The Banality of Good: The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace's last work, the unfinished novel The Pale King, is fractured, disjointed, and incomplete; and so too will this review be fractured, disjointed, and incomplete.  As with many incomplete works, roughness adds to the novel's mystique, and unfinished plot lines stimulate the reader's imaginative faculties in ways polished and completed works of fiction cannot.  It is a rare chance that we readers get to invade the mind of a master so fully as to behold his thoughts frozen in progress.  [NOTE: For totally anal readers, the passages below may contain spoilers, but I don't think knowing some of this stuff really takes anything away.]

David Foster Wallace is a relatively new discovery for me.  When Infinite Jest was published in 1997, I was thirteen years old.  When Wallace's groundbreaking essay on television, e unibus pluram, was published in 1993, I was nine.  Wallace's work was beyond me and still remains beyond me more often than sometimes.  Since becoming an adult and a writer, I had been vaguely following Wallace's work throughout the years, often stumbling across a piece in the New Yorker or Harpers, always making mental notes that I'd have to get around to checking out his catalogue someday.  

Since Wallace's suicide in 2008, I have paid much closer attention to his posthumous publications.  The Pale King is the first full-length work of Wallace's that I have read.  He is, for me, the first writer since Victor Hugo whose works I have immediately wanted to consume in their entirety after reading just one.  (The others are Jorge Luis Borges from my adult life; nothing from college since reading for pleasure is anathema to university curricula; Philip K. Dick and Franz Kafka from high school; and from my childhood: the writers of wild fantasy C.S. Lewis, Susan Cooper, Brian Jacques, Dr. Seuss, and Michael Crichton.) 

The premise of The Pale King as unfinished novel (or what may have been the intended premise - Wallace's last work reads like 500 pages of exposition.) is that it's 1985 and there is a WAR going on within the IRS.  On one side are idealists who believe in enforcement of the tax code as patriotic duty: the IRS is a moral entity, and IRS examiners are the modern equivalent of heroes.  (There is something about the 1980s in particular that elevates the banal to heroic.)  On the other side are pragmatists who believe the IRS should be run like a business: its sole job is to generate revenue as efficiently as possible.  The pragmatists want to replace human examiners with a computer, and they are preparing for a demonstration - a la Garry Kasparov vs. Deep Blue or Ken Jennings vs. Watson - where they pit the most productive human tax examiners (some of whom possess superpowers, such as the ability to maintain total concentration in the face of pure boredom or the ability to keep one's eyes open and unblinking for several minutes) against the computer A/NADA.  (From my reading, I interpret the idealists as protagonists - or, the team we are supposed to route for, but this may just be projection; the pragmatists are, of course, "correct" in the sense that they win and necessarily so, which would make The Pale King a tragedy in the classical sense, albeit without a catharsis.  Although I can perceive the irony of having tax-payers forfeit a percentage of their earnings to a machine vis-a-vis the pragmatist position.)

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Oscar Preview 2011: The Best of the Best Pictures

Last year I wrote an Oscar preview for Best Picture and outlined my reasons for doing so. This year I have done the same, and I'm glad to say that this year it was a much more pleasurable experience. The films are reviewed in the order they appear on the official nomination list.

1 - Black Swan - Black Swan started off combined with The Wrestler as one film; director Darren Aronofsky brings us the tale of young ballerina Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) and her transformation from Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde. Black Swan is told from Nina's point of view: she is cast as the lead in a production of Swan Lake, and must portray the White Swan and the Black Swan. She is a perfectionist, and can play the White with ease, but she is criticised for her lack of passion when it comes to the Black. Portman puts in a truly Oscar-worthy performance as Nina, and her depiction of a young shy woman's descent into insanity is heartbreaking to watch. Mila Kunis plays Nina's main rival, Lily, whose motives are unclear, as paranoia is a huge part of our unreliable narrator's personality. Lily could be a conniving little bitch, or she could be a genuinely nice woman who is really happy for Nina's achievements. Kunis plays this ambiguity to a tee. Vincent Cassel plays what is unfortunately a clichéd character – the director of the play. He actually spouts of lines like “The only person standing in your way is you” and “you could be brilliant, but you are a coward.” Cassel's convincing pomposity is what ultimately saves his character from becoming a caricature. Barbara Hershey also adds realism to a character we've all seen many times before – the overbearing mother. Aronofsky in this film creates a tense atmosphere that just doesn't let up, even when Nina spends a night out with Lily, trying to let herself go. His use of CGI in this film - whether the viewer is aware of it or not - is quite simply amazing (video contains spoilers). Black Swan is an intense experience, with a slow build up to an interesting if not ultimately satisfying climax.

