Slumdog Millionaire

I get queasy when I hear of movies about poverty in India being made by foreigners. It isn't that these movies are bad per se but I find the Indian characters to be terribly contrived. The Indian setting in "After the Wedding' was peripheral to the movie's plot but I still found it unbelievable. In my mind, street kids don't talk like that (ditto for the Pakistani subplot in Syriana). I always cringe and avert my eyes when the halting Hindi is spoken -- in my mind, the subtitles sound better (and they probably are, the subtitles are probably directly from the script, while the spoken vernacular is a clumsy translation).

I bring all this up because the much-lauded Danny Boyle's much-lauded movie Slumdog Millionaire releases today in the city. Predictably, Manohla Dargis, an astute reviewer but susceptible to the auteur theory (i.e. a good director = a good movie), not to mention a Danny Boyle fan, has given it a favorable review (although she tempers it a bit at the end).

I'm much more hopeful that one of my favorite critics, The New Republic's Chris Orr has given it a rave too -- and an unqualified rave at that.

And of course I am disappointed that my favoritest critic David Edelstein chose not to review it altogether...

So I'm thinking I'll go and see it this weekend ...

UPDATE: I should mention that the movie is based on a novel Q and A by Vikas Swarup Some reviews here.

Do you want to move to Canada?

I guess this is at least two weeks too late but what the hell - it's still funny!

From the annals of incomprehensible academic writing

ScienceDirect - Journal of Personality and Social Psychology :

Cooperation in Social Dilemmas: Free Riding May Be Thwarted by Second-Order Reward Rather Than by Punishment:

Cooperation among nonrelatives can be puzzling because cooperation often involves incurring costs to confer benefits on unrelated others. Punishment of noncooperators can sustain otherwise fragile cooperation, but the provision of punishment suffers from a “second-order” free-riding problem because nonpunishers can free ride on the benefits from costly punishment provided by others. One suggested solution to this problem is second-order punishment of nonpunishers; more generally, the threat or promise of higher order sanctions might maintain the lower order sanctions that enforce cooperation in collective action problems. Here the authors report on 3 experiments testing people's willingness to provide second-order sanctions by having participants play a cooperative game with opportunities to punish and reward each other. The authors found that people supported those who rewarded cooperators either by rewarding them or by punishing nonrewarders, but people did not support those who punished noncooperators––they did not reward punishers or punish nonpunishers. Furthermore, people did not approve of punishers more than they did nonpunishers, even when nonpunishers were clearly unwilling to use sanctions to support cooperation. The results suggest that people will much more readily support positive sanctions than they will support negative sanctions.

Dont .. watch this movie

Manohla Dargis, who once wrote a full movie review in verse, writes another inventive one today -- reviewing "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas ".

Newsweek's post-campaign Sarah Palin tidbit

Newsweek gives a heads-up on what it's traditional "How he did it" post-election issue contains. Among them, this priceless tidbit:

At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys' club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. 'I'll be just a minute,' she said.

I must say that I have no clue about why this is included as if it is a revelation (I mean -- Sarah Palin comes out of the bathroom wearing a towel -- so what?) but I did burst out laughing when I read it, simply because it's so vividly painted.

Michael Crichton is dead

Lots of big things happened yesterday so I was shocked to read today that Michael Crichton -- yes, he of Jurassic Park -- died yesterday also.

Here's an appraisal from the New York Times.

Everyone seems to agree that Jurassic Park is his best novel. I never read it but the Spielberg movie was one of the first English movies I've seen and I think, it's one of the best in its genre. My grandmother recommended Sphere to me long ago (I did see the movie which was pretty bad.) The only novel I've read is Airframe, which wasn't bad at all.

I guess his death is not an occasion to bring up this blog post I once wrote about him. Let's just say that he was a little, uh, unconventional, in the way he used his own real-life spats with real people in his fiction. Right now though I guess the only thing to say is RIP.

UPDATE: An obit by James Fallows here.

PCs that boot fast

This is ridiculous!

You know what PC makers need to do? They need to stop putting in stupid applications when they ship the PC -- and they especially need to disable applications that start up on boot and slow the computer down. But trying to make an extra buck out of "fast starting" PCs? Someone needs to start a consumer uprising or something!

The spotless mind

Via Slashdot, looks like the world of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind might be here sooner than we expected (ok I'm half kidding, but still ... and the movie is a gem).

It sounds like science fiction, but scientists say it might one day be possible to erase undesirable memories from the brain, selectively and safely. After exposing mice to emotionally powerful stimuli, such as a mild shock to their paws, the scientists then observed how well or poorly the animals subsequently recalled the particular trauma as their brain's expression of CaMKII was manipulated up and down. When the brain was made to overproduce CaMKII at the exact moment the mouse was prodded to retrieve the traumatic memory, the memory wasn't just blocked, it appeared to be fully erased.

Excellent timing too, as Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York gets released tomorrow.

Hooked by The Wire

It took me around 30 minutes and subtitles to get into it - but folks, all the critical praise is not unwarranted: The Wire is a gripping tale, gritty and literary at the same time. It's so so so hard right now for me not to keep watching it and do something else.

Line of the day

Line of the day: David Edelstein on Clint Eastwood's Changeling

The way Eastwood shoves Jolie’s suffering in our face is like a threat to the Academy: “And the Oscar will go to … ” She’s a great actress. She doesn’t need his domineering chivalry.

Jolie

This profile of Angelina Jolie in the Times is almost complete fluff but it makes one good point: that Jolie has ascended to superstardom without starring in a single romantic comedy.

That may be part of the reason she has become virtually the only current A-list actress to achieve her status while completely bypassing romantic comedies. Nobody is ever likely to call her “America’s Sweetheart.”

Food for thought, no?

Subjective-Objective

One book. Three different reviews. Check them out.

The Black Swan

I know Nicholas Taleb's stuff is widely read and interesting, and the current crisis seems to have vindicated him but I found The Black Swan well-nigh unreadable -- not for its content, but it's style, it kept circling around its main point but never made it (at least in the first 30 pages, which is when I stopped reading).

Of course this was half a year ago. Now I wish I'd read it. But may be I should go back and give it a try.

UPDATE:
See here for another viewpoint.

UPDATE#2:
Here's an example of Taleb's murmurings that makes The Black Swan unreadable.

Debate # 3

I'm so glad that Obama didn't agree to McCain's town-hall meeting proposal -- just imagine watching the two of them in fifteen friggin' mind-numbing sessions like this across the country!!!!

McCain was bad tonight -- grinning, grimacing, unable to stick to a point, weirdly aggressive one moment and piteously whining the next. And his sarcastic interjections just looked ... petty.

Alex Massie -- whom I don't read regularly but whose commentary on the debates so far has been side-splittingly funny -- used a little thingie called CoveritLive to live-blog the third debate. I wonder when we'll be able to live-blog via IM -- wouldn't that be great??!!

The financial crisis

There are tons of articles on the financial crisis out there -- but here are two (well, one is an article, the other is just a quote) that helped me make sense of it*.

Jim Manzi's exceptionally well-written take explaining what's happening in terms of a primitive hunter-gatherer society.

And this quote from Barry Ritholtz, who writes at the Big Picture blog:

To show the impact of deregulation, consider the underlying premise of all credit transactions – loans, mortgages, and all debt instruments. Over the entire history of human finance, the borrower's ability to repay the loan has been the paramount factor in all lending. With mortgage, this included elements such as employment history, income, down payment, credit rating, other assets, loan-to-value ratio of the property, debt servicing ability, etc.

