We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
I was intrigued by this:
American movies have forgotten how to portray heroism, while a large part of their disappearing audience still wants to see celluloid heroes. I mean real heroes, unqualified heroes, not those who have dominated American cinema over the past 30 years and who can be classified as one of three types: the whistle-blower hero, the victim hero, and the cartoon or superhero. The heroes of most of last year’s flopperoos belonged to one of the first two types, although, according to Scott, the only one that made any money, “The Kingdom,” starred “a team of superheroes” on the loose in Saudi Arabia. What kind of box office might have been done by a movie that offered up a real hero?
Up to a point. There is no doubt that much of what James Bowman says here is true. John Wayne-style movies just do not seem to get made any more, but I am not sure that heroism is dying out completely. I love the film, Apollo 13, for instance, for its realistic portrayal of the mental as well as physical heroism involved in getting the Apollo craft safely back to Earth after the craft suffered a massive loss of oxygen.
His point about “superheroes” is true: I thought the recent Iron Man film had some heroic as well as downright funny moments. As for other stuff, the last James Bond film, Casino Royale, while also not totally realistic, was a much grittier, tougher 007 film than recently, has at its core the fact that Bond is a hero who takes on the baddies.
The trouble is that heroism is often idealised, but I don’t have a problem with this if it involves “supermen” characters, like the last Batman film, which was pretty heroic, not to mention 300, the re-telling of the doings of ancient Greece. Outside of Hollywood, there are all those heroic Hong Kong action movies. Not to mention a film that was actually called Hero. Some of the Japanese anime films also are full of strong, uplifting moral themes.
So I do not think the cupboard is bare. But Bowman does make a good set of points about the lack of “real-life” hero films. I suspect that if there is a dearth of heroic figures on screen, some of it is down to how people, in their revulsion against war in general – a perfectly normal reaction – have taken against the military virtues. But as I hope some of the examples show, there is more to heroism than courage under fire.
Where I think there is a real problem, which the article does not really touch on, is the lack of any heroic characters in movies about business. I keep banging on about this, but it is a real pity that almost all businessmen and women are potrayed as morally sleazy or downright evil. A shame: I regard some entrepreneurs and their willingness to take big risks as heroes.
Quiz: name your top 5 most heroic films, of any genre.
The State of Pennsylvania has made a very old CMU Fine Arts Department tradition untenable. The 89 year old quadriennial Beaux Arts Ball is so well known in the arts community that its passing rated a New York Times story. They call it “the original toga party”. That is putting it mildly.
Although the article presents a number of reasons for the passing, the biggest one is Statist intervention. They grey minded, grey suited, grey souled clones killed it:
‘The off-campus establishments have liquor licenses and are prepared to uphold the state’s liquor laws,” the dean said. ”Responsibility for alcohol is the main reason the ball was moved off campus.”
At the 1985 ball, which attracted more than 1,200 people, the building received more than $50,000 in damage. The Student Affairs office reported open drug use and under-age drinking. Since then, Pennsylvania passed a law requiring universities to be responsible for drinking on their campuses.
I might add I was costumed as sort of ‘Retief’ type interstellar adventurer at the 1985 affair, complete with cape, tights, a chestpiece glittering with LED’s and a mean looking laser side arm in my quite real holster.
And yes, it was … quite a party.
I am very sorry to hear this. I could not give a damn about what his political views are. Fact is, he has been one of the acting greats. The Sting, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, Cool Hand Luke, Harper, The Road to Perdition….that is just a few of them. And he was a pretty mean motor racing driver as well, like his old pal, Steve McQueen, who succumbed to cancer at a much younger age.
At 83, he’s already put a lot of miles on the clock, but I hope he can make a few more.
I watched Iron Man a few days ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. Downey is excellent, as are the rest of the cast. And how can you not like a film that starts off with a bunch of US soldiers driving along in a truck listening to AC/DC?
One thing I noticed is that Audi must have wangled some kind of product placement thing: all the main cars that feature are Audis. One of two aspects do not quite work and the physics of the energy system that powers the suit is not something I am fit to judge, but it seems a bit far-fetched. But what the heck.
Jim Henley, a comics buff, has a good review of the film. Mind you, I still have not entirely forgiven Jim for sliming Mark Steyn over the recent Canadian free speech kerfuffle a few months ago. Not his finest hour.
The other day I referred to a PJ O’Rourke gag which made the crack about a guy marrying Angelina Jolie for her brains (as opposed to her looks). Thinking about it, it was actually not a very good joke, even though it did not imply that Jolie was unintelligent, far from it. Anyway, it turns out that she is indeed smart and has a fair amount of guts as well:
“The pregnant mother of four told the U.K.’s Daily Mail that she owns guns similar to the ones she used in “Tomb Raider.” Jolie and partner Brad Pitt are not against having weapons in their house for security reasons, she says.”
