Archive for June, 2006
By sheer coincidence, we had a group viewing of Munich (in Entertainment Weekly’s words, “Steven Spielberg’s latest ‘Big Important Movie’”) on the same day that the 2006 World Cup opened in Munich. Maybe we should have watched soccer/football instead. It might have actually contained more insightful political commentary.
In all the glowing reviews I read when Munich was released in theaters last December, the word “political” dominated. I knew it was about the assassins assigned to avenge the deaths of Israeli athletes slain at the 1972 Olympic Games—but somehow, knowing that the screenplay was mostly by Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Angels in America, I expected more politics and less assassination. As Kushner himself says, “Nothing ever happens in my plays. People sit around and talk.”
Would that there had been more talk, or at least more narrative impetus. At two hours and 44 minutes, the movie was at least an hour too long. Did we really need to see every single assassination? I think we could have gotten the message “violence begets more violence” after just a couple. Oddly, before Kushner took over the screenplay, some of it had already been drafted by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), but somehow I have a hard time attributing Munich’s bloodfest to the Master of Saccharine. I think I mostly blame Spielberg. I mean, all the gore was effective once—in Schindler’s List—but when he keeps basing every film around shock-inducing violence, it gets a little old.
At least for me, Schindler’s List was more interesting as a story than Munich because it portrayed a dissolute, profit-oriented character who, to his own surprise, manages to do good. (Plus, there’s that one scene in which, after all the horror is over, Schindler breaks down and sobs, “I could have done more.” Uf. Years after seeing the movie, that’s what I remember most vividly (not to downplay the atrocity of the Holocaust events—I’m speaking in narrative terms).) In Munich, we get the far more boring arc of a “basically good” character (Avner, played by a very aesthetically appealing Eric Bana) who is drawn downward into an accelerating cycle of violence. It’s a classic fall from innocence. Not like we’ve ever seen that story before.
I’m struck here by some similarities between Munich and another well-reviewed 2005 movie that disappointed me: A History of Violence. Both go out of their way to portray their heroes as kind family men who love their wives and children. In fact, each movie frames the violent bloodbath in its center with two contrasting sex scenes between husband and wife. In the first scene, everything is idyllic and pleasurable for both, while, in the second, the “fall” has occurred, and we see the ways in which the hero has brought violence home with him. (There are differences in the way they bring violence home, though. The second sex scene in A History of Violence is borderline, if not actual, marital rape, while, in Munich’s second sex scene, Avner is merely haunted by memories of the murders of the Israeli athletes. Which seems odd, by the way, because he wasn’t there. And yet he keeps having “flashbacks” to that event throughout the movie. It seems far more psychologically plausible at this point in the film that he would have been remembering the murders he himself had committed.)
The way these sex scenes are used bothers me, and I’m still trying to put my finger on why. Maybe it’s just that their narrative purpose—showing the change in the main character—is so blatantly obvious. But I think it also has something to do with using women—and the male protagonist’s interaction with women—as the primary gauge of that character’s corruption.
For me, the most disturbing scene in Munich was not the bloodiest (I wasn’t looking at the screen for most of those scenes anyway) but rather the most personally vengeful. One of Avner’s group of secret operatives has been seduced and killed by a female assassin. In spite of the fact that this woman had nothing to do with the Munich situation, they then track her down and kill her. They seem more ruthless with her, not just because she killed their friend and associate, but because she used sex to do so. After each one in the group shoots the woman, they leave her naked in a chair (though I feared that they would rape her, they didn’t—and one operative also expressed regret afterward for not covering her up). It’s not as if the film is glorifying the violence in this scene at all—it’s not. But it still bothers me, for some reason, that violence against a woman is the turning point in the film, the point at which it’s clear that they’ve gone too far. I guess it seems like the filmmakers are using women for easy narrative tricks, rather than letting them be characters in their own right. Plus, it seems like there’s an attempt to manipulate vestiges of chivalrous feeling in the (male) audience: it’s as if the movie assumes that the audience will only fully recognize the horror of violence when they see it enacted against women. Yet, ironically, “we must protect our women” has actually been an excuse for violence for, let’s see, how many millennia now?
Of course, “we must protect our women” used to be (and still is, only sometimes now it’s “we must protect their women”) a rallying cry for nationalistic violence. And this brings me to something else that troubles me about Munich. Avner learns, by the end of the film, that nationalism is no answer. He has killed in the name of Israel, and yet, in the end, the Israeli government betrays him. So he retreats to private family life in the U.S. (as does Tom Stall at the end of A History of Violence). There’s nothing in between, no larger community in which he can participate. It’s either corrupt nation or private family life. It’s not like it would make sense for Avner to go off and join the Peace Corps or anything, but it does bother me to see individualistic retreat portrayed as the only option to violence.
