Thanks to Doug Strassler for reminding me that Invictus should have been on my list of the worst movies I saw this year. Here’s the entry I forgot to write…

—

Invictus

You remember how I was worried that this movie was going to be sanctimonious? And that it would mash complex questions of racial relationships in South Africa into tasteless, colorless pabulum? I was totally prescient, you guys.

The way Clint Eastwood directs (and the way his writers write), it’s like they’re smart guys, but they think we’re too stupid to hold up our end of a conversation. So they use sophisticated camera techniques and highly polished scripts to make the most simplistic points imaginable… like they’re doing us a damn favor by introducing our tiny minds to concepts like racial inequality or parental grief or lady boxerdom.

I will give Invictus this, however… it provides me with an image that encapsulates why I generally hate Eastwood’s movies. Now, I don’t have to explain my loathing any more. I can just describe this image and be done with it.

In the movie’s final moments, you see, when the South African rugby team wins the World Cup, thus uniting the nation’s races around a common sport and helping Nelson Mandela start the process of healing, we see a shot of Matt Damon holding his team’s trophy. Then we get a close-up of his white hand on the trophy. And then we see a black hand slide into the frame, gripping Damon’s hand and the trophy at the same time.

And then we get a wave of nausea. Or at least I do.

That pretty much sums up my response to Eastwood’s humorless, pompous inistence on “teaching me” what I’ve known since I was in utero. The man is a talented filmmaker, but other than with Changeling, he’s never applied his talent to anything that respects me the way the critical community clearly wants me to respect him.

Many thanks to my friend Kerri for directing me to this story about the 10 Most-Recalled Television ads of 2009, meaning the ads that viewers were most likely to remember within twenty-four hours of seeing them. The data comes from Nielsen,  but the tackiness comes from the people.

To paraphrase Kerri,  the descriptions of the ads tell us everything we need to know about society.

This is AdAge’s Top Most Recalled TV spots of 2009. I think the descriptions of the spots say just about everything one needs to know about American culture.

1
Budweiser
Clydesdale travels to find Daisy (:60). 259
2
Budweiser
Clydesdale fetches a large tree branch (:30). 252
3
Burger King
Burger Shots; women gather and ask to squeeze burgers (:15). 250
4
Doritos
Man throws snow globe into vending machine (:30). 247
5
Taco Bell
Man at ballgame has fake pregnant stomach concealing nachos (:15). 239
6
GoDaddy.com
Friends in dorm room watch Danica Patrick take shower (:30). 233
7
Quaker
People fly in sky with oatmeal jet packs (:15) . 229
8
Febreze
Mother tells son his room stinks and needs to be washed (:15). 228
9
Progressive
Flo shows customer Dave his own aisle (:30). 223
10
McDonald’s
Monopoly Million Dollar Dice Roll for Andrew M. (:30).

Previously: My Best Picture Candidates

—

It’s not just the Oscar nominations that get announced next week… it’s the Razzie nominations, too. On Monday, The Golden Raspberry Award Foundation will announce their nominees for the worst cinematic crimes of the year. As part of his excellent year-in-film coverage, Roommate Joe announced his least faves earlier this week. So before I get to my favorite performances of the year, which I’ll write about soon, I want to join the fun and dishonor my least favorite movies of 2009.

Keep in mind that I’m only discussing movies I’ve actually seen. Therefore, no All About Steve or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen or Bride Wars. But despite missing those gems, I still saw an awful lot of crap last year.

[Read more →]

By DOUG STRASSLER

I’m looking forward to this weekend. I plan to catch a couple of shows, and celebrate a friend’s birthday (what up, Desiree!). Oh, and I’m psyched about the Michael Jackson tribute on Sunday’s Grammy Awards.

One thing that’s not on my radar: catching Edge of Darkness, Mel Gibson’s first movie in about eight years.

[Read more →]

Is that fire in my veins? Lightning in my loins? Pop rocks and Pepsi mixing in my mouth?

No! It’s the impending announcement of the Oscar nominations, driving me mad with anticipation!

