Wired Mesh

Baccalaureate Bachanalia

I'm graduating. We're rocking.

Be there. Or be square.

News That Will Probably Excite About Six People

Continuing with today's topic of inter-paper swabbling between movie reviewers, Variety is reporting that A. O. Scott has been promoted to chief movie critic at the New York Times, while Elvis Mitchell has cleaned out his desk. I can't say that this move entirely saddens me: Scott is one of my three favorite critics (Roger Ebert and Anthony Lane are the other two, with David Edelstein running a close fourth) and he deserves to take full control of the reins at the Times.

Still, I will miss Mitchell's increasingly bizzare food fetish, which in his review of Kill Bill, Vol. 2 grew to something entirely incomprehensible: "Mr. Tarantino's movies are also about loss and betrayal, and 'Vol. 2' is a double-burger helping of those motifs. It is rich, substantial and sustained, yet also greasy kids' stuff, a wrapper filled with an extra large order of chili fries, stained with ketchup, salt and cheese." (Yes. That. And rumor has it it may also be a movie.)

For fuller details of the shakeup, read on.

From Variety:

In another shakeup for the New York Time's culture pages, A.O. Scott will ascend to Janet Maslin's former post and soon be named chief movie critic, while film reviewer Elvis Mitchell is expected to depart the Gray Lady altogether.
Move downsizes the triumvirate that put Scott, Mitchell and Stephen Holden in charge of movie criticism when longstanding lead reviewer Maslin stepped down at the end of 1999.

There's some speculation that Mitchell has already turned in his resignation. He could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Anthony Lane Belatedly Reviews The Passion (Sort Of)

Actually, this week Lane offers thoughts on the re-release of Monty Python's The Life of Brian, but he sticks in a few pointed words about that Gibson movie.

“Life of Brian” contains not a shred of blasphemy. It lacks the withering designs of the true heretic—the cruel intent that led Buñuel, say, to stage his boozy parody of the Last Supper, in “Viridiana.” The Pythons are enlightened jesters, whose scorn is reserved for those who persist in walking in darkness, although the anniversary release of “Life of Brian” strikes me not so much as a frontal assault on “The Passion of the Christ”—and surely some enterprising theatre owner will screen them as a double bill—as a sharp sideways nudge, bright with opportunism. After all, nobody could deny that Gibson fulfills his believer’s task as energetically as Palin, Cleese, and the rest of the gang launch their liberal raids. To complain that “The Passion of the Christ” is possessed by death makes no sense, because Christianity itself makes no sense without the shroud of death; the story of Jesus, shorn of its climactic sufferings, dwindles into a set of difficult ethics.

It's hard not to see this bit of criticism as a broadside at Lane's fellow New Yorker reviewer David Denby, who attacked The Passion as "a sickening death trip." My immediate thought is that Lane has a laudable understanding of Christian soteriology, but I'm open to other insights from all them theologians out there...

Evil-Challenging Tripods

From the "Trouble with the Church is It Doesn't Kick Enough Ass" Department, I bring you Doug Giles, who has penned a pastoral letter arguing that today's church is filled with women, and that blows.

"More and more, we are seeing fewer and fewer mature and responsible, evil-challenging tripods who love leadership, the struggle and aren’t afraid to boldly face an increasingly godless environment with conviction, power and the love of God," Giles writes. "Put an end to preaching by cheesy, whiny, quiche eating, preening Nancy Boys . . . right now! It freaks us meat eaters out. Get it? Hire a pastor who throws off a good John Wayne vibe instead of that Boy George feeling. Know what I mean?"

Actually, Doug, I have no idea.

"If the Church wants to recover its losses," Giles continues, "we’ve got to draw the knuckle draggers back to church. Masculine men are pretty easy. Toss in reason, competition, initiation, struggle, fun and a problem to spiritually throttle, and we’ll be there like stink on a monkey."

So what I'm hearing here is that if we make church more like, I dunno, say, fixing a car, then more men will show up.

It's not that Giles' points are all wrong (he offers valid points about sacharine artwork and endless counseling), it's just that he makes that fine conservative-Christian, gender-essentialist error of thinking men and women are easily-categorized, distinct species with simple needs. And there's a real anti-intellectual vibe here that makes me wonder if Giles thinks throwing a proper spiral is the ticket into the kindom of heaven.

I mean, life is one tough mother of a struggle, and men should be men and whatnot, but shouldn't we be people first? And loving, caring people at that? And doesn't this essay just continue the errant argument that the Church should become something totally new to garner parishioners? Shouldn't we affect people by being like, oh, Jesus, not Robocop? Doesn't the problem lie in the body's failure to reflect its head? Am I missing something?

