Month: October 2013

Richard Corliss praises Paul Greengrass’s new thriller Captain Phillips, based on the 2009 hostage situation:

Richard Phillips’ calm, tough demeanor and the flinty resolve he displayed in protecting his crew make him a good fit for [Tom] Hanks, who in many films (including his own astronaut gig, Apollo 13) has played the competent, ordinary guy whom dire circumstances force into extraordinary valor. He was stranded offshore before, too, in the 2000 Cast Away. But that trauma was a stroll on the beach next to his face-off with Muse (Barkhad Abdi), the Somali pirate who commandeers the Alabama, points a gun in Phillips’ face and says, “I’m the captain now.”

The interplay between Phillips and Muse duplicates the elemental tension of any western confrontation: peaceful hero vs. armed villain. … Many of the pirates had been fishermen, and some Somalis have insisted that foreign ships poisoned the fish by dumping toxic waste in the water. Poverty and revenge may have given incentive to the young men, whom Abdi and the other excellent Somali actors portray as teens driven less by greed than desperate bravado.

In a less favorable review, Andrew O’Hehir sees a current of jingoism:

There’s a racial or cultural subtext to this film that’s right on the boundary of consciousness, and cannot entirely be ascribed to verisimilitude.

Hanks’ Phillips – the only fully realized character in the entire film – remains a calm and rational actor until he is pushed to the limit of human endurance. The Navy officers, SEAL team members and other military personnel are competent, emotionless automata, seen mostly in shadows or illuminated by their electronic gizmos. But the Somalis behave like unmedicated hyperactive children with guns – they’re wild-eyed and hot-tempered, vacillating from murderous rage to companionable good humor and back again every few seconds. “Captain Phillips” is less an adventure yarn about the daring rescue of a captured American than a celebration of a huge and expensive machine that crushes disorder.

Joshua Keating bemoans the lack of historical context:

For instance: In the film, Muse briefly mentions foreign vessels coming to take away the fish off the Somali coast. Viewers new to the subject may not know what to make of these remarks, but they refer to what many observers believe was a precipitating cause of the uptick in Somali piracy roughly 20 years ago. When the regime of longtime Somali dictator Siad Barre collapsed in 1991, the country was plunged into ongoing violence between rival armed groups and left without a central government capable of defending the country’s economic interests—including the “exclusive economic zone” off the Somali coast. Fleets from Europe and Asia quickly moved in, depleting the supply of fish.

As an African Development Bank report from 2011 put it, “Fishermen, dismayed at the inability of the central government to protect their country’s EEZ, and at the number of foreign fishing vessels illegally exploiting their traditional fisheries, took matters into their own hands. Initially arming themselves to chase off the illegal foreign fishing vessels, they quickly realized that robbing the vessels was a lucrative way to make up for lost income.

Ryan Kearney lauds the film from a purely cinematic perspective:

Captain Phillips, like all of Greengrass’s films, is an immersive experience: My eyes became one with the camera, and the soundtrack became background music. I might have had misgivings about Hanks’ accent or the stilted officialese, and I might have cringed at the lazy humanization of secondary characters. But those were fleeting moments in a barrage of shouting and sweating and crying and swearing and scowling and shooting. It is a film critic’s worst nightmare, really: a film with many flaws that doesn’t grant a moment to consider said flaws. And before this critic knew it, all of my nails were a quarter-inch shorter, the camera was rising from the sea and panning out to the horizon, strings were swelling, and this 134-minute action film was over in a flash.

Dave Eggers’s new novel The Circle follows a young woman named Mae who works for “The Circle,” a massive social-media conglomerate:

Though The Circle’s just four years old, 90 percent of all searches on earth go through it. The company owns 92 percent of all text messaging and controls 88 percent of the world’s free-mail (think Gmail) market. But the killer app that secured The Circle’s fortunes is TruYou, the online identity that is required of everyone who wants to use any of The Circle’s array of indispensable Internet tools. Give just a smidgen of personal information — your real name, which is then tied to your bank accounts, your credit cards, your email accounts, and all of your social media profiles — and “anytime you wanted to see anything, use anything, comment on anything or buy anything, it was one button, one account, everything tied together and trackable…”

Edward Docx hails the novel “a work so germane to our times that it may well come to be considered as the most on-the-money satirical commentary on the early internet age”:

There is much to admire. The pages are full of clever, plausible, unnerving ideas that I suspect are being developed right now. “SeeChange” is one such: millions of cheap, lollipop-sized “everything-proof” high-resolution cameras with a two-year battery life that can be taped up anywhere so that the video streams can be accessed by all. “This is the ultimate transparency. No filter. See everything. Always.”