Before the bomb drops next Tuesday morning, I’d like to present my dream Oscar ballot, starting with Best Picture. Since there are ten nominees in the category this year, the following can double as my best-of list for 2009. Two birds. One stone.

Side note: There should be a comedy with the tagline “Two Birds. One Stoner.” Like, maybe its called Flying High, and it stars Megan Fox as Dusty, a twentysomething burnout who makes her living as a pet babysitter. One day, she’s feeding the two exotic cockatiels of a certain Mr. Baked (pronounced “Bah-KEYED”) when a gang of toughs try to break into his mansion. She hears the crooks (Vivica A. Fox and Josh Duhamel) talk about killing the birds, so in a flash, she grabs them and runs. But now the crooks are chasing her!!! Why do they care about these birds? Will Mr. Baked (Ben Kingsley) be angry when he gets home? And can Dusty ever get rid of these munchies? Find out this spring… only in the theaters!

Um… anyway. Here are the ten movies I would choose as Best Picture nominees. (If I’ve written about them on The Critical Condition, I’ll link to those essays.) Let me know what you think of my picks, and tell me yours!

[Read more →]

By KAREN GRECO

iCarly is the best show you’re not watching

Three teens on Nickelodeon kicked Jack Bauer’s ass on Monday, January 18, when the premiere of iCarly: iSaved Your Life hit the ratings jackpot, scoring 11.4 million viewers, coming in first in its 8 PM time slot, and besting Fox’s 24 by 5%.

So… why is this happening?

[Read more →]

Patty Griffin has long been one of my favorite singer-songwriters, but her last album, 2007′s Children Running Through, disappointed me. Smothered by overly lush arrangements and inaccessible song structures, it sounds like Griffin got in the studio and started thinking too much, like she started making dry, intellectual choices about how her music should evolve. This is a problem, since I listen to her music for its  no-bullshit assault on my heart.

This happens to a lot of singer-songwriters: They break through with raw, unadorned material—as Griffin did with 1996′s mind-boggling acoustic album Living With Ghosts—but as they evolve, they trade simplicity for sonic experiments and a twelve-minute song without a chorus.  Sometimes this works out okay (Fiona Apple, Ryan Adams). More often, however, it results in tiresome self-indulgence (Ani DiFranco, R.E.M.)

When I “lose” an artist this way, I always hope we’ll reconnect some day. It happened with Dar Williams, who bounced back from the soggy Beauty of the Rain with two of her best albums, and with her new album Downtown Church, it has happened with Patty Griffin. (You can listen to samples here.)

A collection of gospel and religious songs (both originals and covers), the album really was recorded in a church in downtown Nashville. It features guest vocals from gospel group The Fairfield Four, as well as alt-folk perennials like Emmylou Harris, Shawn Colvin, and Buddy and Julie Miller.

Mostly importantly, the album features the Patty Griffin I was missing: Immediate, emotional, unadorned. It’s like she tried on achoir robe, decided she looked amazing, and then just let go. No thinking, just feeling, singing, and hollering.

Now, obviously there’s craft on this album. Griffin and company didn’t just sit down and improvise on some magical afternoon. But you don’t sense their hard work.

You do sense Griffin’s complex relationship to religion. For every song about the power of faith, there’s a track about death, sadness, and anger. The balance makes the album feel honest, because let’s face it… religion brings up contradictory responses in almost everyone.

My favorite tracks are “If I Had My Way,” a lively traditional song that lets Griffin shout about tearing a house down, and “Little Fire,” a mid-tempo original with excellent lyrics and Emmylou Harris.

And then there’s “Waiting for My Child,” a cover of a Sullivan Pugh song about a woman trying to cope with her missing son. Is he dead? Or just gone? Hard to say… but the pain is clear. Griffin brings vivid ache to lines like, “Oh, my child may be somewhere on his sick bed with no one to rub his aching head. Oh, my child may be somewhere in some lonely jail with no one there to go his bail.”

This song alone would have brought me fully into Griffin’s church, but it’s just one of the testaments to her new album’s power.

