Sneaky petes

11 12 2009

I love caper flicks.

It’s where the little guy gets over, sneakiness wins over force, and wits—sometimes matched, sometimes overmatched—trump all.

There’s a definitional issue, here (of course): Do caper flicks have to be light? How much heaviness can creep in? Is there such a thing as a heavy caper flick?

I tend toward the lightness (or fleetness) aspect of capers, with just enough heaviness to anchor the thrill of the exploits.

Have you watched Hopscotch? It’s an old film (available thru Netflix streaming), about a CIA man about to be shackled to a desk who decides instead to get out; the trouble begins when he’s prompted (by his KGB counterpart, natch) to write his memoirs—about his spy work. It stars Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson (both delicious), with the perfect Ned Beatty in the role of the Nixonian spy chief, and beautiful and young Sam Waterston as Matthau’s protege and would-be captor.

Complete fluff. Oh, that it’s about the dirty deeds of the CIA and the desire of both the CIA and the KGB to stop him from revealing those deeds serves mainly to underline the glee with which Matthau consistently baits the poobahs, and watches as they respond exactly as predicted. There’s a bit of a bump at the end, but it ends as all caper flicks must, with a win.

This, by the way, was a problem with Duplicity, with Clive Owen & Julia Roberts. I should have enjoyed it more than I did, since it’s basically a double-/triple-/quadruple-cross about consumer-products business secrets. An opening sequence with Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson trying to beat each other up as their horrified associates look on sets the appropriately absurdist tone.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t maintain that tone, and darkens inappropriately. It’s about consumer products, for chrisssakes! And the ending does not satisfy.

Ocean’s 11 satisfies. A fine ensemble piece, laced with a bit of melancholy (which you know will lift by the end), and with a ludicrous premise with equally ludicrous stakes. The best scene? When Matt Damon racially insults the late, great Bernie Mac in a performance which just possible echoes one of the best scenes in SNL history: when Chevy Chase (I think) psychologically interviews Richard Pryor, using increasingly racially-charged word-association.

No, no one can compete with Richard Pryor, but still: even an echo is great.

Ocean’s 12 was okay (my favorite scene in that? When Matt Damon’s mom, the fabulous Cherry Jones, springs the crew from the police). Haven’t seen Ocean’s 13.

The Thomas Crown Affair with Pierce Brosnan, Denis Leary, and, crap, whatshername, was fine—the scene near the end, with all the men in bowler caps, was terrific—but I’m not a huge fan of the (younger) Brosnan. And I haven’t seen the original, with Steve McQueen, so I don’t know how it compares.

The movie which really cemented my love for capers, however, was Sneakers (great score by Brandon Marsalis, by the way). It features Robert Redford, Mary McConnell, Sidney Poitier, David Straithairn, River Phoenix, with Ben Kingsley and James Earl Jones appearing near the end; the set up is  that of a second-rate security firm, headed by Redford, hired to retrieve a global decryption device. This bit of hardware, in other words, would allow one to penetrate every electronics system in the world—no secrets.

It’s a bit darker than some other caper films—at least one guy is murdered—but the ensemble is a delight, with the frictions and affections between them applying much of the fizz. Great scene? Straithairn’s character, who is blind, drives a truck off-road and down a hill to save the day. He is appropriately terrified and exhilarated.

Would Inside Man count as a caper flick? I think not, as the crime-film aspects overshadows all, but the caperesque aspects of the film are precisely what make it so delightful.

The various Bourne movies are definitely not capers: too dark, too violent, too little humor. Still, the catch-me-if-you-can aspect. . .

. . .Catch Me If You Can. Forgot about that one, probably because I haven’t seen it. A caper, right?

See, I’m stuck because while I love this genre, I can’t think of that many films which fit. The Sting—of course. There has to be more.

There has to be ‘something more’. . . !


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Categories : Review

Never enough

9 12 2009

Be beautiful.

Be smart (but not too. . .).

Be supportive.

Be thin.

Be a wife. Be a girlfriend. Be a mother.

Be everything.

But not enough. It won’t be enough, not for him.

Let it be stipulated that not every man cheats. Let it be stipulated that women cheat. Let it be stipulated that monogamy is not for everyone.

