Blanche, Anthony

These are not the redirects you're looking for

What you were searchin' this month, and what we think it might mean:

• chadtaylormarginalia.blogspot.com*
• alien movie spacesuit
• ingrid pitt jason king
• prometheus alien et
• model with uplit face **
• rayograph
• shunryu suzuki quotes
• steve martin 1977
• avatar wasted legs
• avengers touch of brimstone
• christine perfect
• kraken pulp noir
• fighting irish tattoo fail**
• liz phair naked***
• nazi chick heels****

* Success!
** Not so much!
*** But not really.

**** Best I can do, sorry.

Two dollar pistol but the gun won't shoot

I pushed my way through two of Henning Mankell's Wallander novels, Faceless Killers and Firewall and was not so impressed. They were commendably bleak but surprisingly loose with the plot. Here for instance, Hastings, is Firewall not summing things up:

They never did manage to find a satisfying answer to why Sonja Hökberg was thrown against the high voltage wires at the power station, nor why Falk had been in possession of the blueprint.

Which was only central to the entire plot. To quote Raymond Chandler, Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel (1949):

The mystery novel must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law courts. Contrary to popular belief, this has nothing to do with morality. It is part of the logic of the form. Without this the story is like an unresolved chord in music. It leaves a sense of irritation.

Still, Mankell sells mega, so it's a reminder maybe that mysteries are not all about answers. (I've pleaded as much myself.)

I am however a hard and fast fan of the Swedish TV production starring Krister Henriksson. A few of the handsomely produced movie-length episodes were based on Mankell's novels while the remainder were storylined by the author and scripted / worked up by television screenwriters. The encroaching professionalism means that over the course of the two seasons the series evolves into something not unlike others we have seen but at its core Wallander is grim, locally authentic and refreshingly awkward. One aspect of this is the locale – as with Stieg Larsson, the extremes of winter are both an elemental symbol and threatening plot device. Another is the mood of the players: the Scandanavian cast are naturalistic and react in ways that are unexpected. Kurt Wallander really is curt; Prosecutor Katarina is brittle; Martinsson is blinking and uncomprehending – a by-product of the writers not giving him many lines, or the camera needing something/one to cut away to. Sometimes the stories are just damn clunky, but there's really something there, and so the dramatisation has sent me back to the novels to puzzle them out. I love a good mystery, especially the conundrum of how the writer did it.

End of days no really

Critics are saying Cowboys & Aliens didn't work, and wondering if the western is dead. Saying the western is dead is like saying the blues or jazz or figurative painting or the novel is dead: some things will always be there, in one form or another. What disappointed me instantly about the film was the aliens: I was expecting a 1950s flying-hubcap saucers vs. cowboys mashup, but I guess Indiana Jones and the Collective Noun of the Crystal Skull put everyone off that. (It nearly worked in Mars Attacks.)

Along the same line, thrillers are back. (THRILLERS! ARE! BACK!) Or rather, we flee to them in a menacing world dada-dada-da-da. As I've said before (somewhere...) I believe readers –broadly – turn to crime / thrillers because the genre commits to telling a story. At a recent literary event a publisher told me she classified a crime novel as being about "something that has already happened" and a thriller as "something that hasn't happened yet."

Screen caps from the Comic-Con trailer for Ridley Scott's Prometheus are up here. I am now officially keen. David Slade has directed S04E03 of Breaking Bad. Collider reviews it here. So that's more viewing to catch up on.

If you watch TV via torrents the New Zealand and UK governments are coming for you. Torrentfreak claims that the consultation process for the UK's Digital Economy Act was a sham and that the decision by then Secretary of State for Business Peter Mandelson to disconnect downloaders was a foregone conclusion. Exotically, Mandelson supped with Dark Lord Dreamworks founder David Geffen to discuss the matter, a mashup more discombobulating than Cowboys & Aliens / Alien Vs Predator / Frankenstein Vs The Wolfman. (Does Geffen put down the white cat with the diamond collar when he is at table? How does Peter eat with his fingertips touching together?)

