Forget It Jake, It's Seattle

Police Beat

I'm a crime film fan. This is not a crime film. The crime in this film is not a part of the plot, but rather a part of the setting.

Police Beat is about an immigrant, far from his family, struggling to deal with the complex rules of 21st century American love. His heartache is the constant foreground of this movie, displayed as internal monologue in Wolof and written as English subtitles. The criminals and victims we see provide a lurid backdrop for his despair.

The filmmakers have created a Seattle here that is so beautiful and intricate that it becomes a de facto character in the story. Seattle demands his constant attention, but his thoughts always drift to his absent girlfriend. While investigating a murder threat, he asks to use the victim's phone so he can check for messages from her.

The movie is a wonderful twist on past and present police procedurals. Z is the opposite of Joe Friday, that crime-solving automaton from Dragnet. Z finds common-sense solutions to Seattle's problems, ending most of his reports with "investigated and released."

The movie is very funny in subtle ways: the inanity of the criminals and victims, the general goofiness of Seattle, and Z's own saddle-sore walk that recalls at once both John Wayne and Barney Fife. Beckoning a confused old man out of Elliot Bay, Z tells him, "You must come out of the water. This water is for ships, not for humans."

If you've been frustrated in love, it will be easy for you to identify and root for Z. He wants to put her out of his mind, but he just can't.

It's About Time We Acted Like Adults

It's a bit odd to go into a darkened movie theater--the scene of American escapism for the last one hundred years--to receive such a brisk wake-up call. Still, watching this movie in a theater with hundreds of strangers is, I think, the best way to view it because we are all in this together.

If you've been politically aware in the last 10 years, chances are there isn't any one fact in this movie that you haven't heard before. It is a shocking movie nonetheless, and the shock comes from seeing all those facts marshalled together, presenting a clear-cut case. Here's the inconvenient truth: the earth is getting warmer, that our actions are the reasons why it is getting warmer, and that we must all work together to solve this problem or else it will become a crisis for humanity.

The good news is that there are things we can do now that will hopefully avert or diminish the coming havoc, but the first step is learning about the problem. Even though this film is intercut with scenes that often feel like a Al Gore political ad, it's the best way for most people to learn about this problem. The data is explained in easy-to-digest graphics and examples.

I urge you to see this movie. Take your parents, take your kids. Let's save ourselves before it's too late.

Dream: My Repeat Burgler

Last night, while we were having dinner, we turned on the TV and watched a little of a really bad Clint Eastwood movie called Absolute Power. Clint plays a jewel theif who watches the Secret Service kill a woman who was having rough sex with the President of the United States of America. Ugh. This horribly distasteful premise is supported by a sloppy plot and hare-brained writing. For example, the First Lady starts the cover-up right away and orders one of the SS agents to check the woman for evidence of sex since the Prez is too drunk to remember if he cleared all the bases. SS agent: "I'm no gynocologist." First Lady: "I just made you one!" Ick.

I think the movie made me dream of burglery. I dreamt that I was awoken by the door bell late one night. I opened the door and there was a policeman. He started talking to me through the screen door, but I couldn't understand him. I tried to open the door and turn on the porch light, but I suddenly lost motor control of my arms. I kept fumbling for the light switch and the doorknob, but I couldn't find them. I was apologizing, but my lips and tongue were thick and I could only mumble out the words. It's like I was having a stroke. Wendy came up came up behind me and engaged the cop.

After he left, I regained my senses and Wendy started to tell me what he wanted. Then we heard a noise in the bedroom. I ran inside and found a burgler going through our things. I wrestled him to the ground while Wendy called 911. I hit him several times in the face, but he was able to get me off my balance and knock me over. He escaped.

The next night, we had a dinner party. I was telling our guests about what had happened, when I heard a noise from the other room. I went in and found the same burgler going through our guests coats and purses. This time I hit him repeatedly in the face--almost as though he couldn't fight back. I felt queasy and guilty for hitting him, but I didn't stop until he was unconcious. He was just a kid in his late teens.

Columbia: I [heart] Huckabees

Wendy and I went to see this movie last night at the Ragtag Cinema in Columbia, MO last night.

