This theme quiz was handled in short order. Congratulations!
Tuesday Trivia: Guess the Theme
(Theme solved by Evn, comment #6.)
1. “To make a long story short…” / “Too late!”
Solved by Evn (comment #1).
2. Trying to get to Shell Beach.
Solved by Evn (comment #13).
3. This is the directorial debut of an actor, and his leading lady is his real life wife. It is the only English language film he directed. She made her screen debut in her teens and is the daughter of a famous actress.
Solved by Evn (comment #20).
4. This is the eight film adaptation of this classic novel. There have also been two mini-series, and two made-for-TV movies. This modernized version stars a man who started acting in his teens, and also writes and directs, and a woman who made her screen debut in her teens and is the daughter of a famous actress (but is not the same actress as in clue #3).
Solved by Hazel (comment #14 and 15).
5. The machine that goes “Ping.”
Solved by Evn (comment #2).
6. “Come on, ________, think of something clever to say, huh? Something full of magic, religion, bullshit. Come on, dazzle me.”
Solved by Evn (comment #13).
7. A famous fictional character (and his fictional co-stars) meets a famous historical character in a plot revolving around the two stars’ shared addiction.
Solved by Melville (comment #3).
The True Diversity of American Religion
Jason quotes Philocrites about Mitt Romney’s “I am a Mormon but Don’t Hold it Against Me” speech.
By trying to define “faith” as conservative traditionalism and “pluralism” as a name for monotheistic traditionalism, Romney misrepresented the true diversity of American religion, explicitly dismissed Americans who don’t identify with a religious tradition, and painted the traditions he did mention in a way that celebrates their most traditionalist wings and ignores almost all of their visions for the commonweal. What a disappointment.
I agree with everything except the “what a disappointment” part. What the flock were you expecting, tolerance? On the Right?
I think not.
Monday Movie Review: The Namesake
The Namesake (2006) 6/10
Ashoke Ganguli (Irfan Khan), a Bengali professor living in New York, marries Ashima (Tabu) and brings her to the United States in 1974. Their American-born son Gogol (Kal Penn) struggles between his family’s traditionalism and his desire to assimilate. Directed by Mira Nair.
The Namesake is a movie struggling to find itself. Although I haven’t read the novel, and so have no idea how close it is to its source, it feels like a movie trying to slavishly follow a novel’s plot and pacing. It has a novels way of rising and falling around events, without a clear flow of character or narrative arc. I wanted to take it apart, shake off the loose pieces, and put it back together with a more sound structure. Almost everything about the movie is appealing except its inability to tell a story.
This is the sort of movie I see all the time and don’t bother to write a full review of. (After all, most weeks I see two or three movies and only review one here.) But it has some very good qualities that are worth discussing. First, of course, is the modern immigrant experience; arriving not on Ellis Island but at JFK International Airport, treated symbolically (if clumsily) in the movie as a sort of waystation; each time the Ganguli family passes through JFK they pass between worlds; between states of being. Ashoke and Ashima are always aliens in their adopted country, their traditions don’t fit in. And looking at it, you can certainly see how most of our traditions didn’t fit in at one point, and how the first generation born here struggled with a foot in each world.
There’s a fascinating anti-feminist feminist component about The Namesake. I realize that sounds contradictory, so hang in there.
In the course of the movie, there are two women in Gogol’s life. They are incredibly poorly-written characters, stereotypes of Evil Feminists or Evil Modernism or something else Evil and Female. Their evils are variously independence, informality, premarital sex, wearing short skirts, and disrespecting tradition. The feeling at the end of the movie, when the family comes to a particular sort of resolution but the Evil Women are cast aside, is of misogyny.
Rethinking my position involves spoilers about the end. Continue at your own risk.
Friday Catblogging: The Anklesaurus
Okay, right after I took the picture, he snagged a bit of flesh, but it was worth it.
Waste Time. Feed the Hungry.
This is so great. Play the vocabulary quiz game and donate rice through the United Nations to help combat world hunger.
It’s a super-good quiz. The words are hard, and some of the words given as possible answers are also hard.
So far, my best level is 48. Go ahead and beat that.
Narcissism and cluelessness
I know someone who is a narcissist. I don’t mean someone vain or self-centered, I mean a textbook, DSM-IV, narcissist.
One thing I’ve noticed about this person is that he’s pretty clueless about all sorts of things. Doesn’t know about common illnesses or their well-known home remedies. Doesn’t know what sort of government agencies exist to help with common problems. All sorts of small, helpful awarenesses are just utterly absent.
I was surprised at this at first, because this is a very intelligent person. But ultimately I realized that it is in fact, part of the narcissism (Gods, I hate typing that word).
One feature of narcissim (argh) is lack of empathy. Which at first seems like an interpersonal problem. Damages friendships and family relations, that sort of thing. But it turns out, you learn a lot in life from being empathetic. Face it, there’s a finite amount you’re going to learn by studying, or by experiencing it yourself. Most of us have a huge body of knowledge gained by paying attention to our friends. My friend had back surgery. My sister and another friend had gastric bypass. I have several friends in AA. I know two people who’ve successfully sued to get SSI disability. None of these are things I’ve experienced myself, but all of them are things I know about, and can talk about knowledgeably, because I’ve paid attention to what my friends had to say about their own experience.
If you lack empathy, you lack an enormous resource for becoming smart about the world. So no matter how high your IQ, you end up…kind of dumb.
Trivia: Announcement and Solutions
Trivia was all solved with no hints! Yay! Solutions below the fold.
I’m going to drop the requirement that every trivia game have a Bond connection. My Bond readers have primarily migrated over to the other blog, and the trivia players here don’t get a lot of fun out of hunting down the Bond question, as far as I can tell.
Tuesday Trivia: All Quotes
In support of the writer’s strike, here are things that were written:
1. So, young woman, the way forward is sometimes the way back.
Solved by Evn (comment #3).
2. Dames are put on this earth to weaken us, drain our energy, laugh at us when they see us naked.
Solved by Barbs (comment #21).
3. Merry Christmas, sorry I fucked you over.
Solved by George (comment #19).
4. Congratulations to you and Peter. I’m glad you taught me to speak so I could say that.
Solved by Melville (comment #1).
5. You must excuse me, gentlemen, not being English, I sometimes find your sense of humor rather difficult to follow!
Solved by Barbs (comment #22).
6. From where I sat it looked as though you were conjugating some irregular verbs.
Solved by TomHilton (comment #14).
7. I’ve got a degree in ass wiggling, mate.
Solved by Evn (comment #2).
Monday Movie Review: The Hours
The Hours (2002) 10/10
A single, pivotal day in the lives of three women: Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) in the 1920s as she writes Mrs. Dalloway; Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) in 2001, as she prepares to throw a party for her friend Richard (Ed Harris), whose nickname for her is Mrs. Dalloway, and Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) in the 1950s, who is reading Mrs. Dalloway.
Last week, I saw The Hours for the second time (I saw it in the theater in 2002), and then read the novel The Hours.
The first thing I should say is that The Hours is fully and one hundred percent a movie. What author Michael Cunningham did with words in his novel is done visually in the film. Director Stephen Daldry created a visual language, a language of jewelry and flowers and color and food. The women flow in and out of each other, and that’s crucial, but it’s not done in a way that’s verbal or linear. They connect in their hand movements, and their earrings; the visual particulars of life, every bit as much as they connect through events. This is what I think the movie’s great achievement is, to work from a famous and highly regarded novel, and not to succumb to novel-worship. The Hours is a story to look at and to feel.
The novel, on the other hand, is very much a story to read. Its words are exquisite, complex, delicate, and dense.
As she pilots her Chevrolet along the Pasadena Freeway, among hills still scorched in places from last year’s fire, she feels as if she’s dreaming or, more precisely, as if she’s remembering this drive from a dream long ago. Everything she sees feels as if it’s pinned to the day the way etherized butterflies are pinned to a board. Here are the black slopes of the hills dotted with the pastel stucco houses that were spared from the flames. Here is the hazy, blue-white sky…She is a woman in a car dreaming about being in a car.
This passage stuns me. It’s just Laura driving; but all the images add up to so much; to numbness and death and escaping death, to the beauty of life and the intense sense of disconnection.
Daldry achieves something similar in the film, although not quite as brilliantly. I don’t want to compare the two (that never works) so much as contrast them and use the novel to illuminate the movie, to show both its brilliance and its flaws. Certainly the internal life of each woman cannot be conveyed as easily on film. Instead, the movie is more emotional, more embracing. It’s a good choice. It’s a movie that makes you cry without being a “tearjerker.” Which is to say, I didn’t feel jerked.
Both times I saw the movie I was intensely struck by the costumes, by how put together they were, perfectly real in a way that was almost too perfect. Clarissa dresses exactly like the character she is; a successful New York lesbian with a long-time partner and a gorgeous brownstone. The black turtleneck, the elaborate necklace, the amber earrings, all just so. And the book definitely gave me insight into that; each woman is aware that she’s performing; Laura Brown just doesn’t dream she’s a woman driving, she is playing the character of a woman driving, of a pregnant housewife and a mother baking a cake. The heightened tone illustrates that.
There are sour notes in the movie. There were lines that felt so “literary adaptation,” that were so written. And they fell with a thud. Interestingly, those lines mostly weren’t in the book; they were an attempt to convey things from the book in dialogue rather than in imagery and action. Screenwriter David Hare is the likely culprit; he’s better known as a playwright than a screenwriter, and the literary tone could certainly work on the stage.
Ed Harris is kind of off. His dialogue didn’t fit his emotional presence. I understood the character much better reading him; in the novel he was kind of fey, but Harris plays Richard with a driving rage, and that doesn’t entirely work.
But these are isolated moments. The movie is completely worth seeing, completely fascinating. So few movies attend to the small details of life in a way that adds up to something larger. The Hours is one of them.