Stick to soccer, gentle readers. Trust me.
June 11th, 2006
Dormouse just called my attention to Slate’s Blogging the Bible project (subtitled “What Happens When an Ignoramus Reads the Good Book?”). It’s not biblical scholarship, just the honest reactions and questions of a man reading the Hebrew scriptures closely for the first time. AND he invites reader responses. Pop Otter, calm yourself. You can’t spend all your time posting ten-page answers to his questions.
Now seems like as good a time as any to reflect upon a life surrounded by Bible-philes. Let’s start off with a little illustrative anecdote. I think it was maybe the second or third time I brought Porpoise—then my boyfriend—home from college to visit my family. On a lazy Saturday morning, Mama Chipmunk*, Porpoise, and I were relaxing after breakfast when Pop Otter bounded into the living room, dropped a stack of books on the coffee table, and asked, “Want to help me review commentaries on Leviticus?”
I’m not sure about this, but somehow I don’t think that’s the question most girls fear their fathers will ask when they bring a boy home.
We were each to select a passage from Leviticus, so that we could compare how it was explicated in the various commentaries. Mama Chipmunk immediately piped up, “I want the passage about mildew regulations! Can I have mildew regulations?”
Well, stunningly, despite this experience, Porpoise married me anyway and is now part of the whole insane crew—and, trust me, he has his own brand of insanity, too.
Recently, he’s begun playing with my interlinear Bible and my basic biblical Greek textbook. It’s partly for work, but he is enjoying what he’s learning. So is the Cherub. Look—here she is sitting next to the interlinear Bible, looking very scholarly.
In short, I am surrounded by people who love reading the Bible. Yet I do not like reading the Bible. I make myself read it anyway (well, I try), and I think, for me, part of faith is trusting that this will somehow help me know God better, even if I don’t “feel” anything. I do appreciate learning things about the original languages and literary forms, things that have often been obscured in translation. But most of the time I feel like I learn more about God’s nature and the Christian journey obliquely—through other books that I read (particularly, of course, The Lord of the Rings).
And then I realize that I wouldn’t be able to see God in fiction and poetry—at least not in the same way—if I hadn’t already read about God in the scriptures.
Anyway, for someone who’s read the Bible enough that she’s bored with it and yet still has so much to learn about it, it’s interesting to read the questions of a self-proclaimed “ignoramus.” I think I’ll be following the Blogging the Bible project—maybe it will be a good balance with looking at the scriptures in light of their original context, which is what I usually try to do (along with lectio divina, which I really like but have a hard time settling down for). If nothing else, it will at least provide a few good chuckles.
*Mom hasn’t chosen her own moniker for the blog, but, when I was two, I informed everyone that she was a chipmunk. Don’t know why—maybe because she hoards sunflower seeds. So Mama Chipmunk she is.
June 7th, 2006
I’m not really comparing them because, well, that would be stupid. They just happen to be the two movies I saw this weekend. And I just happened to like one better than the other. Guess which.
Here’s a snippet of dialogue showing how movie-watching sometimes goes at the Otter-Porpoise household:
[Lois Lane is dangling out of a helicopter, Superman has just donned his little suit and is making his first public appearance, and we’re seeing the stunned faces of Metropolites below.]
Otter: Hey, wait a minute, was that Ben Vereen? [dives for the remote control and skips back a few seconds]
Porpoise: [shocked silence, unnoticed by Otter]
Otter: I think that’s him!
Porpoise: [reclaiming remote] Please don’t ever do that again.
Otter: What?
Porpoise: It’s only the most important moment in the whole movie!
Otter: Huh? [already trying to remember in which years Vereen was nominated for a Tony]
Most of you know my undying love for Broadway musicals, which is why I hope you won’t be shocked at my heretical priorities. And I don’t have much to say about Superman (1978) except that it bored me silly (sorry—maybe you had to see it as a kid to appreciate it) and that I’m relieved that Rory Gilmore’s recent, rather unappealing hairstyle can at least be explained as tribute to the 1978 Lois Lane’s locks (I mean, they’re both journalists, right? Am I on to something here?).