New Zealand Sony general manager Andrew Cornwell says the new anti-file sharing / anti-download / You Wouldn't Steal A Car / Hey Kids Stop Tagging law is targeting the muddle:

"You're never going to stop it entirely. There will always be some hard core people who want to take on the system and get a lot of pleasure out of defeating it and proving they're smarter than the next person. The whole thrust of it is aimed at middle New Zealand who might do the occasional download."

So... the industry will be aiming its thrust at the amateurs who don't cost them very much while leaving heavy-duty downloaders to establish a second tier distribution network which will undercut legitimate corporations by supplying what users want, when they want it and at a lower price. Because that is, after all, how the drugs war was won.

But in America – the last country which Americans can't push around – former Google CIO Douglas C Merrill says Limewire was good for artists. And CNET reports album sales are climbing:

Wayne Rosso, the former president of defunct file-sharing network Grokster who now blogs about the music industry, says that the last time the recording industry saw album sales climb was in 2004, when there were a dozen file-sharing services operating, including Grokster, eDonkey and BearShare. Rosso said plenty of studies show file sharing stimulates song sales.

"This minor blip is nothing to get too excited about," Rosso said. "But it really shows it's all about the product...music has to have legs. That's what has been lost in the last decade: quality."

Full story (bar charts, balanced reporting) here.

Break my heart and leave me sad

Recording a track with Amy Winehouse for a duets album, Tony Bennett told her she reminded him of Dinah Washington:

"The minute she heard that, her eyes popped wide open and she said, 'You know that I like Dinah Washington?' I said, 'She was a friend of mine.' She was all excited that I knew Dinah Washington and that was the main inspiration. And from that moment on, the record came out just beautiful...

"Everybody just said, 'Oh, I don't know how you're going to handle her,' but I felt completely different. She really loves to perform. Every great artist I ever met, Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne, Pearl Bailey, they'd always have the butterflies. And Amy Winehouse was like that, she was always apprehensive of what was going to happen."

Postmortem: sales of the singer's music skyrocket; likelihood of a third album to be released; possibility that Blake Fielder-Civil may be in line to inherit the estate. (Update: or not.)

I hope there is a third album. I'm sure there are parts of one somewhere, which is all a record company needs. Her most recent single was a brilliant workaround; her limitations, we now learn, included emphysema.

Online listeners and critics are already discussing how Amy Winehouse will be remembered. Frank is eclectic but above all observed, like a good student doing her jazz homework. The themes of heartbreak are acquired and the lyrics so neat the arrangements are practically ruled off underneath. It was only with Back to Black (as uneven in texture as many other albums from her UK contemporaries – don't engineers mix any more?) that the artist began to inhabit and embrace the dissolute jazz persona the performer had created.

I still don't buy the title track or 'You Know I'm No Good', with its fifth-form poetry imagery but when she cracked the lyric 'He walks away / The sun goes down' for 'Tears Dry On Their Own' I fell for La Winehouse hook, line and sinker. With that track she put everything she had on the girl group sound and doubled down. Restless, pissed-off and charming, that single was shorthand for a whole lot of music that came before and a hint of what might have been.

Clint

Clint Eastwood interviewed by Stuart Fischoff Ph.D. for Psychology Today, 1993:

Psychology Today: One part of your film career - the "Dirty Harry" aspect of it - contains a lot of violence, as well as people who use violence to resolve conflicts. There's an argument that, if enough of these points of view are put in movies or on television, eventually it becomes an educational experience. So do you ever consider the social implications of your films before you make them?

Clint Eastwood: I consider them, yeah. I consider the social implications. But you mention violence as a means of resolving conflict. Well, conflict is the basis of drama. I guess that goes back as long as time has existed as far as mankind is concerned, dating back to the Greek tragedies or the Old Testament. And violence is a form of conflict, so whether that's catharsis or whether that has some socially damaging effect on audiences - I suppose that would just depend. I tend to believe that audiences are relatively well-balanced people. You're making the film for the average person. You are not making it for the one guy out there who is going to take it seriously and go, "Yeah, gee, that's crazy, I might jump off a building or what have you."

PT: Did you think about the social messages of the "Dirty Harry" movies?

