Extra Extra

I'm not sure whether it says more about me, or the film, that I liked Lars and the Real Girl less after watching the cutesy five minute DVD extra where cast and crew are interviewed about Bianca (the titular character who isn't Lars) and pretend that she's actually real (and rather demanding). The Whimsy is almost redeemed by Ryan Gosling's offhand reference to Bianca's appearance (she's supposed to be Brazilian, remember) in a Walter Salles film.

My favorite non-straightforward DVD extra of all time probably remains the bizarre video diary from Magnolia where director Paul Thomas Anderson plays...director Paul Thomas Anderson, and his then-girlfriend Fiona Apple plays...Magnolia, more or less. I loved this so much that I transcribed it, back before YouTube made it available to all.

Just hide in the closet with all your length and your frogs!

Restatement

Wow, that basketball post from yesterday was a mess. I changed directions about three times there. Maybe it's because I almost fell asleep on the bus home from work, so I was actually more alert later on, when I wrote about coy vampires. Anyway, I was trying to communicate, in the end, a few different things, which I'll do much more briefly this time around:

(1) You should read The Last Shot. Everyone should read it. It's a fantastic book, and if you're not interested in basketball just pretend it's about something else you're not interested in but willing to read a compelling and well written book about. It's reporting on events that happened, now, almost twenty years ago, but like its logical companion piece Hoop Dreams (aka the only three hour documentary I watched twice in one day because I was so blown away by it), all that's changed is that rap is more integrated into the mainstream and hairstyles are different. Since the NBA instituted its deplorable age limit, the situation is exactly the same. Except that people are getting paid a lot more now, and the sneaker-sponsored AAU summer league teams are possibly more influential now (though the sneaker market itself is shrinking; I don't know yet what this portends).

(2) I don't know why I went on about Marbury - not someone I spend much time thinking about, NBA-wise - except that, especially as viewed by reading The Last Shot and The Jump at the same time, he is a fascinating figure. I suppose I was trying to complicate the kneejerk reaction towards a particular kind of athlete by saying that his context and upbringing account for a lot of what makes him difficult to like today; if he didn't have those negative qualities, he might well have gotten lost before making it as an NBA player, instead of getting lost after making millions of dollars. Plus I accidentally stumbled into something else: in The Last Shot, one heartbreaking refrain is that parents and educators alike continually wonder if there's something specially wrong with their neighborhood: why, when Lincoln High has been a dominant force in the Public School Athletic League for years, had it never sent an athlete to a Division 1 program? Why do they all struggle to make the 700 on their SATs? The average background for an NBA All-Star is probably something like "poor and disadvantaged but not hopeless." Coney Island at the time of The Last Shot was hopeless. The extra hurdles and damages incurred for a talented athlete to survive Coney Island vs. a rough neighborhood in Oakland in the same time period may account for a lot of the difference between Stephon Marbury and Gary Payton.

(3) One of the main reasons why I was spurred to try and write that post is because I was trying to articulate why, beyond my pure love of the game, I find basketball so engrossing: more than any other sport, the matrix of social issues that surround pro basketball is to my way of thinking indicative and relevant to a lot of things going on socially in America at large. (Or, alternatively, the social issues relevant to basketball are the ones I'm interested in.) The whole system of basketball education, development, and recruitment for - as ultimate goal - the pro game is broken, corrupt, exploitative, and, as I said in the prior post, fetid, rotten, ill. But that's not just of interest to basketball; the System here is an extension, and expression, of the Larger System affecting America overall, and by understanding the exceptional specifics of this instance we find ourselves having larger discussions about race, class, education, social justice, and, to get broad and sentimental, what we want from our public figures and what we want for our children.

Why So Coy?

Okay I lied a little. I decided to watch a brace of shitty vampire movies (the Underworld series, soon to have a third installment) and then followed it up with a pretty good BBC serial called Ultraviolet. This isn't really a review of either one, just a jumping off point for a musing. Maybe gearing up for Buffy.

