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).