Greenspan’s decision to not supervise mortgage lenders led to a brand new lending standard. During a five year period (2002-07), the basis for making mortgages was NOT the borrowers ability to pay – rather, it was the lender's ability to sell a mortgage to firms that securitized them.

This represented an enormous change from the past.

These new unregulated mortgage brokers no longer cared about a standard 30 year mortgage being repaid over time. In the new world of repackaged loans, all that mattered was that the loan did not come back to the originator. By contract, this was typically 90 or 180 days. As long as the borrower did not default in that period of time, it could not be put back to the originator. [emphasis mine]

*Of course everyone's been talking about the housing bubble for a long time. What I didn't know about was the labyrinth of "securitization" that existed behind each mortgage which was how subprime mortages were viable in the first place -- something that is only now becoming clearer to me, as I read about the crisis. (In my defence, I've never taken out a mortgage, so I have no idea of what it entails). :-)

Organize All The World’s Information, Then Put Google Ads On It

I think Michael Arrington gets this right:

Most people still think of Google as a search business. But what the analysts understood long ago, and the rest of us are realizing now, is that what they really want to do is organize all the world’s information, and then put ads on it.

Debate # 2

Line of the day -- Alex Massie's reader writes:

McCain is better than before. In that he's making his talking points fairly effectively but in his paedophile uncle, rather than his mad uncle, voice.'"

Dang

I stayed at home, skipped the movie at the Film Festival because I thought tonight's debate could just possibly have some kind of earth-shaking moment, some monumental gaffe, something that would be remembered in posterity, even if no one really remembered Sarah Palin.

But no - this was the even more boring than the Obama-McCain debate. Palin chirped on and on and while her answers made no sense, she repeated catchphrases ad nauseam, and explicitly (!) made it clear that she would not answer certain questions, overall, it was still significantly better than her abysmal performance in the Katie Couric interviews (Oh, update on that, watch this , the latest from what Daniel Larison calls the eternal Couric interview).

Biden was very good, very authoritative and it was a good decision for him not to talk down to Palin or belittle her in any way.

Also after watching McCain's utter contempt for Obama - the congeniality between the two Veeps was kind of nice.

Oh and I was right that Palin does better with her hair loose.

Sigh, Sarah Palin

I must say that this tpmtv video chronicling Sarah Palin's "greatest hits" does make one thing clear: that even during Palin's biggest gaffe in the Charlie Gibson interview, her initial confusion about the Bush Doctrine, she was almost completely in control. She looked cocky, she looked at Gibson right in the eye and her answers, even though completely short on substance, were never as cringe-inducing as the ones she gave Katie Couric.

See for yourself:



Makes one wonder what has changed in the meantime. Has the cramming become too much? Or is it just that Palin speaks much better when she wears her hair long rather than scrunching it up into a bun? I suspect the latter -- she clearly seems more comfortable wearing her hair long.

Of course one thing is also clear. CBS did a very canny thing by releasing snippets of the interview so that Palin's gaffes seem even more stretched out. What we have to realize is that most of these cringe-inducing answers happened in one seating and clearly in times like these, one error leads to another. So Palin's gaffes must be taken in this context: that she committed a gaffe, which in turn led to her losing her cool, and committing another, and another. But by looking at one gaffe at a time, each seems even worse.

Notes on the debate

1. This was one borrrrrring debate.
2. Obama actually pronounces Pakistan as Paak-ees-taan, not Pak-is-tan, as most Americans do. I guess that's because of his upbringing -- one would think the Republicans would use that to paint him as a clandestine Muslim, no?
3. McCain actually has good voice modulation -- and his sing-song style, which put me to sleep during his Convention acceptance speech, worked particularly well when he went in for some (mostly crass) emotional pitch. Still, the jibe about sitting at a table with Ahmadinejad had great rhetorical power -- though it didn't make much sense,
4. One thing is clear though. I thought that there was bad blood between Obama and Hillary Clinton when they debated each other during the primaries. Let me just say that that was nothing compared with what exists between Obama and McCain. McCain clearly detests Obama, views him as some sort of upstart. I was really struck by the remark he made at one point -- something about how on his subcommittees at least, they do the business they are supposed to do -- his voice dripped with venom that at least I thought was unfeigned.
   

Against the Machne: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

So, today, I got Lee Siegel's Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob from my library to browse through and yes, the book really is as awful as they say. It's petty, full of self-regard, vicious, argument-less, sometimes unintentionally hilarious and seemingly written in a hurry. It was a pain even to browse through and I pity the people who actually had to read it word-for-word.

If you're interested in reading the only interesting essay Siegel wrote (IMHO) then click here.

Tina Fey as Sarah Palin

I must say that while I've always liked Tina Fey, I never thought that she was much of an actor. Accomplished writer and performer of comedy, yes. Actor, as in the kind that disapears into a role, no. But watch her uncanny impersonation of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live; even as simple mimicry, it's probably one of the most accomplished I have seen.

David Foster Wallace, Writer, Is Dead at 46

The news is that he hanged himself.

I never read Wallace's novels but I loved loved loved this essay he wrote for The Atlantic Monthly. Called "Host", it is essentially the profile of a right-wing radio host called John Ziegler. The great thing about it is that it's extensively footnoted -- with footnotes within footnotes within footnotes -- a beautifully constructed piece of non-linear reading that managed to be the profile of a man as well as an analysis of a phenomenon (right-wing talk shows). The Atlantic's website has a nicely formatted hyperlinked version of the essay but to see how it looked in the magazine itself -- and trust me, it's worth a look! -- click here. (It's a big pdf file - almost 11 MB).

Also read Jack Shafer of Slate raving about the essay.

UPDATE: Oh - and also here is Wallace on the phenomenon that is Roger Federer (this was, of course, before we knew that Federer is human after all).

Interesting!!

Via Matthew Yglesias:

A Danish chain of gyms is now offering membership free of charge, with the only caveat that you have to show up, in order for the membership to be free. If you fail to show up once per week you will be billed the normal monthly membership fee for that month. This should solve the problem with incentives that gym-membership normally carries - there is suddenly a very large (membership is around 85$ per month) incentive to show up each week.

Obama's speech

Pretty good speech, huh?

The pun on "own" (ownership/on your own) was pretty good -- as was what followed. His delivery was almost perfect, even hypnotic, even though the speech had to literally cover everything (the economy,health care, foreign policy, his "preparedness", "change", what have you) and refer to everyone (Clinton, FDR, Dr King).

I thought Obama was best when he talked like a politician (which he did 90% of the time), recited his laundry list of policies and criticized McCain. He was worst when he talked like a disapproving college professor -- as in when he said we all had to work hard, for e.g. -- but thankfully he didn't do that much.

I am faintly embarrassed to say that the conclusion was quite moving even though, as Kevin Drum points out, it was content-free and I don't generally find political speeches at all inspiring (which doesn't mean that I don't like them).

One small quibble. Don't people think that the "It's not about me, it's about YOU" line incredibly condescending? God knows I am not speechwriter but doesn't "It's not about me, it's about US" sound much much better?

Line of the day!!

I can't resist posting this. The "Today's Fortune" on my Orkut page says:

Today's fortune: You have an unusual equipment for success, use it properly

!!

Quote of the Day

Matthew Yglesias commenting on this ad advocating abstinence:

If anything, characterizing the sex-engineering link in this manner seems overwhelmingly more likely to reduce interest in engineering than to reduce interest in sex.

He he.