I probably am. Lord knows -- literally -- I still have a lot to learn about living in the Gospel. But I'm pretty sure that said Gospel offers opportunities for both strength and weakness that Giles simply doesn't mention.

Batter My Heart, Five-Pointed Palm

And here's the review whose reception I'm most curious about, especially with all the recent Tarantino hubbub. Yep, it's time for a Kill Bill, Vol. 2 review and -- gasp -- I liked the film. Yes, you nattering nabobs of negativism, Quentin Tarantino made a great movie. Here's why:

Quentin Tarantino kills Bill softly in his masterpiece pastiche

By Aaron Mesh
Published in the April 21 edition of the Pulse

Midway through Kill Bill, Vol. 2, Uma Thurman’s character is given a “Texas funeral,” which is a genteelly Southern way of saying that she’s stuffed in a wooden casket and buried alive. Just as we’re dying (ahem) to know how she’ll break out of the tomb – after all, there’s still killing of Bill to be done – the scene shifts to a flashback where David Carradine’s Bill sits by a campfire and relates to Thurman a story about his martial-arts mentor. Any hopes that this will be a brief discursive are dashed as we realize that Bill is taking his sweet time in telling this tale, pausing after every other sentence to play his hand-carved flute. Thurman watches him with a mix of pleasure and frustration: it’s a good story, but she wants to know how it ends, just like we still want to know how she’s doing back in that pine box six feet under the ground. But Bill gets his jollies from the anxiety. The more infuriating his pauses get, the more he lengthens them.

Like Bill, Quentin Tarantino is one twisted son of a gun: that’s the most obvious conclusion that emerges from Kill Bill, Vol. 2, the second half of the director’s martial-arts revenge epic. By this I don’t just mean that Tarantino relishes creating a world where a murderer eliminates her enemy with a black mamba snake’s bite, then sits down to read him an Internet-downloaded report of exactly how the poison is killing him. Tarantino surely does enjoy this universe, but he delights even more in slowly strangling his audience’s expectations for how an action movie should work.

Kill Bill, Vol. 1 was a bloody bucket of instant gratification, as Uma Thurman’s Bride barely paused for breath between hacking limbs and heads off any Yakuza, nurses or housewives who stood between her and Bill, the man who shot her on her wedding day. It was a rush of blood to the head, leaving viewers both elated and slightly queasy. But Vol. 2 puts a screeching stop to the carnage, denying at every turn the audience’s desire, honed by years of lazily-scripted car-chase climaxes, for the release of simple revenge. The revolting trend in action movies of late has been to make the hero suffer as brutally as possible to justify the eventual vengeance he will wreck upon his tormentors. But Tarantino has deftly reversed the shorthand; the Bride gets her “bloody satisfaction” in Vol. 1, and then suffers in Vol. 2.

Once you get in step with Tarantino’s perverse rhythm, however, the second movie has as many joys as the first. It’s a breathtaking cornucopia of moods and genres, borrowing from Hong Kong martial-arts extravaganzas and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns to create something original and powerful. Many critics, whether they liked the film or not, have proudly flaunted their prowess in solving Tarantino’s crossword of references, but they’re missing the point. No knowledge of Tarantino’s sources is needed to savor the liveliness of his filmmaking. He’s in love with every silly thing he puts in his movie, and the pleasure he takes in his craft is infectious. I can think of no other director who could take a concept as unabashedly cheeseball as the Five-Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique and, by the sheer force of his belief in it, transform it into something grand, even sort of sad and moving.

And here is where Kill Bill poses a wonderful dilemma for the moviegoer (like, say, me) who is convinced that one of the greatest virtues of film is helping us to better see the world and the people around us. Tarantino has no interest in the real world or in real people. Everything in his movie is about the thrill and emotional intensity of other movies.

It’s not that the movie is all style and no substance: the heroes and villains in Vol. 1 were merely gore-spattered cartoon characters, but here they have rich, conflicting emotions. Michael Madsen, as a beer-swilling lowlife, and Carradine deliver especially complex performances; we never know what they’ll do next, or whether we’ll love or hate them for it. And Thurman’s work here is spectacular: she starts as a single-minded revenge machine, but her sufferings expand her. Watch her face as she talks to Michael Parks’ slimy pimp, as she realizes what it means to labor under the thumb of a male handler, and you’ll never be able to stomach the Charlie’s Angels girl-power pabulum again.

