch among students of the medium and avid amateur film-buffs alike. “There was a period of three months where I heard Dr. Strangelove dialogue form the moment I woke up until I went to bed at night,” commented Vera Anderson, first wife of the late Z-Channel programmer Jerry Harvey, during her interview discussing Harvey for Xan Cassavetes’ documentary about the station.

Ultimately a character-piece (despite all superficial appearances to the contrary), Dr. Strangelove tells the unnervingly credible story of an Air Force base at which the Colonel in charge, Col. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has slipped quietly into madness and, in consequence, ordered a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union by his almost-too-late-to-recall bombers, led by Maj. T.J. “King” Kong (Pickens). When word of the rogue makes its way to the darkest basement lair of Washington (“Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here; this is the War Room!”), the job of breaking the news falls to Joint Chiefs representative Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott). ...But for the small problem, that is, that Turgidson is finding himself distressingly torn about whether or not the government should bother trying to recall the bombers, anyway.

In just one of the astounding statements that he made over his tragically shortened career, Peter Sellers grabs this movie by the throat and bashes it against every wall in the room with his coolly resolute fulfillment of three completely separate parts—with performances so distinct in character, mood and accent that the same former girlfriend of mine refused to believe that they were all the same actor until I proved it to her on IMDB.

We meet him for the first time in the personage of Ripper’s NATO observer Lionel Mandrake, desperately trying to coax the recall codes from his nutty C.O., while army soldiers outside the building are trying with equal desperation to kill the both of them and take the base. Not long after, when Turgidson can finally hang up from the incessant phone calls of his bored and lonely secretary for long enough to sort-out his briefing, the President to whom he delivers it, Presdient Merkin Muffly, turns out to be Sellers again—this time finding himself haplessly mired in an impossible telephone conversation of his own with the Soviet Premiere, who is drunk on the other end and oscillating wildly between not comprehending or believing what he’s being told, and accusing Muffly of having been discourteous with him.

When Kong and his crew are nearly shot-down by a Soviet air defense missile and their recall radio is shorted-out in the process, the grim reality of the situation prompts those in attendance in the War Room to begin marshaling their resources to prepare for the worst. It is then that we encounter Sellers in his last and greatest role—the wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi scientist of the title, a man whose fixation on the subsequent breeding behavior of those few humans who might survive the conflagration serves as a fitting red ribbon on the arabesque appetites and unfathomable character defects of these people in whom all of our lives have been (and remain, incidentally) continually entrusted.

This is, in the end, the simple genius of Kubrick’s adaptation of Peter George’s book (called Red Alert). To make the film’s message digestible for a fatalistically desensitized, post-Cuban-missile-crisis audience, he had to sneak up on them with the gravity of the situation—and to sneak up on them, he chose consciously to mold the very straight original text into an absurdist comedy in which people behaved in ways so wacky and incomprehensible that the grim horror of what just might happen could hide from our cynicism in plain view. Oh and one more thing: As comedies go, it's very difficult to conjure as successful an example of its genre--in that on top of everything else, it's actually funny.

19. Yi Yi (A One and a Two), (2000). Director Edward Yang returns to familiar subject matter in a far more accessible and linear style than his earlier, cult favorite A Brighter Summer Day, this time following three generations of an extended family living in Taipei—from a nearly undermined wedding at the movie’s outset, through the lives and times of a galaxy of delicately interrelated characters with quiet crises all their own. This is a long and contentedly patient work, with characters’ inner conflicts not so much on display as peeking out from around window-curtains, ranging over issues as familiar as infidelity and the nature of love, at one extreme, to those as unfamiliar as whether a shadowy and self-made businessman should be trusted to rescue one’s faltering dreams of commercial success, at the other. And despite the fact that Yang will indulge in nearly three hours’ worth of exposed film canisters along the way, at the conclusion of the experience there doesn’t seem to have been a single gratuitous or disposable moment.

Choosing non-professional acting talent as is his custom, Yang inspires writer-director in his own right Wu Nien to crackle with the credibility of untrained inspiration as N.J., the conscience-conflicted third partner in a struggling computer company that hopes to tie its fortunes to a wealthy and unscrupulous Japanese computer-game tycoon. While sorting his mixed emotions about the impending deal in Tokyo, N.J. takes up a brief re-initiation of a relationship he had (and unilaterally dissolved for no obvious reason), thirty years earlier. Meanwhile the woman to whom N.J. has been married this whole time, herself emotionally damaged and unsettlingly needy, is in his absence barely holding-down an extended household consisting of N.J.’s perpetually hazed son, sexually adventurous and self-despising daughter, loan-shark-indebted brother-in-law, comatose mother, and piano-playing and possibly abused next-door-neighbor.

The quiet with which the desperation of all these many figures plays out is only part of Yang’s genius; the other part is his playful and yet somehow seamless shifts in narrative point-of-view, from long vignettes of N.J.’s son becoming increasingly obsessed with photographing (and, to that extent, living inside) the world that others can’t see at the backs of their own heads, to long vignettes of N.J. strolling arm-in-arm with his erstwhile lover on an appropriately boulder-strewn and alien-looking “beach” near Tokyo, and back to the slow-dawning realization on the part of his daughter, that her own newfound appetites may be clouding her capacity to judge character in ways that have important and possibly even lasting consequences.

To call this movie anything other than a “family portrait” would be importantly dishonest, for this is indeed the heart of Yang’s matter with these people: They are, in the end, come Hell, high-water, or both, a family. On the other hand, the maudlin self-mythology that so-called “family portraits” often evokes is evaded deftly by a director with a keen sense of the precise moment when his principals are beginning to sound unduly sanctimonious or victimized, and we could all do with a little break to splash around in some slightly pulpier fare. The fact that there are Yakuza and semi-enslaved hostess girls and random acts of property damage and gripping existential questions on the nature and quality of life, serves not as striking contrast to the far more identifying dilemmas faced by N.J. and his family, but rather as the license through which those more routine dilemmas may be legitimized.

Neither does Yang settle for a “family portrait” level of professionalism when it comes to craft: From the carefully composed shots—some of them lasting only an instant or two, others lasting whole minutes—to the sparing use of soundtrack, Yi Yi is in the end that most delicate fabric of the quietly beautiful and sweeping motion pictures of the highest Asian filmmaking traditions. Woven from what might in lesser hands be mostly banal and predictable subject matter, Yang strikes a perfect balance between the deeply personal dramas of a large and semi-typically challenged family, on the one hand, and the more cinematic plot-points against which those personal family dramas ultimately derive all of their special gravitas in this picture, on the other.

Comparisons are often made between Yang and Bertolucci—in particular between this picture and 1900—but I for one feel that a closer parallel is deserved of the finer works of Antonioni, particularly La Notte, despite the completely different sense of scope. Whereas 1900 is a character-piece set against the backdrop of fascism’s rise in southern Europe, La Notte and Yi Yi are both character-pieces set against a backdrop of nothing. And in no small way this is the film’s point: There is no lumbering movement with ominous pan-social consequences lurking just over the next hill; there is only us—there is only this. There is only now.

18. The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). (Author’s note: The following is a re-print of my herein previously published review of this film, dated November 30, 2008.)

Like many of the best foreign Directors, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami apparently doesn't lose much sleep at night over the question of whether his films have too little plot. Far from the roar of pyro crews and the all-nighter hothouses of CG post-production that are modern Hollywood, Kiarostami is free to explore the question, not of how much eventfulness an audience may tolerate in a two hour sit-down in a darkened theater, but rather how little.

Without exception Kiarostami’s films are explorations into the subtlety of characterization—questions of morals and morale, decision vs. destiny--often hinging on a single event buried deep within the fourth reel and, in case we hadn't yet caught the premeditation in such choices, delivered off-camera anyway. Though perhaps an acquired taste for Western palettes, Kiarostami's introspective character pieces are always provocative, always moving, and in the end, always a treat to the senses to which few other filmmakers may aspire, and The Wind Will Carry Us is the apogee of his portfolio. It is a film so adroitly timed, so pitch-perfect in every tiniest detail, that its completion would surely have stranded a lesser individual with the crippling sensation that he would never be able to make another film again.

