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I was going to throw up something rather substantive this weekend, but instead I was occupied with something I might write about in the future. Or not. (It was boring, don't worry.) Two quick thoughts:
(1) I generally get annoyed when people cross subjective and objective types of reaction to art - actually, it pisses me off to an unreasonable degree. I especially find it annoying when people express a strong subjective opinion as objective fact, especially immediately after someone expresses exactly the opposite opinion. This bugs me most, because it seems most misplaced, with acting. If someone's just said that Joshua Jackson is really good on Fringe, and your experience is that he's an unwatchably bad actor, shouldn't you consider the fact that lots of people disagree? Shouldn't you say "Jackson just doesn't work for me, for reasons x, y, and z, and I'm somewhat perplexed that people think he's really good?" Why would you say "Joshua Jackson is wrecking this show with a horrible performance"?
I think I notice it here most because I often seem, on the one hand, less bothered by performances other people find bland or unconvincing, and on the other hand not especially impressed with performances other people thought were transcendent. This surely has to do with my own experience as an actor, which gave me lots of opinions (not necessarily any insight, though! - I wouldn't claim for a heartbeat to speak for other actors, or actors in general). So when everyone's bagging Anna Torv's performance in the pilot of Fringe, which I watched yesterday, I didn't feel one way or the other about it. And (uh oh!) when everyone was applauding Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, I wasn't especially impressed. I'm not going to be the "provocative" guy who claims that Ledger only got the acclaim because he died - I don't think that's true, except perhaps at the margins. And I thought the Joker character was very well portrayed/presented/whatever onscreen. It was very effective, and the thing that worked best about the movie for me.* But I felt a lot of it had to do with the writing and the costume and the makeup. Ledger's performance, in my opinion, was very very very good, and a lesser actor would have made a hash of it, but once you clear the hurdle of someone attempting to ham it up, I just don't think it was very hard. I don't think you needed to provide what the film required. There's multiple layers and complexities here - you could point out that much of the time a really great movie doesn't require Great Acting, and Great Acting in the way we understand it can seem kind of awkward and forced, which is how lots of people received, e.g., Sean Penn in Mystic River - but I just feel like whatever Ledger's considerable talents and potential, playing The Joker didn't sratch the surface. I have a suspicion that any of the other actors considered for the role would've evoked more or less a similar response. But all of that has to be filtered through my personal conviction that playing scary, creepy, and scarily creepily nuts isn't a particularly difficult thing to do, and that while Anthony Hopkins is enjoyable as Hannibal Lecter, he's just kind of dicking around artistically compared to something like Remains of the Day. (Which isn't a bad thing. Different movies have different requirements.)
*Which, incidentally, I liked more than the critics who hated it, but liked less than everyone who wrote hate mail to the critics who hated it; I thought it was inferior in conception and execution to Batman Begins. I have reasons for feeling that way, but they're incidental here and they don't add up to much that I would consider objective - well, I think my reasons are objective, I think it's a fact that the movie's plot doesn't work as well as its predecessor's, but whether that matters to you as much as it did to me is entirely up for grabs. The major reason I think The Godfather, Part II is better than The Godfather is because I think the sequel's story is infinitely superior in its construction - it's an artful structure, for one thing, and it manages to actually have a well-developed and coherent plot, as evidenced by one movie covering several months in some detail and the other one covering almost a decade in isolated scenes.
(2) I'm reading, and this will be entirely unsurprising, Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball. Two things that I find kind of jarring: (a) typos. Multiple types in the first couple hundred pages. It's really kind of perplexing to me. (b) the book makes basically no concession to the notion that someone unfamiliar with Simmons' column might be reading. If you start reading someone's column it becomes clear, if they have a particular personality or schtick, that you've stepped into an ongoing narrative, sort of like picking up a TV show in season 3. There are things that aren't really going to be explained for you any more. I would've guessed that in writing a gigantic (and so far, very good) book, Simmons might've gone a little out of his way to be more accessible to someone who didn't read his stuff every week. I guess I shouldn't have thought that, since he's said on his press tour that it's basically the same voice he uses for ESPN, but R-rated. (So far I'd call it a soft R. Mild language, drug use, suggestive situations, brief nudity.) So he makes a gimmick of providing fake explanations of his pop culture references for readers in 2025, but much of the ephemera about Simmons' style really would be inaccessible to someone reading in 2025, and some of it would be inaccessible now. Given that one of the delights of the book is that some of the facts he dredges up about the pre-24 hour news era of professional basketball are the sort of thing that require footnotes to say "Seriously, I'm not joking," which make plausible other wild facts which require him to footnote that he is, in fact, joking, it's jarring to find him making other jokes that a somewhat less savvy reader might not realize weren't true. The subject of the book is intended to be somewhat timeless, and in its substantive approach I'd say it is, but a lot of the flourishes sort of float by weirdly; if in a column Simmons talked about the debut of the Ralph Samson Face, even if he had to explain the Sampson reference (which he does in the book), the general schtick is understood for readers of his column previously familiar with the Faces of Derek Lowe, Peyton Manning, etc. I mean, you can sort of work out what's going on, I presume, but it doesn't flow as easily as it does for the experienced Simmons reader. Just think it's an interesting choice; I wonder if it'll affect the perception of the book years down the road. (One of Simmons' reasons for writing the book is that he quite correctly feels that, compared to baseball, there's an embarrassing dearth of quality basketball books, and his pick for the best ever, John Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game, was out of print when I tried to buy it last year.)