Before we went in, I overheard one person ask the theater's owner what "I Love Huckabees" was about. The owner corrected him: "I Heart Huckabees," he said, "is difficult to explain. It's about a young man who hires existential detectives to sort our his life." I think it's more about the strain of our shattered beliefs.

Albert (Jason Schwartzman) does go to the existential team to resolve a series of coincidence in which he runs into the same tall African man on three separate occasions. Lily Tomlin's approach is to divine an answer in the most mundane details of his day-to-day life--she spies on him at all hours of the day, goes through his trash, and trails the people in his life. Dustin Hoffman, on the other hand, goes to work on understanding of the world by goading him into breaking down his experiences into quantum physics; things are simultaneously neither here nor there and everything is interconnected. Meanwhile, a nihilistic French woman insinuates herself into his life by representing another existential view, that nothing is connected and that nothing matters. The woman, a former student of the two detectives, is at war with them over this young man's soul.

The movie is too long by half and is filled with bits and pieces gleaned from much more coherent essays. In a nutshell, the hero learns that he is in a constant state of self-sabotage, that he is the one who starts the chain reactions that eventually lead him to failure.

More interesting is the political position the film stakes out. Most of the characters are confused, do-gooding lefties who are hopelessly mired in a post-belief state. The detectives search for clues in the trash or in the way a subject brushes his teeth. They convince him to lie down inside a closed-up body bag in their office so he can perform mental exercises (which, he learns afterward, he can also do by just closing his eyes--still, they force him into the body bag again later in the movie). The French nihilist shows him and his "other" (a partner-in-loss played by Mark Whalberg) how to reach a state of understanding by beating each other in the face with a balloon and by pushing the hero's face into the mud. In contrast, the Christian family we meet are content to live in a nice suburban house, eat dinner together, be religiously observant, and to share their extra with an orphaned African who, like them, is merely seeking to better himself in the land of opportunity...and score some celebrity photographs. Wahlberg lays into them at dinner for their complicity in their consumption of petroleum, and the family just doesn't see his point. They're living by the rules and trying to better the world--so what if they have an SUV in the driveway?

Clearly, as the filmmakers have set the scene, the crazy ones are the truth-seeking duo who storm out of the house and shake their heads in disapproval at the family.

We also see the sterile corporate office of Huckabees that gets into the open-spaces scene to improve its public image and mysteriously decides that the land in question--the one being saved from development--would be a great place to put a new supercenter. This project actually becomes Brad's undoing. When the other folks from the Open Spaces committee learn what has happened, they spit on him in disgust. He whines to them, "But I saved 20 of the trees!"

So what's it all mean?

It all comes down to faith. In the absence of proof, faith can steer you in the right direction or in the wrong direction, but the point is that it's steering you. Without a rudder, you will go nowhere.

The Center of Convenience

Today is Monday; I have been in Vegas since Friday night. I am at a place called Terrible Herbst getting an oil change for Mom's Isuzu truck. Mike Lennon came out from LA to hang out with me & mom. We had a good time together--mostly we went out for meals and talked while mom played at the casino.

   On Saturday, we all went to see About Schmidt. They didn't enjoy it much, but I thought it was a great character study and a cautionary tale about an unexamined life. The character would save money obsessively and was much more concerned with having his needs met than meeting the needs of those close to him. He even constructed his own realities to suit his needs rather than confront his growing irrelevance/impotence. He has created such a well-worn groove in his life--a groove that swallows all of his relationships--that he stopped listening to the people around him and has even stopped seeing that the world has responded by shutting him out.

The movie starts in Shakespearean fashion with a banquet in honor of Schmidt's retirement. He's worked for 40 years at Woodman insurance; the name of the company is a subtle nod to his personality. As an actuary, he renders the lives of people only in abstraction--his job converts their hopes, dreams, and fears into dumb, naked probability. The only faces that emerge from the banquet crowd are those of his wife, his best friend, and his successor.

Part of what makes this movie so interesting is its interaction between plot and character. The plot throws realistic developments at him, and Schmidt reacts by believing each event defines the final true course for the rest of his life. Each one, though, is a false summit. Schmidt thinks he's arrived only to find out there's another summit right behind it.