Both Underworld and Ultraviolet attempt to take a relatively science-informed perspective on the whole vampire schtick, and have the obvious starting point of viewing the vampiric condition as, basically, a virus. Underworld is a little more pretentious with its faux-scientific aspirations and actually tries to just offer a hand-wavy explanation for the virus: a plague swept through a fifth century Hungarian village and killed everybody except one Alexander Corvinus, who, we're supposed to gather, had some genetic mutation that by chance allowed him to survive the plague by mutating it, with the result that he was immortal. So far so good, for what it's worth, and the whole plot of the first movie especially is involved with the fantasy-logic of evolving strains; one of Corvinus' sons wound up being the first vampire and the other the first werewolf. Except that the reason why is that one of them was bitten by a bat and one by a wolf. So this crazy plague-virus-mutation *also* had the ability to, uh, incorporate DNA characteristics transmitted through another animal's saliva. And those characteristics which humans find evocative, rather than the ones which are actually germane. A little dodgier ground. What makes it hilarious is the self-seriousness of the first movie's commentary, where Len Wiseman (the director and co-creator) and Kevin Grevioux (co-creator and the big black dude with the crazy deep voice who plays a werewolf) talk about their desire to make it all plausible within the movie's world. They're not fooling themselves that they're dealing with actual science, but they're gesturing very broadly at the idea that, given their first principles, they've tried to work out something plausible and rigorous, which is an admirable notion that reaches its climax when Wiseman explains that in these movies vampires DO reflect in mirrors because he couldn't come up with a reasonable explanation for why they wouldn't. At which point I burst out laughing because, for fuck's sake, What is the reasonable in-movie scientific explanation for being allergic to ultraviolet light?!?!?! Because the vampire ancestor was bitten by a BAT?! So "prefers the night-time" is glossed as "will burst into flame when exposed to the sun?" JEEEEZ, guys.

(NB1: The "vampires reflect" thing is actually put to very clever and subtle story use in the first film, so props for that.)
(NB 2: The association between vampires and bats is much younger than the idea of the vampire. The word "vampire" in Slavic languages traces back about a thousand years, but the various cultural manifestations of the idea [in Slavic and other cultures] are much older. The vampire bat, on the other hand, is indigenous to South America and wasn't encountered by white men until the 1600s; the bat was named for the beast, not the other way around. Also, vampire bats are a lot smaller than the bats you see in vampire-associated contexts these days. Fairness does compel me to note that bats were considered to have mystical properties in Europe, and so maybe there was some association predating the vampire bat after all. Probably not, though.)
(NB 3: The idea that vampires are allergic to sunlight is less than a hundred years old and seems to date to the film Nosferatu in 1927. In Stoker's Dracula, the titular character is weakened and less powerful in sunlight, but fully capable of walking around in the daytime. Incidentally, the no-reflection theme is considerably older [though not at all universal] and may date to the days when mirrors were backed with silver, which was considered a good all purpose material for fighting supernatural bad guys. Werewolves with silver allergies, by the way, is apparently a sufficiently rigorous scientific concept for the Underworld braintrust.)

This kind of myopic seriousness is indicative of Wiseman and Grevioux's contentions that they're just really big "genre" fans and wanted to make a completely unapologetic and uncompromising "genre" film. I hate the use of "genre" in this sense, where it's deployed as a descriptive noun to mean "stylistic or plot-based ghetto". What they really mean is "horror," except they don't because they admittedly made an action movie. So what they do mean is, in fact, "not-'literary'." What this results in is taking the world-building conceit superseriously, which is a valid way to go except for where the whole "mirrors vs. sunlight" and "being bitten by a bat" thing makes it ridiculous. I certainly wish that at times Buffy had been more careful with its own continuity and world-building, but Joss Whedon was always forthright about that not being his primary or secondary interest. Whedon is a gigantic "genre" fan as well, but his engagement with genre tropes is to play with deconstruction and collage of those elements. Buffy's raison d'etre, particularly in the first three seasons, was the extended articulation of the horror genre as a metaphor for everyday life: your school is a pit of Hell, if your mom won't let you go out tonight it will be the end of the world, sleeping with a boy will change him in very real and upsetting ways. This would be insufferable if the show didn't have a sense of humor and, really, a sense of camp about its own mechanisms; it couldn't be what it wanted and shoot for the straight-faced tone to which Underworld aspires.

(NB 4: Another mechanism of the whole "we're just big fans of 'genre'" thing is the way in which Underworld is sort of fan-service-y. Wiseman talks on that same commentary track about how, filming a particular shot of Kate Beckinsale walking from behind, he told her "I'm really sorry, but this is absolutely going to be in the trailer." And it was. [He doesn't mention, on the commentary, that during filming he and Beckinsale began a relationship {they're now married} and she ended a longstanding relationship with the father of her daughter, which gentleman was also a main character in the movie!] Vampires are sexy, post Anne Rice, and part of being "genre" for these guys is putting attractive women [and let's be honest, Beckinsale in skintight black leather is one of the things that kept me awake through these two flicks] in revealing costumes. On the other hand, there are no female werewolves in either movie, because presumably werewolves as conceived here aren't sexy. In the Buffyverse, werewolves [in their wolf form] aren't sexy either, but there are two female werewolves of some considerable appeal anyway, one played as a somewhat unlikeable femme fatale and one played as a sympathetic romantic interest. Not to mention, of course, Seth Green's turn as Oz. In Whedon's world, the emotional logic rules everything else, whereas in Underworld the allegiance really winds up being "what do we think is cool." Really really really hairy chicks is apparently not cool.)

