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.