But, oh, I was overjoyed when “Z” and “A” brought The Producers to share with us! You can probably tell from many of my recent posts that I’ve been dying for a good ol’ musical, and I finally got my wish. I’ve only seen snippets of the original, primarily non-musical, movie, and I never saw the stage show, so this was my first exposure to the phenomenon (except for my Jewish friends in high school choir, who would quite often break into “Springtime for Hitler”).
The recent movie musical (with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane, stars of the smash Broadway show) got mediocre reviews, and many critics cited overacting as the reason. “Z” and I found ourselves asking, “Have they ever seen a musical?”
Admittedly, the movie was a bit slow to start out, but Porpoise says the original is somewhat plodding, too. Things pick up once the singing and dancing start, which makes sense, considering that director Susan Stroman is primarily known for her choreography. In addition to The Producers, she choreographed the revival of Oklahoma (yes, the one starring Hugh Jackman!) and the movie Center Stage (which was dumb, but which did have some amazing dance scenes). I’m a fan.
As far as a film, The Producers may have some big flaws—I don’t know. I just enjoyed the silliness (an aware silliness, as opposed to certain other movies currently in theaters). “Springtime for Hitler” is, of course, as hilariously gauche as ever, but for me, one of the highlights was seeing Nathan Lane’s sung monologue summarizing the entire show up to that point. As Porpoise said, “I think every musical needs one of those.” Porpoise, for the record, liked The Producers well enough to give it four out of five stars.
No reviewer can fail to mention The Producers’ strange journey from movie to stage musical to musical movie—and a similar fate awaits Hairspray, which will soon (once again) be a movie, this time starring John Travolta. It’s an interesting pattern, considering that movie musicals (with the obvious exception of Chicago) don’t seem to do very well critically anymore. Rent. The Phantom of the Opera. Evita. All got mediocre-or-worse reviews. And, at least in the case of The Phantom of the Opera, most of the reviewers I read admitted that they didn’t like the stage musical in the first place. How can the movie musical get a fair rap these days, when our aesthetic is in so many ways anti-everything-that-a-musical-is?
However, Broadway shows are so expensive now that movies may be the only access that most of us have. I just heard someone reminiscing on the documentary Broadway: The Golden Age that, in 1949, it cost two dollars to see a movie in the cinema and 85 cents to see a Broadway show. Sigh. And yet, instead of bringing stage musicals to the screen, the current trend seems to be more in the direction of translating movies onto stage (in addition to The Producers and Hairspray, there’s The Full Monty, Billy Elliot, and scads of animated Disney movies).
What do y’all think about the current relationship between stage and screen? About the current state of musicals as a whole? I ask as someone who, for years, hasn’t been able to afford tickets for live musicals.
By the way, I haven’t been able to verify whether Ben Vereen does indeed have an uncredited cameo in Superman. However, he does appear in PBS’s fabulous miniseries Broadway: The American Musical, which I highly recommend not only as a retrospective of musicals but also as an interesting look at U.S. social history.
June 5th, 2006
Okay, I have to confess first of all that I’ve only ever seen one episode of Buffy, so forgive my ignorance. But I just read a paragraph in an Entertainment Weekly article (commemorating highlights of the WB channel) describing a key Buffy plot point thus:
Buffy “was compelled to slay her great love, Angel, to save the world. At that point, Angel (David Boreanaz) was switching in and out of his evil alter ego, Angelus, representing death and destruction as much as he did allure and romance. At the operatic climax, Buffy and Angel kissed, then she stabbed him in the chest.”
Sound like a certain recent film climax, anyone?
Jillian and Dormouse, you two watched Buffy faithfully. Did it bother you to see the same plot resolution in X-Men 3? Was it okay because it’s a pretty common myth pattern anyway?
Also, I wanted to bring to prominence a comment Dormouse made on the previous X-Men post, because it’s really interesting:
“Also, I really enjoyed the ending of the movie. B/c I felt like it drove home a really key point–mutation cannot be cured, which, in my mind, indicates there’s nothing wrong there to begin with.
Besides, Rogue’s tragedy really compels me, and I hate the idea that she could just cure herself.”
I definitely agree that there’s nothing about the mutants that needs to be cured. But, on the other hand, I felt quite sympathetic with Rogue’s decision. The form her mutancy took was, to her, more heartbreak than benefit (she can’t touch people she cares about AND she doesn’t have any other powers that work at a distance). Now I can see why you would be upset with her decision if you’re viewing mutancy as a parallel to homosexuality. But what about if you think of it as a parallel to disability? Take a deaf person. Now there’s nothing “wrong” there, either, nothing that makes that individual less than a person. But what if that individual chooses to have a cochlear implant? Some in the deaf community would never want cochlear implants, because they cherish the particularity of that community, including communicating through sign language. And I don’t think people who get cochlear implants are necessarily saying there’s anything wrong with being deaf–they’re simply making a choice about how they want to live their lives.