Welcome to Wife Watch!, the only blog post that ranks the most powerful wives on this week’s episode of Big Love.

Before we examine “Strange Bedfellows,” I want to praise National Geographic magazine’s current cover story on polygamy in America. Written by Scott Anderson and photographed by Stephanie Sinclair, it chronicles life on an FLDS compound with an admirable sense of balance. You understand why some people feel drawn to FLDS—why some people, in fact, will never give it up—and you understand why some people feel it has ruined them.

That balance dovetails with one of Big Love‘s major themes—trying to see the complexity of a different world.

[Read more →]

Thanks for this discussion on yesterday’s post, in which I ask whether there’s such a thing as a “true story.”

To tell you the truth (ha!), I knew I was going too far with the whole “no objective truth” argument, but I felt so overwhelmed by my hundred thoughts on this topic that the only way I could bring myself to start addressing them was to just push myself to the extreme.

This may sound weird, but in thinking about that post and your responses, I’ve realized that what I really want to write about is our need to believe in the veracity of fiction that is based on true events.

More to the point, I’ve been thinking for weeks about some of the responses to what I wrote about The Blind Side. I’ve been arguing with the claim of some commenters that it’s impossible to fault the movie’s story without also faulting the real lives of the people involved, as though the story were just a perfect mirror of the world. Reading Mendelsohn’s piece in The New Yorker got me back on that train of thought.

Honestly, I knew I was thinking about  The Blind Side when I posted yesterday, but sometimes I have trouble allowing myself just to talk about what I want to talk about. Sometimes, I feel like I have to dress up a subject in grandiose claims because I secretly worry that whatever I want to discuss isn’t “important enough” on its own merits. It’s like this one time in grad school, when I wanted to write a paper about Patty Griffin’s songs, but I spent the first three pages trying to make some big, bullshitty argument about how sound affects our emotions before language does. As with yesterday’s throat-clearing exercise, all that nonsense got me off track from the smaller, more interesting thing I wanted to tackle. In both cases, I ended up making arguments I didn’t really believe in because I wasn’t giving myself permission to talk about what was really on my mind.

Anyway… back to this whole “based on a true story” thing. A few years ago, I reviewed a play that was based on interviews that a playwright did with a group of senior citizens. I specifically criticized the playwright for shaping these interviews into the most treacly, “I love grandpa” stories you can imagine. She reduced very complex lives to a series of saccharine anecdotes, and it annoyed me.

Well, after my review ran in Variety, the playwright e-mailed me to say that I was totally off base… that I couldn’t blame her for the stories in the play because she had merely transcribed them. She wasn’t an author, just a vessel, so by disliking her play, I was disliking the people she wrote about.

That playwright was making the same argument as the many people (here and on The Huffington Post) who told me that by questioning the approach of The Blind Side, I was saying the real-life Tuohy family was paternalistic. Because again, this movie was based on a story that really happened, so I couldn’t possibly fault a screenwriter just for telling it like it was.

I should note, of course, that other people made some well-reasoned claims against my argument that the movie is paternalistic and pro-white conservative Christian (not that there’s anything wrong with that last one). And hey, maybe they were right. I can accept that after our discussion, I might have a different reading of the movie if I saw it again. What I cannot accept, however, is the idea that there is no way to read the movie unless I apply the same reading to the people that inspired it.

What I detect in that argument is a need to deny the authorial hand… a need to find the “truth” in what’s being presented on screen by insisting that the fictional narrative is somehow just like the reality it’s based on. And I don’t understand how anyone could make that argument. All stories are shaped. Even a story I tell my friends is going to have select details omitted and others emphasized for effect, so once an actual event has reached an Off Broadway stage or a movie screen, then it’s damn well going to have been shaped by a writer’s biases, desires, and goals.

So why deny that? Why pretend that the authorial impact doesn’t exist? What is there to gain from insisting that the story on the screen or on stage is telling us the absolute truth? Why argue that by criticizing the artistic rendering of a story, we are also criticizing real life?