But as complex as they are, the characters are always behaving according to the logic of the movies. They bear little resemblance to anything but Hollywood icons. This is pure film, a celebration of form and formulas, and while Tarantino digs as deeply into the meaning of movies as he can, he refuses to engage anything outside the theater doors. He rejects anything even tenuously connected to our everyday lives, and we learn nothing from him.

Why, then, do I find myself adoring this movie? Maybe it’s because Kill Bill, Vol. 2 is one of the least cynical movies ever made. Most films are interested neither in real life nor in other movies, but instead in pandering to the audience’s assumptions all the way to a big opening weekend. Tarantino is too passionate about cinema to consider that. When he uses Ennio Morricone’s score from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly at his film’s climax, he does so simply because he thinks that the music is wonderful, and he wants to make it seem wonderful to everyone else, too. He uses every trick he knows to immerse the audience in the bliss he feels watching even the goofiest kung-fu flick. So be warned, ye ironists: Quentin Tarantino not only wants to frustrate your expectations and blow your mind, he wants to explode your heart.

Waiting Around to Die

If by chance you are in too great a hurry to read three movie reviews this afternoon, just know that The Alamo is one of the dullest movies ever made. And that it has Dennis Quaid looking constipated. Which livens things up, comparatively.

John Lee Hancock misses The Alamo for the trees

By Aaron Mesh
Published in the April 14 issue of the Pulse

About halfway through The Alamo, the bedraggled soldiers defending the famous stone mission are beginning to consider surrender to the Mexican troops besieging them. But then they see an ominous red flag raised over General Santa Anna’s troops. Its message seems pretty unambiguous: a giant skull looming over the words “Muerte de Traidores.” But director John Lee Hancock, worried that the audience might not understand this message, adds a translation in giant white subtitles. At that moment, I myself surrendered, abandoning any hope that the movie might grow enjoyable: Hancock had taken the movie’s first moment that could provide a jolt of mythic power, and ruined it with ham-fisted explanation.

I have no idea whether The Alamo is historically faithful to the events of 1836, when Santa Ana’s troops slaughtered an outmanned group of Texas rebels. But it certainly wants to be accurate, down to the last carving on the mission’s walls. The movie reminded me of those Civil War reenactments where people obsess over every button on their replica uniforms, stand around in field pretending to shoot each other, and go home satisfied in their authenticity. Hancock seems completely tone deaf to the mood of the events, the doomed heroism that makes the Alamo legendary. But he wants to make darn sure you know what the flag says.

The attention to detail would be fine if it were put to a purpose. Any purpose would do. But this is not a movie, like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, intent on uncovering the ugly realities of war. It takes its accuracy and puts it to the service of battle scenes as squeamishly bloodless as a 1940s western, without the wit or style of those old movies. It looks exactly like recent overwrought period pieces like Titanic or The Patriot, with the same slow-motion shots and exaggerated score. But those movies were using their historical settings as an excuse for romance and family drama. The Alamo is using these techniques for nothing at all. The characters sit around and wait, they nap, then they wait some more, and the music and pacing scream all the while that this is very important. Because we all know what a hot-button issue Texan independence is today.

I’m guessing that the point, such as one exists, is to deconstruct the Alamo legend to something realistic, but the film just builds another one, with all the portentousness and none of the grandeur. This blend of verisimilitude and melodrama is a deadly concoction, a movie that Davy Crockett himself might describe as plumb awful. Really, there are no words to explain how boring this movie is. It’s an artless mess, a seemingly endless string of scenes where the Alamo’s defenders observe that things look pretty grim, then make the same comment again. Sometimes they are interrupted by truly lousy special effects, including a woefully unconvincing cannonball-view shot that is patently ripped off from Pearl Harbor. Yes, you heard that right: here is a movie that’s actually trying to copy Michael Bay. And what’s truly frightening is that it fails to reach those heights.

It doesn’t help matters that the movie looks terrible: Every night shot is washed out to a fuzzy blue haze, like a black T-shirt that’s been through the rise cycle for a decade or so. The performers are nearly as colorless: Jason Patric takes a game shot at breathing life into James Bowie, but he is quickly resigned to croaking lines from a sickbed. Meanwhile Dennis Quaid, perhaps sensing that his vehicle is a disaster, delivers what will undoubtedly go down as the best bad acting of the year. His drunken commander Sam Houston steadily holds a hilariously bug-eyed facial expression, as if someone had just asked him to drink a saucer of rancid milk. In his best moment, he stands on a battlefield, closes his eyes and sniffs the air, his brow furrowed with something between ecstasy and the sudden relief from constipation. This is camp at its finest.

