Odds & Ends for the Week Ended Jan. 16, 2010

NEW YORK—I have just a few brief things I feel like mentioning, so I'll pool 'em all in one all-over-the-place post.

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Every week, I try to put aside a couple of long train rides to listen to the podcasts of two public-radio programs: Studio 360 and This American Life. Last week's This American Life program was, I found, unusually compelling, especially its first act, which focuses on a prison lifer in California who maintains hope, against all odds, that he'll eventually be released after his prison parole board, on his seventh try, decides to finally recommend that he be freed. [SPOILER ALERT] Alas, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger overturns the parole board's recommendation, and, maybe a month after the prisoner experiences this bitter defeat, he's heard castigating himself for getting his hopes up too high. (There is an eventual happy ending to this story, however, but I'll leave that for you all to hear for yourselves.)

This story resonated with me in a particular way—not so much because of the man's story, but because it reminded me that I myself tend to get suspicious of ever getting my hopes up too high for something. Ever since high school, I've always had a habit of keeping expectations guarded—because, that way, I'll be pleasantly surprised if those low expectations are fulfilled beyond my wildest dreams, and if things don't go the way I want, I won't be too disappointed. To wit: I applied for the Dow Jones copy-editing internship in 2006 on a whim, and didn't expect much to come out of it; so imagine my delight in receiving a phone call from my to-be-residency director Dr. Edward Trayes a couple months later offering me an internship at The Wall Street Journal's now-defunct copy desk in South Brunswick, N.J. On the other extreme: I had high hopes for Lorin Maazel's performance of Mahler's Eighth Symphony in his last few concerts as music director of the New York Philharmonic last year; alas, the performance turned out to be more workmanlike than inspired, really only coming fully alive in its concluding "Alles Vergängliche" prayer—a rousing, reach-for-the-stars finish in Maazel's hands, but perhaps too little too late. (It was the kind of performance that turned me, for a moment, into a doubter of Mahler's unwieldy Eighth—and that is never a good thing in Mahler performances.)

I don't know if this is necessarily a good way to live a life, and certainly it's not an approach I consistently live by. But, as with most things that you've grown up with, it's a way of thinking—of perhaps controlling emotion, to be more precise—that, I suspect, will stay with me as long as I live, whether I like it or not.

Anyway, if you have an hour to set aside, give this particular This American Life radio episode, entitled "Long Shot," a listen. If nothing else, its first story, about the prison lifer, is gripping, affecting stuff..

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Turning to the personal front, two notable events, one positive and one negative.
The positive event: Remember that irritating clusterfuck over auto-accident-related medical bills and unprocessed claims that inspired me to post something about an image from Terry Gilliam's Brazil? Apparently someone over at Aetna's Hartford, Conn., corporate headquarters was listening! I got a call from someone there last week who says she saw a tweet I had made about a recently denied medical claim. Thus, I explained my whole situation to her, and a couple days later, I started to see all those as-yet unprocessed accident-related medical claims (plus a claim for an H1N1 vaccine I received in December) finally get processed. I'm not free and clear from all this: I still have some payments to make to Robert Wood Johnson for services rendered (my mother had insisted I wouldn't have to pay anything related to that August car accident, because I wasn't at fault; not quite right, it seems), and it turns out one of the claims I thought had already been processed was done incorrectly.

Nevertheless, I'm stunned. Even this Twitter fanatic didn't expect it to carry that kind of power! And who knew that someone at Aetna would, I assume, be looking for these kinds of tweets, and would actually respond to them (or, at least, to mine)? I guess they really do take public relations somewhat seriously.

The negative, however? In a snap of uncontrolled frustration on Friday night (don't ask me why), I stupidly landed a fist on the area to the left of the trackpad and below the keyboard on my MacBook and thereby fatally damaged my hard drive. Yesterday, I was able to get an Apple "Genius" to look at my computer, and he said they could replace the hard drive (for no cost, either, because I have AppleCare). But my external hard drive had been on the fritz for a while now before this happened—lots of clicking noises and such—and thus all the stuff I backed up onto that drive, thanks to Mac's Time Machine feature, may be gone for good. On the bright side, I have some of my important documents backed up on a flash drive, and of course my music files are still on my iPod, so it's not quite a total loss. I will see today, once I get my computer back. Stay tuned...