Let it be further stipulated that athletes and politicians and corporate moguls and celebrities are not like the rest of us.

Nonetheless.

I look at these everything-women and their caddish men and think Women are fucked.

Told constantly by magazine writers and self-help authors and media representations and advertisements and sexperts that if women would only lose the weight and change the hair and brighten the smile and maybe engage in a little bo-nip-tuck-tox (and, of course, shave/wax/defoliate one’s nether and whatever other  regions) you too could earn yourself The Man of Your Dreams™, we are confronted with the scenario in which said Man simply decides that one is nowhere near enough.

I know: media representations are bullshit, and my rational feminist brain tells me that relationships are complex and compatibility runs far deeper than the skin.

Nonetheless.

This plain and single woman cannot rid herself of the enduring thought that if only she’d lose five pounds and/or get in better shape and get her teeth and eyes fixed then maybe, just maybe, she could be worth dating.

Irrational, yes. Pathetic, yes. A handy way to avoid addressing the real reasons I don’t date—yes, absolutely, yes.

Nonetheless.

The thought remains.

As does the apparent evidence that whatever fixes one enacts won’t ever be enough.

Fucked, all around.


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Categories : Rant

Nothing comes from nothing

6 12 2009

‘No! You cannot argue with me! The problem is entirely theological.’

‘Well, philosophical, at least. Existential in any case.’

‘Theological. The deepest question of human beings! We are at the point of crisis. We are!’

‘It’s always there. Always. What’s new?’

‘We cannot continue to live like this. No! We cannot!’

Jtte, my orthodox-Marxist-and-orthodox-Catholic colleague, and friend, is at the frayed ends of her orthodoxy.

She is, in other words, less orthodox than she insists.

I don’t know what prompted this crisis, for her, or, to put it less personally, what prompted this recognition of crisis in the world. We keep trying to make lunch or dinner dates, but our schedules block us from anything more than a quick argument between classes.

And it would help to know, because I don’t know what to make of what appears—appears—to be a profound alienation and an acute need to clamber beneath that alienation, to something real.

I don’t want to push this interpretation too hard, not least because I really don’t know what the hell is going on with her. (And, as a conversation with another friend last week reminded me, ’tis best not to insert meaning into the unsaid.)

I am also admittedly puzzled by her insistence upon crisis. What, now, is different? There is nothing new in capitalism, nothing new in technology, no paradigm-shifting breakthroughs in science, no visitations from outer space nor even, to follow up a recent discussion, the barest hint of asteroids or global nuclear exchange or some new pandemic.

Yeah, things are falling apart, but things are always falling apart.

And yes, we are in the midst of an anthropic fucking-over of our climate, but one to which our scavenger species will adapt. Life may be worse in a hundred years, but it will continue.

So why the crisis?

Jtte, at least, is optimistic: She thinks we will become more human, more of whom we’re supposed to be, that life will get better (whatever that means).

Do we need a crisis for that? ‘Existential crisis’ is one of those tropes around which to build a novel or film or some form of art. It’s what happens when we get everything we want or nothing we want or everything we thought we wanted, or when we lose everything, or when what matters becomes jumbled with what does not—it’s what happens when we live, and think or feel our lives.

Crap. None of this is what I wanted to say. It’s not right, it doesn’t fit. None of these words. . . huh. Nothing.

My friend Jtte is sounding an alarm and I don’t know why.


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Categories : Musing

Friday poem IV

4 12 2009

What lyric this week?

A poem for war?

Or perhaps a poem for my aching head, dunned twice with migraine.

Or for the half-awakening in which Chelsea dipped into that triangle between arm and body and air and purred me back to sleep, even as I cried, again, at her absence.

Sifting through the cut-outs, I could find nothing. And then I came across this poem by Kelly Cherry, who taught a poetry seminar I took at UW-Madison.

Cherry was a bit ornery, a bit odd, and a hell of a teacher. She had definite ideas about poetry—no misspellings and odd capitalizations, and you goddamned better well know the difference between lie and lay—but she didn’t seek to stamp herself into all of our styles.

Her approach was, instead, Make your work, better.

I have kept that with me for over twenty years, and try, and more often fail, to live up to that in my own teaching.

This poem was originally published in the Atlantic in two columns. I’ve inserted a stanza break between the two columns, but it’s possible that this was meant to be  a one stanza poem.