The only sincerely good performance is Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett. Thornton’s Crockett is a bit of a charlatan, simultaneously trying to escape and live up to his own legend, but he’s a passionate fraud: when he picks up a fiddle, The Alamo is shot through with the life it otherwise lacks. And Thornton gets the movie’s only haunting scene, austerely recounting the story of an Indian massacre that ended with soldiers eating potatoes roasted on the flesh of their victims. The harrowing tale works because Thornton so clearly cares about its meaning, the awful poetry of its images. He realizes that a narrative’s power emerges from something deeper than the listing of facts. John Lee Hancock has no such understanding, and The Alamo is the tedious result of his tin ear.

A Real Good-Looking Boy

At some point, I need to just go ahead and create some other site for my Pulse film reviews. But today I'm going to bombard you with three of them from this month's issues. In honor of Hellboy, a smash-em, bash-em, demon-fightin' film I enjoyed more than I thought I could, I also offer this violent bonus: A list of people Jack White should beat up next.

Big red hero has great fun battling gothic monsters

By Aaron Mesh
Published in the April 7 issue of the Pulse

Pity the mad monk Rasputin: poisoned, stabbed, shot, drowned and, in the ultimate insult, never adequately portrayed in the movies. The few photographs of the Russian occultist show a bearded figure with an eerie gaze that makes Steve Buscemi look like Bambi – a stare that suggests some unspeakable horror is crouched over the cameraman’s right shoulder. No movie has quite captured the blood-curdling look in Rasputin’s eyes, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy is, sadly, no exception. Grigori Rasputin is the chief villain of Del Toro’s movie, undead and bent on releasing some awful presence from another dimension, but as embodied by Karel Roden, he is merely bald and bulky, looking like what might happen if Joe Pantoliano had the bad fashion sense to become Amish.

Fortunately, Hellboy gets just about everything else in its exaggerated universe right, especially its title character, a hulking red demon released into the world by Rasputin but immediately enlisted into the apparently inexhaustible task of fighting evil. Hellboy, as effortlessly played by Ron Perlman, is a good-natured, horned oaf with equal predispositions toward cocksure toughness and boyish petulance. He spends his working hours wisecracking and battling the spawn of Satan, and his downtime eating pancakes. Lots of pancakes. (The movies best visual jokes involve weary FBI agents delivering heaping mounds of flapjacks to the hero’s lair.)

The movie follows its protagonist’s lead: it’s both intricately gruesome and innocently amusing, an instant schlock classic that knows how ridiculous it is. In cased you haven’t already guessed, Hellboy is based on a comic strip, and Del Toro is clever enough to approach his material with the right balance of sincerity and farce. Little in the movie is a fresh idea, especially not the hero’s battles with Nazis and mythic monsters, but Hellboy is one of those rare action films that brings a new spark of life to the familiar. Nearly every scene echoes of other capers, particularly the Indiana Jones trilogy, but it’s a pleasant evocation instead of a worn retread. It’s no surprise, for example, to find Hellboy engaged in a fistfight on a subway platform – I kept waiting for Hugo Weaving to show up – but it’s a nice touch to end the scene with the immortal hero edgily enduring the long process of being run over by a train. The whole movie is filled with such cheery riffs on time-honored tropes: it feels like an invigorating warm-up on a lukewarm cup of coffee.

The bright-if-cheesy visuals and snappy dialogue are aided by strong performances from the supporting cast, who acquit themselves well amongst the computer-generated hellhounds and otherworldly portals. John Hurt is particularly delightful as the good Professor Bruttenholm, Hellboy’s adopted daddy: his presence is welcome in a movie where the lead essentially declares, like Hurt’s Elephant Man, that he is not an animal, but a man. A big crimson man, with horns, but a man nonetheless.

As agreeable as this pronouncement is, Hellboy still ends up a little unsatisfying. It’s a very good movie that makes you want to see an even better one. Part of the problem may lie in tensions inherent to the source material. Many critics have noted Hellboy’s debt to the writings of horror master H. P. Lovecraft, and Hellboy certainly seems to be fighting Lovecraft’s hideous, squidlike Cthulhu in the final frames. But little of the uneasy dread of gothic horror makes it onto the screen. Much of the bone-chilling charm of the gothic lies in the slow, inexorable discovery of something unutterably awful within clanking Victorian machinery. But nothing in Hellboy is slow and, proving faithful to the medium of the comic strip, nothing much is unseen either. No wonder Roden’s Rasputin doesn’t look truly haunted: We see everything he sees, and it’s not that scary.