My Dark Knight hate, cont'd

Since I've already talked about how boring I found The Dark Knight and since the movie goes on to achieve greater and greater box office glory, here are some dissenting pieces on the movie that I've read in the past few days. Meant for the especially ga-ga fans (you know who you are!):

• David Edelstein's review should be the starting point for everybody since he was probably the only mainstream daily reviewer to not give the movie a rave. Read also his reply to the outraged fanboys who responded with death threats (or something on those lines, I assume).
• This one hates it even more than I did.
• Reverse Shot's very erudite take.
• Periperally, also take a look at Dennis Lim's great video review essay in Slate on the "choppy fight scene" (he begins by referring to The Dark Knight's incoherent action sequences).

The Dark Knight is a crashing bore

What was Christopher Nolan aiming for exactly when he and his brother sat down to conceptualize The Dark Knight? I say "conceptualize" rather than "write" or "script" because that's how the film felt to me: a high-brow attempt to construct a philosophical puzzle, that unfortunately, falls flat on its face. Perhaps if the Nolans had spent less time devising philosophical scenarios that are supposed to illustrate the ins and outs of human nature, the pros and cons of vigilantism or whatever else it is that they were trying to illuminate and much much more on writing better lines (not speeches, Nolans, lines) or fleshing out their action sequences, The Dark Knight could have actually worked as a movie. As it stands though, it's a boring mess -- philosophically didactic and narratively incoherent.

Let's take it one at a time. First the philosophy. It's clear from their oeuvre that the Nolans are a philosophically-inclined team and prime examples of what I call concept film makers (Charlie Kauffman also comes to mind). . A concept film, like their breakthrough Memento, is characterized by an intriguing philosophical setup -- everything else in the film is in service of that setup. Their last film, The Prestige, is more fun but still a concept movie albeit one made in a spirit of reckless fun and one-upmanship ("you want a twist??! take that! and that! and .. ")

The Dark Knight, on the other hand, as you may all have heard (and probably seen!) by now, is a relentlessly dark movie. The darkness is there literally in the film's look but it's also there in the way the film's characters speak -- no one really talks, they all make speeches about justice and vigilantism and love and death. You know, all of those Really Important Things. And there is the body count -- I think more people died here than all the other superhero movies put together! Since all the exposition was already done in Batman Begins, the earlier, and very engaging, edition of the Batman franchise (as the studios call it), the Nolans were free to play with their quirky little philosophical concepts. The Joker is an "agent of chaos". The Batman (as the Joker calls him) is a vigilante with rules. Two-face is ... what exactly? A representation of the human spirit torn between self-preservation and the community? It's all very pretentious and borderline-ridiculous.

Consider the climax. I forget how exactly this happens (and we'll get to the jumbled narrative in a moment) but the Joker has managed to wire up two boats evacuating Gotham citizens with explosives. One of the boats has civilians on it; the other has convicted felons -- and the Joker arranges to place on each of the boats a switch: if the civilians press the switch, the boat containing the convicts will blow up but they will be saved. If the convicts press their switch ... well, you get the picture. Well, all right, the Nolans want to show us the Prisoner's Dilemma cinematically. But consider what follows. The civilians debate whether they should just pull the plug on the convicts and then -- yes, you guessed it -- they put it up to a vote (Lesson: The Perils of Democracy). Big surprise - they vote to kill (Lesson: Man is an animal). And then, of course, none of them can really do it and everyone ends up alive and well (Lesson: Human nature is good after all).

What are we supposed to make of this? That man is an animal dedicated above all to his own self-preservation ... except when he isn't?! That hard times will bring out the worst in human beings ... except when they don't?! I will admit that Nolan manages to create some tension by cutting between the scenes on the two boats but the scenes themselves are so weighed down by their symbolism -- and the conclusion is so arbitrary -- that the episode, as a whole, never comes together. The same could be said of the rest of the movie.

Wait a minute now, you might say. A studio production worth millions of dollars can simply not have civilians blowing up the convicts. Or vice versa. Commercial considerations must have played a role in how the scene ends. Well, fair enough. But my point is deeper. Yes, at least one of the boats getting blown up would have been more in keeping with what comes before in The Dark Knight, more in keeping with the bleak view of human nature that the Nolans, at least, seem to have but it would have been equally arbitrary. The movie's glaring flaw is not how it resolves its philosophical conflicts but in the ham-handed way it frames them -- in the narrative that brackets the philosophy. As Bill Clinton would have said, it's the narrative, stupid!

By narrative, I don't mean things like how the Joker gets into certain places or how he seems to anticipate almost every single thing that everyone else does. That's something I take on faith in a superhero movie. No, it's something much more banal. I've already mentioned the tone-deaf dialogue. To that I'll add the abysmal exposition. The Nolans never make it clear how we moved from point A in the plot to point B (and I say this as someone who read the reviews before watching the movie). When I got home from the movie I had to read the synopsis of the plot on Wikipedia to find out why exactly everyone had to evacuate Gotham in the end. Even worse are the action sequences. Everyone seems to go ga-ga over the scene where the huge trailer-truck (with the Joker in it) turns a huge 180-degree somersault and crashes. That is spectacular, I agree but it takes a whole of 2 seconds to happen -- what about the incoherent 10-minute chase sequence that precedes it? I dare someone to sit with me with the DVD and explain the logistics frame-by-frame. As for the final climax here's David Edelstein:

Then, finally, take the Ultimate Challenge: following the climax with Batman, the Joker, more faux Batmen, decoy hostages dressed as clowns, a SWAT team, and Morgan Freeman’s Lucius with some kind of sonar monitoring gizmo that tracks all the parties on video screens. Actually, Freeman looks like he knows what’s going on. Maybe the sequence plays well in sonar.

Maybe it does! Or maybe it just needs a repeat viewing to fathom what I just called the incoherent action sequences. Maybe if I see it a second time, the movie will win me over. The first time though, I just thought it was a crashing bore.

P.S:

What of the actors? I must say that I barely noticed Christian Bale in this movie. But Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman and Aaron Eckhart did the best they could with the bad lines that they were given. Heath Ledger, on the other hand, positively revels in his lines. But then the Joker is a concept, not a character and it somehow seems wholly appropriate for the Joker to be hanging by slender thread from the top of a building and to say "I am an agent of chaos". Ledger is SCARY. It's a go-for-broke performance that actually benefits from the movie's weaknesses. Its sad that he won't be around anymore.

Chaos over a school

The Times has a longish piece about an ongoing controversy in Brooklyn, about a new public school, that offers Arabic as its second-language. Worth a read.

The status of "theory"

Stanley Fish has a nice long post up in the NY Times about "French Theory" -- and it's a good summing up of what Theory is. Essentially its a different kind of epistemology, which stresses that fact and interpretation are inextricably bound up in each other.

The key point, in my opinion is this:

That’s a loss, but it’s not a loss of anything in particular. It doesn’t take anything away from us. We can still do all the things we have always done; we can still say that some things are true and others false, and believe it; we can still use words like better and worse and offer justifications for doing so. All we lose (if we have been persuaded by the deconstructive critique, that is) is a certain rationalist faith that there will someday be a final word, a last description that takes the accurate measure of everything. All that will have happened is that one account of what we know and how we know it — one epistemology — has been replaced by another, which means only that in the unlikely event you are asked “What’s your epistemology?” you’ll give a different answer than you would have given before. The world, and you, will go on pretty much in the same old way.

Which is why I find the bilious comments that follow the post so strange. What do people feel so threatened by?

Sentence of the day

Man, I wish I could come up with a sentence like this one from Daniel Larison [via here]:

The only thing more annoying than Joe Lieberman himself is his conceit, which many people indulge out of habit, that he is some kind of “centrist.” Perhaps if we think of the political spectrum as a series of rings surrounding a cavernous abyss (or perhaps a pit like the Sarlaac), then Lieberman and McCain can fairly be called “centrists.”

Wow.