“If anybody comes into my home and tries to hurt my kids, I’ve no problem shooting them,” she said.
Jolie, 32, has starred as a heat-packing vixen in several action movies – two “Tomb Raider” films, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” and the upcoming futuristic thriller, “Wanted.”
“I can handle myself,” she said. “There’s a side to me that people know is humanitarian, and there’s a side to me that’s a mommy. But there’s also the side that likes to get down and dirty and run and jump around and fire guns.”
If the NRA wants a replacement for its former figurehead, Charlton Heston, they could do a lot worse than Ms Jolie.
Do readers have any other examples of Hollywood/other actors and actresses who have come out in favour of self defence like this? There must be some, surely.
Ask anyone under a certain age as to whom Bo Diddley was, and you will get a blank stare. But for the generation that grew up listening to the likes of the Rolling Stones – heavily influenced by Bo, as well as Chuck Berry – they will definitely know. As an early 40-something, I grew up in a very different era but I also had heard of the guy and was encouraged to listen to a few of his tunes by an old friend. He’s great. I particularly like the tune, “Roadrunner” – ideal fodder for the car stereo, blasting at full volume while you are driving a convertible with the hood down and driving fast.
Sadly, the maestro died a few days ago. Those hipsters at the Reason Hit & Run blog have put up a nice set of links to music of the master. He will be greatly missed.
Here’s an album of some of his greatest hits.
If a Mafia don forced you and your neighbours to pay him protection and he later had the brass neck to claim that you were getting great value for money instead of the services offered by free marketeers, I think you would, humble reader, suspect a bit of a flaw in the logic. Well, that flaw appears to be lost on the author of a piece that carries the headline, “Why Jonathan Ross is worth the money”. For people who have been blessed with ignorance as to whom Ross is, he is a foul-mouthed, extremely well paid late-night chatshow host and movie pundit who, among other recent glittering performances, told the US actress Gwyneth Paltrow and mother of two children that he’d like to f**k her. Classy.
Excerpt:
The most important thing is that in everything the BBC does, the trust is looking for it to demonstrate as often as possible an understanding that it must justify the licence fee by striving constantly to deliver the highest standards and programmes that stand out from the crowd.
The public values talented performers – but expects, rightly, that it will get the best possible value when paying for them.
The author of this piece forgets that value is in the eye of the beholder. If I think that I get value for money for shopping in Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s or Walmart, that is my judgement, made on the basis of my choice, for specific goods that I happen to buy. If one of those supermarket chains demanded that I pay them a flat fee every year regardless of whether I shopped there or not, and claimed that its services/goods were “great value for money”, and employed loutish staff, I think I might be a tad unimpressed by that logic.
The only way to know if the BBC offers value for money is to let customers pay for it out of their own free will. Everything else is special pleading.
“At 7.30 on the morning of Thursday, August 12, Bond awoke in his comfortable flat in the plane-tree’d square off the King’s Road and was disgusted to find that he was thoroughly bored with the prospect of the day ahead. Just as, in at least one religion, accidie is the first of the cardinal sins, so boredom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.”
From Russia With Love.
It is a measure of the achievement of what Ian Fleming produced that, for all the criticisms hurled at his 007 adventures for their supposed snobbery, sexism and violence, that no-one ever accused his output of being boring and that he ended up producing the most famous fictional British character of all time, apart possibly from Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes. Born on this day in 1908, Fleming died at the relatively young age of 56 in 1964, just when the movies made out of his books were going into overdrive. Goodness knows what he’d make of the hoo-ha marking his centenary.
Sebastian Faulk’s new book, which he has tried to write in the Fleming style, is in the mail. I’ll put up a short review when I get it. With any luck, the book will be fodder for another great film with Daniel Craig.
Update: here is an article in the New York Times about Fleming and the new book. It is pretty harsh about Fleming, calling him a nasty piece work, including the sin of anti-semitism. Really? I cannot remember anything in the books that refers to Jews in a clearly disparaging way. Considering his depiction of the Nazis in Moonraker, I’d say that Fleming was pretty sound, in fact. As far as I know from reading his books or the excellent biography of him by Andrew Lycett, this was not an issue that came up. Was he a racist? Well, his portrayal of blacks in Live and Let Die is a bit condescending. He writes about people of different races, such as Koreans and Turks, in ways that sometimes paint too broad a brush, but I do not get the sense that he damned whole swathes of humanity because they had different skin colour. The NYT reviewer also refers to Fleming as a “failed” journalist. That is flat wrong. He worked for several years at Reuters and covered the Moscow show trials of the early 1930s with considerable aplomb; after the war, he worked as a senior executive at Kemsley Newspapers, responsible for running foreign news and training up staff as well as checking copy; he also had a column at the Sunday Times. Yes, he was not, by his own frank admission, one of the “greats”, but to say he was a failure is grossly unfair. At least – unlike the NYT – he did not make up news stories and kept his fictional skills for his novels.