The Best Song Will Never Get Sung

So it looks like Wilco is playing a free show at Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Arts Festival on June 6.

That's right. Free. The best current American band, perhaps the best American band ever, is playing for free.

So who wants to take a little trip to Pennsylvania in June?

Josh the Polar Bear

In which April Roe and I undertake a complex psychoanalysis of my dreams about Arctic creatures. The insurance firms and medical offices of Chattanooga should take comfort in the knowledge that their employees are engaged in such crucial communiqués.

(It may or may not be worth noting that during this entire e-mail exchange, I was listening to Wilco's A Ghost is Born -- legally, on streaming audio -- for the first time. It's good.)

April: I just remembered I had a dream about you last night.

You were on a softball league, and I was looking at a picture of you in your uniform, except it was really really tight on you. And the legs were too short so I could see the tops of your socks and the bottom of your belly. It was pretty funny.

Mesh: I had a dream that I met a giant polar bear named Josh at the aquarium. Josh and I became good friends. Then I ran into a group of women, all of whom I used to date or have crushes on, but it didn't bother me, because now I was friends with Josh the polar bear. I found him comforting.

April: LOL. You are lying!

Mesh: I wish. I'm pretty sure that Josh started as a sea turtle, but by the time we became friends, he was definitely a polar bear. A big one.

April: Hmmm, you know this dream is laden with homo-erotic connotations. Maybe you and Josiah shouldn't hang out so much...

Mesh: Yeah, but Josh was a polar bear. And my feelings for him were like he was a father figure or something. It wasn't a sexual thing, really.

April: I mean, maybe you don't believe me, but look at the evidence:

The sea turtle is the traditional representation of the human sexual act in childhood fairy tales. The polar bear is the creature of mystery and intrigue - it is white and perfectly camouflaged in the North Pole - thus representing something forbidden, hidden, desired.

And Josh/Josiah - that is TOO clear.

Mesh: That's amazing. You made that up with admirable speed.

April: OR MAYBE I DIDN'T MAKE IT UP!!

I know this might be uncomfortable to address with me, however, I just want you to be honest with yourself, Aaron. I am concerned about you. :(

Mesh: I'm afraid I'm just not honest enough to confront such subconcious frustrations via e-mail. I think I'm going to blog this discussion. It's just too good.

This Boy is Exhausted

I feel as if I should, at some point before I forget, recount the events of the past two weeks -- a bit of procrastination-fueled drama that culminated in my official approval for graduation from the old C-nant. But now is not that point. For the moment, I'll just note that I've written some 14,000 words since the first of April, and that I'm developing a disturbing addiction to typing something -- anything -- between the hours of 1 and 3 a.m.

Andy noted on his blog on Monday that I endeavored to keep him awake at the wheel this weekend with my "seasonal mix CDs." You may ask yourself, "What are these seasonal mix CDs?" (You may also ask yourself, "Where is my beautiful wife?", but this is a different musical question.)

Recently I've come to the conclusion that the collegiate events that once served as inspirations for mix tapes are a thing of the past. There aren't so many dance parties and banquets when everyone is holding down a day job. So instead of waiting for special events to unveil my mixes (which have become mildly legendary to, oh, about seven Chattanooga hipsters and assorted Covenant young people), I have decided to compile a single mix tape for each season of the year.

The goal of these mixes is to capture a bit of my mood and a bit of my background noise from a certain time in my life, and offer it up for everybody's listening pleasure. I'm working on my spring mix now -- any suggestions for upbeat pop/rock tunes would be welcome -- and I recently finished my winter one. It's called Trying to Get Some Rest: Mesh's Winter Mix 2004, and here it is. Feel free to grab your iTunes shopping cart and play along at home.

Bran Van 3000 – Mama Don’t Smoke
The Wrens – This Boy is Exhausted
The Postal Service – The District Sleeps Alone Tonight
Donovan – Jersey Thursday
The Stranglers – Golden Brown
Belle and Sebastian – Piazza, New York Catcher
The Magnetic Fields – Deep Sea Diving Suit
The Postal Service – Nothing Better
The Jesus and Mary Chain – Just Like Honey
Sun Kil Moon – Glenn Tipton
Death Cab for Cutie – A Lack of Color
Iron & Wine – Upward Over the Mountain
Palace Music – New Partner
Terrence Martin – Steel Rail Nightingale
Johnny Cash – Redemption Song
Paul Simon – American Tune
Everything But the Girl – The Only Living Boy in New York
Terrence Martin – Sleeper
Iron & Wine – Such Great Heights
Israel Kamakawiwo`ole – Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Ernie (from Sesame Street) – I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon

The Greatest Thing I Have Ever Done

...is this.