Ultraviolet is much better. For one thing, it has Idris Elba (fans of The Wire take note!) and Jack Davenport (fans of the original BBC's Coupling take note!) among other players in a very strong cast. It's six episodes long, tells a compact dramatic arc, and works on its own terms much better than Underworld. The show is much less concerned with origins; the science works to the degree that humans have figured it out (yes, it's a blood virus, and you can do things like isolate the active ingredient in garlic and use it in a smoke bomb), but the whence and wherefore of vampires is left unexplained, unknowable. One character deduces that it was exposure as a young boy to vampires which drove another character into the priesthood - what but a vampire could be a clearer sign that there were supernatural powers in the world? By being less ambitious with the extent of explanations, Ultraviolet's science works better and the show overall is much more compelling. It does, however, share a title with a Milla Jovovich movie directed by Kurt Wimmer, and the Netflix envelopes for the show think they're holding the movie.

Fun fact: the Milla Jovovich Ultraviolet is ALSO sort of about vampires! I did not know this from the trailers to that movie! Like, no mention of vampirism, or indication of explicitly and uniquely vampiric qualities! It's like they didn't want us to know there were vampires in the movie. Which by the way, nobody says the word "vampire" in the show Ultraviolet. They call them "Code Fives" - i.e., "Code V" - or, for slang, "leeches", but usually "them". The show's creator has said he thought it'd be easier to sustain the tone he wanted if nobody used the word. Also: while people do use the word "werewolf" in the Underworld movies, the preferred term is "Lycan", as in "lycanthropy". And the reason is because Len Wiseman and Kevin Grevioux thought werewolves were a little cheesy and didn't think they could or their audience could take seriously the use of the word over and over. Hence lycans. GUYS: You developed a whole movie around the idea of a war between werewolves and vampires and then you thought that you were a little embarrassed by the fucking word werewolf?!?! This is what I was talking about before! It's a perfectly good word with perfectly respectable and scary Germanic roots. So anyway, I knew the movies had werewolves when I saw the trailers because I deduced it from the whole clever "lycans" thing, but otherwise I might not have known until I started reading the press. And finally: I haven't seen I Am Legend, and I'm not really interested. But: the early press, at least, for the movie gave no indication as to who or what the monsters were. At the time I assumed that they'd followed the book and made them vampires, but instead they made them, apparently, some sort of zombie-like thing, because they decided they'd rather re-make The Omega Man, itself a profoundly unfaithful adaptation of the source novel, one of the great works of 20th century horror. Some day someone will make a faithful adaptation that actually understands what the fucking point of the book is, but until then I'm left to wonder why only the first movie version - The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price - bothered to use vampires instead of vaguely associated zombie creatures. Are undefined zombielike mutants so much more palatable than vampires?

(NB 5: This, from the wikipedia article on the Will SmithI Am Legend, fucking kills me everytime I read it: "The director [Francis Lawrence, who directed Constantine and a bunch of music videos] had watched The Pianist with a low volume so as to not disturb his newborn son, and realized that silence could be very effective cinema." This is priceless. An adult who aspires to be a film director took until the last few years to realize that silence could be effective as a dramatic tool? He didn't notice this from watching any actual movies that intentionally deployed long stretches of silence? This guy got to direct a fucking movie?)

People seem to be anxious about admitting their vampire and werewolf movies have vampires and werewolves in them. They seem to feel the need to disguise or apologize or alter them so as to not seem so - what, silly? If the idea is silly it's silly even when you call your werewolves lycans. The (late) WB network apparently always had a problem with the title Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I can see why; like with Battlestar Galactica, in addition to struggling with the memory of a predecessor work bearing the same name, the title is a barrier to someone presuming he can take the thing seriously. But I do like Whedon's rejoinder, which is that it's all right there: the show is a blend of comedy (Buffy), horror (Vampire) and action (Slayer). What else do you need to know?

Who Did You Think He Would Be?

(I know my small readership doesn't give a shit about basketball. The Finals are over! Your hometown team won! What's left to say? Well, I have like 2.5 basketball posts left in me, at least until the Olympics start, if I decide to write about the Olympics. Hopefully whatever I come up with basketball-wise here and in the near future will be a little more general interest.)

