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In my childhood, going to movies was all about the stories. I am sure that I was affected by the pictures and sound, but the things that I remembered were what happened to the characters. This led to a weird period where I would substitute reading cheap novelizations for going to films, because I got the same story either way. When I got to know more actors, I became more interested in the craft of acting and realized that a film’s performances could have as much to do with whether I enjoy it as the story. As I became more of a film geek, I got more interested in how the film was directed, shot and edited and how that affected how I felt about it. The writing grew less important to me.

But in 2006, it seems like almost every movie I saw sabotaged itself with crappy writing. The highly rated one’s were often the worst. I don’t know if I am getting pickier, or if the writing is getting worse.

The Queen (91 on Metacritic)
This is a great idea for a film, and it was artfully acted and edited. It is too bad that the script skimps on any insight on the characters or, their history or their future in favor of lengthy discussions of English flag-flying protocol and endless CNN clips. The great performances make it worth watching, but they don’t make it enjoyable.

The Departed (85 on Metacritic)
This one did better than most. The film was well shot and acted, and the script had moments of brilliance. I just wish it all would have been as good as the best parts. Most of the scenes with Vera Farmiga were stilted and cliched.

Casino Royale (80 on Metacritic)
The theory was to recreate the James Bond franchise with a more modern and sensitive hero, and to simultaneously return the series to its Ian Fleming roots by basing it closely on one of his books. The star was great and the directing was thrilling. But most of the scenes were predictable build-ups to predictable conclusions (I don’t have much doubt that Bond is going to win at poker and not leave the film married). And the script’s inability to decide whether this Bond was naive or suave made it difficult for the audience to know how to invest in the character. Because the script had to do so much work to accomplish these things, it was filled with needless and unbelievable interchanges between Bond and various women.

Children of Men (84 on Metacritic)
I saw this one last night, and it kicked off this train of thought. I am an Alfonso Cuarón fan, and he made this movie quite a spectacle to watch. The world was completely immersive, and many of the scenes were staggeringly beautiful or disturbing. But you lose a lot by having paint-by-numbers characters like ‘reluctant hero’, ’somewhat helpless heroine’, ‘quirky old guy’, ‘arrogant rich guy’ and ‘red shirt’. And it doesn’t help to spend the whole time putting characters I am not that interested in into predictable jeopardy, while saying nothing insightful about who they are and the time they live in. And to top it off, it took five writers to complete this thing (maybe there were even more uncredited ones).

I don’t regret seeing any of these, but they all could have been much more memorable with believable and surprising stories and dialog. I hope to see Volver, Old Joy and Pan’s Labyrinth soon; hopefully one of them will be better. Or else I’ll have to start doing my own screenwriting, and learn how hard it really is.

Protest to the building of the new athletic facility

I was feeling slightly nostalgic today, so I typed the name of my college into Flickr. On the top page was the following photo of a woman protesting the homophobic design of the new gym. Now, in many places these sorts of protests would come from bigoted football players harassing their peers or hateful graffiti. But I have never known Macalester to suffer from those. This protest was about a gym design that enforces separate-gender bathrooms:

Buck called the planned athletic facility “a homophobic, heteronormative space” due to the absence of gender-blind bathrooms in the building plans.

Along with confusion surrounding the college’s new Institute for Global Citizenship, Buck said that the athletic facility construction “shows Macalester is moving in a racist, heteronormative direction.”

http://www.themacweekly.com/articles/20061006/news/10735

The funny thing is that of all the design choices to criticize a building for, this is one of the easiest to remedy after it has been built. All you need to do is put a ‘Unisex’ sign outside the bathroom. We de-gendered the bathrooms on our own in my dorm.

At least the school hasn’t changed too much.

I OD’ed on James Ellroy books a couple of years ago, and found myself spending way too much time trying to find ways to use outdated slang. I do still have a couple in reserve to read (I think I am going to like ‘White Jazz’). A recent essay by Ellroy in the LA Times is a nice reminder of why the world needs more of his prose. My favorite paragraph:

I’d see little kids with their pets and start weeping. I’d see news clips of Lou Gehrig and Ronald Reagan and lose it. I could not cut myself off from the world. All my compartments were sieves.

There have been many great libraries in my life. As a child the University City Library was one of my favorite destinations in Saint Louis. As an adolescent nothing made me feel more officious than having an excuse to do research at Washington University’s Olin Library. When I was a jaded college student I made cracks about how our college library was a better place to hang out than do research, but it actually served both goals well and I always visit it when I am on campus. As an adult I haven’t spent much time in libraries, which is a result of my not needing to do research, owning more books, doing less reading and getting more information online.

In Seattle we have a public library that is famous both for doing a great job at serving people’s needs and being headquartered in an architecturally stimulating spaceship-like building (go through the whole slideshow if you have the time). I have passed the building hundreds of times, and always admired it and meant to go in. Today I finally made it inside and got a library card. And it is a fantastic library in ever sense. You can borrow everything from books on continental philosophy to copies of Fight Club. The building design is inventive but also very usable. There is a lot of space for people to read and scores of computers. The stacks are an endless spiral of books that you can walk through forever. I want to go back one day when I have more time to wander.

But I don’t need to go back any time soon. The reason that I was in a sudden rush to get my card is that I discover that the library does digital lending of books, music and are about to start providing movies. (Maybe everyone else knew that libraries did this, I didn’t.) In particular, you can access the Safari technical bookshelf, which includes scores of O’Reilly books which make great reference material but tend to be hard to search and become obsolete if you own the print editions (the online version also had books which haven’t been released yet).

The notion that a library can loan materials and not be limited by the lender’s physical proximity to them is interesting, and makes on wonder whether libraries need buildings and books at all. This library could be more like a credit union, acting as a collective to obtain goods and share them effectively among a group of members with some common interest, but not being restricted to a town or neighborhood. Then again, I believe that credit unions stay in business much more due to regulation than due their ability to do a better job at serving customers’ needs. Maybe without a physical community we won’t need libraries at all, and it will be more efficient just to rent books from their publishers, and we can convert the buildings into more general public spaces.

That is one of the most depressing thoughts I have ever had about a world of perfect access to information. Hopefully by the time that happens we’ll have a good virtual reality simulation of wandering through the stacks and smelling old books.

This is slightly annoying because I just picked up the original album last year. But it is mostly great, because it is an amazingly distinctive and prophetic recording that more people should hear. I expect that recording quality will be better, but I don’t prefer the new cover art: