Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan).
Last week I wrote about how the mammoth cost overruns in Boston’s Big Dig project, among other things, continue to resonate when government proposes large scale public works projects. This has been particularly true in Seattle, where a $4.2 billion tunnel replacement for its 50-year-old double deck waterfront highway has become a major campaign issue in next week’s election.
Well, cue the spooky violin music and find an older mom voice actor with an exceptionally concerned timbre, as this new campaign ad summarizes the point aptly.
If the ad’s scenario came to pass, it’s true that an amount equal to $15,000 for every Seattle family would have to be found whether through toll revenue, some sort of tax, or from the legislature in Olympia. It’s unlikely, however, that families would get that bill along with their monthly Comcast charges.
Chronic City
By Jonathan Lethem
(Doubleday, 432 pp., $27.95)
My heart sank when I read the opening line of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel. “I first met Perkus Tooth in an office,” it reads. Oh no, I thought, not that again. Is he really going to drag us through the kind of genre exercise a cutesy name like “Perkus Tooth” connotes? Lethem’s career was not supposed to be going like this. After banging out four sciencefiction novels in as many years, he had graduated, with Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, to a more mature realism. Genre elements still clung like packing chips to both works--detective fiction in Motherless Brooklyn, the last remnants of sci-fi, or so it seemed, in Fortress--but so stunning was the latter despite its flaws, so dense its every phrase with feeling and implication, that there seemed to be no going back. After successively closer approximations, the introverted boy from Boerum Hill, who flung himself into prodigies of pop-cultural absorption after the death of his strong-willed hippie mother a short while after his fourteenth birthday, had come home to his subject. Family dynamics and adolescent friendships; comic books and rock and roll; the word on the street, the throb of the city, the wounded edge where black meets white. Brooklyn sang, and Lethem vibrated like a reed. You Don’t Love Me Yet, a facile rom-com set amidst the L.A. hipoisie, was a beach vacation we could have done without, but Chronic City promised a return to New York and, at more than four hundred pages, a resumption of high ambition.
Robert Altman: The Oral Biography
By Mitchell Zuckoff
(Knopf, 592 pp., $35)
Here is your exam question: who is the last American movie director who made thirty-nine films but never won the Oscar for best director? Name the film by that director that cost the most money, and name the film of his that earned the most. Clue: The Departed, which must have been around Martin Scorsese’s thirtieth picture, and did win the directing Oscar, cost $90 million (four times as much as any of this man’s films cost)--so don’t go that way. Background info: Gosford Park cost $15 million; Nashville cost $2.2 million; M.A.S.H. cost about $3.5 million, and earned around $70 million; Popeye cost $20 million (in 1980). Here is your assignment: assess and reconcile these allegations in an essay of approximately 3,000 words. (Note: banish from your mind any insinuation that nowadays a director who makes thirty-nine films has to be given a best director Oscar--though it is not easy to think of many that fecund who don’t have a bronze fetish to nurse at night.)
Disgrace
Paladin
The Other Man
Image Entertainment
J.M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace has been made into a film that, in good measure, is faithful to it. Along with the admiration that obviously drew them to the book, the film-makers had to deal with some heavy data. Coetzee is a Nobel laureate; Disgrace won a lofty British award called the Booker Prize; an English newspaper poll lately named Disgrace as the best novel of the last twenty-five years. Aesthetically dubious though such tags are, nonetheless the book has been a favorite of many good readers over many years.
Alex Jones is a husky man with short sandy hair, weary eyes, baby cheeks, and the kind of deep, gravelly voice made for horror-movie trailers. And it’s horror he has in mind. "Your New World Order will fall!" he screams through a megaphone at the shiny façade of a nondescript office building. "Humanity will defeat you!"
David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men has been adapted for the screen. Well, parts of it have been adapted--chiefly, the four parts that bear the same title as the book and the film. Wallace’s book is a miscellany of prose outbursts, some that soar in known styles, some that fling aside known styles, some of deliberate wildness. The book evokes much the same reaction as does Godard. Godard’s films often convey that he thought his film-making talent was a curse; that he was doomed to use that talent in prescribed patterns, that he must try to explode those film-making patterns as drastically as possible yet still make his talent evident--at least, by letting viewers know that he was protesting. (For much the same reason, I thought, the avant-garde musician Henry Cowell played parts of his pieces with his elbows.)
The Baader Meinhof Complex.
This German film about German terrorists of the 1970s is not only dynamically made and acted, it tries to tell the truth about the reason for the outbursts. Certainly there is a great deal of violence, but there is also some understanding of character and of political texture. (Reviewed 9/23/09)
Lorna's Silence Sony Pictures Classics
My Fuhrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler First Run Features
One of the more thrilling chapters in film history is the account of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The joint career of these Belgian brothers has been, since they became known, breathtaking. After some twenty years of documentary work for Francophone television, in the early 1990s they began to make features. The first two were not widely seen. Then came La Promesse (1996), which was so much better than good, so complete and startling a work, that the occasion seemed less like the arrival of a fine new film than the discovery of a long-lost masterpiece.
Quiet Chaos -- IFC Films
The Girl From Monaco -- Magnolia Pictures
Nanni Moretti, treasured in Europe, is scarcely known in the United States. This schism usually happens with film people whose work is strapped culturally to one country, but Moretti's writing and directing and acting are not only celebrated in Italy, they have prospered elsewhere. Not here, however, though his strongest concern is human commonality.