I somewhat accidentally started re-reading The Last Shot, by Darcy Frey (a freelance journalist who also wrote the article which inspired the movie Pushing Tin) the other day, and am unspurprisingly engrossed in it again. It's easily the best book I've ever read about basketball - though there are some other avowed classics I should check out, at least one out of print - and for human interest and literary quality absolutely crushes The Jump, its logical prose companion piece. The Jump is about Sebastian Telfair, of Coney Island and Lincoln High School, and follows him during his senior year of high school (class of '04) as he navigates the college recruitment process while simultaneously weighing the option to jump to the NBA, which he does. Telfair goes late in the lottery and the book closes on a high note that's probably well earned: Telfair has done extremely well for himself and, I hope, for his family, even though he's been an unmitigated disappointment thus far as a professional basketball player. My criticism of The Jump - which I read a few years ago and might be remembering unfairly - is that it treated the overwhelmingly rank and fetid bullshit people like Telfair need to go through for the one in a million shot at escaping Coney Island as a series of hurdles an aspiring kid could conquer, rather than the manifestations of a broken system that stifles and chokes everyone but the one player in a thousand who gets a shot at pro ball.

The other criticism is that Telfair isn't the most interesting guy in the book; his cousin is. His cousin was also in The Last Shot, which follows three seniors and one freshman on the Lincoln High basketball team during the 1991-1992 academic year. All of them have, in varying degrees, the basketball skills to at least earn a scholarship to a four year institution and maybe go pro. Without spoiling the book's heartbreaking afterward, this is what happened to the three seniors: one dropped out of junior college and as of 2004 is scraping by but actively pursuing his non-basketball related passions; one suffered a horrible car accident in the middle of his college career and is now physically and mentally disabled, working as a plumber and maintenance man; one is dead, a possible suicide. And the freshman? He's the most interesting character in The Jump, maybe the most interesting character in The Last Shot, Sebastian Telfair's cousin: Stephon Marbury. Multiple NBA All-Star, 20 points and 8 assists per game for his career (possibly still only the second man in league history with those marks, but I'm not going to check), over $100 million in gross lifetime earnings from basketball, let alone his endorsements.

Marbury is a shadow at the edges of The Jump, the cousin who made it, the model to follow, and yet a bitter and inscrutable man seemingly jealous of his cousin's impending success, also tagged with the label of someone who hasn't done enough to help those he left behind in Coney Island. Marbury's the closest thing to an enigma in The Last Shot as well; the preternaturally talented freshman who walks onto a team of extremely talented seniors and is, instantly, on their level if not better. He is, perhaps unintentionally, constantly marked and written as The Other in the book: he gets treated differently by the coaches, the other players kid on the square by saying things like, "Here comes Stephon, future of the neighborhood," and he himself is at fourteen astoundingly arrogant and aloof. On the other hand, people have known about his basketball ability since he was SIX YEARS OLD. What you need to know about Stephon Marbury is that he is the fourth and last Marbury brother who played basketball at Lincoln High and was considered a future pro, but he's the only one that made it (the others weren't able to either go pro or get a degree). The final hope of a storied family, into which all the weight of his brothers' failures has been poured, by his parents, his family, his neighborhood. What you need to know about Stephon Marbury is that a school custodian stopped him in the halls and told him, "Don't fuck up like your brothers." Marbury's father refuses to cooperate with Frey unless he gets paid. Burned by the supposed failures of three sons, he watches the development of his last hope with ferocity and a small-minded solipsism that, Frey eventually concedes, may be the most rational response to the world with which he's been presented. Marbury pére accuses Frey of buying the kids off in the same way college coaches are constantly slipping favors and cash and promises of more to come under the table, and in the moment of accusation he sounds like a fool and a pathetic man - "At the Seven-Eleven in Gettysburg: I saw you buying them slushies!...And now I suppose you want me to think you did it because you're just a nice guy. Oh, come on!"

Oh, come on indeed, Mr. Marbury. And yet: "having spent several months with Stephon, I am beginning to wonder how he and his father are supposed to act. The entire basketball establishment has been trying to buy Stephon for years." The Marbury response is to assume that they're being used and shamelessly demand that they get their in turn. If you want to make money off of me, you'll give me mine first. If I'm going to be used and exploited and then dropped when convenient like all these other kids, then I will have no shame in demanding my cut of the pie. And who can blame them, really?

