April 4, 2012

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All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story. You told it with a hint of doom. You included his flaws. You emphasized the obstacles that could prevent him from succeeding. That was what made the story epic: the player, the hero, had to suffer mightily en route to his final triumph. Schwartz knew that people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering. Most people couldn’t do this alone; they needed a coach. A good coach made you suffer in a way that suited you.

Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding (via Austin Kleon)

How Do You Make Life-Changing Decisions? | RyanHoliday.net

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Books. Books. Books. People have been doing [whatever it is your deciding about] for a while now. They’ve been moving West, leaving school, investing their savings, getting dumped or filing for divorce, starting businesses, quitting their jobs, fighting, dying and fucking for thousands of years. This is all written down, often in the first person. Read it. Stop pretending you’re breaking new ground.

How Do You Make Life-Changing Decisions? | RyanHoliday.net

13 Assassins

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十三人の刺客 (13 Assassins). One important thing others movies can learn from this one: the diplomatic boardroom plotting in the first part of the film is perfectly balanced with an absurd(ly fun) bloodbath at the end of the movie. I’m pretty sure there was some Japanese cultural nuance here that I just didn’t get, but I still dig it. Great directing and great acting. Also, be ye warned, there is one scene early in the movie that I just can’t unsee.

Shame: A Durkheimian Take – The New Inquiry

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The fact that addiction is a clinical condition that is straying into more and more areas of life is itself an interesting sociological phenomenon. It’s not that the field of psychology does not or should not exist, but efforts to cram more and more into this field represents a form of societal dishonesty that rivals the psychic dishonesty of addicts refusing to come clean.

Shame: A Durkheimian Take – The New Inquiry

March 25, 2012

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God with magnificent irony / gives me at once both books and night.

Jorge Luis Borges, in Poem About Gifts. Disclaimer: translated, paraphrased. He almost certainly has blindness in mind when referring to night, but it reminded me of me complaining on Twitter:

Every night the same fruitless bedtime prayer: “Dear God, please let me stop getting sleepy so I can read more. Amen.”

À bout portant (Point Blank)

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À bout portant (Point Blank). Some movies do all the clichés right. Wrongful suspicion! A man in over his head! A woman in labor! Crooked cops! A chase on a complicated urban transit system! General ridiculousness! It all works. This movie reminded me of a great episode of a TV thriller–there’s not a ton of time for bullshit conversations and plot thickeners on your cellphones, so just go go go. There’s one chase scene in here that ends perfectly. It’s exactly what I would do.

March 24, 2012

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Elaine in Seinfeld, Male Unbonding episode. I probably quote this more than anything I’ve ever seen on TV:

ELAINE: Come on, let’s go do something. I don’t want to just sit around here.

JERRY: Okay.

ELAINE: Want to go get something to eat?

JERRY: Where do you want to go?

ELAINE: I don’t care, I’m not hungry.

JERRY: We could go to one of those cappuccino places. They let you just sit there.

ELAINE: What are we gonna do there? Talk?

JERRY: We can talk.

ELAINE: I’ll go if I don’t have to talk.

File under: boredom, introverts.

March 23, 2012

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I dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes — all the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.

Michel Foucault (via viafrank). See also Clive James:

Whatever the subject, a real critic is a cultural critic, always: if your judgment doesn’t bring in more of the world than it shuts out, you shouldn’t start.

and Anthony Lane:

Of all the duties required of the professional critic, the least important—certainly the least enduring—is the verdict.

Why I Hate The 'Goldberg Variations' : NPR

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[Bach] says, in effect, yes this is bound to be boring but I am going to be so masterful that you will be in awe and not care even if you will be bored.

Jeremy Denk is a great writer. See also Denk on recording and photos of Glenn Gould during the March 1955 ‘Goldberg’ recording sessions collected by The Selvedge Yard.

Why I Hate The 'Goldberg Variations' : NPR

March 18, 2012

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Real life is messy. And as a general rule, the more theatrical the story you hear, and the more it divides the world into goodies vs baddies, the less reliable that story is going to be. […] One of the central problems with narrative nonfiction is that the best narratives aren’t messy and complicated, while nonfiction nearly always is.

Felix Salmon. I was so glad to see this article this afternoon. I just created my life is messy tag last night. (via)

The Thin Red Line

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The Thin Red Line. I’ve now seen everything Terrence Malick has directed. I thought I’d like this one more. Concessions: it’s gorgeous, the hilltop battle is a masterpiece (I can’t think of any movie battle where you have such a feeling for the geography, the space they move in), the acting is top-notch. The challenge he doesn’t quite meet here is in telling a story about humanity by letting everyone tell a human story. Badlands and Days of Heaven each had single narrators; this one has at least seven, just counting off from memory. That’s fine. Single narration isn’t a rule. I appreciate the experimentation. I just don’t think it works here. With a few exceptions, these guys almost always speak lofty Malickian. Which is also fine! I can understand an argument that this could be the Universal Voice of the Yearning Soul, or something. It just didn’t feel right to me because the language was too similar, as if it were one person with a handful of accents. Wikipedia tells me that Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, Jason Patric, Viggo Mortensen and Mickey Rourke were all cast and filmed, but didn’t make it into the final edit. Incredible! I wonder if keeping these guys in, with their own voiceovers, could help balance the narration. Along with all the other actors who basically got cameos (Travolta, Clooney, Brody), could this be a movie that isn’t long enough? Dare I say it? My Terrence Malick rankings:

  1. Days of Heaven
  2. The New World
  3. Badlands
  4. The Tree of Life
  5. The Thin Red line

I ranked this one dead last (close call), but note that Malick’s worst has still got a good lead over the median film. I think it’s safe to say he’s one of my favorite directors (up there with Eastwood and Buster Keaton). I’d probably say that based on Days of Heaven alone. Other movies I’ve seen.