Bloggasm

“I can’t remember to forget you,” Leonard Shelby’s voice-over says of his dead wife in Memento, and even though Charlie Koffman has his characters poke fun at screenwriters who use voiceovers in Adaptation, Christopher Nolan crafts them so that they convey such a lonely obsession that we never even question their legitimacy. And it’s intentional irony that Nicolas Cage’s Adaptation character speaks often in the very voice-over that is so bemoaned. There were times during Hugh Jackman’s voice-overs in The Prestige where one could almost believe that Guy Pearce was hired to do them. Nolan uses these voice-overs to symbolize his character’s isolation within his own head, conveying to the viewer that by becoming obsessed with something, you are essentially alienating everything else in your life.

Obsession is a theme that Nolan portrays well. Leonard Shelby is told by Teddy that he no longer knows who he is, indicating that one can be defined by his own obsession. Shelby is so set on finding his wife’s killer that (spoilers!) it no longer matters if he finds the right one. In the case of Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), he too is consumed with an obsession so acute that he often sacrifices his own wealth and happiness to achieve it.

Because there are so many twists to the actual plot of The Prestige, following it for too long drags the reader so far into Spoiler Land that it seems futile to do so. Add to this the fact that it’s actually difficult at times to follow the linear progression of what is happening in present time because of the constant use of flashbacks, then one can truly understand the difficulty of providing even a basic premise to the film.

The Prestige is the story of two rival magicians, Robert Angier (Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), who essentially progress through their entire careers trying to simultaneously out-do and sabotage each other. The crux of this rivalry lies in the debate of whether or not Borden is responsible for Angier’s wife’s death in a magic trick which went fatally wrong. How it went wrong–Borden’s stubborn insistence on using a different kind of knot when binding her hands together–represents his inventive resistance to the norm. It is Borden’s belief that magicians should be continually refining their acts to push through to new levels of greatness; he isn’t satisfied with what he considers boring, stale tricks. Angier, on the other hand, is less inventive but more given to the theatrical nature needed by a good magician. In his mind, the trick itself isn’t what matters, but rather how one delivers it. Borden, though his tricks are easily more amazing, doesn’t know how to handle the crowd, and the viewer can see this plainly with the rather dull settings of his magic performances.

Borden eventually creates a new trick called “The Transporting Man,” which causes Angier to digress from a mere rivalry to an unhealthy obsession. He can’t figure out how the “The Transporting Man” is done, so he makes it his life’s almost-spiritual quest to unlock its mystery. This segways into another rivalry between the famous scientist Thomas Edison and another scientist named Nikola Tesla (David Bowie). Their scientific battles are juxtaposed against Borden and Angrier’s own, and so Angier naturally takes on a kind of comradery with Tesla in their quests to out-do their opponents. How they help each other do this lies so deep within the realms of Spoiler Land that we dare not venture that far.

All of this is told in flashback form. In the present, Borden is in prison, and the viewer deduces early on that he was framed at some point for murder during the mental battle of the wits with Angier. Because that’s what this is, a mental chess game, where moves are often made in the anticipation of how the other will respond, allowing for a plethora of surprises and the notion that nothing is as it truly seems. Borden often plants misleading clues along the way to throw Angier off his scent, and the viewer is forced to follow Angier down every path, even the ones that turn up cold.

The Prestige is easily one of the best films this year. As one reviewer put it, it’s the movie that gives Nolan enough room to fully extend himself so that his complex narrative can be realized. The movie is over two hours long because it needs to be that length. It’s multi-layered and has the room to slowly unfold itself, and though a keen viewer will be able to guess several of the twists before they happen, he or she won’t feel let down by it since Nolan never makes the story hinge off the twist, as is often the case with directors like M. Night Shyamalan. No, the entire story rests upon the weight of obsession, and how it slowly becomes its own antagonist, a beast that will never release its stronghold from the neck of its own creator, not until he’s destroyed by that very obsession for which he was defined.

Related Posts: The Departed, Thank You for Smoking: If only lobbyists had it so good

An 86-year-old man named Les Geddes has invented a new gadget that uses a camera to scan text and project it onto a screen for people with severe eyesight problems:

A GADGET invented by a retired Edinburgh engineer to help his partially-sighted wife read is set to revolutionise the lives of thousands of people.

Created by 86-year-old Les Geddes, the reading device uses a tiny portable camera to scan small print and project it on to a television screen.

Mr Geddes came up with the invention to help his wife Anne see the buttons and display on their microwave oven.

What’s most cool about it is that he’s not trying to patent the machine, rather he’s posting instructions up on the internet so other people with similar problems can create these gadgets on their own.