To me, this response smacks of the same need that drives us to be so angry when a supposedly-true memoir turns out to be a fake. In both cases, some of us need to believe in stories… to let them comfort us by shaping and grounding (and so making sense of) the world. We so crave the order that a good story brings that we will fight anyone who says the story isn’t true. We will deny that anything other than Life could have written a story, even if it’s being told in the same building as Transformers 2.

Do you know what I mean here? Now that I’ve cleared out the cobwebs of yesterday’s post, I realize this is what I really want to talk about.

I’m pondering a big, messy subject today, and I’d love to discuss it with you. Let’s dig around in this topic and see what comes up!

—

In last week’s New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn writes a fascinating piece about the role that memoirs play in our cultural imagination. He distills the history of the form, from St. Augustine through James Frey, then investigates what makes contemporary reactions to the memoir unique. Mostly, he senses something new in the anger we feel when memoirs that are discovered to be fake, exaggerated, or otherwise less-than-perfectly true. We’re more sensitive to this literary deception, he says, because

[t]he greatest outpouring of personal narratives in the history of the planet has occurred on the Internet; as soon as there was a cheap and convenient means to do so, people enthusiastically paid to disseminate their autobiographies, commentaries, opinions, and reviews, happily assuming the role of both author and publisher.

So if we’re feeling assaulted or overwhelmed by a proliferation of personal narratives, it’s because we are; but the greatest profusion of these life stories isn’t to be found in bookstores. If anything, it’s hard not to think that a lot of the outrage directed at writers and publishers lately represents a displacement of a large and genuinely new anxiety, about our ability to filter or control the plethora of unreliable narratives coming at us from all directions. In the street or in the blogosphere, there are no editors, no proofreaders, and no fact-checkers—the people at whom we can at least point an accusing finger when the old-fashioned kind of memoir betrays us.

In other words, Mendelsohn suggests we’re counting on memoirs more than ever to be vestibules of truth. They’re supposed to be reliable stories that tell us actual things that we can apply to our everyday lives. They are not supposed to be like fictional narratives, which may tell us a larger, symbolic truth about the world, but never tell us the actual truth. No, memoirs are supposed to be concrete, solid, believable. If we are moved by a memoir’s story, it’s supposed to be because it really happened.

But are we asking too much of a memoir by demanding the actual truth? Mendelsohn, who has published a memoir himself, suggests we are. He closes his piece by recounting a time that he and his brother honestly believed they were both recalling a childhood event exactly as it happened… even though their memories conflicted with each other. Which story is true? Is there any way to know?

There are genres that address these problems. Truman Capote called In Cold Blood a “nonfiction novel,” and the word “truish” has been applied to writers like Dave Eggers and Augusten Burroughs.

And to me, that seems appropriate. No matter how much we want it to be, no story, no story, can be rock-solid “true,” in the sense that it can relate events in the only possible way those events can be related. There’s always another way to look at things. There’s always another perspective.

By freeing ourselves from the belief that what we’re reading “happened just this way,” we free ourselves to see that every story is telling us “a truth” instead of “the truth.” We free ourselves to realize that objective truth may be impossible to find but that subjective truth is just as valuable.

Granted, I understand (and often feel) the frustration that Mendelsohn describes… the frustration of being assaulted by narratives and spins and perspectives from a million different angles. News outlets, politicians, memoirists… so many of them disagree, yet so many of them purport to be telling the truth. Sometimes, I want us all to agree on what’s true and just leave it at that.If we all just decide that Obama’s health care plan means this and marriage should happen like this, then we can all simmer down.

But then again… I don’t want that. Ultimately, I’m happier when I remember that the “truth as I see it” is not necessarily “the truth.” That doesn’t make my personal sense of the truth any less valid or any less important in guiding my life choices, but it spares me the unbearable pressure of trying to make everything in the world conform to my concepts. I can fight for what I believe in, yes, but I can remember that no one is required to agree with me.

What do you think about all this? It’s a big subject, I know, but it’s on my mind.