Three Tweets On Doc, Bill Russell, Legend

 1 Compelling, stirring doc, Bill Russell Legend. But:

Too hagiographic?

It didn’t note specifically his activism’s acts (or did I miss them?)

I saw subtext that he seemed a bit purposeless after leaving Celtics (or do I read in too much?)

Were the last minutes over-egged?
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My feeling is, his undeniable athletic greatness grounds the off court greatness claimed for him that I’m unsure the doc makes a case for.

I miss what he did off court, other than commendably being his own man, that was so extraordinary.

I’d like to be told what I missed. 2/2
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P.S. 3/3

Where were acts by Russell even remotely comparable to the great magnitude of what Ali forfeited in refusing the draft, which the doc extolls but maybe unintentionally defines by contrast what Russell seems not to have come close to doing. 

Happy to be shown wrong.

A Few Thoughts On Film To Leslie

 Watched it with my wife. Had to rent it but I’m glad I did. 

I think it’s a terrific small movie that suffers not in its excellence by being small. And thats its arc is predictable bothers me not at all. 

Of course Riseborough is spectacular in it. (I checked out the “controversy.” What horseshit! A listers going all out to try to ensure Riseborough gets her due. I’m all for them doing it. She deserves the nomination and if publicizing her by feting her got her there I’m glad for it, even as the academy awards mean little to me.) 

I saw someone say her presence outstrips the movie (maybe like Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine.) I don’t agree with that in To Leslie though it’s true about Blue Jasmine. She is the movie; it’s about her and while her performance stands out she doesn’t overpower everything else. Rather there’s a symbiosis between her and everything else that’s effectively mutually reinforcing. 

In Blue Jasmine, what’s not Blanchett is Woody Allen at his most formulaic and flat. And even as in To Leslie the arc is predictable and we sniff out about 1/2 way, though in a very broad way, how it will end, the movement to the ending is organic —ok with maybe a dash of the formulaic. 

Btw, Allison Janney is utterly potent as the queen bitch. I’m not sure I was 100% persuaded by her final turn around though its effectiveness is helped by her hate-filled bitchiness in the midst of that turnaround as she machine guns Leslie with how awful it was how she abandoned her kid. 

Mind you, when she says she was at fault too in not stopping Leslie when she could have, as though there’s some equivalence between their faults, that seems misconceived to me. The way Leslie’s then raging drunkenness/alcoholism is described, there’s no way a friend’s stern warnings could’ve abated it. So that didn’t ring true to me. 

I also thought the Royal character was too much of an unconvincing distraction even though it fit in with the generally idea of wrecking yourself with booze and drugs. His howling at the moon, prancing around in his underwear or even naked is to me unneeded filigree, caricature.

There’s of course a lot more to be said about the film—Marc Maron, the music supplementing the action, the scene where he dumbly but with good intentions plays the tape of her winning the lottery, the scenes of her resisting drinking and so on—but I’ll leave it here.

8/10 is my score for it, if I were scoring it.

Thoughts On Film Stillwater

Me:

Watched Stillwater, long, engrossing, with a superb Matt Damon. It’s a real film, solid, serious, intelligent, mature, such a contrast with the crap out these days that Scorsese rightly baffed. I don’t care if it’s at odds with Amanda Knox’s story. It has its own truth that runs deep.

L:

Okay, I was getting ready to not like it. Fine acting by Matt Damon, you're right, but found the character too much of a dumb ass, as he calls himself. Also irked by what seemed like the requisite "deplorable" references -- rednecks, racists, xenophobes, and of course Trump voters. But then the second half kicked in, the dancing scene with Sammi Smith playing in the background, and I warmed to it. But then of course his ability to fuck things up reappears. I ended up mixed, though the final scene in Marseilles was pretty moving. The thing is, I get that he's damaged, as is his daughter, as she says, but  that doesn't seem enough to hang this sort of story on, is my general impression. But I agree that it's a whole order of magnitude above the usual comic-book retread. 