The film opens with a long take of the (unexpectedly?) beautiful Iranian countryside, in wide-shot--a tiny-looking International Scout making its way down a winding road only barely noticeable in an unremarkable corner of the scene, while the vehicle's four occupants, recorded in production sound instead of ADR, can be heard quietly bickering about whether or not they've misunderstood their driving directions. Even at this early juncture two things are inescapably apparent about the experience that this film will represent: First, our director sees no reason to explain himself--you know as much about who these people are and where they're going as anyone else, and no more than you're supposed to--and second, if you'll pardon the pun, this film is hardly in a hurry to get anywhere. Through a series of long takes shot at different angles along the route, this anti-scene of four guys gently squabbling about the proper turnoff continues for over five and a half minutes, long after the opening titles would have been over and done with, had there even been any.

Eventually the quartet finds their intended destination--a small village carved into a steep hillside and notable to our eyes as the sort of un-even-roofed hodgepodge that we'd be less surprised to find in desert Africa. Indeed after finding a young guide on the outskirts of town, our presumptive lead character (and the only one of the four whom we will ever see on camera throughout the film) makes his way literally across the tops of the earthen dwellings that will encompass his universe for the duration of the picture, hopping first up two feet to transit the next interval, and then down again.

Kiarostami devotes this opening reel of the film to establishing not just its tempo, but also its principal source of mystery--that these four obviously urban Tehranians have checked themselves into the closest local semblance of a guesthouse, apparently for the purposes of monitoring the health of an infirmed and elderly local, convalescing at the opposite end of the village. Throughout his long walk across the rooftops with the boy who will be his foil, our lead character--"The Engineer"--inquires repeatedly and with implied familiarity about the old woman's health, the boy's side-mouthed answers revealing either discretion or ignorance; we aren't supposed to know which.

I can think of no higher tribute to Kiarostami's achievement with this picture than that, by the time we actually discover what these four men are doing here and why they've taken so much interest in the health of an old woman, it no longer really matters to us anymore: Like the characters themselves, we've become immersed in the day-to-day rhythm of this at once surreally alien and improbably familiar little community. Its cranky restaurant matron, her semi-estranged and possibly philandering husband, the arrestingly pregnant and then arrestingly “un-pregnant” innkeeper, the hauntingly beautiful young woman who milks a cow in darkness so that their collective guests might enjoy just one more locally tricky little comfort from home.

The film is described by assorted critics as a mystery, and to that extent they're right: We are meant to wonder, of course, who these people are and how they came to find themselves in such a far-flung place with such a seemingly insignificant agenda (indeed at one point in the film the Engineer's three accomplices become so bored that they literally disappear, never to be seen again). But to describe the film with this single identifier is to entirely miss Kiarostami's point. There is mystery in life, of course, but it isn't the glamorous, maybe-they're-spies kind of mystery that we so often find ourselves escaping into at the movies; it is rather the mystery of mundanity--the strange shooting-script by which all of us on this homey little planet of ours seem to play out the same micro-dramas, the same rivalries, the same petty squabbles. The mystery in life is that it could contain so little real mystery, and yet seem so mysterious--so wondrous. So beautiful.

17. Layer Cake (2005). “You’re a smart boy. But you keep very bad company.”

If it seems superficially implausible that British East-ender Matthew Vaughn would be given something not unlike a blank check by Sony Pictures to try his hand at directing, then one must consider his previous two assignments—as producer and script supervisor for Guy Ritchie’s incomparable Snatch, and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. That kind of greatness doesn’t strike where it pleases, either, folks, and it is to the betterment of us all that the suits at Sony knew a bird-in-the-hand when they saw one, since their semi-bold vestment of Vaughn resulted in the creation of one of the most delicately balanced and down-to-the-second flawless of all the fractured-narrative gangster movies that have ever been attempted.

