Month: January 2007 Page 1 of 3

Tom Hanks is Bond. James Bond.

Dude, this is an awesome trailer mash-up. The voice-over’s a bit weak, and you kind of have to pretend that Tom Hanks looks the same age in all the clips, but wow. Of course, the idea of Hanks being Bond scared me for a second…

I couldn’t catch all the clips, because most of them are from older Hanks films that I haven’t seen, but it has twenty different films represented. TWENTY. That’s an enormous amount of work. Hat tip Trailer Mash.

Awards and Pan’s Labyrinth and Children of Men

Jeffrey M. Anderson on the Golden Globes. Among other things.

This is an old post (twelve days is really old in blog-world), but I had it marked in my feedreader to mention and I’m just getting around to going through some of those. I mentioned in my brief, ranty Golden Globes post that I was surprised by Babel‘s win. Anderson wasn’t, particularly, because as he accurately identifies, it’s an award darling. It’s calculated for awards, in a way that, say, Pan’s Labyrinth is not. Now, I still haven’t seen Babel, so I’ll let Anderson speak to the specifics, but you can see the difference in the trailers. Babel is Important with a capital “I,” while Pan’s Labyrinth is ethereal and mysterious. Anyway, the point is, as Anderson indicates, it’s become distressingly easy to bait the awards, and the same thing happens at the Oscars, except usually more so.

The Oscar nominations for Best Picture are Babel, The Departed, Letters from Iwo Jima (which I also haven’t seen, but at least it isn’t nominated in the Foreign Language category this time–another thing Anderson rants about the Globes, just as I did), Little Miss Sunshine, and The Queen. Of the three I’ve seen, I’d pick The Departed, though the other two are good as well. But Babel has A Message, so it may very likely win. However, I’d put both Children of Men (although I wasn’t as enamored of it as some) and Pan’s Labyrinth above all of them, and Volver above many. The fact that Volver wasn’t even nominated in the foreign category stymies me. Pan’s Labyrinth better win it.

Because honestly, Pan’s Labyrinth was one of the most beautiful, most moving, most gorgeous, most heartbreaking, most everything films I’ve seen in a long time. It takes place during the Spanish Civil War (also the setting of director Del Toro’s excellent The Devil’s Backbone), and in fact, the “realistic” sections dealing with the war take up substantially more screen time than the “fantastic” parts, despite what the trailer might lead you to believe. The main character, Ofelia, moves with her mother to a military outpost when her mother marries a captain there (her father is long dead); her mother is very pregnant. The captain is a brutish man, only interested in having a son to carry on his name, and focused on routing the rebels up in the hills above the camp. Hating him, Ofelia’s only escape is into a fairy world, where she may be a long-lost princess–if only she can carry out the three tasks that the faun Pan gives her. But the fairy world isn’t a safe retreat; it’s just as dangerous and scary as the real world. But it’s a world where she has a place, where she has a role and a purpose–unlike the real world, where her step-father would just as soon she disappear entirely. Is there a message? Well, yes. The importance of self-sacrifice and doing the right thing, even when it’s dangerous. But the message is woven into the action of the story; you have to tease out the meaning yourself, as you sit in the theatre and quietly cry while the credits roll. Or maybe that was just me.

The thing is, award-winning films hit you over the head with their messages. That’s probably why Children of Men didn’t get anywhere in the awards, either, despite being critically acclaimed from nearly all quarters. I’m hard-pressed to come up with a single, pithy message in the film. Love people? Care about them? Do all you can to help them? Fight against despair? Oppose fascist governments? The thing that made Children of Men great for me wasn’t WHAT it said, but the WAY it portrayed the world of the not-very-distant future. The care in the set design. The perfect camera set-ups. It was able to show the complete devastation of a world thrown into terror and confusion because of a plague with an unknown cause that led to worldwide sterility, without ever needing any of the characters to describe what was going on. It’s one of the most perfectly designed films I’ve ever, ever seen. But “perfectly designed” doesn’t hit as hard with the awards people as “Has a Really Obvious and Laudable Message.”

I should really stop ranting about awards. Everything I write about awards turns into a rant. I should just resign myself to the fact that awards are dumb and rarely get it right and just go on about my business of watching good films. So ignore the rant portions of this post and take to heart my advice to see Children of Men and especially Pan’s Labyrinth if you can. Do note both are violent, so don’t take the kids.