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Scott Pilgrim is a Christmas Tree

Set in a world governed by video game rules, in order to earn the right to go out with the girl of his dreams, a 22 year old, charming but self-absorbed musician must first defeat her seven evil exes.

A cursory glance at Scott Pilgrim vs The World suggests that this film is amazing. There is a lot of humour involved, be it pithy dialogue or sight gags, and the film is edited in what is becoming Director Edgar Wright's trademark short, snappy style – one minute Scott's in a library, the next frame, he's at home at band practice, and 10 seconds later he's walking down the street, on the way to a party, all in one seamless, fluid motion. Not a moment or space is wasted. Wright makes things happen  at all times, whether it be driving the plot forward, making us laugh, or creating the smug feeling within ourselves of “I get that reference”.

The film also just looks great. The CG special effects are polished, and they perfectly meld the 'real' world with the gaming world. Wright tried very hard to perfect this film on the technical side to within an inch of its life.

However, once you pay more attention to this film, it becomes a soulless vacuum. There is not a single, likable, developed character in the film: the titular character is played by Michael Cera as a more selfish Michael Cera.

At the beginning of the film, Scott is dating a sycophantic high school girl named Knives Chau (best name ever( as a way to make himself feel better, because he still isn't over his last girlfriend, who he broke up with a year earlier. He takes Knives for granted, then forgets about her completely after he discovers his (literal) dream girl, Ramona. It is only at the behest of his friends that Scott breaks up with his jailbait friend.
 
Scott's personal arc in the film is about learning to love himself, but from the outset he loves himself a bit too much – when he reaches his personal climax, a Street Fighter-esque voice booms: “Scott earned the power of self-respect!” Great! Now can he gain the viewer's respect?

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Inception: Drawing Demons

Martin Schongauer, Anthony the Great plagued by demons, 1480sI wanted to respond briefly to Pete's excellent review of Inception.

   

I just finished watching Inception, and I wanted to get these thoughts on the film out quickly before I forget them (like a dream).  First of all, I think the film tells too much instead of showing or allowing the viewer to draw his own conclusions or fill in the gaps in his own understanding of the story and its world.  While it surely required some degree of imaginative power to conceive the world of the film, watching Inception for me was a fairly unimaginative experience, somewhere between walking to the nearest convenience store and listening to music on my iPod.

  

That's not to say my mind didn't wander pleasurably throughout the film, just that processing endless amounts of exposition left little room for speculation. (There is a reason science fiction is often called speculative fiction.)  As an aspiring neurologist, I found the subject matter particularly thought-provoking.  It was the story that was really bare-bones.  I prefer the vague weirdness of say THX 1138 to the logical funeral pyre of Inception.  The way the story was told reminded me a lot of the kinds of television shows made for twelve-year-old boys, where so-and-so character has this ability and so-and-so character can do this but can't do this.  I imagine Dragon Ball Z served as the main inspiration for the Inception writing team.  

  

As such, Inception is just part of a greater trend within our culture towards Simple Simon cinematic experience based upon layer and layer of nerd-knowledge scaffolding.  As Pete says in his review, Inception is a stale heist film in disguise.  Its warm critical reception draws on the fact that critics were so distracted by the film's smoke-and-mirrors that they failed to see what was right in front of their faces (a trend): that with enough money, anybody over age eleven could have made this movie.

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Inception: A Small Golden Nugget in a Mountain of Silver?