Daniel Craig plays the part of a smart, upper-crusty and nameless young cocaine broker—the sort of guy Burt Reynolds’ Hooper was thinking of when he said, of stunt-men, “these days they all wear pleated pants and carry little pocket calculators.” At the film’s open Craig’s character (often referred to as “XXXX” for convenience’s sake) explains the modern English drug trade, and his role in it, with a marvelously understated voiceover that could easily have come across as unsubtle and manipulative in the hands of lesser filmmakers. XXXX, it transpires, is trying to hold his tidy little arrangement together for one last week before he can extricate his ill-gotten finances from the bank, and disappear. Only problem is, his benefactor and skin-crawlingly taciturn supplier Jimmie Price (Kenneth Cranham) has two important assignments for his favored protégé, neither of them without messy and possibly even life-threatening entanglements: To move a way-too-big shipment of ecstasy, on the one hand, and to locate the runaway daughter of an even better-connected colleague, on the other.

In due course the ecstasy turns out to have been stolen from a band of grimly homicidal Serbian militia who dispatch their top man to hunt down whoever is trying to move the shipment and return with both it, and him. Meanwhile the hunt for the missing daughter turns out not to have been the well-connected-colleague’s idea at all, thus putting XXXX in the delicate position of trying to explain why he’s been stalking and attempting to bundle-off the target, to an unhappy father with no qualms about venting his frustrations in a most creatively permanent way. This is not even to mention that the loud-mouthed nobodies who stole the ecstasy in the first place are splashing XXXX’s name and reputation all over the place, to both cop and criminal alike, that XXXX’s new love interest turns out to be the long-time lover of the nephew of the principal thief, or that XXXX’s hired muscle Morty (George Harris) must disappear from his side at the critical moment as a result of some unfinished business left over from his days running with the counterpart for Jimmy Price, Gene (Colm Meany).

Just as the tangle of overlapping storylines risks indigestibility, XXXX presents himself at Gene’s flat for what I would argue is the centerpiece moment of the film: Two colleagues at the highest reaches of the London drug trade, coolly friendly but first and foremost mutually respectful, sucking-down single malt scotch and splitting what just might be the most memorable order of Chinese takeaway in film history, all while Gene fills XXXX in on the dealings that render this whole web vastly more complicated and self-telescoping than either he or us had previously understood. Clearly it will take every last shred of XXXX’s guile, every last contact, every last favor, and no small allotment of blind good luck, if he is to escape all of this intrigue in one piece—let alone retire at the end of a single further week to a life of princely anonymity somewhere else. “Let’s go back to his place and see if what he says is true,” a certain character says over the momentarily crumpled figure of XXXX, at a point roughly halfway through the film, “and if it’s not, we’ll both kill him.” --And what of the fact that the two characters having this conversation are, even on the basis of this short read, the last two people you’d expect? Par for the course in this how-much-trouble-can-we-expect-him-to-get-out-of cavalcade of sinking fortunes, intrigue, dishonesty and greed.

I’ve been a sucker for movies of this style for a long time, now: Not so much for the violence or the grim subject matter but for the tendency in pictures of this genre to weave such sparklingly multi-faceted plot lines, often with the paths of characters crossing at moments neither opportune nor expected but just perfectly placed to ensure maximum leverage over everything that happens after. And with this picture Matthew Vaughn stakes his claim to status as one of the great, fractured-narrative gangster movie directors of all time. His is a film that works positively flawlessly, regardless of which ending you watch—and if that last comment doesn’t quite make sense, you’ll have to rent the DVD and give all three of them a try for yourself.

16. Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulin de Montmartre (2001). Not every director is principally concerned about narrative, and with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie (for short), placed back-to-back with Layer Cake, placed back-to-back with The Wind Will Carry Us, our list could not do a better job of highlighting the latitudes with which filmmakers may choose to prioritize or de-prioritize the significance of the events they’re showing, as opposed to the characters or the scenes or the suffused emotional resonances sought as overarching takeaways from the finished product. Whereas everything in Layer Cake, the settings, the soundtrack, the set decorations—even the exquisitely painted characters—exists in service of the plot, the plot of Amelie exists strictly in service of the feelings we in the audience are supposed to experience at the taking of each scene.