What was the woman thinking?

Something puzzles me about the latest literary controversy. And no, it's not just the literal absence of the fact-checking process, although that is puzzling too. For how could an editor collaborate with an author for more than three years and not know that at least some of the author's story was false? This suggests to me that the author "Margaret B. Jones" was at least an accomplished actress (and a gifted writer) -- she kept up appearances without slipping, for three whole years! But then what was the woman thinking granting an interview to the NY Times Magazine? Did she think that the Magazine was the local Community Reporter (a local rag that arrives -- unsolicited -- in my mailbox every week)? Did she not realize that, with a story like hers, that was so transparently false, would be instantly revealed? (Incidentally it was her sister who blew the whistle on the affair, which suggests to me that the two sisters are not going to be calling each other anytime soon).

And then, finally, there's the book itself. From all accounts, it seems very well-written and a powerful piece of work. I realize the public (and the literary establishment) doesn't like being made a fool of. But there's a difference between Stephen Glass-style fabulism (he was writing for The New Republic and was in essence scamming its readers, who expected political coverage) and a fabricated but nevertheless gritty look at life growing up on the streets of L.A. I think perhaps after some appropriate punishment for Ms Seltzer, Riverhead Books should reissue the book -- only this time as a novel. She seems like too much of a good writer to ostracize.

An affair to remember

Of course I'd heard of An Affair to Remember -- everyone who is into movies has, at some point or the other. I first heard of it when I was in high school and it played on TV (my Dad told me it was a famous movie). When I started becoming interested in movies, I never really made any effort to see it because its story sounded rather sentimental to me and there were so many other movies that I wanted to watch.

I did see bits and pieces of it but my only frame of reference was Nora Ephron's hip trendy Sleepless in Seattle where an appreciation of An Affair to Remember was put up as the cultural marker between men and women -- the women wept buckets over it, the men did not.

Of course, Sleepless in Seattle is a very slight movie. But the point is -- I never really saw An Affair to Remember until last week and this was because I read Dave Kehr's beautiful piece on it (On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, Fox has released a remastered 2-disc DVD edition.)

So here's a clip from Sleepless in Seattle (Yay, youtube!)



And another one:



And now watch last scene of "An Affair to Remember"

And my point? Don't let those silly (even if affectionate) lines from "Sleepless in Seattle" stop you from seeing the movie. An Affair to Remember is not a clever hip little movie that bounces off cultural references and makes fun of its own premise (that would be Sleepless in Seattle). As Kehr says:

“An Affair to Remember” evolves effortlessly, almost invisibly, from light romantic comedy to a kind of spiritual drama, as the characters cast off their public identities (they are both performers: he in the tabloids, she on nightclub stages) and approach their essences: Nickie as a practicing (though still unsuccessful) painter, Terry as a singing teacher who now must use a wheelchair.

Is there another line of dialogue in American movies as gloriously absurd, as heart-stoppingly direct, as Terry’s climactic expression of faith, “If you can paint, I can walk”?

“Yes, darling, yes, yes, yes,” replies Nickie, in a burst of affirmation that constitutes the couple’s true marriage vow. The words burst out in a spontaneous rush (as they may well have on the set: McCarey always left ample room for his actors to improvise), without protective varnish.

It is what it is

I heard this story on NPR this morning and I thought it was pretty funny.

Aaja Nachle: some remarks

[2007 was an interesting year for me -- I actually went and saw three Hindi movies! (Yes, yes, I know how snobbish that sounds.) I'm going to review all of them here, one by one, because they were all interesting (note, not good, but interesting) and all of them exemplify some of the changes taking place in the Mumbai film industry. First Aaja Nachle, next in line: Saawariya and Om Shanti Om.]

Ram Gopal Varma once remarked in an interview that the worst thing about the Bombay film industry was not poor over-all standard of most commercial Hindi movies. It was that even the better Hindi films were probably only as good as an average Hollywood product. This is a nuanced, tricky argument that needs some explanation. What it does not mean is that Hindi movies are worse over-all than Hollywood films. That would be like comparing apples and oranges. Nor is it simply a question of who has better production values, more money or better special effects.

In what way are Hindi movies poorer then? In this day and age Hollywood movies are, in a sense, "mass-produced". That is they have generic storylines, teams of writers, endless rewrites, focus group endings, etc. And like every other mass produced good, there is a certain quality to each piece. All cars look the same, work the same and none is made especially for you as such but all of them can be driven comfortably. A mass produced movie lacks a soul, for sure, but it serves its purpose reasonably well. Recent examples would include the romantic comedies 27 dresses and Over her dead body. Not exactly The Philadelphia Story-league but they suffice.

This wasn't (and isn't yet) so for our commercial Hindi movies. Even within the narrative conventions and production values of the genre -- a concoction of a story, songs, dances, humor, action, all derived in some ways, from folk theater -- barely 10% would make the cut as "average" (meaning at the level of a standard mass-produced product like 27 Dresses). Perhaps that was because Hindi films weren't mass-produced. The story of how a Hindi film gets made is almost always a saga: the cash is provided by the underworld, scripts are written on the day of the shooting, actors do three shifts a day, working on 20 different films at the same time, as, astoundingly, do some directors (prime example, Mahesh Bhatt in the early 90s).

But this is changing now. Economic liberalization, a booming economy and the rise of an urban middle-class, a change in the revenue model so that a film earns more from urban areas than from rural areas -- all of these are slowly changing the face of Hindi cinema. Not its narrative conventions, those are still the same, at least in essentials. But some kind of mass-production aspect has definitely come in. The number of average movies -- workmanlike constructions with a solid script, good songs, decent acting -- is on the rise. Overall, I think, this can only be a good thing.

Aaja Nachle is a prime example of an average movie -- and it illustrates the pros and cons of the mass production system perfectly. It seems to be heading towards disaster in its first twenty minutes. It opens with a gorgeous credit sequence -- Madhuri Dixit dancing. Her character Diya then receives a telephone call and the movie slides into 20 minutes of exposition, punctuated by lines straight out of a Handbook for Screenwriters. The story is this: Diya loved dance, ran off with an American, disgraced her parents, had a child, got divorced, and now her dying guruwants to meet her one last time. She arrives back in Shamli and more plodding ham-fisted lines follow, until the movie gets to its premise: Diya has to successfully stage a dance musical in the local theater, with local actors and dancers otherwise it will be demolished and a shopping mall will rise up in its place.

With that premise in place, the movie does reasonably well, if not superlatively. A sampling of engaging supporting actors is introduced, notably the mandatory love interests (Kunal Kapoor, smouldering!) and Konkana Sen Sharma (fearless and funny as usual, but whose plain jane looks seem to have been the main reason why she was cast), Diya's former pining lover (Ranbir Shorey, touching), and a squabbling middle-aged couple (Vinay Pathak and Sushmita Mukherjee, both hilarious). There are the usual crises: the smarmy politician (Akhilendra Mishra) changes sides thrice, the smarmy mall builder (Irfan Khan) tries sobataging the production, and so on, but it all culminates in a grand 20 minute production of Laila/Majnu for which choreographer Vaibhavi Merchant deserves most credit.