There have been several complaints recently that the Times has been focusing less on its daily hard news section and devoting more and more of its time to magazine-like “fluff” articles. This Column reinforces this notion and even admits that this is mainly being done to raise advertising dollars, which have slumped in the newspaper industry:

T: Style’s perfume critic — like the advertising-driven concept for the glossy new real estate magazine — is part of The Times’s calculated effort to create new content and publications that will attract additional advertisers. The redesign of most of the paper’s existing weekly sections, such as Travel and Dining, has given them a magazine-like flair intended to increase their appeal to advertisers.

“We don’t put out a daily newspaper; we put out a daily newspaper plus about 15 weekly magazines,” Bill Keller, the executive editor, reminded the news staff at a meeting late last year. “Some of them are actual magazines. But a lot of them, although they’re printed on newsprint, are still — in format, in conception, in design — are magazines.”

As a newspaper journalist myself, I’d say that 95% of the articles I write are focused on straight reporting news items, while the rest are feature-like articles on things that probably wouldn’t be considered “news,” as in they’re not as dated as most the articles I write. Also, these types of articles don’t normally follow the standard inverted pyramid style of writing where the lede summarizes the entire subject in a single sentence.

But calling these articles “fluff,” might be taking it too far, in fact there are some straight news items that would by considered more fluffy than these feature articles. A colleague of mine uses the term “beautiful junk” to describe the filler that goes into papers, stuff that isn’t heavy on information and usually includes several big pictures to take up space. Some kind of local Pumpkin Festival is a great example of this: Reporting on the events in the festival and having lots of pictures even if nothing of particular note happened at the event. It’s still news in its own way, because it just happened, and it follows the typical news style, but what have we learned after the article is finished, other than the fact that the festival took place?

Feature articles are wonderful because they’re more stylistically appealing — the writer can jump around and sometimes even speaks in first person– and are a lot better at relaying a lot of information in a single article. Like a paper’s thesis, general news reporting must always stick to its subject matter, while feature articles can go into their own little tangents and anecdotal stories. The writer is brought to the front of the piece so that the reader can view things as he or she sees them.

This certainly gives these “fluff” items much more appeal, and in some ways just as much worth as your typical NYT news article. They give the stories a New Yorker-like context that isn’t always easy to accomplish with more traditional news reporting.

Related posts: R. W. Apple, Jr. New Yorker profile

Martin Scorsese knows he’s walking through a minefield of potential cliches in his movie The Departed, so much so that the film often takes on a metafictional quality in which his characters have to justify their own actions. When Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) emerges from his stint in jail and goes to his cousin to try and work his way into the drug trade, his cousin says something along the lines of “You know what I have to ask you, it’s the thing we always have to ask in situations like these,” to which Costigan replies, “I’m not a cop.” How many times in movies have we seen scenes where an undercover cop is accused of being a cop? Hell, how many times have we experienced this ourselves? It seems that every time I’ve been in a room full of strangers where some kind of drug was pulled out, that question inevitably found its way to me, this question that is utterly useless because of how the answer will always amount to “no,” whether it’s true or not, so why bother asking? But it must be asked anyway, because that’s how these situations play out, so Scorsese has his characters wink at the audience every now and then to let us know that this really is a different movie after all.

At some points in this movie, the prevalent theme seems to be father figures, since both of our main characters are fatherless and taken under the wings of someone else: With Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), it’s a mob boss named Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), with Billy Costigan, it’s the head of the Boston undercover police division, Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen). The problem lies with each character’s connection to his father figure. We get a brief scene in the beginning where a young Colin Sullivan first meets Costello, who for some reason buys him groceries, but throughout the entire movie we’re constantly questioning Sullivan’s loyalty to the mob boss, and though that loyalty finally does cave in, there’s seemingly no reason it was there in the first place. For DiCaprio’s character, we’re given a series of flashbacks of a dying mother coupled with a vague explanation of why he’s decided to join the police, but we’re never completely sure why he decides to risk everything.

Based on the Japanese Hong Kong film, Infernal Affairs, The Departed depicts the lives of two snitches–one an undercover cop posing as a gangster, the other a gangster posing as a cop. In the middle Scorsese throws in a too-convenient love triangle, though none of the characters know the true implications of the love triangle they’re in until the very end– Costigan never figures out he’s having sex with Sullivan’s girl throughout the entire thing, in fact he never even learns her boyfriend’s name. Eventually, both the police and the gangsters figure out that there’s a rat in their midsts, and so it becomes a cat and mouse game of who gets found out first.