Sometimes, in a career that began in 1973, he has appeared in films directed by others. This is true of his latest, Quiet Chaos. He was co-author of the screenplay, adapted from a novel by Sandro Veronesi, but the picture was directed by someone else. Thus we get the chance with this film to concentrate on Moretti the actor, his screen presence and aura. He has often been compared to Woody Allen, but the comparison is weak. The two of them share only two qualities. Both of them are intelligent, with intelligent interests. Both of them are ordinary-looking; if their faces were not familiar, we would pass them in the street without a second glance. The differences between them, however, are drastic.
On the front page of the Weekend Arts section on Friday, the Times published an above-the-fold celebration of the work of Cary Grant so backhanded and begrudging as to be genuinely mystifying. The occasion was a retrospective taking place at BAMcinematek, and the author was Mike Hall, who usually writes about television. Hall begins by noting
On a Wednesday night in San Francisco, opening night, in a theater no more than half full, the truth was as inescapable as rain at a picnic. Johnny Depp just wasn’t cutting it. He wasn’t even making the attempt. Once again, Michael Mann had poured his nearly liquid talent over a gangster picture without ever thinking to ask himself why. That oddly vague title Public Enemies--why isn’t it called Johnny D. or just Dillinger?--was turning into a startlingly detached and affectless movie.
Kazan on Directing
Edited and with commentary by Robert Cornfield
(Knopf, 368 pp., $32.50)
There's a tendency, in the endless discussions about the economic crisis, to think of the entire financial industry as a single, ultra-powerful actor. Big commercial banks, nimble hedge funds, even the odd insurance company all get lumped together under the heading "Wall Street," with its sinister, Death-Star connotations.
Sacramento, California
On the dais, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger--his jaw jutting, his chest thrust forward, his unlined bronze face frozen in a smile--is flanked by four small black schoolchildren, one of whom gazes up at him in rapt wonderment. Behind him stands Latina Democratic State Senator Martha Escutia, and in front of him are crates and baskets of oranges, avocados, and grapes. Schwarzenegger has called a press conference to announce his support for Escutia's Healthy Schools Now Act, which would encourage schoolchildren to forgo junk food. But the event, held here on July 25, was about more than just cute kids and healthy snacks. Over the past eight months, Schwarzenegger has had rancorous conflicts with nurses, firefighters, police, and teachers, while voters were treated to revelations of his personal excesses and ethical lapses--most recently, The Sacramento Bee's report that the California governor was under contract to body- building magazines that make money from advertising notoriously unhealthy dietary supplements. This, then, was the first of many summer events intended to revive Schwarzenegger's standing among the state's disillusioned electorate.
Ticket lines for movies are rare in Israel, and rarer still for features that have already been showing for five weeks, and unprecedented for a German production centered on the character of Adolf Hitler. Yet Israelis are still lining up to see Oliver Hirschbiegel's tenebrous docudrama about the Third Reich's closing days, Der Untergang--The Downfall.
"Am I on?" asks the figure on camera, who identifies herself as "Laura Lou." "This is like a testimony, isn't it?" She wipes her face nervously, explaining, "Jimmy says when I wear too much makeup it makes me look like a whore." Her story is about the beatings she used to take from her drunken husband; she tells it between sobs, tugging at her bangs as if to hide behind them. At one point she breaks down altogether. "I can't talk," she weeps.
When Spider-Man hit theaters in the spring of 2002, I thought it had distilled the perfect formula for cinema superheroics, a careful blend of in-costume action and out-of-costume drama, seasoned with a dash of unrequited adolescent longing and liberal portions of Tobey Maguire's insistent adorability. There was no reason to doubt that the recipe would work equally well in a sequel.
It's not often a television show can make you reconsider the talents of a longtime celebrity. "Arrested Development," the nearly cancelled FOX sitcom whose first season is now out on video, has made me reconsider the talents of two: Ron Howard (whom I'd written off as a purveyor of tame commercial pabulum) and Liza Minnelli (probably best if I not detail my objections).
I don't like to think of myself as the kind of person who would open a column with a reference to a Billy Joel song. But this week, while ruminating on the often-inverse relationship between quality and longevity, I fleetingly considered it. I don't mind saying it scared me a little.
Ben Stiller has the rare distinction of starring in two of the funniest American films of the last decade, the Farrelly brothers' There's Something About Mary and David O. Russell's lesser known Flirting with Disaster. Stiller also has the rather more common distinction of starring in a lot of utter rubbish. It will probably come as no surprise that Along Came Polly, out on video this week, falls into the latter category.
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
IFC Entertainment
35 Shots of Rum
Cinema Guild
David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men has been adapted for the screen. Well, parts of it have been adapted--chiefly, the four parts that bear the same title as the book and the film. Wallace’s book is a miscellany of prose outbursts, some that soar in known styles, some that fling aside known styles, some of deliberate wildness. The book evokes much the same reaction as does Godard. Godard’s films often convey that he thought his film-making talent was a curse; that he was doomed to use that talent in prescribed patterns, that he must try to explode those film-making patterns as drastically as possible yet still make his talent evident--at least, by letting viewers know that he was protesting. (For much the same reason, I thought, the avant-garde musician Henry Cowell played parts of his pieces with his elbows.)