Critics, I think, have dumped on the movie a little unfairly. Most horrid, Khalid Mohamed telling Anil Mehta: "would he please stick to cinematography?". Khalid, would you please stick to criticism? All your movies stunk to the high heavens. Then there is GreatBong who, in an otherwise valid review, says:

Okay we know how this is going to end. We also know that believability is not one of commercial Hindi movies’ priorities. But when the principal plot premise is about a rag-tag bunch of no-hopers (numbering less than ten), with no prior dance skill, putting on a dance show, why oh why does the ultimate stage production (that goes on for more than 20 minutes) resemble a Broadway musical with flawless choreography, mega sets, awe-inspiring lighting and hundreds of backup dancers who move in glorious synchrony ? How would Lagaan have been if in the climax, Bhuvan’s team came out wearing corporate logos and colored clothing under floodlights with cheerleaders dancing and Tony Greig doing the pitch report

This completely misses the point. In Lagaan, Bhuvan and his team do come out and play impeccable cricket and they beat a vastly superior team in a game that they've been playing only for a few days! That's as hard to believe as Diya's rag-tag team putting on an ultimate Broadway-musical type performance. But this brings out an important difference between the two movies, two completely conscious decisions taken by the film-makers, and the reason why Lagaan rose above its material, while Aaja Nachle doesn't.

Lagaan's makers chose to emphasize the conflicts between the lead players. The level of cricket itself was tepid, even if artfully shot. And that was fine -- the level of games in sports movies has never fared well when you compare it to the real thing. But that isn't so where dance or music are concerned. A movie audience expects that a performance at the end of a movie about the performance be fairly competent . What would Aaja Nachle have looked like if the final performance had been staged realistically, as befits a rag-tag group with no prior dancing or singing experience? What would have sustained this tension, and maintained audience interest would not be the performance itself but the relationships between the characters. How those relationships and their ups and downs fed into the performance itself. How the performance changed those relationships. What if, for instance if Kunal Kapoor's Majnu and Konkana Sen's Laila had a tiff before the final performance? Or if .. .well, you get my point.

An Aaja Nachle that was more realistic and more about what it takes to stage a show by amateurs would have been a totally different movie; a movie that would have been stunning had it worked, but a miserable failture if it had not. I, for one, am not suprised that Sahni and Mehta chose the safer way: some funny lines, quirky supporting characters and a happy ending with a big production number. With a little hard work, the product, in any case, would at least turn out average -- and it did.

Finally, that's the problem with assembly-line film-making. You turn out more good products on an average (and this is certainly better than the status quo) but even talented film-makers like Jaideep Sahni and Anil Mehta take less risks.

For a change, an A. O. Scott essay that is no good

I think Brad DeLong goes off into an unnecessary rant about The Devil Wears Prada (so what if it isn't a romantic comedy?), in response to recent A. O. Scott's essay in the Times. That said, the essay itself is one of Scott's lesser efforts, a boring and meandering piece whose point seems to be that romantic comedies today are different than they were back then. It seems to be, as they say, "phoned in".

David Denby made the same point in a beautiful New Yorker essay which I recommend for everyone who loves movies, especially romantic comedies.

Priceless

A picture in the New York Times. Caption: Margo Uusorj and Sandra Kullas of Estonia won the 2006 Wife-Carrying World Championships in Sonkajarvi, Finland.

The erection theory of power (yes, you heard that right!)

Via Daniel Drezner, from Gideon Rachman's column in the Financial Times

I got an insight into the thrill of power recently, when I had lunch with a friend who had helped to handle a national emergency in Britain, working from the emergency bunker known as Cobra – which sits beneath the Cabinet Office near Downing Street.

“What was it like?” I asked him. “Brilliant,” he replied. “There are all these video screens and generals and admirals sitting around in uniform. You have to say things like: ‘It is 3.45pm and I am now bringing to a close this meeting of Cobra emergency command.’”

Is my friend uniquely juvenile? I suspect not – just unusually honest. He certainly believed that all the other officials around the table were delighting in the little rituals of crisis management. “I guarantee that everybody around that table had an erection within five minutes,” he mused.

Extrapolating slightly, my friend developed what you might call “the erection theory of British foreign policy”. His argument was that British government’s bias towards the “special relationship” with the US, in preference to the European Union, has something to do with the thrilling nature of American power. “If you fly into Camp David on a helicopter,” he assured me, “it’s instant arousal. But if you have to go to a European summit in Brussels, its so depressing you’re impotent for a week.”

He he he.

The Iowa Caucuses

I woke up this morning to the radio and the first thing it announced -- it was NPR -- was that Barack Obama had won the Iowa caucuses with Hillary Clinton a distant third. (The winner on the Republican side was Mike Huckabee -- and as much as I may disagree with his policies, I have already written about why his rise pleases me.)

My first reaction, I admit it, was a pang of sympathy for Hillary Clinton. This, again, has less to do with her policies (although she seems like a very competent woman, and would be a very good President), but more with the impression I have of her, as a very hard-working, ambitious woman, who now has very little time left to fulfill her ambitions. Mostly, of course, this is because she married another, more ambitious man, who shared her wonkishness for policy but combined it with something she lacks altogether: charm and charisma. To say that she was always in her husband's shadow is hardly appropriate -- she, after all, was a very visible face in Bill Clinton's administration and did manage the ultimately disastrous health-care initiative. But one could argue that it was only after the end of his second term as the President that she could branch out on her own, and even then her time was running out. Her campaign, even now, has something of a desperate quality to it. (It reminds me of Ivan Lendl's desperate quest for that elusive Wimbledon title: he was thwarted in 1986 by a 18 year old Boris Becker and then in 1987 again by the over-rated flash-in-the-pan Pat Cash.)

The question lurking around all this, of course, is would Hillary Clinton be where she is now -- would she even have been able to run for President? -- if it hadn't been for her marriage to Bill Clinton? This is perhaps an unanswerable counterfactual. But this is Clinton's last -- and only -- chance at the Presidency and it seems like she may lose the nomination to a young upstart. I don't think a vice-presidency would satisfy her -- she's already "served" in an administration before. It's all kind of depressing, really.

Matt Yglesias and David Brooks have made me think of Obama's win in a slightly different -- and more positive -- way. I think they are right: he definitely delivered what he promised.

UPDATE: James Fallows describes the post-caucus tableaux. Vividly. Best line:

And Bill Clinton!!! Who managed a wan smile but for seconds on end stood motionless, as if traumatized or stuffed. Better than anyone else in the country he must understand the situation. The young candidate with the sex appeal and the fun and the magic and the sense of the future and the opportunity to shed the old -- Clinton knows the advantages that candidate has. And he knows full well how feeble the appeals to "experience" and "ready from day one" and "competence and responsibility" were when they were issued sixteen years ago by a candidate who really was superbly prepared and experienced: the incumbent president, eight-year vice president, victorious war commander, former ambassador and CIA director George H. W. Bush.

Perhaps watching television has its uses, after all

In the last five years (and the four years before that) I haven't had a television set. And perhaps, because of this, I've consumed most of my news about politics and ideas (and I consume a lot of that) via newspapers, magazines, and blogs. I do watch the moving image a lot -- but its mostly movies or music videos (yay, youtube!). But perhaps, because I like reading, I far prefer reading about them (or reading them) to actually watching or listening to them -- I find them far too theatrical.

I have been watching some television lately though. Why? I have been taking the cab to go home after work. And this means calling the cab company (they invariably take more than 20 minutes; but one can never be sure when they might be early), and then waiting in the lobby for the cab to come. This gives me my twenty minutes of daily television -- since there are two huge screens in the lobby, and its mostly the very annoying Chris Matthews doing his Hardball.

Yesterday though Matthews was interviewing John McCain. And its the first time I ever listened to McCain speak (I don't normally watch the debates -- I find them too theatrical). Now I've read lots of articles on McCain, from Jacob Weisberg's argument that he is a republican only in name, to Michael Kinsley's much more skeptical view of McCain's straight-from-the-hip style. But I'd never heard the man speak -- and when he did speak, I found myself warming to him -- and he is of course very different from George W. (perhaps this only means that Kinsley is right -- but I digress). And today, I read John Dickerson's piece on McCain in Slate (via Daniel Drezner):

In McCain's conversations with voters, I'm struck by the contrast between him and Barack Obama. I have covered Barack Obama more than John McCain this campaign. Obama tells audiences he's going to tell them uncomfortable truths, but he barely does it. McCain, on the other hand, seems to go out of his way to tell people things they don't like, on issues from immigration to global warming.