There are certain things you have to be realistic about. Dirty Harry would not be on a police department at my age.
– Clint Eastwood. Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival.
“Biopics”, or films about the lives of the famous, have their place. According to this report, the US actor Leonardo di Caprio, who played Howard Hughes in “The Aviator” – which I thoroughly enjoyed – is lining up to play Ian Fleming, who would have been 100 on 28 May (the same birthday as your humble blogger). Hmm, not sure whether that is great casting. There was a film made a few years back with Charles Dance that did the job rather well.
For Fleming fans, this biography by Andrew Lycett is strongly recommended. John Pearson’s biography is also good.
Talking of famous writers, though, here are some people I reckon would make for quite good biopics:
Victor Hugo
A. Dumas
Tolstoy
Dickens
Saki (Hector Munro)
Robert Byron
Voltaire
Evelyn Waugh
F. Scott Fitzgerald
E. Hemingway
James Baldwin
Jonathan Swift
Shelley
Patrick Leigh-Fermor
By the way, my list does not imply that I necessarily admire or like all the writers, only that they are interesting as subjects of film.
So give your suggestions if you have others.
Update: several writers are unimpressed by di Caprio. I think he was okay as H. Hughes but as I said, I have my doubts as to whether he will be able to play Fleming well. Fleming was an old Etonian, a bit of an eccentric but despite all his possible foibles and failings, a first-class writer and journalist with a great eye for detail. I fear the Hollywood movie-makers will want to focus on his womanising. I suppose this is inevitable.
Finding myself uncharacteristically unable to give a flying fuck about what is in the news today and therefore unable to murder helpless pixels merely to write about politics or world events, I took advantage of my inamorata being away on business to escape the Ivory Tower and go bathe in the blood and beer of popular culture… yes, I just saw Doomsday, a post-Apocalypse Mad Max-meets-28 Days Later action splatter flick.
It is a movie that sets its sights low and consistently hits the target. Okay it does get a bit wobbly when any character has to speak for more than fifteen seconds, which thankfully occurs rarely. That said, much as I enjoyed this exceedingly low-brow gore-fest, Rhona Mitra is simply better than the movie. She is superb as the quipping but mostly taciturn harder-than-nails action chick with the one thing so many action heroines lack: physical presence. Also this movie has the best and most brutally ended action-girl-on-action-girl fight scene, well, quite possibly ever.
And the ‘eye thing’… very cool.
But I am not writing this to praise Rhona… well, actually I am…
…no…no… the purpose was to repeat what an old Scottish chum of mine said to me on the phone this evening when he unexpectedly called me up and I told him I had seen Doomsday.
“Oh yes, that film is a hoot!” he replied, “but it just made me wonder, maybe the Apocalypse is just Glasgow at chucking out time on a Friday evening, only it never ends. And people who can eat deep fried Mars Bars will eat anything.”
I just came across this. What’s happened is that they’ve discovered another Vivaldi opera, and classical music blogger Jessica Duchen is less than thrilled:
Vivaldi was an astonishing character with a hugely colourful life. But isn’t there a limit to how many of these rattly, twiddly baroque things the market can take? After all, most of them feature either a one-name title (eg Tomasso, Soltino, etc) or a massively long one (Il trionfo del blogorissimo classicale di Madamina Duchene), arias da carping hell for leather for several hours trying to sound inventive on the reprise (my favourite carp is to be found in halaszle, Hungarian fish soup), not to mention recycled bits and bobs from other works, a harpsichord sounding as harpsichords do, a swarm of wasps where the violins ought to be and a reluctance to cut even one note leading to hellishly uncomfortable theatrical experiences as the reverential principles of Richard Wagner are applied willynilly to music that was actually designed as background entertainment to business meetings, illicit love affairs and the odd bit of orange throwing.
Well said. Or to put it another way, the trouble with the authentic movement is that it isn’t actually very authentic. But the real point here is not the alleged tedium of Vivaldi operas, so much as the exuberantly self-centred relish of her own eloquence with which Madamina Duchene writes about them. Lovely.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