There are multiple layers to this movie that deserve a very long review, but unfortunately it’s very late, and since I’m having a hard time articulating my thoughts tonight anyway, we’ll move through them quickly: You can always tell that you empathize with a character when you watch him get into a pickle and share his “Oh fuck” moment, and there were times when DiCaprio’s character almost gets caught and you really do have that “Oh fuck” feeling. Matt Damon’s character however, though well acted, never gets our sympathy, mostly because we realize he could walk away from this whole thing and clean up his life. He has no real incentive to work for Nicholson, and so whenever he comes close to being caught, the audience knows he probably deserves it.

I listened to Filmspotting’s review of this movie, and even though they spent most of their review trashing the movie, they had to come around in the end and admit that they really liked it, and reading back over what I wrote, I realize that I’ve done the same exact thing. Up until now, you’d probably think that I didn’t like the movie, but such is not the case. It’s flawed, but it’s also great, and one of Scorsese’s better films, and definitely his best recent one. Even though it has some unsatisfactory twists and turns near the end, and character motivation often seems to be lacking, there’s a certain charm to everyone, and you end up liking just about every single character.

I didn’t talk about Mark Wahlberg’s performance at all during this review, so let me just end this by saying that this guy can act. I’m one of many critics who is perturbed that somebody who used to call himself Marky Mark could turn himself into the actor he is today.

Related posts: Filmmaker tries to jump-start Brazil’s movie industry

Even though I’ve owned an Ipod for months now and am absolutely in love with it, I almost never listen to music on it. Instead, I’m a podcast junkie and also occasionally lay down money for an audio book when I have some extra cash. Discovering new podcasts is harder than discovering new blogs, since one has to devote significantly more time testing a podcast than spending the 60 seconds it takes to read over a blog, I obviously don’t add new podcasts to my list unless recommended by a friend. Below are my absolute favorite podcasts:

Brainfood: I put this one first because it’s the rags-to-riches of the bunch. Its formula is really quite simple: the guy takes everyday things and tells you how they scientifically work. After doing this, he runs through a bunch of science headlines and random facts. It’s incredibly entertaining and this podcast has really caught fire despite the fact that it’s a grassroots type venture.

Filmspotting: Filmspotting is the first podcast I ever subscribed to, on a whim no less, while I was surfing through podcast listings, and I can honestly call myself a Filmspotting junkie. You know you’re one of these whenever you find yourself rushing home to write them an email, hoping they’ll read it out loud on the air. It’s run by Adam Kempenaar and Sam Van Hallgren, and do a show once a week. Three out of every four shows are just podcasts, but once a month they’re on air on Chicago Public Radio. Utterly fantastic banter about movies, fun games to play along with, cool prizes, the occasional interview. I love it.

Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me: A lot of people know about this show already since it’s been around for awhile, but I have to mention it anyway. It’s one of the few NPR shows that you can download for free, for some reason they make you pay for shows like “This American Life,”which is utterly stupid. If you’re a news junkie, then Wait Wait Don’t Tell me will make you feel like a genius every week, and there are very few episodes where I don’t have several laugh-out-loud moments during the show. It makes me want to travel to Chicago solely so I can be an audience member.

New York Science Podcast: What’s great about this is that they don’t just read the articles to you, they actually interview the writers who wrote the articles. Very interesting.

Related posts: Interview with Laurence Simon from This Blog is Full of Crap

I’ll start this essay with a joke about race jokes:

Person #1: How does every racist joke start?

Person #2: I dunno, how?

Person #1: (pantomimes looking over each shoulder to see if anyone of color is within hearing-range)

With that looking-over-the-shoulder, is Person #1 recognizing that what he is about to say is racist, or does he simply know that anyone overhearing it will take it out of context? I had a conversation recently with a friend of mine over whether or not it was fine for a liberally-minded person to make what many would label a racist joke. We theorized that within some realm of justification, we were simply mocking people who were racist by taking their racist stereotypes and putting them up to their funhouse mirror of ridiculousness. In essence, true racism is conveyed in a way so that these stereotypes are portrayed seriously, while race “jokes” are meant to paint a grim but funny picture of a serious issue.

How much of the above is blatant rationalization in a resistance to giving up our politically incorrect ways is up for debate, but one can certainly see it mirrored in both the comedy and political scenes of today. The word “Macaca,” escaping from Senator George Allen’s mouth causes fierce political debate. A comedian calling a gas station clerk “Abu” in one of his jokes is only met with laughter. Mel Gibson claiming that the Jews are responsible for all the world’s wars causes public shame. Jon Stewart announcing that his nose couldn’t look any “Jeweyer” is comedic gold.

Race humor has become such a huge fad that you can hardly watch a Comedy Central comedian line-up without coming across a comedian whose jokes are mostly based on racial stereotypes. These kind of jokes first came into fashion with black comedians like Richard Pryor and Chris Rock, but then quickly caught fire with Latinos like George Lopez and Carlos Mencia. And now, the fad has grown so huge that even white comedians are jumping on the bandwagon, some of whom are becoming well known for their race humor, like Lisa Lampanelli.

