THE TALKIES
Bowman, James
Time passed. Joe and Steve came to my Bar Mitzvah, to my wedding, and I visited them on rare occasions. Then Monticello declined dramatically as the resort business changed when people got air...
...99 Legato Systems Inc___8 Living Resources Press...
...Well, the season will soon be over...
...Plus, I am only human...
...I make life miserable for everyone when I lose, and my crew are like sad, worried school children when I lose...
...And I am so sad about all of the people who have died—my Mom and Pop, Mr...
...Or so I thought after seeing Hannibal.Why is it that Ridley Scott's sequel to The Silence of the Lambs is setting records at the box office as I write...
...I keep winning game after game on my show, but when I lose, I throw a giant fit...
...They both had what had killed my mother, congestive heart failure...
...FRIDAY I have to be committed to a mental hospital...
...As we are all more or less persuaded of our own goodness we know that, like Clarice herself, we have nothing to fear from the monster...
...What Steve, as blameless and as kind, as good and as loyal, will do without him is anyone's guess...
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...Because it's as unsurprising as that fish swim or birds fly...
...Real reality TV...
...as are the devoted Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden), Pollock's wife, and others...
...Perhaps—who knows?— Clarice even develops the taste for human flesh...
...And the inability to distinguish between posturing and real criticism, self-or otherwise, is analogous to the inability to distinguish between design and art...
...Joe went up and down, seemed to be rallying, fell back, and now, this afternoon, a call from my dear sister...
...Lecter or to that of anthropophagy...
...And, indeed, in the movie his victims comprise a pickpocket, a greedy bounty hunter, a sexually harassing and corrupt FBI agent, and a vengeful pedophiliac bilTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 83 lionaire whose capacity for cruelty and ruthlessness rivals that of Hannibal himself—though others are hinted at...
...The egregious Quills comes to mind...
...American Spectator Online...
...A really, really lot...
...Two more of these came along this month to prove the point...
...But in the movies, design has so far taken over from art that we may THE TALKIES from time to time forget that we are seeing the one and not the other...
...And as for losing, well, I am lucky to be alive...
...Life, even for the most privileged among us, is just too damned hard...
...In Mr...
...Or at least we ought to know it...
...The pose of satirical outrage in the one case, like that of moral contrition in the other, is just that...
...Then their glorious sister Berniece, at whose wedding I had been a ring bearer, died about 1983...
...The romantic iconography of the suffering artist who transforms his sufferings into art has long since been vulgarized by the Hollywood treatment, which here as elsewhere makes a few respectful bows in the direction of art before focusing on the much more interesting sufferings which have allegedly inspired it...
...I am like a big spoiled baby on my show...
...Their willingness to be self-critical is like Bill Clintons willingness to apologize in that both are intended to mask a monumental self-satisfaction and willfulness...
...And it avoids the consideration of the things they would condone...
...Here's why...
...Of course as the man is the corrupt and bigoted sexual harasser mentioned above, played by Ray Liotta, we can be sure that there is no derogation intended to the dignity either of Dr...
...Pretending that they would condone even murder for the sake of a good story is easier to take because we know it's not really true...
...The causal connection between a riotous, 84 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 scandalous or excessive personal life and the art which is supposed to justify it has never been established and must be regarded as largely bogus...
...What is going on here...
...Apparently Eric Holder, the acting attorney general of the United States, long-time deputy AG, had never heard of Marc Rich, probably the most well-known financial fugitive of the postwar era and tops or close to tops on the Justice Department's most wanted fugitive list...
...I usually lose when I am tired and upset, and I am very tired and very upset...
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...There is much I could learn from him...
...Wong manages to find the intersection between design and morality—those dark and empty night scenes, that throbbing gypsy waltz on the soundtrack, that continual attention to what is not happening as a way of making it more present to our imaginations—which is also the birthplace of art...
...This, I take it, is an oriental trick, reminiscent of Chinese painting in which a static spaciousness is artfully filled with infinite suggestion...
...But I dread losing a lot...
...That's why...
...I begged him to come live with us and maybe he will...
...Fell, still kills and eats people from time to time, but he does so as a gentleman and a scholar and a connoisseur of exotic cuisine...
...I am lucky to be in America...