Jason Diamond finds the novel “very real, and very necessary.” Lydia Kiesling remarks that “a lot of it feels farcical, but when you invoke 1984, the implications are deadly serious”:

Orwell wrote 1984 from a knowledgeable position, as a person who had invested himself corporeally in the political system that he was later moved to skewer in his writing. Eggers, meanwhile, has been very open about his position vis–à–vis the facts of tech culture, a position that might be stated as IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. There is some merit to the idea that the public perceptions of a company, particularly the storied, insular, tech giants, are as good as reality, but we wonder if Eggers is the right person to explain the specifics of why technology is scary. …

There’s are noble impulses behind this novel–to prophesy, to warn, and to entertain–and it basically delivers on these fronts. But The Circle boldly asks us to reckon it alongside one or more of the most, to use the odious word, impactful, novels of the 20th century, and it’s not bold enough to carry that weight. It seems to hedge its bets, so that it is just a little bit sad, a little bit funny, a little bit scary, and a little bit thin. A little bit beta, if you will.

Hillary Kelly fails to see the appeal of The Circle, writing, “Paging George Orwell: Someone’s gone and made a mockery of your masterpiece”:

The premise is terrifying; the execution is absurd. Eggers’s vision is so clouded by righteousness that he fails to provide his characters with any sense of humanity; instead, he’s created cardboard cutouts representative of Our Scary Internet Future. Mae, The Circle’s protagonist, is mealymouthed and naive. Other Circle employees wander about the page in raptures, gleeful about their Elysian employment. One has a hard time imagining why they’d be hired in the first place—their vision and intelligence is sorely limited. And the more knowledge-hungry The Circle grows, and the more the company exposes its dastardly plans, the more comical the novel feels.

But the most galling aspect of Eggers’s unsubtle pen is the disservice it does to the very real threat that digital conglomerates pose. Eggers’s monster is a lumbering Godzilla, easily seen for miles. The real invasions to our privacy are small, creeping, and slipped into our bloodstreams with a series of small pinpricks.

Recent Dish on the book here.

Appreciations for the work of newly-Nobel’d Alice Munro continue to pour forth. From David Lynn:

For many writers, the short story remains a genre of apprenticeship.  It is cultivated in workshops because it is, well, short. … Most writers are eager to graduate to novels (or screenplays) where the hope of glory and even rare lucre flutters ever bright. How different to read and savor the stories of Alice Munro.  Like Anton Chekhov or Frank O’Connor, Peter Taylor or Flannery O’Connor, they reveal vast spaces within a small sphere, deep resonances in a few deft images, sweeping lines.  Think of many of the greatest authors, generally known for their novels, whose short stories are, in fact, often superior.  D. H. Lawrence an obvious case in point.

All of this simply by way of a shout of joy.  This is splendid news indeed.

Sasha Weiss agrees:

It’s often said of Munro that her stories are so packed with emotion and incident that they are like novels—generations playing out their compulsions and longings across a few pages. Other writers study her work with devotion, trying to figure out how so much can happen in so little space. With Munro, it’s easy to pick out examples of miraculous economy: there are many, many stories and most of them are perfect.

James Wood says the news came as a surprise:

The announcement that this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Alice Munro probably strikes many readers and writers as deliriously incredible. Few contemporary writers are more admired, and with good reason. Everyone gets called “our Chekhov.” All you have to do nowadays is write a few half-decent stories and you are “our Chekhov.” But Alice Munro really is our Chekhov—which is to say, the English language’s Chekhov.

(In Munro’s great story, “The Beggar Maid,” an ambitious man sees that a friend of the woman he is courting “mispronounced Metternich,” and says indignantly to her: “How can you be friends with people like that?” I’m put in mind of Chekhov’s story “The Russian Master,” which has a character who repeatedly torments a young teacher by asking him why he has “never read Lessing.”)

Yet many of Munro’s readers had sadly concluded that she was not, somehow, the kind of writer that the Nobel committee seemed to like; I had decided that she would join the list of noble non-Nobelists, a distinguished category that includes Tolstoy, Nabokov, Borges, Hrabal, Sebald, Bernhard, Ingmar Bergman—and Chekhov, as it happens.

Many more Munro appreciations are here. In a 1994 interview, the writer shared the sources of her inspiration:

Reading was my life really until I was thirty. I was living in books. The writers of the American South were the first writers who really moved me because they showed me that you could write about small towns, rural people, and that kind of life I knew very well. But the thing about the Southern writers that interested me, without my being really aware of it, was that all the Southern writers whom I really loved were women. I didn’t really like Faulkner that much. I loved Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Ann Porter, Carson McCullers. There was a feeling that women could write about the freakish, the marginal.

For the uninitiated, C. Max Magee recommends “A Beginner’s Guide to Alice Munro.” The New Yorker‘s archives have many of her stories to explore. Previous Dish on Munro here. You can purchase a few of her collections here and here.