Junior year. Covenant College. A week locked in the basement of Carter Hall, with ocassional visits from writers. A lot of Chris Isaak ("Forever Blue") and Ryan Adams ("Gold") buzzing from a tinny CD player. And thus was the 2002 Windbag born.

Now that I'm officially done with school, this little 12-pager seems like a precious time capsule, capturing a certain perfect moment in the Covenant experience of me and my friends. We had a lot of sand, back in the day. I don't think the college will ever be quite so ready for Matt Jelley ever again.

But enough nostalgia. School's out forever, and it's tax time.

Thanks to Josiah for digging this up.

A Study of American Latrinalia

Why can't Polish people tell jokes?

While you consider the answer to that question, enjoy this New Yorker profile of one Gershon Legman, the author of “Rationale of the Dirty Joke,” an encyclopedic anthology and analysis of vulgar humor. "Reading through Legman’s vast compilation of dirty jokes is a punishing experience, like being trapped in the men’s room of a Greyhound bus station of the nineteen-fifties," writes Jim Holt.

But what an old john it is: Holt traces the written history of the joke back to the Philogelos, a fourth or fifth century collection. ("The most haunting joke in the Philogelos, however, is No. 114, about a resident of Abdera, a Greek town whose citizens were renowned for their foolishness: 'Seeing a eunuch, an Abderite asked him how many children he had. The eunuch replied that he had none, since he lacked the means of reproduction. Retorted the Abderite . . .' The rest is missing from the surviving text, which goes to show the strange potency of unheard punch lines.") There's also a brief discursive on Rennaisance humorist Poggio Bracciolini, who almost single-handedly resurrected the art of the joke. The lingering effect of the piece is a feeling that the ancients had their minds in the gutter about as much as we do, reality television aside.

Timing.

Dark Side of the Mind

Time for another movie review, everybody! Whee! Get funky! It's Robert McNamara, in the house!

Robert McNamara tries to know Vietnam for the first time

By Aaron Mesh
Published in the March 31-April 5 issue of the Pulse

Errol Morris is a big geek, the sort of guy who gets so lost in his own head that he forgets to modulate his voice when he speaks, and ends up shouting a lot. So it’s an intriguing paradox that Morris makes documentaries about the limits of reason, about people who discover that their minds aren’t big enough to control the shifting ambiguities of the world. He’s profiled a lion tamer, a topiary gardener and, most recently, an electric chair designer who became convinced the Holocaust never happened, because the Auschwitz gas-chamber construction didn’t match his own theories on execution.

Robert S. McNamara, the former United States secretary of defense who oversaw much of the Vietnam War, is hardly the sort of eccentric that Morris usually examines. But early in “The Fog of War,” Morris’ haunting set of interviews with McNamara, it becomes clear that the powerful cabinet member gazed over the brink of insanity as much as anyone. A Berkeley philosophy major with a head for logic, McNamara soon found himself calculating formulas for firebombing Tokyo, and arguing with John F. Kennedy about the security risks inherent to blowing Cuba off the face of the earth. He tells a story about a phone call with Fidel Castro years after the Cuban missile crisis. He asked the dictator if he knew the consequences of a nuclear war, and if he ever talked to Nikita Krushchev about those effects. Yes, Castro said, he knew that nuclear war would mean the horrific destruction of his country. And he told Kruschev to bomb America anyway.

Robert McNamara is 85 years old now, and he tells such stories with a mixture of boyish exuberance, ingrained arrogance and overwhelming regret. He talks to Morris through a device called the “Interrotron,” which allows him to stare directly into the camera while he speaks. His ruminations would be fascinating enough unadorned, but Morris frames the interviews with disquieting visuals. This is not a typical Cold War documentary, with clichéd footage of soldiers marching through rice patties. It feels less like a rehash of past events, and more like a vision of some awful mechanistic future, with pilots shielding their eyes from the fiery orange explosions of their own nuclear tests. The impression is of a society so impressed by shiny gadgets – Morris uncovers a hilarious Ford commercial featuring cartoon cars delivered by comets – that no one realizes that the technology is slipping beyond human understanding. It’s almost unsurprising when McNamara remembers Petagon officials speculating that Russians were about to test weapons of mass destruction on the far side of the moon. When McNamara declares that “rationality will not save us,” the observation has the cold ring of wisdom.