This post has taken a more Marbury-centric turn than I intended, so I'm going to stay true to that. Originally I was going to focus more on college recruiting, but a single passage suffices to encapsulate the rotten heart of all this. Rollie Massimino, then the coach at Villanova, makes his pitch to one of Lincoln High's seniors by stressing the importance of family, the close relationships he has with his players, their mutual trust, etc. ad nauseam. Lincoln's coach, daringly, cuts through the bullshit for a minute: "But all you coaches are looking to move."

When a player signs a letter of intent to attend a certain school, the college's conference requires him to honor that commitment, whether or not the coach who recruited him stays around to honor his commitments. Now that many top coaches are compensated in the high six-figures...they regularly migrate from school to school, shopping for the best deal, unrestricted by the best rules that bind the players.

Massimino's response is to laugh and then seriously note that, when he was younger, he could've promised the player a forty year relationship if he signed with Villanova. Now, in his older years, Massimino can only offer a twenty year guarantee. "Ten years from now, you'll call me to talk things over...Because if you don't ... I'll kick your ass!" Frey observes that the player seems a little unimpressed by the appeal to loyalty, which is a good thing because "it is also a fact that were [he] to join the Villanova family next year, Massimino would be dispensing his help, guidance, and love three thousand miles away, to the players at the University of Las Vegas."

(Sidebar: this matters, not just because of the mendacity and double standards essential to the recruitment process and the treatment of coaches vs. players, but because a different coach with a different attitude may not provide the right opportunity for a player to grow and hopefully [for the talented few] sell themselves as NBA prospects. If you're a 6'8" bruiser and the coach who signs you promises to continue his school's proud tradition of pounding the ball in to the big man, you should be freaking out when he leaves and is replaced by someone known for a run and gun, guard heavy offense.)

This is the barest slice of what gets exposed about the filth involved in basketball development in The Last Shot. So imagine what it takes to rise above all that, to persevere and emerge not just from such a broken system but from the most broken feeder of that system, the basketball-obsessive wastelands of Brooklyn. (Notable that New York is always acclaimed the Basketball Capital of the World, that the city is in particular famed for its point guards, and yet over the past thirty years the Next Great Point Guards from NYC - Rod Strickland, Kenny Anderson, Stephon Marbury, Sebastian Telfair - have all been disappointments at the pro level. Chicago has produced a richer crop of guards in the last thirty years, but the undisputed [I should hope] two best point guards produced in the USA in the last twenty years grew up hooping in Oakland. It's worth noting as well, for the larger point I'm barely articulating in this post, that an off-hand tally in my head has very few of the most successful NBA players coming from the absolute blight of a place that Coney Island c.1990 was; the kids coming from the worst of the worst neighborhoods wind up as role players and troubled All Stars more than they do outright phenomena.)

And now think about Stephon Marbury - "Starbury" - an All Star talent with All Star numbers relentlessly decried as selfish, a loser, a team cancer, someone whose teams have always improved in the year after he left them, someone whose gaudy numbers are hollow. Consider that he's donated heavily to charities. That he's perceptive enough - and concerned enough - about the damaging structural role the sneaker companies play in the filthy machine that he started his own line of bargain priced shoes to try and change the paradigm: put a name bristling with street cred (and Marbury still has that - at this point in his embattled pro career, the only things he may have left are his street cred and his millions) on a $15 sneaker and maybe fewer kids will get beat down or even killed for a pair of Nikes (and maybe the shoe companies will stop being such a force in the recruiting and development process). Consider his character as hazily outlined in The Jump, resentful of his cousin's shining moment in the sun, closed off and isolated from his old neighborhood, from his extended family, possibly from everyone. Trustful of few if any. Always arrogant - how else could he make it out? Always shameless - how else could he make it out? Stephon Marbury made it to the promised land, and possibly for the very reasons he was able to get there he's been unable to truly find a place in it. Surely he's found it wanting. His millions have brought him the ability to walk away from his past, but not much else (other than, you know, all the other things that millions can buy.) Don't feel sorry for Stephon: he's obscenely rich and has become so for playing a game, and he's kind of an unlikeable personality. But when he's held up, as he so often is, to be the poster boy for the spoiled, arrogant, entitled, selfish athlete, remember what was necessary for him and others like him to reach the plateau they've achieved, what personalities they needed to develop to break through their dismal origins. His three most talented classmates wound up broke, disabled, and dead; his three brothers were labeled failures in their own neighborhood. He's a multimillionare because he was more talented and because he was stronger. What kind of strength does a fourteen year old need to batter through all that?

Who did you think he would be when he was grown?