Critique the critics

I know I promised something on friendship, and there is more and more "research" material piling up daily, but I'll start with something else.

As I left home today for the gym, I noticed that I had inadvertently left my BlackBerry® at home. I know, Maryam, it's a big source of shame, but I'm a relative newbie. This is only relevant because following my workout, I rode my bike to Chestnut Hill Café, Lancaster's haven of sanity (or insanity, if that's what you like best). Not having my handheld device on which to tweet, e-mail, text and play Sudoku or Word Mole, I resorted to whatever section of the New York Times happened to have been left on one of the tables.

It was the film review section. Now, a handful of my dozen followers may recall that I had dabbled in some reviewing of silver screen productions on this very blog, but today I'll do something much wilder. I will attempt to review three reviews of films I have not yet seen. I'm sure this has been done before. I've never read such a piece, but I don't care enough to google it and check.

The review of Woody Allen's new film, Whatever Works, was as entertaining as it was (expectedly) annoying. Critics love comparing any of the former Mr. Konigsberg's newest works to any number of his olden ones. They also occasionally compare him to other directors and accuse him of not being as good as the directors they argue he was trying to imitate. Now I agree that Annie Hall was fuckin' awesome. So fuckin' what? I also loved most of the Almodóvar films I've seen, with or without Penéleope Cruz. But when I watch a Woody Allen movie, I consider it a genre of its own. I guess Almodóvar is another of those genre-of-his-own directors. Robert Altman sure is (when my mother and I were watching A Prairie Home Companion, she leaned over and said, "it's just like Nashville!" to which I replied, "all of his films [e.g., Prêt-à-Porter, Gosford Park] are like Nashville – shit, don't you hate my digressions?).

So here comes A. O. Scott in the NYT with another mediocre review of a Woody flick (great title, I'll give him that: "Kvetch Your Enthusiasm"). And it's shot in Manhattan again (after a few European-shot films, in case you've been under a rock, no offense) and has Larry David as the Woody-like character. Conclusion: a must-see.

The next two I'm less passionate about, but their less-than-perfect reviews have convinced me that I will probably enjoy them.

On The Narrows, Stephen Holden writes that it "can be appreciated as the film equivalent of a reasonably palatable pasta dish concocted from a familiar recipe and served in a no-frills restaurant." Now have I ever turned down a decent fettucine carbonara? A nondescript, yet yummy lasagne? From what it seems, this is another New York movie, one of those that spans more than one borough, has a slightly more masculine than, Leo DiCaprio-looking adorable star, and promises some tension between blue-collar street smarts and ivory-tower goofiness. I'll go see it, I think.

Finally, the only movie I actually had known about before reading today's Times, and one that got probably the most decent review of all three (by Manohla Dargis), Year One. While Ms. Dargis digs up other, more "classic" pseudo-(pre-)historic films, by such geniuses as Mel Brooks, here's one thing about this movie that makes it a priori hilarious: Jack Black and Michael Cera in the leading roles.

I know a lot of people think JB is vulgar, that he overacts, and for those and/or other reasons simply hate his guts. Michael Cera, I guess some people might call him a fad, a fluke, a soon-to-be-has-been. But here's what I see. Jack Black as the anti-hero in School of Rock and as (the anti-?)Christ in Prop 8 – The Musical. And MC not only as the awkward son of the Jason Bateman character in Arrested Development, not only as the complex geek/jock/stud(???) in Juno, but also as a character in and of his own. Just go to YouTube and type his name for some gems. So there you go, a few shallow reasons to see these two in action, together.

Okay, enough of this pop-culture nonsense. I'll be back in a bit with the serious goods.

Summertime...

Sure, it's only mid-May and today's forecast calls for no more than 63 degrees Farenheit (that's 17 Celsius), but in our lazy world of academia this is the beginning of summer, the end of classes, end of grading (I was done 25.5 hours before the deadline!), and a catastrophe of rising tides in the blogosphere. I haven't written a word here since Cairo, and I expect to squirt out gigabytes of text in a very short time. The good news is that I'll probably get tired and/or lazy (oops: bad writing; I had already used "lazy" in this paragraph) and relieve the world of my ramblings much sooner than expected. Which probably means this whole expectation thing is nothing but a paradox.

When I first moved to the United States as an "adult," in 2000, I subscribed to the New York Times. How could I not? I think that for the first few weeks or months I also subscribed to the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was either free, or deeply discounted, and I felt the urge to get a local perspective on things. Whatever. Needless to say, my priorities quickly changed and reading the paper was no longer on the top of the list. I went through periods of full subscription, no subscription, weekend subscription, and as of late, a Sunday subscription. 

To be frank, I am still too lazy (hey, this is a new paragraph!) to read the entire paper, and in most cases, as I indicated in my first post (probably still my best one; check it out!), I typically read only certain portions of the New York Times Magazine. Though the Op-Eds are often worthy of my time too.

Now nobody wants to read my critique of the Times' writers' critique of the world. But here's something that's been bugging me for a while. I really want to like Maureen Dowd. Can't really put my finger on the reason. Maybe because she's a woman with a regular, serious column in the NY Times. Perhaps it's the brevity of her column (it's actually a column, not four or five). Or could it be her somewhat literary style of conveying the same ideas other writers express in their dry, journalistic, unengaged jargon. Or maybe it's just something about the ring of that name: Maureen Dowd. Sounds like a good name to drop at the brunch table with my more sophisticated friends and colleagues.

At any rate, Dowd writes from Washington. I may have even read that she lives in Georgetown. And if I haven't, that's where I imagine she lives. Having lived in the DC area for two years, I find it unimaginable that she would live in Silver Spring or Alexandria. She's gotta be a District gal.

Like everybody who's anybody this week, she's picking on Nancy Pelosi. Of course, she also accuses Dick Cheney of having "done many dastardly things," but that's like accusing a cow of mooing, as Simon Cowell so eloquently put it a couple of weeks ago when one of his colleagues had criticized Adam Lambert of being "too theatrical."

It's hard not to agree with virtually everything Dowd writes this week in her column. But her language, her style, really got on my nerves and reminded me of that DC-insider lingo and behavior that can take away much of the fun of living in Washington. 

Dowd cannot find it in her heart to stick to just one signifier for each signified. "Nancy Pelosi" is also "the liberal speaker from San Francisco," "[t]he stylish grandmother," "the glossily groomed speaker," "the woman who's making Joe Biden seem suave" and "one ambitious congresswoman." And all this, mind you, in a single one-columned column.

Other DC characters each get fewer signifiers, but the ones they get are nauseatingly Washingtonian: 

"The Bushies," I believe, refers to the collective of Bush administrator insiders, starting with "W." himself, and going down the chain of command to "Condi Rice," "Rummy," and my biggest pet peeve, "Vice." I admit, Had I not seen Oliver Stone's docudramedy "W," in which the title character often addresses his vice president simply as "Vice," I probably would have gone back to the beginning of Dowd's column to look for a name whose last name is Vice. 

I also dislike Dowd's chummy reference to "Osama" and "Saddam" by their first names only, although she is not the only one in public discourse to be guilty of such conduct. 

The final, and possibly most telling, insider lingo in this column is "State." That one actually bugged me last night too while listening to Dr. Shirley Anne Warshaw of Gettysburg College speaking on WITF's (the Central Pennsylvania NPR affiliate, based in Harrisburg) "Radio Smart Talk." It brought back memories of Georgetown University professors trying to sound like they're more governmental than the government itself. Oh, and "State" means "State Department," in case you were wondering.

My next post will be about "being 'a gay activist'." I think.