Spoiler Alert from Adam Quigley's /Film review of Inception:

Spoiling Inception is near impossible without writing out a manual to explain what those spoilers mean, but regardless, this review includes vague references to plot points that could be deemed spoilers by those who probably shouldn’t be reading reviews anyway if they really wanted to avoid finding out anything about the movie. You’ve been warned. -

Oscar season is approaching and Christopher Nolan's film Inception has consistently made critics's top ten lists.  Inception was Mark Kermode's favourite film of 2010, and it featured prominently on lists of two of the three hosts of /Filmcast.  Indeed, /Film's Adam Quigley has provided the most reasoned and measured review of Inception.  

I don't doubt that Inception is one of the better films of last year, but at times I think it has been overrated, by Mark Kermode in particular and elsewhere within the cranes and scaffolding of the Internet geekdom.  It was finally a comment from my brother on Facebook on the hilarious a capella version of the Inception trailer that summed up best how I too felt about the film:

Meh not bad - I have to say the more I think about Inception the less impressed I am. It's just too up itself for its own good. But maybe I should watch it a second time to see if it gets any better. Also the plot was nowhere near as cerebral as everyone made out. 

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Five-Tweet Reviews From Now On

Nothing screams "good guy" like smoking a cigarette while giving a young child a piggyback.Recently, I've been tweeting my thoughts about movies as I watch them, and I've decided to turn this into a regular series.  I'm not really sure how or when it started, but the five-tweet form has crystalized as of late.  So far, I've taken on The Hangover, Terminator 4, the new Rambo, August Rush, A Perfect World, and debatedly some Thin Lizzy concert DVD on Japanese late-night TV.  Here is what is so far:

On some Thin Lizzy Concert DVD:

Watching Thin Lizzy live on Japanese late-night pay-per-view. Never realized how amazing they were. It's not just "Boys are Back in Town". 

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Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III

Last week, the best rapper in the world went to prison for a year.  In his honor we're reviewing the last truly titantic rap album- with all apologies to Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Part II.  Good luck Weezy.

The battle for the soul of rap was never really in doubt, but it finished emphatically on the day Lil Wayne released Tha Carter III.  The recalcitrant New Yorkers declaring "hip hop is dead" to spitefully burn the throne rather than cede it to the South just seemed sadly anachronistic in the album's wake: they were revolutionary's still fighting the last war.  The South won because while 90's rap will always been celebrated as a creative peak (after all, I do write classic rap reviews for a reason), constantly returning to that well led to diminishing returns.  If the greatest New York rap albums all came out in 1994, what the fuck is there left to say? The irreverence of the Dirty South seemed shallow when Master P topped the charts, but it led to a expanded palette of the possible through artists like DJ Screw, Lil John and Block Beataz.  That dirty irreverence can also produce dreck like Flo Rida, but undeniably the most interesting hip hop has been Southern for a long time. 

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Oscar Preview 2010: The Best of the Best Pictures

At Oscar time last year, I had watched very little of what was actually being shown, but I had watched The Wrestler, loved it, and I really thought that Mickey Rourke should have won Best Actor.  It was the best performance I'd seen in a long time, but when Sean Penn won for Milk, I was outraged.  But because I hadn’t seen Milk, I had no business feeling outraged; I was comparing a performance I had seen and loved to a performance I had not seen. So this year, I thought, well, of course, you can’t watch every movie that's nominated for everything, so I decided to watch every movie that was nominated for Best Picture.  That means that when I inevitably disagree with whatever movie wins Best Picture, I can legitimately disagree with the Academy's decision.  The Academy extended the number of picture nominated this year to ten, which doubled my workload, but it was a labor of love.

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Awesome Avatar Message Board Exchange

I recently posted a summary and link to my extremely negative Avatar review on a fanboy site; this elicited no fewer than twelve err, umm, avatars to insult me and accuse me of being a troll.  A routine link bomb had turned into solid entertainment.  Some highlights: 

Vanessa791 says, "It never fails to amaze me that trolls love to get on a FAN site just to be able to trash a movie that the other members love. You actually think the garbage you are spewing is going to open our eyes??? You sir, are a fool then. Go spew your crap on a board where it is wanted, it isn't wanted here."