This truth hits hardest in a sequence where McNamara recalls helping cigar-chomping general Curtis LeMay orchestrate the firebombing of Japan during World War II. Morris flashes images of ruined cities on the screen in rapid succession, along with the names of similarly-sized American towns. (McNamara makes special mention that Toyama, a city “the size of Chattanooga,” lost 99 percent of its buildings.) And Morris provides another visual, one that lingers in my head long after the film is over: the sight of numbers, endless calculations deliberated by McNamara, raining down on Tokyo like syllogisms from Hell.

Recounting these horrors is clearly a wrenching experience for McNamara, a man whose former confidence in his own judgment is now bookended by a creeping certainty that he was a war criminal. At the end of “The Fog of War,” he takes a measure of solace in lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding”: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” But Morris’ disturbing implication here, as in all of his superb films, is that no journey can grant the human mind an adequate understanding of how to live. The thickest fog is in our own minds, he says, and it will not lift.

Shimmy Shine

Every day, at least twice a day, I am trapped in a small compartment hurtling vertically, standing beside people who often cough into their fists in a manner suggesting that lingering death is imminent for all of us, then turn to me and smile. These 90-second ventures into the Erlanger Medical Mall elevators are my daily taste of odd personalities and the occasional gleam of the brilliant aside.

Yesterday I wandered into the center elevator, and found a janitor buffing the metal of the door with a cloth covered in some cleanser that smelled of citrus and various less healthy acids. The middle-aged woman next to me was fascinated by the metal's new gleam. "That smells good," she said to the janitor. "What brand of cleaner is it? I want to use it on my car."

The man looked down at the cloth in his hand. "It's some kind of shimmy shine," he pronouced, and went back to scrubbing.

This, I decided, was one of the best evasive answers I'd ever heard. He was completely confident that he'd satisfactorily answered the question. I'm still convinced that "some kind of shimmy shine" needs to become shorthand for "a blatantly vauge, unhelpful answer to a precise question." It's up to you to bring this fine saying into the limelight. Off you go.

I'm taking it a little easy in the office today after staying up until five in the morning finishing my last Covenant paper. I just ran across a wonderful audio link from KCRW radio in Santa Monica, California -- a live in-studio performance by the Magnetic Fields of eight of their 69 Love Songs. This is easily one of my top five albums of all time, so it's surprising to discover that some of these tracks, especially "Asleep and Dreaming" and "Yeah! Oh Yeah!" sound even better played live. And there's a nice moment when the host blithers that Stephin Merrit's music covers every aspect of love.

"Well, most," Merrit corrects him. "No pedophilia."

That's How You Fight Greediness

Say you're the resident genius behind an incredibly talented, obsessively followed rock band. Your new album has just been leaked onto the Internet, and is being illegally downloaded by loads of people. Do you:

a) Run screaming to the RIAA?

b) Scramble to complete post-production and rush your album into stores?

c) Do this?

If you answered c), then you are a hero. I think it's safe to say that the bar for how musicians should respond to online markets has just been set very, very high by one Jeff Tweedy.

Thus Spake Charlie Kaufman

Things That I Want to Do Someday, No. 497: Build a monorail in my backyard.

That bit of absurdity, courtesy of Heaneyland, seems like as good a way as any to introduce my Pulse review of the new Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry flick, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is pretty odd in its own right.

I've been doing a lot of work on Kaufman lately, including penning a 4,000-word research paper on his Adaptation screenplay as a reflection of Friedrich Nietzsche's early works. I promise I'll post that piece soon, but right now I just want to get it graded so I can officially depart my alma mater. And I want to get started on my last -- last! -- Covenant paper ever, a intercultural experience review about my 2002 trip to Japan. I also want to get to bed before four in the morning.

But enough of my moaning. Enjoy the review, and go see the movie.

Magnificent movie finds Sunshine in the darkest of memories

By Aaron Mesh
Published in March 24-30 issue of the Pulse

It is probably safe to say that Charlie Kaufman is the only screenwriter in Hollywood harboring an ongoing fascination with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s reflections on the self-loathing narcissism of intellectuals have found cinematic grounding in Kaufman’s films ever since John Cusack first dreamed of life as a puppeteering ubermensch in Being John Malkovich. Kaufman’s masterpiece Adaptation, for all its narrative contortions, was filled in every layer with the Nietzschean concept of Apollonian and Dionysian creative forces battling for control of life and Charlie Kaufman screenplays. The writer finally revealed his influence in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, where a Nietzsche quote emerged from the wide mouth of Julia Roberts, thus assuring that Friedrich Nietzsche will forever remain famous for achieving two degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.

