Essay: "Global Warming, Neville Chamberlain, and the Lloyd Christmas Effect"

I don't like it when amateurs talk about politics because they rarely have anything remotely interesting to say.  I also don't like it when people make analogies involving Hilter or the Nazis, because it's inflammatory and almost always innaccurate.  Having said that: brace yourself.  After having read this amusing article on The Onion, I now intend to do both.

Review: "Read My Lips"

I’ve been, for a long time, a fan of the French actor Vincent Cassel.  I first saw him in the shocking French film Irréversible and have admired most of his subsequent performances.  I often thought he deserved better roles in Hollywood (he was the moronic son of the chief gangster in Eastern Promises, for instance) and with his role in the much-hyped Black Swan perhaps that’s going to happen.


Recently, Cassel starred in two highly-acclaimed movies about the notorious criminal Jacques Mesrine.  I downloaded them both but they didn’t do much for me - they seemed to just depict Mesrine’s famous exploits rather than say anything about them.  But in a review of those films I read a description of another film (Sur mes lèvres (English title: Read My Lips)) which I later saw and I think has become my favourite love story of all time.

Essay: "The Game Ones"

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very moving essay about the parallels between dogfighting and professional football in which he summarizes the medical research which shows that the rate of concussions in football is astonishingly high and provides a description of the horrors of dogfighting (the noted pastime of professional football player Michael Vick).

Gladwell then describes the quality of “gameness”: a dog’s desire to please the owner at the expense of itself. The owners of fighting dogs, apparently:

understand this desire to please on the part of the dog and capitalize on it. At any organized pit fight in which two dogs are really going at each other wholeheartedly, one can observe the owner of each dog changing his position at pit-side in order to be in sight of his dog at all times. The owner knows that seeing his master rooting him on will make a dog work all the harder to please its master.

Review: "Deus Ex"

Recently, Roger Ebert made waves when he argued on his website that not only were video games not art, they never could be art.  This provoked a lot of rage in the video game community, although Ebert himself graciously lied that he received "no more than a dozen ... cretinous comments from gamers."  As someone who admires Ebert's reviews and essays, I found his attitude disappointing and bizarre.  Fortunately, Ebert gracefully gave up his position, writing:

I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place. I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn't seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself.

Thanks Roger.  But, seriously - of course video games are art.  It is just common sense that if all that weird crap you find in galleries these days is "art" than the bar for what it takes to make "art", at least conceptually, is pretty darn low.  Basically, if it's art when Marcel Duchamp puts a snow shovel in a gallery then video games can be art.  As the boys at Penny Arcade asked, how can a hundred artists create art for a year but the result not be art?  When I doodle on the blackboard at Smoke's drunk at 3 a.m. in the morning, that's art.  It just might not be very good.

And that, to me, is the more interesting question.  Are video games good art?  Sure, you and I like to play Super Mario Galaxy.  But I mean - is it good art?

Essay: "Retconning"

Are you a nerd? Here is a very simple test: when Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman's character in the new Star Wars movie) died (rather unconvincingly) in childbirth, were you angry because in Return of the Jedi Princess Leia had clearly stated that she remembered meeting her mother?

Essay: "Racism"

It often seems to me that it is not particularly useful to call people racist. I think it is best to call statements, decisions or actions racist, and separate that judgment from making an overall assessment of a person as “racist” or “not racist.”

Review: "Suttree"

It took Cormac McCarthy a while to find his audience. He won the National Book Award in 1992 for All the Pretty Horses, which was adapted into a film in 2000 starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz. But after I was first introduced to his writing, in early 2001, it was years before any of my acquaintances had heard of him. It was not until the release of the film version of No Country For Old Men and Oprah’s endorsement of The Road that the secret seemed to get out.

Essay: "Film Noir"

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Red Riding, a trilogy of British made-for-TV movies that I feel are an excellent example of film noir. This week I thought I'd write a bit about film noir more broadly, because two of my favorite movies of the past few years (I'll Sleep When I'm Dead and Brick) are examples of the genre and I have strong opinions on the subject (although I should note that you can read definitions of film noir online written by people who are much more qualified to speak about the subject than me, and so what follows is my own personal view).

Essay: "The Western and the Apocalypse"

As a kid and a teenager I wasn't much into Westerns, and neither (it seems) were you, since Unforgiven is probably the only really significant Western film of the 80s and 90s.  But it seems to me that the Western is experiencing a resurgence in popularity, and I have a theory regarding at least one reason why this might be.