(1) I generally get annoyed when people cross subjective and objective types of reaction to art - actually, it pisses me off to an unreasonable degree. I especially find it annoying when people express a strong subjective opinion as objective fact, especially immediately after someone expresses exactly the opposite opinion. This bugs me most, because it seems most misplaced, with acting. If someone's just said that Joshua Jackson is really good on Fringe, and your experience is that he's an unwatchably bad actor, shouldn't you consider the fact that lots of people disagree? Shouldn't you say "Jackson just doesn't work for me, for reasons x, y, and z, and I'm somewhat perplexed that people think he's really good?" Why would you say "Joshua Jackson is wrecking this show with a horrible performance"?
I think I notice it here most because I often seem, on the one hand, less bothered by performances other people find bland or unconvincing, and on the other hand not especially impressed with performances other people thought were transcendent. This surely has to do with my own experience as an actor, which gave me lots of opinions (not necessarily any insight, though! - I wouldn't claim for a heartbeat to speak for other actors, or actors in general). So when everyone's bagging Anna Torv's performance in the pilot of Fringe, which I watched yesterday, I didn't feel one way or the other about it. And (uh oh!) when everyone was applauding Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, I wasn't especially impressed. I'm not going to be the "provocative" guy who claims that Ledger only got the acclaim because he died - I don't think that's true, except perhaps at the margins. And I thought the Joker character was very well portrayed/presented/whatever onscreen. It was very effective, and the thing that worked best about the movie for me.* But I felt a lot of it had to do with the writing and the costume and the makeup. Ledger's performance, in my opinion, was very very very good, and a lesser actor would have made a hash of it, but once you clear the hurdle of someone attempting to ham it up, I just don't think it was very hard. I don't think you needed to provide what the film required. There's multiple layers and complexities here - you could point out that much of the time a really great movie doesn't require Great Acting, and Great Acting in the way we understand it can seem kind of awkward and forced, which is how lots of people received, e.g., Sean Penn in Mystic River - but I just feel like whatever Ledger's considerable talents and potential, playing The Joker didn't sratch the surface. I have a suspicion that any of the other actors considered for the role would've evoked more or less a similar response. But all of that has to be filtered through my personal conviction that playing scary, creepy, and scarily creepily nuts isn't a particularly difficult thing to do, and that while Anthony Hopkins is enjoyable as Hannibal Lecter, he's just kind of dicking around artistically compared to something like Remains of the Day. (Which isn't a bad thing. Different movies have different requirements.)
*Which, incidentally, I liked more than the critics who hated it, but liked less than everyone who wrote hate mail to the critics who hated it; I thought it was inferior in conception and execution to Batman Begins. I have reasons for feeling that way, but they're incidental here and they don't add up to much that I would consider objective - well, I think my reasons are objective, I think it's a fact that the movie's plot doesn't work as well as its predecessor's, but whether that matters to you as much as it did to me is entirely up for grabs. The major reason I think The Godfather, Part II is better than The Godfather is because I think the sequel's story is infinitely superior in its construction - it's an artful structure, for one thing, and it manages to actually have a well-developed and coherent plot, as evidenced by one movie covering several months in some detail and the other one covering almost a decade in isolated scenes.
(2) I'm reading, and this will be entirely unsurprising, Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball. Two things that I find kind of jarring: (a) typos. Multiple types in the first couple hundred pages. It's really kind of perplexing to me. (b) the book makes basically no concession to the notion that someone unfamiliar with Simmons' column might be reading. If you start reading someone's column it becomes clear, if they have a particular personality or schtick, that you've stepped into an ongoing narrative, sort of like picking up a TV show in season 3. There are things that aren't really going to be explained for you any more. I would've guessed that in writing a gigantic (and so far, very good) book, Simmons might've gone a little out of his way to be more accessible to someone who didn't read his stuff every week. I guess I shouldn't have thought that, since he's said on his press tour that it's basically the same voice he uses for ESPN, but R-rated. (So far I'd call it a soft R. Mild language, drug use, suggestive situations, brief nudity.) So he makes a gimmick of providing fake explanations of his pop culture references for readers in 2025, but much of the ephemera about Simmons' style really would be inaccessible to someone reading in 2025, and some of it would be inaccessible now. Given that one of the delights of the book is that some of the facts he dredges up about the pre-24 hour news era of professional basketball are the sort of thing that require footnotes to say "Seriously, I'm not joking," which make plausible other wild facts which require him to footnote that he is, in fact, joking, it's jarring to find him making other jokes that a somewhat less savvy reader might not realize weren't true. The subject of the book is intended to be somewhat timeless, and in its substantive approach I'd say it is, but a lot of the flourishes sort of float by weirdly; if in a column Simmons talked about the debut of the Ralph Samson Face, even if he had to explain the Sampson reference (which he does in the book), the general schtick is understood for readers of his column previously familiar with the Faces of Derek Lowe, Peyton Manning, etc. I mean, you can sort of work out what's going on, I presume, but it doesn't flow as easily as it does for the experienced Simmons reader. Just think it's an interesting choice; I wonder if it'll affect the perception of the book years down the road. (One of Simmons' reasons for writing the book is that he quite correctly feels that, compared to baseball, there's an embarrassing dearth of quality basketball books, and his pick for the best ever, John Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game, was out of print when I tried to buy it last year.)
Labels: Basketball, Film, Sports
posted by medrawt at
20:29
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