Midway through the questioning period in Weare, N.H., a man stood to ask why McCain and other public officials weren't standing up to defend the military against attacks from the media. "You talk about torture," the man said, before cataloging what he saw as unfair attacks on soldiers accused of atrocities in Iraq. He continued, arguing that soldiers worried about getting prosecuted or tried in the press would become hesitant, and that would get them killed.

The proper candidate response was to agree and praise the fighting men and women. That would win the man's vote and pick up an easy round of applause from the room. Instead, McCain argued that "the unique thing about America is we hold our [soldiers] accountable." McCain saw that the man wasn't swayed and asked him to speak again. He did so at length, suggesting that McCain wasn't putting the interest of the soldiers first.

McCain had a trump card: His son is a Marine on the ground in Iraq. So he could easily prove that he cares about the welfare of the grunts. But he didn't mention his son (he almost never does). Instead, he argued that the soldiers could handle the press coverage and the scrutiny of the justice system. As he finished, a young man stood up. "I am one of those serving, and I don't think I'm being hindered by anybody. We need to finish the job. That's why I'm still serving, and that's why I believe in this country, and that's why I'm supporting Sen. McCain." The room went bonkers. McCain was smart enough to end the town hall there. Better than playing a trump card yourself is when somebody else plays it for you.

All of which makes me think: Are we unfair to the telly after all? Does only reading about politics and politicians (rather, than listening to them, or watching them) in some way, diminish my capacity for political judgment? I'm uncomfortable with the idea of voting for a candidate because I like the way he talks but maybe that's also because I'm making too much of the reason/emotion distinction?

Peter Jackson is going to direct Tintin!

Here, I was, reading about the tiresome soon-to-be-made (I'm tired of the squabbles, I mean, the movie itself, I look forward to) The Hobbit, when I came across this snippet:

Though Sam Raimi has stated his interest, it is unclear who will direct the two Hobbit movies, but Mr. Jackson will not. Mr. Jackson and his producing and writing partners, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, are committed to making “The Lovely Bones” through 2008 and then he is directing “Tintin,” based on the Belgian comic strip, for Steven Spielberg.

Peter Jackson is going to direct Tintin????? Oh, I've never been happier!

UPDATE: Quick googling revealed that there are going to be three movies, one directed by Jackson, the other by Spielberg. The director of the third movie has not been revealed. Now I wonder which Tintin stories they will choose ...

Why Mike Huckabee's rise pleases me

[Note: This is a slightly more coherent, more theoretical version of my previous post on Mike Huckabee]

This New York Times Magazine profile of Mike Huckabee has been understandably causing a buzz, although, as Ross points out, for all the wrong reasons. And yet, and yet, I have to admit that reading the profile caused me, in a strange way, to warm to Huckabee, if only because, there's something rather ... democratic about his rise.

Ross defends Huckabee's qualifications for the job but is rightfully annoyed that Huckabee hasn't prepared himself for what is after all his moment in the spotlight. After all isn't it Huckabee's duty to seriously apply himself to the study of all that he is deficient in (foreign policy, economics, the whole jazz) especially, now, when it seems like he could win the Republican nomination? Matt Yglesias says the same here.

So why did I end up feeling good about the Huckabee phenomenon? Especially after reading the NYT profile?

Let me explain. In a democratic society, every adult is eligible to vote. The key point however is that every adult is also eligible for political office -- no qualifications are required, anyone can stand for elections. In contrast to other professions (say medicine, or the law) where a credential is required, there is no credentialing in politics. There are no formal qualifications either; we don't expect our politicians to be political theorists or policy analysts. All we ask of them is that they be electable -- if I can win elections, I'm qualified.

But as societies grow more and more complicated, politics itself has become professionalized. To govern complex societies like ours, we want our politicians to be competent and more than that, as per the capitalist ethos, we want them to be motivated by other things beyond public service; we want them to be paid for their hard work. Once they've gotten elected, we ask of them what we ask of any other "professional": that they work hard, that they do their best. What this means is that politics no longer remains a hobby. I can no longer dabble in politics (except may be as a consumer); to stand for elections I need to devote myself to it full time. In time, a lot of actual professions -- that require qualifications and credentials both -- have grown around politics: there are lobbyists, publicists, pollsters, speech writers, all in addition to the media that covers politics (print, television, radio).

That politics is a profession (albeit one without qualifications) is as it should be but it comes at a price. The price is that in order to stand for office -- to , in other words, participate in politics -- one needs a fair amount of acumen. One needs to be able to deal with interest groups and lobbyists, one needs to be able to work the media, one needs to have a substantial amount of funds and oh so much more. So if I were to decide tomorrow to stand for office, it would take me a long while to be able to understand how it all works and even then I'll probably never manage to have enough money to strike out on my own. (The amount of money required to stand for political office is of course, the prime reason why some folks want campaign finance laws but then that's a story for another day). To an outsider, the world of politics is a forbidding world -- and very very hard to get into.

And a look at the contenders for 2008 proves the point. All of them, Republican or Democrat, have huge amounts of funds at their disposal (Romney, Clinton), have a well-oiled political machinery at their disposal (Clinton), were born, so to speak, with silver spoons in their mouths (Romney) and all of them radiate a kind of confidence that they can chart choppy political maneuvering (dealing with lobbyists, big business, unions, big donors, what-have-you) with ease. I

And then there's Mike Huckabee. He seems to have achieved his lead in the Republican nomination despite being the complete opposite of what a Washington insider should be. The guy travels commercially, has no advisers, no funds, no well-oiled machinery, seems to have had no success in getting endorsements, and isn't walled off behind a battery of people who claim to speak for him. And he's leading the Republican nomination! I don't know about you, but I find his rise strangely appealing -- very... there's no other word I can think of ... democratic.

UPDATE: According to Ross Douthat, I have a case of Huckenfreude:

Huckenfreude (n): Pleasure derived from the outrage of prominent conservative pundits over the rising poll numbers of Mike Huckabee. Particularly sharp when the pundits in question are partisans of Rudy Giuliani, but extends to supporters of Mitt Romney as well. Usually experienced by evangelicals, crunchy cons, populists, and other un-airbrushed elements of the conservative coalition. Tends to coexist with an awareness that Huckabee isn't actually ready for prime time, and that his ascendancy may ultimately do their various causes more harm than good.

Mike Hukabee seems ... democratic!

This New York Times Magazine profile of Mike Huckabee has been understandably causing a buzz, although, as Ross points out, for all the wrong reasons. And yet, and yet, I have to admit that reading the profile caused me, in a strange way, to warm to Huckabee, if only because, the guy is so ... democratic.

Let me explain. The 2008 US election is populated with candidates, who have huge amounts of funds at their disposal (Romney, Clinton), who have a well-oiled political machinery at their disposal (Clinton), who were born, so to speak, with silver spoons in their mouths (Romney) and all of them radiate a kind of confidence that they can chart choppy political maneuvering (dealing with lobbyists, big business, unions, big donors, what-have-you) with ease. From a democratic standpoint, this is as it should be -- yet to someone like me, far away from Washington insiderism (like most people, I suspect) it is also a forbidding world, a world that I, for instance, were I to decide to stand for office tomorrow, would be utterly at sea in.