Essay: "Comic Books"

I always liked superhero comics as a kid, but I didn't regularly collect them.  They were too expensive, and every time I bought an issue it seemed to take place in the middle of a story I didn't understand.  But when I was in law school I saw an ign.com article on the 25 greatest Batman graphic novels.  They sounded pretty awesome and I wanted to check them out.  I looked on the Toronto Public Library website and found some in the Merril Collection, a pretty neat branch of the library at College and Spadina dedicated to science fiction and graphic novels.  I used to go there on Saturday afternoons to read, since you couldn't take the books out.

Essay: "The Virtues of Misanthropy"

In my younger days I was really into Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine. As we all know that kind of music is troublesome to adults because it is so loud, angry and despairing (not to mention profane and nihilistic) and it is sometimes blamed, in the media at least, for leading kids astray, into crime or suicide. I've always had a problem with that kind of thinking, and I used to argue (around the time of the Columbine killings) that Britney Spears probably caused more depression than Marilyn Manson, because when kids look at Britney, with her (then) perfect hair and body and peppy attitude, they feel like outsiders and losers. But when they look at Marilyn Manson, with his bizarre appearance and clothing and (allegedly) missing ribs, they think they're not such freaks after all.

Review: "Red Riding Trilogy"

I think we've all been spoiled a little, as far as television goes, by "The Wire."  It did far too many things well to list here (particularly since this is supposed to be a review for something else) but I think it's worth mentioning a couple, both of which have to do with realism.

The first was its lack of exposition.  I liked how in "The Wire" you're dropped right in the middle of the story and just observe, like a fly on the wall, how things work in gangs and in the police and in other locations without feeling like someone was explaining it to you.

The second was its plausibility.  Although, as a writer and a reader, I love complicated plots, philosophical dialogue, and depictions of ultimate evil, I am forced to admit that these things rarely occur in nature.  "The Wire", especially in its earlier seasons, avoided the temptation to follow traditional dramatic conventions.  The show, I think, started to get a little bit away from this in its later seasons (the plot to season five, for instance, was still plausible by the standards of "regular TV" but not very plausible at all by the standards of real life) but it remains one of the great strengths of the series as a whole.

Which brings us to the "Red Riding" trilogy, perhaps the British answer to "The Wire."  The trilogy is made up of three movie-length (90 minute) television episodes that were directed by three different (reasonably)well-known directors, filmed in three different film formats and broadcast in England on Channel 4 within two weeks of one another.

Essay: "The New Needs Friends"

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations, the new needs friends."

 

Anton Ego - from Ratatouille

It seems to me that artistic criticism has two purposes.  The first is essentially didactic; to identify the artist's mistakes to help him or her improve.  The second is evaluative; to determine whether the art is "good" or "bad" and how it deserves to be ranked in comparison to other works.  The value of didactic criticism is obvious but the worth of evaluative criticism is less apparent.  Why do we need to classify art as good or bad apart from whether it's popular? 

Essay: "No Real Limits of Any Kind"

For those of you who haven't heard of it, the computer program "Steam" is like a combination between an online video game store and a social networking site. So you buy your games through the program and then when you play them online, you can add people you play with to your friends list and then chat with them and set up games later. A number of extremely unusual people have "friended" me through Steam after a successful round of Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead, but surely the most unusual is a young man who I know as "Turtle."

Essay: "Ian McEwan"

I had high expectations when I read Atonement a couple of years ago.  The movie was receiving rave reviews and the novel had been shortlisted for the Booker and was being named to various "Best Novels in the History of the Universe" lists by prominent magazines.  McEwan had already won a Booker and I felt a kind of confident anticipation when I started to read it.  I felt that not only would I enjoy Atonement, but that I would probably tear through the rest of McEwan's books as well.  I felt as if I was in for a treat.

Essay: "Things That Shouldn't Work But Do"

My first experience with Wikipedia was when I was doing research for a novel about seven or eight years ago. I was looking for information on the Cleveland Street scandal, a late Nineteenth Century brou-ha-ha where the head of the Prince of Wales' stables had fled England in order to avoid allegations he was a regular patron of a homsexual brothel. Interesting stuff, I thought, only I wasn't good at research and I couldn't find anything in the library beyond vague references that assumed I knew the whole story. Frustrated, I just tried googling it one day and lo and behold, an article on the subject popped up, with the complete story and footnotes and everything, provided by a website I'd never heard of before: Wikipedia.

Essay: "That One May Smile and Smile"

When Christopher Waltz won the Oscar for best supporting actor, it marked the second year in a row the award went to a "smiling villain" (after Heath Ledger's turn as the Joker in The Dark Knight).