“The Ruin” (Old English) film

I came across this short film in a blog by an Anglo-Saxon scholar, the Unlocked Wordhoard. It’s a 6-minute adaptation of an Old English elegiac poem, “The Ruin,” done by some students at the University of Oxford. I hadn’t read the poem before (Old English and modern English text here), but it’s hauntingly beautiful. The film is done in Old English with modern English subtitles, and the language is beautiful too. Maybe someday I’ll learn it. But that day may be a ways away. Anyway. My favorite thing about the film is how it applies the poem’s description of a ruined Anglo-Saxon mead-hall to an early industrial-age cement factory…good literature resonates throughout the ages, doesn’t it?

William Cowper

I feel like writing something, for whatever reason, so I guess I’ll write about William Cowper, since I’m giving a presentation on him tomorrow. Of course, the time I spend writing about him here would probably be better spent working on my handout and stuff, but hey. I’ve got like seven hours tomorrow to do that.

William Cowper was a familiar name to me as the author of some of the hymns we sing in church: “God Moves in a Mysterious Way” and “Sometimes a Light Surprises” in particular. But in terms of a poet to be studied in a European Romanticism class, not as familiar. Over the last three days I’ve read two biographies, skimmed two books of criticism, and flipped through his poems, letters, and spiritual autobiography. (This is what we do in grad school, you see. Or this is what I do in grad school, meaning, wait until the last few days and then cram. So really, not much different than undergrad, just MORE OF IT.) And his life is one of the saddest things I’ve ever read.

He was a witty, intelligent young man, but always given to shyness and depression. The biographies try to psychoanalyze him, and it’s hard to avoid it, really…he seems to have been greatly affected by the death of his mother when he was six (and perhaps the fact that of the seven children born in his family, he was one of only two who survived infancy), and the patterns of his later bouts with severe depression and despair seem to indicate an inability to deal with the loss of loved ones, exhibiting itself in paranoia and fear of abandonment. The thing is, he mapped all of this into a religious model, wherein God had turned his back on William and abandoned him. He vascillated between thinking of himself as a fallen archangel, deserving God’s punishment and unworthy of His forgiveness, and as an innocent Job, tormented by Satan and not saved by God. In either case, he felt abandoned by God.

But what about all the hymns? During his stay in a mental hospital from 1763 to 1765, he was converted from Anglicanism to Evangelicalism, following a cousin enamoured of John Wesley’s preaching. In 1765, he felt that God had rescued him from depression, and redeemed him. He met John Newton and wrote a hymnbook with him. Everything was sailing along fairly well, except his religious zeal started to fade (his reserved personality couldn’t keep anything at the high level of intensity that his religiousity was in 1765), and his sense of losing a second mother figure increased (ironically because he nearly married the woman in question, who he saw as a mother figure, but was only about seven years older than himself), he again fell into paranoia and depression. This time, evangelicalism didn’t help–it had failed to keep him out of depression, and his depression showed (to him) that once again God had deserted him.

He had happy times after that…in fact, virtually all of his poetry was written between 1779 and 1790…but he never again felt that God could or would accept him and forgive him for all sorts of perceived sins, and he lived out his days at varying levels of despair and indifference, just waiting for what he perceived as his inevitable damnation. The letters from the last four years of his life are absolutely heartbreaking. And really, he never seems to have abandoned his belief in God’s existence or even in the doctrines of Calvinism. He was just convinced that in the predestination process, God had predestined him for destruction instead of salvation. And he had even read George Herbert, the 17th century poet for whom the doctrine of predestination was a glorious comfort. Reading about his life made me really get a new perspective on people who suffer from depression…how difficult it must be at times to continue believing in God’s love when the whole world seems against you.

Interestingly, I like his poetry more than a lot of poetry I’ve read (you’ll remember, I’m not a huge fan of poetry). Most of it isn’t depressing at all; a lot of it is delightfully comic and even the poems he wrote recalling his depression are beautiful. Certainly he was an important prefigure to the Romantic movement, in his love for nature and attention to everyday, common subjects, and his use of natural language. He’s said to have been one of the most popular English poets throughout the 19th century, though his reputation with critics has gone up and down. Yet again proof that I fall into the “popular” class of readers rather than the “critical” class. See, I am in the wrong business.

My life in bullet points

Haven’t said much of anything lately except American Idol stuff, and I don’t really have a good reason for that. (If I have a reason, it’s that I have too much time, and thus don’t need to use blogging as a procrastination tool.)