Regardless, it’s lovely: a grace note to us all.

Grace

You know of course that you haven’t earned it.
For if you had, it would not be what it is:
Beauty of the candle after you’ve burned it,
The dark bird rising like smoke, always from ashes,
Remembrance of heat and light, describing itself
Invisibly upon the air of the mind,
That takes the life lived in a fury of self-
Love and remakes it into something that shined

So brightly that it might have been a star;
Instead of a candle you were burning at both ends.
And now the night grows black, wherever you are,
Except for the golden shimmer than descends
To the earth through miles of lonely outer space
And lights up your misspent live, with saving grace.


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I am an idiot

3 12 2009

Not the first time I’ve said this, nor will it be the last, but, yes, today, I am an idiot.

I finally got around to hooking up the external monitor. Power cord, HDMI, connect, monitor on, computer on: BINGO!

Then these various display options flicked onscreen. Hmm. What to do with these?

Dunno. Nothing—for now.

Then another set of options, regarding the two screens. The external monitor mirrored all that was happening on the laptop. But wait, was there something about creating options for what appears on the different screen? Do I want to see what that’s about?

Sure, why not?

Wrong answer. The correct answer should have been: No. No, I do not.

Curiosity killed the external monitor.

It went black, and nothing I did could fix this. Click here and there and here and there. Nothing.

System restore.

Fail.

System restore again.

Fail again.

System restore again.

No difference.

Windows is no help. The Acer manual is no help. Check online. These folks want payment, these folks haven’t a clue.

Ah, found a site.

Try this, and then this.

Okay.

Works! It works!

Kinda.

A few more buttons. . . et voila! It’s back to where it was in the beginning.

Excellent. Now, let me just shift my laptop. . .

Oh, fuck. Black screen.

I spent 3 hours fucking with this thing, and now it appears that the problem is with the HDMI cable.

I am an idiot.

*Update*

Okay, got the screen back. Looks like a combo of tetchy cable and resetting the thingamajig in the whatchamacallit.

I am now only touching my glass of wine and the mouse.

I know: I’m still an idiot.


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Categories : Rant

There must be some way out of this

2 12 2009

And yes, I listened to the speech.

Can’t say I was impressed, but I didn’t think I would be.

Obama—all of us—have inherited a shitstorm in Afghanistan, and there’s no good damned way out of it.

Stay, and people die. Leave, and people die.

It didn’t have to be this way, but now, it is.

Is the President’s decision to pour it on the worst, or simply the least-worse, option?

I don’t know. I think nothing good will come of this, but, again, good evaporated some years back. Maybe this is the best that can be done to fend off the bad.

Sorry, this analysis lacks actual analysis. Sorry, I have only dread and bitterness.

At least he set a deadline.


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Categories : Politics

We play that we’re actors on a movie screen

2 12 2009

I have to get rid of my computer.

I’m not going to do that.

The internet, then. Save me some money.

Not going to happen.

No, I will keep my computer and my broadband and I will continue to waste time watching movies and bad t.v. shows and then watching them all again.

Yes, I finally got Netflix, and in the week and a-half I’ve had it I’ve watched 2 DVDs and a lot of streaming movies and t.v. shows.

A lot.

Now, I did learn one thing: I am over Law & Order. I watched an episode of L&O:SVU from their tenth season and just thought Blegggh—really?

And even tho’ I can watch CSI on CBS, my interest lags there, as well. Yes, there are still tw0-ish other shows I still tune in, but, mostly, I’m done with the whole t.v. thing.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that there are all these movies which I can watch at the click of the mouse.

This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, save for my inability to close out the Netflix window after finishing a movie. Nope, time for another.

Pitiful. There’s reading and writing and Oh! Going outside!

Not happening.

This will fade, I know. I’ll get sick of myself doing nothing but sitting in front of my (um, new [it was on sale!], larger, external) monitor watching explosions and tears and drinking and running and people doing all the things I could be doing were not I sitting in front of my new, larger, external monitor.

But in the meantime, what’s that crappy movie I won’t admit to liking even as a guilty pleasure which I’ve seen 18 kajillion times. . . ?

Lord. Pitiful.


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Categories : Musing

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