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Avatar Review Disclaimer

Although Avatar definitely sucked, I must admit that I watched the movie in Japanese because I wanted to see the 3-D.  There was an English version available in my city, but it was the 2-D version, and, really, let's face it, the only reason to go see Avatar is to witness stereoscopic film-making.  As a result, I may have been frustrated - not because I don't understand Japanese - but because I find dubbing to be in poor taste and distractingly ridiculous.  I might understand the rationale behind dubbing - as opposed to subtitling - a special effects movie: people want to focus on visuals and not on reading subtitles.  Nevertheless, dubbing is the norm in Japan for all foreign media.  There are probably only five or six voice actors, and they all sound like Don LaFontaine, even the woman who regularly plays Miley Cyrus.  I attribute this to either widespread hidden illiteracy or widespread poor taste.  Either way, it may have affected my mood as I watched the film.

Avatar is an Elephantine Heap of Excrement

Rowan Atkinson's Na'vi

SPOILER ALERT: If you didn't guess from the title, this review trashes Avatar.  If you still want to enjoy the film, don't bother reading it.  Let's skip over Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, Ferngully, and all that really funny, funny stuff, because that's played out like a Jheri Curl.  Instead, lets explore the less-covered ground of why the movie really sucks: its crude, ham-fisted politics, invidious racism, crappy animation, unfortunate impact on film-making, and hackneyed unoriginality.   

James Cameron's self-righteous injection of partisan politics and one-dimensional morality that is the story of Avatar is ponderous, underhanded, and due to the whopping success of the film, destined to make us all dumber.  The RDA mining corporation, run by a character named Parker Selfridge, is represented as profit-motivated and evil, willing to do whatever it takes - including genocide - for uncertain returns.  The clash between the Na'vi (Honestly, what's with the breath mark?  An umlaut seemed too pretentious?) and RDA reminds me of the simplistic good versus evil narrative of most comic books, where the superhero is endowed by some sort of natural or spiritual deus ex machina and battles the evil forces of - inevitably - a wealthy businessman or scientist.  As Avatar has all the thematic complexity of a bad comic book, it's hard to see it as the masterpiece twelve-years-in-the-making it's been hailed as, and not as the product of the decadent final stages of a pervasive Hollywood meme.  I wonder if director Cameron was so lost in focus groups, financial projections, and delusions of grandeur (He is the King of the World after all.) that he failed to realize his film treats adults like morally incompetent losers in a Spurlockian fashion.  In the words of Turtle from Entourage, "“James Cameron, baby! This could be the worst piece-of-shit movie ever and it’ll still make a billion dollars.”

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Action Movie Review: 300

300 burned hot, loud and fast through the popular consciousness of 2007.  Clearly the action movie of the year- if not the most iconic movie of any type - it had a je ne sais quoi that made it immediately intelligible for everyone.  Yet, beneath the slow motion capes and oiled, tanned abs a festering sickness hid, making it a Trojan horse for an ahistorical nationalism. Combining the themes of Triumph of the Will with the pathos of a Marine recruitment video and the lazy visuals of an M-rated video game, 300 is a potent spoonful of sugar for moviegoers looking to escape their banal lives of not thinking too hard about important things to a place where they don't have to think at all about unimportant things.  

Any moviegoer expecting more briskly lost that innocence when the damn thing opened on a field of infant skulls as two flawless, superheroic Aryan men decide whether or not to kill a baby if it fails to meet certainly eugenic standards. Should the baby make the cut, it will be beaten and starved to toughen it into a super soldier. Don't worry though, the Spartans don't get off on this sort of thing, there are plenty of crying mothers around to show that they are just doing their duty creating the master race.  These are noble, isolationist Nazis, content to cannibalize their own - but you better not fuck them (but won't it be cool to see someone do it anyway?).