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Movie time!

As a favor for a friend, I agreed to sit through Avatar, 3-D but not IMAX, again yesterday—and surprisingly enough, I found myself enjoying the film, in all its verbally cheesy, politically problematic, visually entrancing glories, a bit more than I did the first time. That extended war climax is still the same retro-'80s bombast and noise, but oddly enough, I found it less sleep-inducing, and even a bit more rousing the second time around. And that moment near the end when Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) finally glimpses Jake Sully's (Sam Worthington) human form is stirring enough to almost be considered visionary. My take on the film remains essentially unchanged: it's silly but dazzling eye candy. The formalist in me finds the eye candy satisfying enough.

I still wish, however, that I had been able to squeeze in that critically praised sheep-herding documentary Sweetgrass at Film Forum this weekend. Maybe tomorrow night...?

Tonight, however, will be all about the start of the new season of "24." Yes, hipsters, I still watch "24," and I'm not ashamed to admit it. (Whether it's something still worth watching this late in the game is, of course, up for debate. Maybe I'll elaborate on this in a later post.) Tonight will not be about the Golden Globes, however. That I could really care less about. Besides, the supposed "biggest Hollywood party of the year" cuts into valuable "24" time.

Flying Through Visions Digital and Real

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Once again, I have a backlog of films I've seen in theaters but haven't written about here on this blog. Let me see if I can knock off a few in one fell swoop. Here goes...

Avatar (2009; Dir.: James Cameron)
A Christmas Carol (2009; Dir.: Robert Zemeckis)

After all the hype has subsided about Avatar changing the way we look at movies, I'm finding that I can't really muster up much of interest to say about the movie. It is what it is—a bloated and self-important but undeniably amazing technical achievement—and you either accept the whole package, warts and all, or dismiss it all as so much expensive self-indulgence. I was able to accept the whole package, at least for about two hours, before Cameron, guns blazing and bombastic speeches soaring, started to bore me in its lengthy and noisy climactic battle sequence, bringing back bad memories of the soulless wall-to-wall action spectacle that sunk The Matrix Revolutions—part of another bloated, self-important and technically amazing pop epic about imaginary worlds clashing with reality—years ago.

But boy, is the visual spectacle dazzling in its early stretches! Cameron really has thoroughly imagined an impressive new world here, with images that rank among some of the most awe-inspiring in recent cinema—stuff you just can't see anywhere else. And while this alternate universe is wondrously imaginative in and of itself, what makes Avatar emotionally involving as well as visually entrancing in its early stretches is the fact that its wheelchair-bound main character, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is getting his first glimpses of Pandora along with the rest of us. Sully, then, functions as a kind of surrogate for the audience. It's a canny move on Cameron's part, but it works because for about half its 162-minute running time, the visuals fully live up to Sully's innocent awe. (Not even George Lucas was that canny about inspiring wonder in his Star Wars films. While Lucas's fancy creatures and landscapes peppered the wide screen, his characters seemed to take no notice, the assumption being that these figments of his imagination were merely a part of the characters' everyday lives.)

Even Cameron's most stupefying flights of fancy, however, get crushed under the baggage of its paper-thin characters, clumsy storytelling and ham-fisted attempts at topical relevance. Avatar's third act eventually becomes the kind of video-game spectacle that leaves me me more in a state of numb detachment than exhilaration. (To be fair, the climax of Aliens (1986) already felt like a first-person-shooter video game, but the emotional stakes felt higher there than here; Ripley was fighting for her and Newt's life in a real environment, for one thing.) In other words, the wonder gradually wears off, though not to a fatal degree; in hindsight, I can find myself separating the problematic literal elements from the purely visual aspects of the experience.