Of course, Rogue’s decision isn’t about either homosexuality or disability, and yet it’s about both, as well as a whole host of other issues. I do like the complexity of the questions the film raises, how the same question may look different through different angles.
However, given the wiggling chessman at the end of the film, I think we might surmise that Rogue’s “cure” won’t be permanent anyway.
June 3rd, 2006
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a long time, as it’s one of my little stump speeches, but I am just now getting around to it. More than the historical errors, more than the silly conspiracy theories, what drives me nuts about The Da Vinci Code (the book) is its veneer of the “sacred feminine,” under which lies the deep philosophy of “sex is all about what men get out of it.”
For example, here’s the passage that makes me stomp around and kick things. Langdon is lecturing his adoring students at Harvard (yeah, right) when he veers slightly off topic and offers to give them “this bit of advice about your sex lives”:
All the men in the audience leaned forward, listening intently.
‘The next time you find yourself with a woman, look in your heart and see if you cannot approach sex as a mystical, spiritual act. Challenge yourself to find that spark of divinity that man can only achieve through union with the sacred feminine.’
The women smiled knowingly, nodding.
Blechhh! If this is feminist, then, well . . . the world is even more depressing than I thought it was. Granted, Langdon is talking to the male students at this point, but, even so, I’ve never read anything so male-centered trying to pass itself off as being enlightened toward women. And, if women exist so that you can get access to the divine through them, what the heck are women (heterosexual women, anyway, which I think are the only kind that exist in Dan Brown’s world) supposed to do to have a spiritual experience? Oh, I forgot. We don’t have to. We’re just naturally more in touch with the divine. Which is why we were supposed to be “the angels in the house” back in the 19th century, imparting our naturally superior religious virtues to our offspring. Don’t you love it when Victorian gender ideals get recycled in contemporary bestsellers?
And then there’s the whole chalice-and-blade symbolism thing, which just goes to reinforce the whole “all men are like this, and all women are like that” sort of view that characterizes the novel. Women, represented by the V-shape of the chalice, are thus reduced to being represented by their uteruses, which, may I remind everyone, are not really involved in sex itself. Let’s just randomly pick an organ to represent men sexually, like, say, the epididymis, which as far as I know, is just a passageway and has nothing to do with pleasure. Anyway, uteruses are of course receptacles, which seems to be the main role for women in The Da Vinci Code. Mary Magdalene receives Jesus’ sperm and thus becomes the “Holy Grail” continuing his bloodline; Sophie, as a character, seems to exist mainly to receive Langdon’s superior wisdom.
And this is supposed to be an improvement on the Catholic Church’s treatment of women? It actually sounds rather similar to the view once traditionally taken by the Church: women’s primary role is reproduction, and sex is not about pleasure (at least, not for women). Now, I’ll be first to say that both Catholics and Protestants have a lot to atone for in their historical attitudes towards women and sex. But viewing women as vessels is hardly progress.
Neither is reducing men OR women to their sexual (or reproductive, as the case may be) organs. In incarnational Christianity, sex does indeed have spiritual significance, as a celebration of the body’s created goodness. And that’s why, if there were actually any historical proof that Jesus were married, Christians should have no problem with it. It would have been one more way that Jesus lived out human life with us. I can’t offer any explanation as to why Jesus was single and celibate, rather than married with children. But I have my own little idea, and it goes like this:
Many particulars of Jesus’ life align him with the oppressed, the social outcasts. Though Dan Brown is absolutely wrong in his assertion that no Jewish man in Jesus’ day would have been single (Hey, Dan, you know those Dead Sea Scroll thingies that you reference? Do you actually know anything about the Essenes who produced them?), he is right that men or women without children were looked down upon, perhaps even considered cursed by God. If you were a barren woman in the 1st century, think how much hope you would find in the fact that your Messiah had no children, either. Or if you were, say, a male eunuch. I’ve always found the story of the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 9: 26-40) one of the most moving in the New Testament. Here’s a man considered by his culture to be incomplete, and he finds himself (by no coincidence, I’m sure), reading over a passage from Isaiah:
“He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,
And as a lamb before its shearer is silent,
So he did not open his mouth.
In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth.”