Audrey Tautou is the title character, a young woman whose over-protective father deprived her of a properly interactive childhood out of fear that she suffered from a fragile heart muscle and could die if she received too much external stimuli. As an adult working at the (real-life) Café Deux Moulins in Montmartre, her life is bounded by a an ensemble cast of equally flawed and sympathetic creatures, from the surly and distrusting Joseph (Dominique Pinon), to his hypochondriac girlfriend and Amelie’s fellow waitress Georgette (Isabelle Nanty) to the Renoir-obsessed copyist Raymond (Serge Merlin) who lives down the hall and tries against all better expectations to impart an appreciation for Renoir’s subtle majesty to a simple-minded stock boy who works downstairs.

Upon learning of the tragic death of Princess Diana, Amelie drops the lid to her perfume bottle, which rolls haphazardly across the bathroom floor, eventually dislodging a loose plate of tile behind which Amelie discovers the childhood treasure-box of a previous tenant from many years earlier. Succumbing to the vagaries of fate, she decides to take it upon herself to see that the treasure-box is (anonymously) returned—thus setting in motion her addiction to carefully orchestrated, carefully un-credited acts of kindness toward the people around her.

In due course she repairs the relationship between Joseph and Georgette, enlists the help of an Air Hostess to persuade her father to travel by having one of his garden gnomes photographed in exotic locales, chastens the abusive boss of the store-clerk downstairs by fiddling with the wiring in his apartment, and, in what is to be her piece de la resistance, plots to return the lost photo album of attractive stranger “Nino” (Matthieu Kassovitz) who himself seems preoccupied with collecting the discarded photo strips of a half-seen figure at a coin-operated picture booth at Gare de L’est.

Only thing is, her childhood of involuntary estrangement from healthy human contact is preventing her—and her alone—from realizing that she is, in fact, romantically intrigued by this dashing young man, and not just bent on returning his photo album in the most playful and exotically deferred manner possible. It then falls to her unconditionally loving friends to straighten her out in time (if they can) as to the true source of her desire to do these anonymous good works, and set her on the path to healthy intimacy with the kindly photo collector.

Each of Jeunet’s four principal works are nothing if not visually and aurally arresting, from City of Lost Children with its dreamy rust-brown cityscapes and toothpaste-green water, to Delicatessen with its inimitable sonic repetitions to emphasize the rhythmic mundanity of life inside that terrifically striking little apartment building, to the piano-black claustrophobia of Alien Resurrection, and Amelie is his statement-piece in each regard. The sets are more conscientiously decorated than in any other picture I’ve yet seen, with the richly over-saturated reds of Amelie’s apartment carefully “popped” through foreground placement of a brilliantly ice-blue lampshade, and the warmly suffused ambers of the café abutted in sharp cutaway with the dingy olives of the shopkeeper’s dangerously re-wired bedroom.

The ear, too, is treated like an old friend in this one—with a satisfyingly ham-delivered voiceover (about essentially nothing) setting the not-too-serious tone with far more aplomb than any actor could convey, telegraphing unmistakeably our requirement to send our hang-ups about conflict and narrative tension outside to play in traffic for awhile.

“On September 3rd 1973, at 6:28pm and 32 seconds,” the stern-and-stentorian narrator intones at the film’s opening, “a bluebottle fly capable of 14,670 wing-beats per minute landed on Rue St Vincent, in Montmartre. At the same moment, on a restaurant terrace nearby, the wind magically made two glasses dance unseen on a tablecloth. Meanwhile, in a 5th-floor flat, 28 Avenue Trudaine, Paris 9, returning from his best friend's funeral, Eugène Colère erased his name from his address book. At the same moment, a sperm with one X chromosome, belonging to Raphaël Poulain, made a dash for an egg in his wife Amandine. Nine months later, Amélie Poulain was born.”

...You know, a word or two of caution may be in order—perhaps inspired by having just re-read that last line of voiceover: Though the vibe of this film is inescapably “feel-good,” the picture itself is also inescapably French, and by that measure decidedly not for children.

And so we’ve arrived at last. With this installment, the Key Grip’s list of the hundred greatest movies enters the short subset of films that started with offsetting number-one rankings. I won’t tell you how many of these, from this five, were afforded that honor—but from here on in, every movie we discuss received at least one initial nod as my number-one favorite film, ever. Perhaps that means we can look forward to more frequent installments from now to the end of our journey.

…Perhaps just the opposite.