Nietzsche is quoted again – twice, in fact – in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman’s wonderful new collaboration with director Michel Gondry. Both times the reference comes by way of Kirsten Dunst as a naive secretary with a fondness for Bartlett’s anthologies, and the quote alludes to the philosopher’s oft-stated conclusion that forgetting the past is the quickest, perhaps only, route to an dynamic, meaningful life. This is also the sentiment of Jim Carrey’s Joel Barish, who decides to allow Dunst’s ramshackle medical company to erase his memories of ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) after she ignores his last, tearful pleas to restore their relationship.

Or maybe he talks to Lacuna Inc. before he begs Clementine’s forgiveness; the time of Sunshine’s opening scenes is out of joint, with all the foggy uncertainty about causality and order that drifts in as a love affair disintegrates. Joel eventually realizes that he’s not only breaking up with Clementine, he’s watching himself breaking up with her – in fact, each scene so far has been taking place inside his head, while he lies on his bed, wearing a futuristic metal helmet that is meticulously destroying his recollection of the relationship.

With that, Sunshine is off and running, as the Lacuna machinery works its way backwards through Joel’s memories, deleting them one by one as he subconsciously watches. As wild as that premise is, Sunshine never reaches the free-wheeling creative heights that made Adaptation the best movie of 2002. Things certainly grow crazy in short order as Joel’s memories fall apart. Faces twirl into featureless smudges of flesh, words vanish from the spines of books, and the occasional car plummets from the sky. But sadness covers these rowdy scenes like a burial shroud: Gondry shoots Joel’s memories with dark, fuzzy cinematography that perfectly conveys the uneasy loneliness of a lucid dream, or of a remembrance that is stripped to bare bones with time. And every few minutes, you remember that the sequence you’re watching will soon be lost to Joel forever; it’s as if you’re seeing the only copy of a lovely film that’s being incinerated even as it spools off the reel.

Joel also senses something precious being ruined, and Carrey, who up to Sunshine’s halfway mark is morose and guarded, suddenly reaches for the manic intensity that has defined his acting. But Carrey’s hysteria is focused and desperate as its never been before: “Can you hear me, I wanna call it off!” he screams, kneeling on an ice-covered river where he spent his happiest moments. As Joel drags his memories of Clementine into the deepest corners of his psyche, hoping to hide her there, the movie begins to feel like an extended version of the chase scene inside Malkovich’s mind in Being John Malkovich, complete with quick stops at scenes of childhood taunting by bullies and dreadful sexual embarrassments. But while Malkovich’s cerebral expedition was used as a quick gag, Carrey brings real humor and pathos to the journey. And Kate Winslet delivers difficult and subtle shifts in character as Joel remembers what he first loved about Clementine. She begins as a brash, castrating woman full of leering, abrasive chatter, and slowly transforms into someone sweeter and gentler. She’s so brilliant that it’s impossible to remember that she exists only in Joel’s head.

Meanwhile, a crew of Lacuna employees are sluggishly at work in Joel’s bedroom, smoking weed and chasing after Joel’s erratic, fleeing synapses. The interactions of these characters (played by Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood and Dunst) have been derided by some critics as distractions from Joel’s story, but they serve much like minor characters in a Shakespearian comedy: their slapstick underscores the themes of love and loss churning in Joel’s head. (It doesn’t hurt that Dunst once again infuses a small role with the strongest of emotions.) And Joel finally awakens to rejoin them in the real world. When he does, it’s in a series of scenes that repeat the movie’s prologue, as Joel sprints to a wintry beach on Valentine’s Day for reasons he can’t begin to comprehend.

His dash to the ocean opens a flawless finish to Sunshine, one that marks not only Joel’s escape from his head but also Kaufman’s fist written venture outside of his own pensive self-absorption. This ending, with Joel and Clementine looking at each other with a mysterious combination of wearied knowledge and fresh affection, goes down with the bracing smoothness of a cup of coffee after a night of agitated dreams. It’s Kaufman’s hard-earned acknowledgement, one that Nietzsche would have scorned, that the past must not just be abandoned but redeemed. In writing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Charlie Kaufman has transcended his intimidating influences and discovered hope. It’s a triumph of goodwill, and it makes for a movie both magnificent and consoling.