Cinematic Rock and Hard Place:

Smokler on September 27, 2005

One of my favorite questions to ask fellow cine-heads is “What movie did you dislike that everyone else loved and how did you deal with it?” Thankfully, I don’t find myslef in this position very often, because when I do, it ties me in knots, like trying to explain fireworks to a blind man.

So it must have been my time last night when I went to a late show of The Constant Gardener at the 4-Star, propelled by a rave review from Dave, and then walked out in the middle.

Maybe I’m too literal but in a film billed as a thriller, I expect, well, thrills. Not the roller coaster kind but tension, something that welds me to my seat out of both fear and searing curiosity. The Constant Gardener has none. It’s a story about a man whose wife is murdered while she’s working to expose the immoral collusion of local government in Africa and western drug companies who use the continent and its citizens as one big testing lab. The man goes looking for who may have done such a horrible thing. Trouble is, we already know. We know the answer will be a corporate conspiracy with doors opened by corrupt governments and greed as the prime mover. We know all this by minute 20 so watching him figure it out isn’t compelling. It’s like hearing a joke repeated seven different ways. And then seven more.

Fernando Meirelles directed this movie along with the equated-with-the-second-coming City of God, which I liked ok and reviewed for Film Critic.com. But this man has a problem I see him not learning form: So far, he’s 2-for-2 in choosing precisely the wrong directorial style for the story he’s telling. City of God is a painful, violent, coming-of-age fable told with the slickness of an MTV Video. Gardener, based on spymaster John Le Carre’ novel, has all the snap of wet rag. Pacing is casual, bordering on languid. The first plot point takes 40 minutes to drop and the investigation doesn’t get moving until minute 90. Between them are two dozen scenes which say, in two dozen ways, that Things Are Not What They Seem.

It doesn’t work. Not at all. I feel like Gardener is supposed to rivet me or at least move me to shake my fist in anger. I was too mystified then bored to do either.

Anybody else see this movie? What did I miss?

Grandma Blog:

Smokler on September 26, 2005

I, like much of blogland, thought it was a rare treat to meet Mena Trott’s mom, at least virtually. If Mena is one of the early pioneers of the medium then that would make her mother one of the ancestors.

I’m calling her Grandma Blog should we ever meet.

Women will Save Reading:

Smokler on September 26, 2005

So novelist Ian McEwan and his son decided to throw a bunch of books on a cart and peddle it through London giving away books. For free. In five minutes, he managed to give away 30 novels, nearly all to women. The men who approached his cart did so with suspicion. Only one bit and took a book. Mr. McEwan concluded in this article that “when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”

Okay, I can think of a few possible reasons for this disparity.

1) Are men naturally more suspicious of strangers giving stuff away than women?

2) Do men not like to carry stuff around with them when rushing from one place to the next?

3) Is Ian McEwan a scary looking fellow?

4) Are men simply not interested in books?

I’m only going to address #4 by saying, dudes, wtf? I’ve been hearing in more than a few places that men don’t read. Organizations like Guys Read are in place to combat this problem in childhood and throw out the following reasons why the problem exists:

•Biologically, boys are slower to develop than girls and often struggle with reading and writing skills early on.

•The action-oriented, competitive learning style of many boys works against them learning to read and write

•Many books boys are asked to read don’t appeal to them. They aren’t motivated to want to read.
•As a society, we teach boys to suppress feelings. Boys aren’t practiced and often don’t feel comfortable exploring the emotions and feelings found in fiction.
•Boys don’t have enough positive male role models for literacy. Because the majority of adults involved in kids’ reading are women, boys might not see reading as a masculine activity.

I can see how a few of these play out. A lot of men I talk to don’t read fiction because they equate reading with learning and they don’t “learn anything” by reading fiction. They don’t apply the same standard to television, movies or music which strikes me as a big PR problem for books. Second, reading, being an intimate, vulnerable activity, the human tendacny seems to be to read what confirms rather than challenges one’s sense of identity. Which may explain, in only the most general way, why reading is a much more gendered activity than say, music listening. Few women I know read military fiction. Many women I know listen to Snoop Dogg and his “bitches and hoes” flow.

Third, men seem to assoicate reading with work, with labor instead of a relaxation activity. Which I simply don’t get.

What are your thoughts (via Arts Journal)?

Housekeeping Notes:

Smokler on September 25, 2005

You’ll notice a few chances around these parts if you look to the left. If you’re curious about where I’ll be when, You can see my Upcoming.org events. If you’re not that interested in what I write and just want a pile-a links, I’m posting my Del.icio.us links (RSS feed) too.

And if you.just.cant.get.enough of me, then you can now subscribe to my occcasional audio blatherings as a podcast. Take this url and drop it into iTunes, Odeo or however you get your podcasts and look for something called Smoke Trails. Because I really haven’t beaten the smoke metaphor to death yet.

Blog Cluster Schtup:

Smokler on September 21, 2005

Just in case you absolutely can’t get enough new media, you should A) receive podcasts from Business Week whose latest one (the first in a ten part series) is all about super duper bloggers then B) spray all electrical outlets in your home with a fire house until you’re sitting in total darkness, then venture out into the sun and don’t return until your clothes are tattered and you’ve forgotten how to say your name without grunting (via Mircopersuasion).