CE: I approached it from the uncomplicated point of view, that it was an exciting detective story but it also addressed the issue of the victims of violent crime. In the 1960s and early '70s, it was very fashionable to address the plight of the criminals instead of the victims. Dirty Harry came along and it seemed like it was ahead of its time.

And also, like my character in White Hunter, Black Heart said, you can't let eighty million popcorn-eaters pull you this way or that way. You kind of have to go ahead. But as you get older you try to do things that please you more. You get a little more selfish. You start thinking I want to do things where I enjoy myself. I don't want to go and just jump across buildings. You know, shoot nameless people off the top of stagecoaches or what have you. That's not interesting. That's why Unforgiven became a very important film for me, because it sort of summed up my feelings about certain movies I participated in - movies where killing is romantic. And here was a chance to show that it really wasn't so romantic.

(...)

PT: It has been said about artists, that even if consciously they didn't have an idea, subconsciously they had a kind of shadow government there - the subconscious mind working and being creative.

CE: Yeah, yeah. I think there is a shadow government there. It's sort of part of the soul. But it's probably a combination of what you are. The shadow government is something running inside you and you don't tap into it consciously. If you do, you're afraid it might shrink.

PT: That's a fear that a lot of artists have. It's really true.

CE: I think so. I think a lot of people feel and I must say I felt that same way, too - that if I start fooling with it maybe it will go away or maybe I won't look at it properly.

Full interview here.

Brothers, sisters shoot your best

I genuinely flinched during Captain America: The First Avenger, in a moment when Cap's shield whangs! off a tank and back to camera. So the 3D cinema experience has advanced, for me, at least: instead of making me want to barf in Avatar and slightly blurring Tron Legacy, in Captain America the technology added a sense of delight to all manner of small things. Canvas tent flaps, rivets, paper flags pinned in maps, Tommy Lee Jones' nose: it's all jumping out at you. There were even dancing girls flashing their gams in a nod to the now very-old title sequence in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, and an upskirt. Classy, pleated, very Busby Berkeley, but still an upskirt.

Although Joe Johnston treats the World War II period action with family-friendly, fair fightin' decorum – dude really knows his Jane's Secret Aircraft – he has an eye for the ladies. Chris Evans' Cap is the hero but Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter is the star. Like Jennifer Connelly in The Rocketeer and Emily Blunt in The Wolfman, she adds lustre. She is a sharp shooter and a bombshell. The men are cheery and lantern-jawed, a rainbow coalition bound by courage. After the death of a friend, Cap discovers his scientifically enhanced super body is too healthy for him to even get drunk. This could be the most Aryan version of Americana since Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers.

Above all, Captain America is about heft. The stereo-ified weight of props and machinery is as palpable as each component of the plot clicking into place. The narrative is as carefully balanced as a Disney film, as smooth as a legal argument. If there is a common aspect to all the recent Marvel and DC movies, it is this defensiveness: the desire to get it right always second to the fear of getting it wrong. The hero dons a deliberately bad version of his uniform early on to allow the audience to get over the titters; a somber mentor is sacrificed too soon to give matters gravity (a tweedy and kinda Prada-ish Stanley Tucci, enlarging on Shaun Toub's affecting Yinsen in Iron Man); a Greek chorus of talkative supporting characters to voice the scepticism of any actual scientists / historians / four-star generals who might be present in the theater. Each comic book movie enlarges the canon of plausible solutions to underpants-on-the-outside, and thus cinema marches forward. If Captain America is Captain America not done wrong it is at least Watchmen done right.

There is a Stark Snr (with more dancing girls – I really did enjoy them), and a child who appears to be from Little Orphan Annie, and hey, wasn't that alley from Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy? The Nazis are not Nazis really. Says Johnston without irony, "We turned them into Hydra, the über Nazis. Real Nazis aren't funny, but you can slaughter them in all kinds of interesting ways and get away with it."

Captain America does get away with it. A bullied orphan is engineered into a killer, loses his best friend and the only woman who loved him before being snatched from his world and abandoned to a friendless future, and we are all entertained.

Pic c/- Empire Online.