  • I am taking two classes this semester instead of the four I had last semester; most grad students only take two, so this is normal.
  • One class is on European Romanticism–basically a sort of comparative literature survey course, using texts and translations from England, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain, Norway, Hungary, Denmark, etc. The professor is a little intimidating just because he knows EVERYTHING about everything, and when you present on someone, he expects you to know EVERYTHING about them. (I present for the first time next Monday…so I will be researching today and tomorrow for that.) But he is also British, so there’s that. I like him a lot, but he really does KNOW EVERYTHING.
  • The other class is on the Harlem Renaissance, and it’s actually more interesting than I was expecting. I’ve never read any of these writers (1910s-1920s black writers), and we’re getting a good interdisciplinary chunk of the contemporary politics, music, art, etc. as well as literature, which suits me perfectly. Of course, not knowing anything about any of the works meant that I kept my mouth shut when people were choosing presentation topics until the end, so I got poetry. *sigh* Oh well.
  • I hate presentations. Grad classes are all presentations. What’s that about?
  • But in comparison with last semester, when I wrote upwards of 80 pages of papers and assignments for class, this semester I only have something like 40 pages maximum to write. In European Romanticism, we have three papers, and he gave us 2000 words MAX. That’s like, six and a half pages. MAX. Score.
  • Also, I am a research assistant this year, which is actually a good bit of fun, I think. The professor I work for is in the rhetoric and composition area, and I don’t want to talk much about her research because she’s doing a fairly large project right now for publication this summer or fall. But she’s working with multimodal writing…basically, using other methods of conveying information than your standard academic essay–pictures, video, interaction, etc. It’s fairly interesting, and is making me consider a lot of things I never thought about before.
  • For part of the project, I’m transcribing interviews, and she gave me this transcription machine, which is sorta cool, in a old-tech sort of way. It plays the tape and you run it with your foot, so you don’t have to stop typing to run it back a bit or stop it playing while you catch up. Seems like we ought to be getting pretty close to good enough voice recognition technology, though, to render the whole manual transcription thing obsolete. Not that I mind. I enjoy typing and copying things. One thing that’s interesting though, is how automatically I translate the conversation into proper writing. I’m supposed to keep it pretty much as it is on the tape (though she said to leave out “ums” and stuff like that), but I also tend weed out “you know” and “like” and other interjections that I really want to leave in to show when the interviewee was hesitating or backtracking. It’s harder to type exactly what you hear than you would think!
  • I drove down to Austin last Saturday pretty much exclusively to see Pan’s Labyrinth, and it was totally worth it. Probably the best movie I’ve seen from 2006. Although Brick is still a really close second. But if Pan’s Labyrinth is playing where you are, I suggest you go see it. But don’t take the kids. It may be a fantasy, and it may have a young girl as the protagonist, but it ain’t a kids’ movie. I’ll probably write more about it later.
  • I just finished the second season of Grey’s Anatomy on DVD, and it BROKE ME. Now, to find the tape of this season…
  • I’ve been reading David Bordwell and Kirstin Thompson’s blog pretty regularly (and if you’re interested in film studies, you should be too), and when I was working for my professor in her office the other day, I saw she had their textbook Film Art, which I’ve been wanting to read since I found their blog. And she let me borrow it! She’s pretty awesome.
  • Apparently I’m not meant to get allergy shots down here. I went to start them today (after having been cleared by the doctor here a couple of weeks ago), and they had to call my allergist at home before giving me a shot because it’s been so long since I’ve had one, and they wouldn’t let me get one until I’d seen my doctor! At home! IN ST. LOUIS! Woulda been nice to know that when I was home at Christmas. Because I’m not planning to be back in St. Louis again until May. I don’t know why it was okay in November for me to get shots here without seeing my doctor at home, but it’s not now. Ah well. I’ve been fairly fine without them. Just annoying is all.
  • Speaking of annoying. A few rules for cinema patrons, brought to you due to the two morons in front of me today. 1) Even if there’s only one other person in the theatre (i.e., me), you still shouldn’t treat the movie like your own private Mystery Science Theatre. 2) If you must talk to each other, don’t sit with a seat IN BETWEEN YOU, thus forcing you to use normal voices. Use your quiet voices. 3) Turn your cellphones OFF. Both of them. 4) And, if your cellphone does happen to ring, DO NOT ANSWER IT. 5) If you must answer it, STEP OUTSIDE and DO NOT CARRY ON A CONVERSATION IN THE THEATRE ON YOUR CELLPHONE. People complain about the state of moviegoing these days; sometimes it is the theatre’s fault. But more often, the reason going to theatres isn’t fun is because the audience is boorish. Sometimes audiences are great–first night audiences at fan favorites (like Lord of the Rings) are awesome, and generally art-house/indie audiences are enjoyable. But multiplex audiences are horrible and should be banned from ever leaving their own homes.
  • I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1, and it now autosaves posts! Hell yeah.

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