And this is Mike Huckabee's strongest point. He seems to have achieved his lead in the Republican nomination (at least in Iowa) despite being the complete opposite of what a Washington insider should be. The guy travels commercially, has no advisers, no funds, no well-oiled machinery, seems to have had no success in getting endorsements, and isn't walled off behind a battery of people who claim to speak for him. And he's leading the Republican nomination! I don't know about you, but I find that strangely appealing -- very... there's no other word I can think of ... democratic.

Addendum:
That doesn't mean that, like all pretentious people who think they understand policy, I don't wince when Huckabee talks and I agree in principle that the last thing America needs is another undisciplined, uninformed President. But there's a substantial difference between George W. and Huckabee. For one, Huckabee doesn't seem to project that sense of entitlement that is so infuriating about George W; more than that, like most self-made men, he seems very aware of his own inadequacies, again, unlike, George W (check out Huckabee's answer to what portfolios he is most qualified for). Most important, he has the right idea that a good President needs to surround himself with good advisors (only problem: he doesn't have any advisers yet!).

Great essay on Jodie Foster

I mentioned once in passing that I heartily dislike Manohla Dargis' film reviews, hating what I called their sneering tone and all-round condescension. That dislike hasn't changed -- not yet -- but reading her great profile of Jodie Foster reminds me of why I still read -- or at least, skim -- every piece that she writes.

The piece captures, I think, that most striking Jodie Foster quality: her elusiveness. And it touches on, at the end, her striking choice of roles in the past few years, culminating this year, in The Brave One, a Death Wish-style vigilante movie* about a woman avenging the death of her boyfriend:

As she’s gotten older, she seems to have embraced the hardness for which she has sometimes been criticized. In recent years, she’s played several ferocious single mothers (“Panic Room,” “Flightplan”), a high-powered fixer in nosebleed heels (“Inside Man”) and even a one-legged nun (“The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys”). In “The Brave One,” she packs a gun and redeems the haunting child, the victim, who caused her so much pain. She has become the avenging angel of her own past.

Interestingly the essay makes no mention of Flora Plum, Foster's abortive third directorial venture, that was supposed to star Claire Danes and Russell Crowe (with whom Foster was reportedly having an affair and who was later replaced by Ewan Mcgregor) that has now been officially shelved (it's dissapeared from imdb!!)

*David Edelstein comments:

What could impel Jodie Foster and director Neil Jordan to whisk us back to the bad old days of Death Wish and Ms. 45? Were their credit cards maxed out? Were their kneecaps about to be broken? ... You probably think I’m oversimplifying—that Foster and Jordan are too thoughtful, artistically ambitious, and politically progressive to make a movie that would have Bernie Goetz rolling his eyes. But Foster’s feminist victimization complex seems to be looping around to meet Nixon and Agnew. Next she’ll be hunting Commies for the FBI.

Paragraph of the day

There is another reason why David Edelstein is my favorite movie critic (other than the fact that he writes passionate reviews that I generally agree with) ... and it's because he manages to effortlessly slip in paragraphs like this:

Given its one-joke premise, Lars and the Real Girl goes on too long and repeats itself too often, but the writer, Nancy Oliver, and director, Craig Gillespie, are increasingly inventive in their use of Bianca—who “takes a job” and “reads” to children and gradually wins our affection. She has downcast eyes and a wide mouth made for blow jobs but with just the right hint of melancholy. I wish I could have pushed out of my mind all those horror movies in which delusional schizophrenics develop symbiotic relationships with inanimate objects and end up butchering the supporting cast. If you think you can, by all means see the movie. It’s a good thing for each of us, as movie lovers, to draw our own line between healthy and unhealthy fantasy.

From a review of Lars and the Real Girl.

Sex and Causality

Via Brains, I came across an article in the NYT, written by John Tierney, about the different reasons for having sex.

For now, thanks to psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin, we can at last count the whys. After asking nearly 2,000 people why they'd had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons -- everything from ''I wanted to feel closer to God'' to ''I was drunk.'' They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child.

The researchers, Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, believe their list, published in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, is the most thorough taxonomy of sexual motivation ever compiled. This seems entirely plausible.

Of course, the reasons are all post facto: reasons given by people after they've had sex, which probably means the little details get abstracted over.

My quibble though is about something else. "I wanted to feel closer to God" sounds like an entirely plausible reason to want to have sex. But "I was drunk"? Does drunken-ness have any causal power, besides the power to lower inhibitions? So if I was drunk and somehow ended up having sex, the implication is that if I had not been drunk, I would not have had sex. Or ~p->~q where p stands for "I was drunk" and q for "I had sex". And not p->q (I was drunk, so I had sex). Drunken-ness, it seems to me, cannot have any causal power, when it comes to sex. Sure, it may lower one's inhibitions, and therefore lead to sex but only in the presence of certain other causal factors such as "I wanted to do something interesting" or "I had a headache" or "I thought this was my best way of avoiding a hangover".

A short post on "No Reservations"

The romantic comedy "No Reservations" starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart is so inept that I wasn't even planning to write about it (mostly I plan to write about everything I see or read, and I never end up writing most of it) but a few reviews I've read so far have made me wonder whether, in fact, the critics and I were watching the same movie.

Robert Wilonsky, from the Voice, loved it ("the thing's so charming and frothy and delightful and sentimental and beautifully shot and well-acted and sincere that it takes a good couple of hours before you start craving real nourishment", he says), Matt Zoeller Seitz finds in it "emotional details" that are " surprising, honest and life-size" while Dana Stevens likes Abigail Breslin and thinks that she acted the pants off Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Me? I almost got my hopes up during the credits when I saw that in addition to Zeta-Jones and Eckhart, it has Patricia Clarkson and Brian F. O’Byrne. But the movie sucked. Big-time. Zeta Jones character is a chef, who loves her work, and therefore, in Hollywood, cut off from her emotional life; she's, in other words, frigid. All she needs now is a child and a man. The child she gets when her sister gets bumped off, and the man -- well, the man walks in to her kitchen and listens to arias. I don't mean to be hard on the plot -- good romantic comedies are like delicious ice-cream: they slide past the throat smoothly and leave you feeling all nice and good. "No Reservations", on the other hand, is tepid, meandering along, as if on auto-pilot. The movie is indeed, as Seitz points out, "factory-sealed" but in the worst possible way. It seems to have been written an directed by an autistic machine.

Thoughts on "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" (**Spoilers abound**)

Two things struck me as I finished the Deathly Hallows:

(1) That, after all that furore, I (and probably a good many other adults) had forgotten that the Harry Potter books are children's books (and I mean that in the most non-pejorative way possible). That Harry's story is a coming-of-age tale, a boy's trial by fire into adulthood; in other words, a bildungsroman. To her great credit, and as Deathly Hallows shows clearly, Rowling kept her head, refused to be a carried away by all the frenzy and wrote a conventional happy ending, an ending that is clearly going to disappoint many (present company included) but which is still true in spirit to the spirit of the series.

(2) And what perhaps distinguishes Harry Potter from other children's books (and here I may be mistaken since my knowledge of children's literature is admittedly sketchy) is that while, like other young protagonists, Harry is always in mortal danger, unlike them, he also grapples constantly with the idea of death and mortality. Rowling's very skillful incorporation of death as a theme into the books is, I think, its best aspect, and responsible for creating the series' most memorable scenes.

Let's take these points in that order.