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...Or, in another context, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, which belongs to a very large number of movies that wish to be thought of as "satires" on the culture they in fact thrive on and perpetuate...
...Scott's adaptation, co-written by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, this ending is dropped in favor of one allowing Clarice to preserve her virtue more or less intact, in spite of the cannibals obviously powerful charms...
...Usually, the cinematic representation of a monster is intended to scare us, and that is what the Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Lambs did...
...It's only in its blatancy that it's new...
...I tell myself it's a mistake, but I keep doing it anyway...
...And that, really, is the point...
...The "reality TV" show called The Contenders, in which ordinary people volunteer for a contest the object of which is for them to kill each other, is presented as if it were, well, real...
...Brain Eaters and Breast Beaters BY JAMES BOWMAN The discrimination between art and design may be difficult theoretically but is usually easy enough to make in practice...
...an artist who found himself transformed, willy-nilly, into a designer...
...Too much dying...
...After all, there is no game if I always win...
...The art here is just the excuse for a bit of highbrow soap opera...
...In fact, it may be the best such "satire" ever made because it allows no space for an authorial voice to engage in self-important moralizing...
...Or real TV...
...There are also a lot of laughs (which is what we miss in so many of these alleged satires), especially in the murderous soap opera occasioned by having the returning champion be a pregnant woman who wants to get back with a former boyfriend who is also a contestant...
...In the context of a Hollywood culture which so regularly converts art into design it is refreshing indeed to find that in our Movie of the Month, In the Mood for Love, the director-writer Wong Kar-wai and his cinematographers, Christopher Doyle and Mark Li Ping-bin, have somehow managed to turn design into art...
...I'm afraid the bad news is that it can be and we are...
...Scull, my saintly adult friends from childhood, Mr...
...I feel the film itself is not quite alive to the way in which its tabloid treatment of Jackson Pollock becomes an ironic comment on the transmigration of his drip-painted canvases and their imitators from the famous Long Island garage to tasteful decorations for suburban living rooms...
...So in Pollock, Clement Greenberg (Jeffrey Tambor) is thrust upon the stage in order to assure us that Jackson's daubs are profoundly meaningful (hadn't we heard that somewhere before...
...3 Classifieds...
...Can it truly be intended that we are meant to sympathize with a ruthless murderer and a cannibal...
...Their absolute refusal to ever do anything to upset anyone around them had not changed...
...I am telling you, I am not well in the head when it comes to this game...
...Oh, and one other fact...
...Center Spread F.L.A.M.E...
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...The many gorgeous tableaux vivants of loneliness and longing presented to us by the extraordinarily good-looking adultery victims, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, help in ways that are still not entirely clear to me to establish for us the moral ground on which they do not go and do likewise, though their acting out the roles of the adulterers in other respects causes them to fall deeply in love...
...I had known them my whole life and I can say I never saw a more blameless duo...
...The voyeuristic element is also predominant in Ed Harris's Pollock which, appropriately enough, is about "A little early aren't we...
...If he had been a sober and devoted husband and a pillar of his community, Pollock might never have been taken seriously by the art world, but that is a very different thing from saying that he could not have painted as he did...
...But there is not much that is scary in the sequel...
...Joe and Steve lost their mother in 1958 and then their father years later...
...By thus building his film around a negative, a not-being, Mr...
...Then Joe got sick when Steve got better...
...Steve got quite sick about a year ago with heart problems...
...Nixon and Mrs...
...I asked...
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...One is not accustomed to seeing a movie adaptation more coy and understated and nuanced than the novel it adapts, and I suppose we should be grateful that Clarice's incipient enthusiasm for cannibals and cannibalism should only be implied...
...But when I lose, I go to my room, huff and puff, scream and complain, and generally act nuts...
...But even in Series 7 we cannot quite escape the sense that the media's breast-beating about its own awfulness is protesting too much...
...If there is a heaven, if you get there by the merit of kindness and foregoing even the slightest hurt to your fellow man, Joe Wahrhaftig is there in glory...
...Even the smartest human being cannot win every game at anything...
...Too much going away...
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...Nixon, now cousin Joe, all of the good dogs, MaryTrixie, Ginger, Martha, Puppy Wuppy Susan...