Reviewing the new book Disaster Artist – a behind-the-scenes account of bizarre cult hit The Room and its auteur, Tommy Wisaeu – Adam Rosen asks whether the film should be considered “outsider art”:

For most viewers, little in The Room bears even remote resemblance to real life. One of the film’s most cherished lines, judging by YouTube views, is when Mark exhorts a nosy friend to “leave your stupid comments in your pocket!” For Wiseau, however, this expression made some kind of strange sense. So much so, in fact, he “wasn’t going to let any of us move on until he had this ridiculous line of dialogue in the can,” [co-star Greg] Sestero writes. What else made sense? A scene with four men, each in tuxedos, tossing a football around while standing only a few feet apart. And, the idea that a stockbroker with a randy stay-home woman is the apex of American achievement. The Room may be a non-native’s laughable, even grotesque caricature of modern American life, but it’s an incredibly sincere one.

Given this context, it might be useful to think of Wiseau as something of an outsider artist. Outsider art—also known as visionary art, or art brut— “describes the work of untrained, self-taught people who make art,” says Charles Russell, author of the book Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught and Outsider Artists. Marginalized from society, or at least the art world, due to disability, isolation, or lack of artistic training, outsider artists “are basically following their own personal vision,” Russell says. The label has traditionally applied to painters and sculptors—Sarah Boxer gave an overview of the genre in a recent issue of The Atlantic—but it’s hard to see why it couldn’t also refer to Wiseau or any other thwarted, un-self-aware filmmaker.

The book reveals a lot about the chaotic film production but never cracks the enigma of Wiseau:

What we find out is that Tommy escaped a Soviet Bloc country, unnamed in the book, to Strasbourg, France, in the 1950s. He worked there for a while in a restaurant, eventually moved to Paris, and then on to the New Orleans area. He ended up in Chalmette, a town just east of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, where he worked at a grocery store for an undisclosed period of time. A Greyhound bus brought him to San Francisco, where he supposedly built a successful street vending business, Street Fashions, selling yo-yos and pleather jackets. There’s little information about how he funded this business, let alone a multimillion-dollar film. Sestero and Bissell insinuate that Wiseau may have been affiliated with local mobsters in San Francisco, but there’s little concrete information to support that.

Previous Dish on Wiseau and his bat-shit brilliance here and here.

The wind rearranging fallen leaves the things I should have said to my mother. #tanka #micropoetry

— Alexis Rotella (@tankaqueen) October 8, 2013

ON THE SEGWAY GOING TOP SPEED (12.5 MPH) RUNNING OVER A BUSINESSMAN ON A CITIBIKE.

— CrankyKaplan (@CrankyKaplan) September 13, 2013

Might some one else — so learned — be — And leave me — just my A — B — C — Himself — could have the Skies —

— Emily Dickinson (@EmilyEDickinson) September 28, 2013

If you dont want a carrot now, put it in a ziplock bag and bury it then you have a treat in 3 years I live alone

— Carrot Facts (@RealCarrotFacts) July 26, 2013

In Alena Smith’s view, “a great Twitter writer is one who, like a parkourist in an urban space, plays with and quite possibly subverts the limits or expectations imposed by authorities.”  She highlights some writers worth following:

There is the tragicomic clowning of @RealCarrotFacts, by Late Night With Jimmy Fallon writer John Wyatt Haskell. There is the broken poetry of the “Weird Twitter” crew, notably including non-Internet-based poet Patricia Lockwood. There is the brilliant social satire of the hydra-headed Kaplan accounts, which mostly skewer [Jonathan] Franzen’s own New York publishing world, and their bitchy, hilarious Hollywood counterpart, Jarrad Paul (@JarradPaul). There is the visually fascinating, concrete-poetry-esque glitch art of accounts like @Glitchr_, @Newmoticons, and @l_i_i_l. There are established literary novelists who have effectively used Twitter for political provocations, such as in Teju Cole’s recent series of wryly incongruous tweets about bombing the U.K. And there are the peculiar pleasures to be found when the work of old-world writers is wittily transplanted to the 21st century Twitterscape, as in the case of Samuel Pepys (@samuelpepys: “Went to bed without prayers, my house being every where foul above stairs”) or Emily Dickinson, whose tight-knit, unnerving wordings are remarkably Twitter-ready and have spawned any number of homage accounts.

Meanwhile, An Xiao considers the revival of traditional Japanese poetry on Twitter:

[T]raditional Japanese poetic forms like haiku (17 syllables) and tanka (31 syllables) are ideally suited for Twitter’s brevity. Additionally, these poems were intended as creative dialogues, making the social aspect of Twitter relevant as well. In can be easy to read Twitter’s rapid fire nature as contra the meditative quality of poetry, but that feature couldn’t be more relevant.