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is a fitting conventional (and again, in a completely non-pejorative sense) climax to a very enjoyable tale. A tale, that perhaps, because of its success, we all had started reading into much more than we should have. Will Harry die or won't he? Is Snape good or bad? All of these questions are answered -- Harry lives, Voldemort dies, and Snape turns out to be a good guy after all (which, for the record, I always wanted him to be), and the final battle against Voldmort takes place at Hogwarts, and all the characters, including, improbably, the pompous Percy Weasley, are reunited -- but these answers were preordained from the start. Why we all went into such a frenzy about them, why we thought they would resolve any differently, is a mystery, now that the saga is finally over.

Perhaps the turning point, the point in the story where Rowling could have taken it any way she wanted, occurs somewhere in the middle of the book. When the news that the Ministry of Magic has been taken over by Death Eaters reaches them, Harry, Ron and Hermione are forced to flee. Over the course of the next 150 pages or so, they tramp from one place to another, bickering, fighting, eating, arguing about where the horcruxes can be, trying to dispose of the one they have. There is a hint of a homage being paid to "The Lord of the Rings" here, since the the friends take turns hanging the horcrux-locket around their necks and it affects their disposition, particularly Ron's. After a furious dispute with Harry and Hermione -- the evil horcrux clearly has a hand in this -- Ron leaves them and Harry and Hermione are alone, and truly afraid. Ron has gone, there is very little possibility of his coming back; even if he wants to, he will not be able to find them.

This is where I experienced my first quickening of the senses. Rowling had already hinted that she was going to have to kill off a couple of major characters. With Ron gone, and the chances of their meeting again looking bleak, I thought it would be Ron. And perhaps, Ron's loss (and even death) would bring Harry and Hermione closer, with them probably even ending up together, since Ginny is pretty much out of the picture. (I thought Harry and Hermione would end up together from the first book, when Ron seemed more like a comic foil to Hermione's Miss know-it-all . Then when Ginny got this crush on Harry in Chamber of Secrets, I knew she was going to have a bigger role to play. I have to say I shouted out aloud when Harry kisses her in Half-Blood Prince. Perhaps I watch too many romantic potboilers.)

Whatever my thoughts at this juncture, Rowling punctured them abruptly. In an unconvincing deus ex machina, Ron returns, saving Harry, getting rid of the horcrux-locket (perhaps the one scene, where Ron's true insecurities come forth) and in the process, also revealing to the three friends that Dumbledore's gifts had a purpose. And Harry admits to Ron that he's missed him and that he thinks of Hermione as his sister (I have to admit I cringed at this). The friends are together again, and at that point I knew that the ending would be conventional -- that it would be Ron and Hermione, Harry and Ginny, with Voldemort dead and all being well (The last words of the books are indeed: "All was well."). What is the point of this interlude? I think Rowling wanted to spend some time (and wanted us to spend some time) with her three main protagonists, perhaps trying to illuminate their friendship, wanting, perhaps, to give us some time with them before the war against Voldemort consumed every theme in the book.

Which brings me to my only quibble with the book. Much has been written about Rowling's descriptions, about her ability to conjure up magical fantasias but I think Stephen King got it right in this review of Goblet of Fire. J. K. Rowling's greatest asset, the best feature of the Harry Potter books is, finally, plot. All the Harry Potter books are at heart, old-fashioned mystery stories, their skeletons similar to those polished whodunits that Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers wrote. In the beginning of the books, something happens, something very confusing. Harry and his friends investigate, and that something turns out to have been something else, which in turn, was caused by someone else. And so on and on and on. Perhaps because there is so much else in the Harry Potter books -- let's not forget that everyone here is a wizard or a witch -- this aspect of the books tends to be overlooked, sometimes even not noticed. The first four books were explicit whodunits, with the Prisioner of Azkaban having the most elegant ending, and Goblet of Fire the most spectacular one.

But Rowling has something else going for her -- her long-term attention to details. Clearly she has thought about the plot long and hard. Which is why sometimes throwaway details from earlier books turn out to be significant plot developments. This was particularly evident in Half-Blood Prince, where Rowling gradually revealed facets of Lord Voldemort -- I, for one, was delighted when Tom Riddle's diary from Chamber of Secrets -- a book whose plot always seemed out-of-sync with the rest of the books -- turned out to be a horcrux. Tom Riddle, who appeared out of the blue in the second book, became a much more grounded character in Half-Blood Prince and his transformation into Lord Voldemort was the most fascinating part of the sixth book.

I am of the opinion that this attention to details is overdone in the final installment. Far too much depends on recalling minute parts of the sixth book: the location of the final horcrux (although this part is hardly important in the scheme of things; and even its destruction happens off the pages), the revelations of Harry's ancestry, the importance of Godric's Hollow, the machinations about the ownership of Dumbledore's wand. But perhaps the weakest point of the seventh book are its battle scenes. I've always found the wizarding duels way too unconvincing with everyone going around shouting "Expelliramus" or "Crucio" or "Accio". The final Battle of Hogwarts that concludes the series is meant to be epic -- think of Tolkien's Helm's Deep or the Siege of Gondor -- but the descriptions are painfully inadequate: everyone seems to be running around throwing spells, or duelling, although why the wizards should duel mano a mano is beyond me.

But these are quibbles, drops in bucket as big as the ocean (David Edelstein's line). Like all the previous Harry Potter books, "The Deathly Hallows" is tremendously enjoyable. Dumbledore and Snape become more human, and Harry has a touching scene with the wraiths of the people he loves the most, as he is going to his death. In Goblet of Fire, the death of Cedric Diggory was a stunner. A few more people have died since then and while Harry Potter has ended conventionally, with a happy ending, the theme of mortality has always cast its long shadow over the books themselves. This, perhaps, has been Rowling's greatest success: she has written a wonderfully enjoyable series of books about death, magic and friendship.

ASIDE: Incidentally, what's up with Michiko Kakutani's review? The review appeared three days before the book released; Kakutani apparently procured it from a bookshop, read it overnight and contributed a review at 700 words a minute, recyling most of the lines from her reviews of the previous Harry Potter books (understandable, but still ... someone ought to take the judgemental Ms Kakutani to task for that, no?). Don't believe me? Read this. And then read this and this -- what do you think?

Sad news

I just learnt that the great philosopher Richard Rorty died on Friday (see here and here). Rorty is, as some of you may well know, famous (or infamous, depending on which side of the divide you fall on) as an anti-foundationalist or a pragmatist (again, depending on what kind of pragmatist you are). See here.

Strangely enough, I spend yesterday afternoon reading a couple of Rorty's essays in "Philosophy and Social Hope" at the B&N near Lincoln Center. I also spent some time debating whether I should buy Rorty's most famous work "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (I didn't but that was because I could find it cheaper online).

As my sort of RIP, I"ll link to this autobiographical Rorty essay (from "Philosophy and Social Hope") called "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" (available here) where Rorty recounts his intellectual odyssey: from being a foundationalist analytic philosopher to his rediscovery of John Dewey's pragmatism and his eventual rejection of Platonism. The essay won't help anyone understand the intricacies of pragmatism (see here for that) but it definitely brings Rorty into focus. Read it.

Email of the day

Some kid mails Richard Chappel, after using one of his papers for a college homework assignmentl:

I made the mistake of copying your "Rousseau and Freedom," paper from your blog [link]. I am sorry. My university is going to charge me with cheating. Can you please do me a big favor and temporarily take down "Rousseau and Freedom,"??? I will owe you forever. Please let me know if you can help! Thank you!

Thanks,
[Name redacted]

Fun, eh?

David Thomson on Lars Von Trier

This kicker of a sentence from David Thomson's magisterial A Biographical Dictionary of Film, on the maverick gadfly Lars Von Trier is perfect:

Von Trier is like a seven-year old serial killer whose bombs and weapons have all gone into his eye.

(!!)