Then Philip comes along and explains how this passage can be applied to Jesus’ life. And the eunuch learns that God, when God became a human, didn’t have any children either. And yet Jesus was as whole as any human has ever been. And you are whole, too. Good news indeed.
Human sex can play a role in showing God’s goodness and glory, but humans, according to God, are not defined by their sexual organs—which ones they have, or whether they have them or not. I find that a whole lot more liberating than pseudo-feminist “sacred feminine” bushwah.
June 3rd, 2006
That’s w-e-l-t-s-c-h-m-e-r-z. Weltschmerz. German origin (no kidding). And I am feeling weltschmerz-y about the prime-timing of the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee last night.
When I first heard that ABC was going to show the bee finals, I was overjoyed. The bee’s been on ESPN for years, but now it would be available for non-cable subscribers. And, as a spelling junkie, I was ready to get my fix.
Of course I have to say something here about the recent mainstreaming of the spelling bee, which has surprised and, admittedly, puzzled me. First there was the superb documentary Spellbound (2002), which primarily treated the kids with respect, while showing off the foolishness of their parents, teachers, and neighbors. There were a few psychotically competitive kids, but you also got glimpses of those who competed out of the sheer joy of playing with words. There was also the to-be-expected “look how much this kid has overcome to get this far” angle, also the emphasis of the recent Starbucks-promoted film Akeelah and the Bee (which I was desperate to see, but which only stayed in the movie theaters of my benighted town for a week). I haven’t seen last fall’s Bee Season, but, if it’s anything like Myra Goldberg’s novel (on which it’s based), I think I might find it too depressing. It’s more about family angst than about spelling.
Anyway, why are spelling bees suddenly so popular? Is it because most people, reliant on Microsoft Word, can’t spell anymore? In the broadcast last night, the young competitors seemed to be treated like rather exotic pets—or, sometimes, like Olympic athletes, which, considering how annoying Olympics commentary can be, is not much of an improvement. Indeed, the commentators said things just as idiotic and cutting as Dick Button’s narration of Olympic figure skating events.
These are children, people. Extremely gifted children, but children nonetheless. I was aghast when I discovered that the bee was being broadcast live, between 8 and 10: 15 p.m. last night. This also meant that the competitors had to sit, waiting, letting their anxiety build, as ABC took commercial breaks. As a former speller, I know that’s got to be mental torture.
All things considered, as much as I love spelling competitions, after last night, I wholeheartedly wish that the bee would never be broadcast again. I fear that continuing this trend might make competitive parents push their kids even harder. Relegate the bee to relative obscurity and let it be fun again. Establish an adult spelling bee and broadcast that. Adults can determine for themselves how competitive they want to be. If they become warped, it’s their own faults.
I am, I confess, biased by my own experiences with spelling. I never got further than a third in state, and, even in my day, I think the national spelling bee would have been too competitive for me. But I loved spelling. The adrenaline of competition was nerve-racking—but, before all that, there were the hours of fun preparing. Now a professional coach seems to be a prerequisite for competition, but, back then, I had my dad. He read words, and I spelled them back, but not before we laughed at the definition or traded several puns back and forth. My mom, hearing all the giggling, had a hard time believing that we were actually studying. We were otters, playing with words.
And that’s what I wish for today’s young spellers.
On a side note, I was happy that, for the first time since Nupur Lala (Nupur Lala!) in 1999, a girl won the bee. I was, however, rooting for the runner-up, Finola Hackett. One of her hobbies is Irish dance, so how could I not support her? Sadly, she misspelled “weltschmerz,” which seemed odd, since she clearly knew German spelling rules, and she had correctly spelled many more difficult words (any speller knows that the hardest words are not necessarily the long ones, but those with lots of schwas). Must have been a nervous mental blip. Anyway, I liked her because her face registered expressions (unlike some of the other spellers, who I feared might have been robots), and she didn’t seem devastated when she was eliminated. She’ll be okay. And I hope she keeps dancing.
By the way, you can view online the complete list of words used in the bee. Note that the “championship words” (those used once there are two competitors left) are actually much, much easier than the ones in previous rounds. Odd.
June 2nd, 2006
Oh, my “Office”-lovin’ friends, the Peacock Network cares about us after all. They’re providing us with 10 webisodes to sustain us until Season 3 airs in the fall.
Sadly, we will still have to wait until July 13.
Meanwhile, check out the Entertainment Weekly blog and voice your support for a “TV Watch” on “The Office” next season.
June 1st, 2006
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