Category: uncategorized

Ninja

~ Mark

Ninja. I overreacted, but that doesn’t mean my opinion was wrong. I was inspired to watch this after the AV Club article on direct-to-video action movies. You will find nothing surprising in plot or writing, and now that I think about it, a lot of the actual ass-kicking isn’t that amazing. But – huge but – this movie is pure gold when it comes to the art of moving cameras around moving bodies doing cool things. Really dynamic fight scenes that are still completely comprehensible in time and geography? Sold. E.g., the subway scene. Ultimately, it gets down to a one-on-one battle like you’d expect, which isn’t as cinematically fun. Plenty of good stuff, though.

Captain Phillips

~ Mark

Captain Phillips. I really dug it. Hanks is great, so is Abdi. And what makes this worthwhile is that both of them get fair treatment in how the story is structured (despite the one-sided title). Pretty strong similarities to Zero Dark Thirty in tone and tension, and how they’re not quite really about the obvious thematic baggage they might have easily tended toward. The scale of the stuff – real gigantic boats and aircraft – made me think of 80s/90s action movies. Very refreshing. Also, having captain on the bridge talking to engineering down with the engines reminded me of Star Trek. I really liked Noah Millman’s write-up.

The Arts – €”Agents of Change and Source of Enchantment | Catholic World Report

~ Mark

Dana Gioia:

The modern assumption that writers and artists are dreamy, impractical people is both odd and quite insulting to creative people. Sophocles was a general, Goethe a scientist and statesman. Shakespeare was the most successful entertainment entrepreneur of Renaissance England. I had no particular interest in business, but I had to make a living, and I realized that I had a talent for managing enterprises such as literary magazines and films series. So I took the plunge and went to business school. I found the business world very demanding but also a good place for hard-working and talented people—better, I think, than the university.

I let absolutely no one at General Foods know that I was a poet. I kept my two lives entirely separate. It wasn’t until years later when Esquire featured me in a special issue of “Men and Women Under Forty Who Are Changing America” that my secret life was revealed to my colleagues. I didn’t enjoy the sudden celebrity. It only complicated my life. Never underestimate the advantages of anonymity.

Dana’s brother Ted Gioia:

If you asked me to sum up my view of music in one sentence, I could do it: music is a change agent and a source of enchantment. When people start understanding the arts in those terms, you don’t need to sell them on culture. They come out of curiosity, desire, and self-interest. Teachers can help spur this process, but it’s a different kind of teaching than you find in most classrooms

The Arts – €”Agents of Change and Source of Enchantment | Catholic World Report

~ Mark

ecantwell:

Things That Wake Up My Baby:

  • the sound of me pouring milk on my cereal
  • sneezing
  • the door closing
  • the dog barking at invisible squirrels
  • a spoon stirring cream into coffee
  • his own arms moving involuntarily

Things That Do Not Wake Up My Baby:

  • the microwave
  • the screams of people getting brutally murdered on television
  • books falling on the floor
  • the dog barking at actual men outside our house
  • loud laughter
  • power drills being used in the next room 
~ Mark

Any time you’re trying to explain something based on what broad categories of people do, it’s time to stop, back up, stick to the facts at hand, and ask yourself why you’re reaching so far to get a more appealing answer.

Carolyn Hax. My Hax tag is the best.

Outrage | The Point Magazine

~ Mark

An addiction to outrage seems to afflict writers across the political spectrum. Opponents are castigated for being insufficiently scandalized by the atrocity of the hour, and authors of offending posts are roundly demonized and ridiculed. Silver linings are rarely sought in bad news, common ground with adversaries seldom found.

Delighted to see discussion of Zero Dark Thirty in this essay. I was so bummed out by the conversation around the movie last winter.

Outrage | The Point Magazine

Star Trek Into Darkness

~ Mark

Star Trek Into Darkness. This one does not compare well to the other Star Trek movies. Fun, maybe, kinda, but there’s all kinds of narrative whiplash, and the non-Kirk, non-Spock characters aren’t quite there for me. Slapdash effort. Oh, well. I’ve still got my top 5 or 6 in the series to fall back on:

  1. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
  2. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
  3. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
  4. Star Trek: The Motion Picture
  5. Star Trek: First Contact
  6. Star Trek
  7. Star Trek: Nemesis
  8. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
  9. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
  10. Star Trek: Generations
  11. Star Trek Into Darkness
  12. Star Trek: Insurrection

Gravity

~ Mark

Gravity. It’s definitely worth seeing. Very stressful in an entertaining way. Gotta respect a movie with moments where just grabbing a rail feels like the most important thing in the universe. It’s a steady sequence of disasters and new problems. The special effects are just tremendous. I love the way Cuarón plays with the sound, changing with the environment or how the camera or the viewpoint would experience it. The score is omnipresent, for better or worse, depending on how you feel about that sort of thing, but I liked its spacy abstraction.

The writing is a real weakness I was willing to ignore in the moment, but made me sour a little bit when thinking back. The plotsplaining was a bit tedious at times (“But now we have to do X, but we have to look out for Y.”, or “It’s getting really hot in here!”), and there’s some backstory and associated melodrama that probably could have been excised, but it’s a popcorn genre film, sooooo whatever. Deal.

In Conversation: Antonin Scalia

~ Mark

What I do wish is that we were in agreement on the basic question of what we think we’re doing when we interpret the Constitution. I mean, that’s sort of rudimentary. It’s sort of an embarrassment, really, that we’re not. But some people think our job is to keep it up to date, give new meaning to whatever phrases it has. And others think it’s to give it the meaning the people ratified when they adopted it. Those are quite different views.

Really enjoyed this interview. I need to keep an eye out for this Jennifer Senior character, as I just remembered her really good article on high school.

In Conversation: Antonin Scalia

~ Mark

Beatlemania: ‘the screamers’ and other tales of fandom.

If anyone is likely to look kindly on the excesses of new generations of fans, it’s a former Beatlemaniac. “I understand when I see the One Direction kids going mad,” says Bridget Kelly. “People think they’re silly but they’re not. It’s the togetherness. We had this big communal thing that we all knew and loved and understood — something that was yours and nothing to do with your mum and dad. We were all in it together. It was lovely.”

Remember this old photo? Filed under: fandom.