From that initial scene till the last overwrought second- where the whole movie is revealed to be the long version of William Wallace's "but they'll never take our FREEEEdom" speech in Braveheart- 300 pits our perfect looking, straight, white heroes against the forces of evil: black people, Asian people, ugly people, gay people, diplomatic people and people who have sex outside of marriage. Much has been made about how gay the Spartans look oiled up in big red capes, but they make it clear that they aren't like those "boy lovers" in Athens. The Spartans aren't gay, they are just phalluses that rip and tear through their effeminate foes; they are the Platonic (he was a boy lover too) form of "top," all swaggering machismo and swinging dick. The slow motion shots of bloody penis spears thrusting through less masculine men only cement the comparison.

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Book Review: Bruce Bartlett - The New American Economy

Bruce Bartlett's conservative economic bona fides are apparent in his resume: he started as a member of Ron Paul and Jack Kemp's Congressional staff, then became Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee during the Reagan administration and later served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Economic Policy at the Treasury Department under H. W. Bush.  He literally wrote the book on supply-side economics, with Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action in 1981.  With such unimpeachable conservative economic credentials, Bartlett feels free to slaughter some of the right's sacred cows in his recent book, The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and the New Way Forward.  He rehabilitates John Maynard Keynes as a misunderstood conservative, calls for the victory celebration and subsequent retirement of supply-side economics and defends President Obama's stimulus plan as the only thing to do.

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Book Review: David Loyn - In Afghanistan

In a new reoccurring feature, The Inductive will review relevant policy books.

David Loyn's In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation tells the story of history forgotten and repeated.  Afghanistan has never been important in and of itself, but it touches so many important things, geographically, strategically, politically and religiously, that the great powers sought to possess it and had to pay again and again to learn that it will not be ruled.  Peppered with references to current battles in its descriptions of the violence of antiquity and as it reaches the modern day the locations reveal the permanent violence that we continue.  I felt overwhelmed by the sense that our current war there was not even the culmination of history, but its pathetic continuation as a lesson forever unlearned.  

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The Cove and the Self-Righteousness of Activists

The Cove, a 2009 documentary directed by former National Geographic photographer Louis Psihoyos, boasts an enviable collection of awards and critical acclaim.  The film won audience awards at Sundance, Hot Docs, Silver Docs, Sydney, and Maui, Golden Space Needle in Seattle, Best Feature Documentary in Galway, Best Theatrical and Best in Festival at Blue Ocean, Truly Moving Picture at Heartland, Best Feature Film and Best Storytelling in Nantucket, Winner at Newport Beach, Jury Award in Traverse City, and was selected Best Documentary by the National Board of Review, L.A. Film Critics, and New York Film Critics Online.  The Cove has a 95% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an average score of 82 on Metacritic.  It has been shortlisted for a Best Documentary nomination for the 2010 Academy Awards.  In the words of Metacritic, that is "universal acclaim."

The film's subject is dolphin hunting in Japan: a group of American activists sneak into a private cove used by local fishermen to trap migrating dolphins and film the subsequent slaughter. Yes—that’s right—the Japanese hunt and murder/death/kill cute little baby genius dolphins like Darwin from Seaquest.  While South Park devoted an entire episode to ripping the documentary, Michelle Orange of Movie Line puts it best:

How much of this (The Cove) should we believe? As a piece of propaganda, The Cove is brilliant; as a story of ingenuity and triumph over what seems like senseless brutality, it is exceptionally well-told; but as a conscientious overview of a complex and deeply fraught, layered issue, it invokes the same phrase as even the most well-intentioned, impassioned activist docs: Buyer beware. 

Japanese consumption of whale and dolphin meat and Japan's general spurning of International Whaling Commission resolutions are extremely complex issues that should be examined soberly.  Unfortunately, the activists in The Cove—like many of the louder, more self-righteous environmentalists—skip the part where they take time to consider the multifaceted, layered issue and rush blindly in convinced the world is comprised of evil, greedy men for them to battle.  Even more unfortunately, this attitude turns off many naturally skeptical people (the support of which the environmental movement sorely needs) from real and important causes.

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