...and Mrs...
...The possibility is obviously left open that she will yet yield to his masterful importunity in a sequel...
...Even Kasparov and Spassky lose...
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...Ed Harris, who takes the part of Pollock himself, is too busy playing the artist up as a monstrè sacre—a violent, drunken, taciturn boor whose loutish behavior must be forgiven him for the sake of his genius—to have the time for thinking about his art in other than conventionally reverential terms...
...It is, of course, not an unfamiliar Hollywood phenomenon to find that films which aspire to be taken seriously as intellectual and high-minded drama only use their artists as an excuse for more sex 'n' violence...
...This is, first and foremost, a beautiful film, and its beauty advances (as it were) through continual restatement...
...One hasn't necessarily any objection to such entertainments, so long as they are self-aware enough to recognize that they are merely parasitic upon the art that they pretend to celebrate...
...They were like innocent children in a fairy tale, even into their seventies...
...The media news people and talk show hosts and the politicians and the city officials who allegedly live in awe of them will get as much pleasure as the rest of us out of clucking their tongues and shaking their heads and disapproving of the outrages that the mee-juh perpetrate in Fifteen Minutes, which concerns an enterprising and improbably ruthless Russian immigrant (played with lip-smacking glee by Karel Roden) who cleverly works out that you can get away with anything in America if you can contrive to look vulnerable on TV If we didn't know that ourselves a couple of years ago, we sure know it by now, and the film—unwisely I think— tries to look more original, or possibly just more emphatic, in making its point by running up the body-count...
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...So much so that you can hardly have supposed that there was so much to be suggested by this story of a man and a woman thrown together by the shared knowledge that their respective spouses are having an affair, but who resist the temptation to have one themselves...
...Well that's all right then...
...That's pitiful...
...The good news is that, as Julianne Moore, the new Clarice Starling to Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal, put it in an interview with Vanity Fair, "Tony never eats anyone who's good...
...I hope so...
...She said, in a weary voice, "I'm fine but Joe died this morning...
...And I am not even remotely by any stretch of the imagination in that world...
...Eeew...
...How are you...
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...Their kindness had not changed at all...
...Then Monticello declined dramatically as the resort business changed when people got air conditioning in their homes and apartments...
...Also, like Clarice we are quite prepared to insist on our own virtuous scruples when it comes to eating people, and even (perhaps) our desire that the doctor should be brought to book for doing so—while at the same time rather thrilling to the dash and daring of his exploits and feeling flattered to be considered by him as inedible ourselves...
...SATURDAY Why have I said nothing yet about the Clinton sale of pardons...
...Who, after all, is in favor of our modern media culture...
...For the only thing that seems clear in the end is that, in the riot of explosive color that Pollock committed to canvas during his most creative years, we are meant to find something not altogether unlike the image of a man being fed his own brain...
...I am not proud of the way I act when I lose, and maybe it's not even losing because I have the show win or lose, at least so far...
...We know it, like pornography, when we see it...
...Certainly suggestion is the heart and soul of In the Mood for Love...
...Lecter, now going under the name of Dr...
...Fifteen Minutes, written and directed by John Herzfeld, and Series 7 by Daniel Minahan are both meant to be seen as satirical treatments of our modern media culture, which is all very well, though they can hardly be said to risk anything...
...Series 7 is a better movie...
...It's that simple...
...Accordingly, its climax is chiefly memorable not for the romantic pas de deux between the cannibal and the FBI agent who is the object of his adoration but for the image of a man being fed bits of his own brain sautèed in butter and pronouncing them delicious...
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...Yet the effect is the same if you consider that the thrill of the movie is essentially voyeuristic—like that of what is now humorously referred to as "reality TV"—rather than that of true art...
...That's also simple...
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...In the novel by Thomas Harris on which the new movie is based, this sneaking admiration for the monster is brought to its logical conclusion as Lecter and Clarice run away together to live as man and wife, presumably as blissfully happy jet-setters...
...Such assurances are necessary, of course, because the pictures themselves look worryingly indistinguishable from any other painter's dropcloth, but once they are out of the way we may be left to get on with the much more entertaining business of watching a man destroy himself...
Vol. 34 • April 2001 • No. 3