One could conclude that repeating stereotypes in joke form can get the blanket stamp of approval, but such is not the case. David Cross was quick to attack Larry the Cable guy in an open letter in which he rebutted Larry’s claim that people who get offended by his jokes are too politically correct:

But perhaps the funniest (oddest) thing in your book is you taking me to task for being P.C. Have you heard my act?! I’ll match your un-P.C.ness any day of the week my friend…

…Well, first of all, your act is racist. Maybe not all the time, but it certainly can be. Here, let me quote you back, word for word, some of your “faintly negative” humor and I’ll let people judge for themselves.”

Cross then moves on to quote several Larry the Cable Guy jokes, and–perhaps with the slanted light that is David’s open letter–the quotes do seem incredibly racist and unfunny. Perhaps because underneath the jokes there is a very unsubtle reality to them, as if Larry is simply pointing out what to him is obvious truth. And we have to think about his audience for a second: Southerners, self-described Rednecks, and when we think of racists, they’re the first people who come to mind.

You see what I did just there? I passed judgement on Larry the Cable Guy’s humor simply based on his audience, and the way they would perceive the joke. And that’s the horrible complexity of the racial joke, because we must not only judge the comedian’s intentions but also how it will be received, and nobody will doubt that Larry the Cable Guy knows his audience very well. He seems molded around it. Are we to believe that accent and the fact that “britches” seems to be a normal addition to his lexicon in place of the word “underwear”? How did a person who became rich well before his claim to fame ever come to think a cut-off shirt would be fashionable? Larry the Cable Guy is a self-made caricature of the Redneck, simultaneously degrading the label and giving it legendary status until you’ll actually see high schoolers stick “Proud to be a Redneck” bumper stickers on the back of their trucks right next to their Confederate flags.

And then there is the shock factor to race jokes. Because of the taboos that have developed during the civil rights movement, telling a particularly edgy race joke can be funny simply because of how shocking it is. Compare the laughter of a comic who relies on racial jokes to a comic who doesn’t. You’ll notice a much lower hum to the race comic’s audience laughter, because the audience often makes a deep “Ohh” sound simultaneously with the laugh, the sound we make when we know we really shouldn’t be laughing. And often, the comic will go out of his way to make note of when the laughter reaches a particularly low register, because he knows he is walking a thin line, and his noting it is his way of affirming that he knows what he’s doing, that he’s not pushing it too far after all because it’ll all on purpose.

The problem lies with a comic’s dependence on the shock factor. Very often, the joke is absent of an actual punch line, and the comedian falls into the trap of having to continually up the ante, which is virtually impossible. For every Dave Chappelle, you have a Carlos Mencia, who can’t seem to grasp anything beyond the obvious and instead tries for that deep, taboo laughter, often telling the audience that he has “taken that joke too far,” when they’ve already grown numb to his racist humor.

The prevalent theme here seems to be context, so what is the context in which a race joke is acceptable? Well, before we even begin to answer this question, I must assert that there will be people out there who, no matter the context, will find a race joke offensive, and if you’re worried about pleasing everybody, then perhaps race jokes shouldn’t be your thing. If, on the other hand, you’re willing to move past this, the next thing you should know is that race jokes should never be launched towards an opponent of yours. Michele Malkin will never find an Asian joke funny coming from a liberal blogger and Margaret Cho will never find an Asian joke from a conservative funny. If there is any level of animosity between you and another person, that race joke will become a much deeper cut and take on a serious implication whether or not it’s intended.

It goes without saying that race jokes should only be thrown around with people you know. There’s something about the anonymity of a race joke. If someone feels comfortable telling me a race joke without knowing me, it makes me wonder what that person is trying to convey, as if he’s telling me this joke simply because we’re both white chums, the boy’s club, if you will. My best friend making a joke about black people comes off much more innocently than someone who I just met at the bar.

And finally, I would say that nonverbal communication makes all the difference. What is your face saying as you tell your joke? Do you appear to be satirical or simply mean spirited? Delivery is the key.

Twenty minutes before I started this essay, I was talking to an Asian friend of mine. She mentioned that she’d made another Asian friend on campus. I immediately replied, “Well, I’m glad you’re learning to mingle with your own kind.”

She laughed. I laughed. No awkward feeling between us.

Success.

Related posts: But I only linked to it! That doesn’t mean I endorsed it!, How to build retractable Wolverine claws

I’m usually not one for blonde jokes, but this blonde joke is the best I’ve seen in a long time.

Related post: It’s time to Waterboard GOP Rep. Mark Foley