The first summit is when he goes back to Woodman to help tie up some of the loose ends from his job. The new guy gives him the bum rush out of his office, and Schmidt finds down on the street that all of his hard work, which was neatly placed in storage boxes, is now sitting out in the rain next to a garbage dumpster. Schmidt felt a responsibility to Woodman, but it was misplaced. They were happy to get someone well-trained in computer modeling to replace Schmidt's slide rule. His wife asks him about his day, and he lies to her outright, saying that it was a good thing he went down there since they really needed his help. This behavior is repeated throughout the movie and shows his defense mechanism against his own irrelevance. Ironically, it's also the leading cause of his irrelevance. His alternate reality shuts him off from those around him.

After this first defeat, Schmidt decides to become a foster father to an impoverished African boy. He gets the pitch on TV and starts sending him money and hand-written letters. Aside from being a convenient way of inserting internal monologue into the story, "Little Nduku" becomes a surrogate for all the people in his life; Nduku is his confidant and his responsibility. Moreover, since he doesn't ever expect to receive a letter from Nduku, he sees the boy as citizen No. 2 in his alternate universe. The boy can never question or even ignore the contents of his letters, also, since Schmidt is providing the money. Schmidt is sending messages of desperation in a bottle.

This relationship informs the one with his daughter. She's getting married to Randall, a loveable loser. The course of the movie puts him at different angles, trying to prevent their getting married. He believes that Randal is not good enough for her, which may in fact be the case, but his judgement is blurred by putting his daughter up on a pedestal. She's not as talented, smart, or beautiful as he wants to believe that she is, and that to him, this marriage would be undeniable proof of his failure as a father.

Randall, however, provides an even more alarming representation--the mirror image of Schmidt's failure as a man. To Schmidt, Randall is a deluded loser. As a deluded loser himself, however, Schmidt is clinging to himself as a success. Look to the scene where he snoops in Randall's room to find all his "participation" trophies and compare that to Schmidt's blaming his family for never making it out of his job in 30 years.

A Rainy Day in Seattle

Wendy and I went into the city yesterday. We were supposed to meet a lot of members of her animation organization at a screening of Santa Vs. the Snowman 3-D at the Pacific Science Center. We got there about an hour early, in unusually torrential rains (rain in Seattle is usually a little thicker than a mist), but they had already sold out. We thought about staying for an hour just so we could be there for members who might brave the rain to find out that it was sold out, but we didn't since there wasn't really any other options for us to see it that day.

We went to the Seattle Art Museum instead, to see an exhibit on Mexican Modernism. I thought it was very good, but also very crowded, which leads to a less than great art experience. Probably so crowded because of the rain and the new fascination about Frida Kahlo, thanks to the new film Frida. Afterwards we met some friends in Redmond for some great Japanese food at a place called either "Tuna House" or "I Love Sushi." And then after that, we went to a party at a multimillion-dollar house of some owners of a local animation studio, that is scoring some Internet success with a music video called "White Trash Christmas". Everyone (especially the hosts) were really nice and friendly to us, the house was beautiful, the food looked great (catered with an open bar). They also showed the film, which was pretty funny. Too bad we ate before we got there...

Hamlet on the Holodeck

I've been reading a book called Hamlet on the Holodeck for the last couple of days, and it's given me an idea for a baseball-themed collaborative hypertext novel called "Home 5, Away 4." I've been throwing the idea around for a couple of months, but I wasn't sure how I could organize it. I think if I start with a box score, it can block the story of the game into segments. Then, for each segment (titled something like "fly out to right"), I can insert the radio announcer's monolog, and players thoughts during the game. The references during those segments can then spin off to people in the dugout, people in the stands, people listening at home, people not even aware of the baseball game that afternoon.

Wendy and I went last night to see The Man Who Wasn't There. We saw it at the very quaint Lynwood Theater on the island, and we did plan to have dinner at the cafe next door, but we were turned away by the prices on the menu. We don't often go to such expensive restaurants, but when we do, we don't do so an hour before a movie is supposed to start. We drove back to Safeway for deli food, which was cheap and worth every penny. The movie wasn't as good as I was expecting. I love Coen bros. films, and I especially love film noir, but this lacked energy. Their idea was, obviously, to have a character who didn't have any presence, one who just let life happen to him. That's especially hard to do because if the character doesn't care what happens to him, there's little incentive for the audience to care. I didn't dislike the film; I appreciate its effort. It's just that I felt like looking at my watch a little too often.