So sure, I wouldn't mind sitting through Avatar again, especially in IMAX. (I saw it in regular-sized 3-D, by the way. For me, it's either true-blue IMAX or no IMAX at all; none of AMC Loews' IMAX-lite shite!) If anything, though, Henry Selick's Coraline, released much earlier in 2009, featured more impressive 3-D special effects, if only because those effects were situated in a context that didn't forget to back up its eye-popping imagery with an intriguing story and flesh-and-blood human beings. Avatar, a grand—and contradictory, considering the technology involved—myth of returning to the earth and a utopian plea for understanding unfamiliar cultures, more or less embodies the same "rock-'em, sock-'em" mindset that characterized the primitive 3-D features of yore; it may not be throwing things at you from the screen, but the emphasis on spectacle above all else is similar. It's more a refinement of the various digital filmmaking techniques available to Cameron than an advance; in the end, though, technology is still pretty much all you're left with.

Technology is also the only thing Robert Zemeckis's most recent performance-capture animated projects, The Polar Express (2004) and Beowulf (2007), leave you with—at least, that's what many of his harshest critics have said about them. I still haven't seen Beowulf, but I was admittedly a skeptic of the technique after The Polar Express—not so much because of motion capture's lack of visual warmth (or what some might call the "dead-eyes" problem) as with the technology being totally in sync with a distinct chilliness at the heart of Zemeckis's conception (Santa Claus elevated to the level of religious myth, with odd echoes of Riefenstahl to some of the imagery). I can't say that I experienced a road-to-Damascus moment with his latest, A Christmas Carol; nevertheless, after finally seeing it in 3-D a few days before Christmas, I finally grasp what Zemeckis sees in performance capture.

There's a visual freedom about this one that is at times exhilarating, most notably its interpretation of the Ghost of Christmas Past episode: years of Scrooge's memories compressed into one dense 12-minute long take. Could that kind of complicated camera move have been accomplished nearly so easily with live action? I doubt it, and according to Zemeckis himself in this New York Times interview, that's the kind of freedom he finds appealing about digital performance capture. But what's welcome with Zemeckis's Carol compared to The Polar Express is that the technology is, much of the time, placed in service of putting across a fresh and astonishingly faithful interpretation of Dickens's traditional holiday chestnut; despite a few regrettable episodes which, like much of the first half of The Polar Express, feel more like a theme-park ride than a movie, human warmth isn't totally sacrificed. Unlike Avatar, technology serves the story, and not vice versa.

Up in the Air (2009; Dir.: Jason Reitman)

This is far from the X-ray of current-recession-era America that some of its champions claim it to be—but, taken as a romantic comedy-drama with never-fully-realized aspirations to topical relevance, it has its undeniable pleasures. George Clooney, as a frequent flyer whose profession is basically firing people, once again turns on the charisma (perhaps to the detriment of exploring the darker sides of his character). And Vera Farmiga, as his love interest, has never been more foxy onscreen—mostly because her previous directors (Martin Scorsese among them) have used her more for her ability to project desperation than Barbara Stanwyck-like sensuality. Folks, she had me melting in my seat!

Rarely does it cut particularly deep; even more than with Aaron Eckhart's cigarette lobbyist in his debut feature Thank You for Smoking (2005), director/co-writer Jason Reitman treats his amoral main character with kid gloves, backing away from devastating inquiry in favor of a rather inappropriate smoothness. Still, I come here not to bury Reitman; he's far from the "hope for the cinema" that Roger Ebert proclaimed him as earlier this year, but he's a sincere middlebrow artisan, and his failures of nerve seem borne out of deeply felt emotional generosity than calculation. He managed to locate the heart beating underneath Diablo Cody's self-consciously quirky dialogue in Juno (2007); and in Up in the Air, he brings a refreshing affection for characters like Anna Kendrick's hard young entrepreneur and Danny McBride's not-overly-bright brother-in-law—characters that might have been played for caricature and easy laughs in less sensitive hands.

Thanks to Reitman's snappy way with fresh dialogue, a few entertaining visual coups (including a wonderfully edited montage of Ryan Bingham's packing routine early on in the film), and a boatload of sincerity, Up in the Air works best as a wonderful light romantic comedy that once in a while delivers moments of real emotional gravity. I enjoyed the movie a lot...but let's not inflate this breezy Hollywood entertainment into the realm of "film of our time." Despite its lip service to the wounds suffered by laid-off workers across the country, Up in the Air mostly feels removed from anything resembling working-class experience. The film's conception focuses less on the people laid off than the ones laying them off; no amount of featured real-life working-class talking heads mixed in with the movie-star wattage can quite overcome that inherent flaw.