Me:



Good points all, even as I differ some (as law and custom insist I do.)

Knowing that in his person Damon is an entrenched D, in the Obama/Hillary Clinton mode, I had a preconception that that would inform his characterization of his character.

 But that melted away. A bad fuck up he was, but there is an underlying admirable stubborn strength to him and an admiration for his down to earth usefulness as when he fixes things in Virginie’s apartment and in the basement building and on the job in Marseilles as down to earth as that is. It gets him to functioning adequately in Marseilles, truck and all.

Those virtues especially shine in contrast to the theatre director and in what is effectively Virginie’s choice of Baker over the director. 

His first 1/2 goodness and practical virtue are also apparent from the jump when he helps Maya get the key to her apartment. His practical virtue shows too in the cultural and values differences between him and Virginie, for example in owning guns, where he doesn’t come out the loser or the worse for what he values. 

As well he channels and embodies the down to earth power, integrity and depth of the best of  country music. 

So for me, all that and much more—I could go on—melted away my preconception of slagging a deplorable. 

I guess two of my criticisms are:

basically the film goes on too long, which in some ways is a function of the two stories—exonerating his daughter; his new life with Virginie and Maya—not being more tightly interrelated so that I got the feeling at times I was watching two different movies; and 

keeping the murderer in the basement while waiting for the DNA test seems somewhat preposterous to me, more an inorganic plot device to unify the stories and and themes than something he’d do or not realize he didn’t need to do.

That said, I like the moral ambiguity pervading the film and his ability to accommodate it in his daughter and I love the inexorable sadness of the ending, how flat and changed for the worse Oklahoma seems to him after he loses what he had with Virginie and Maya.

You may not recall this but we disagreed about a previous film by this director, Three Billboards Out Of Ebbing Missouri, but with shoes more or less on different feet. I took quite sharp exception to it and you liked it a lot.

L:

I didn't realize this was by the same director as the "Three Billboards" movie -- and alas I can't even remember my own reaction to that, nor yours. But in this case, your take seems more in line with critical and popular opinion, judging by Rotten Tomatoes at least. And you make enough good points about the positive aspects of the movie that it makes me think I should give it another look. But your criticisms are well put too, and I agree with both, so I wind up mixed, as I was. I should look up that director though. 

On Deracialization

 

https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/deracialization-now

The author, Greg Thomas, claims we conflate race and culture and they’re entirely or at least functionally or practically separable from each other and that for all of us deracialization is in order. What’s wanted is a rooted cosmopolitanism. Thomas says he is rooted in the culture, traditions and history of his people but he proceeds now in self identification as a citizen or the world but with roots in the culture of his “milieu,” his “idiomatic group”:

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“Deracialization can be achieved while maintaining allegiance to specific idioms and practices that derive from cultural, ethnic, religious, and ancestral identifications. I know this is true because I myself have enacted this perspective by remaining rooted in an Afro-American cultural milieu via my family, close friends, and associates as well as the blues, jazz, gospel, and other forms and artifacts of expression distinctive to my idiomatic group. Yet I’m also a citizen of the wider world, as cosmopolitan as jazz itself has become. I’m willing to venture that there are many others in the U.S. and elsewhere who would take to heart a stance of “rooted cosmopolitanism” and discard the idea of race, the practice of racialization (as it exists on the census form for eg.) 

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My first thought is that as things now stand self consciousness of race or ethnicity is ineradicable nor need it be eradicated in our private spaces even as I think “race and state” should be separated. 

And my thought is also that Afro-American cultural milieu” is inextricably bound up with the self consciousness of race and it’s not conflating culture and race to think so. They’re inextricable if one seeks self meaning from his heritage. Instead of deracialization or de-ethnicizing oneself, the better view, I’d think, is simply (or not so simply) not to be reductive or essentialist about it. Thomas, I think, is having it both ways, clinging to what he professes to be jettisoning from his sense of  himself.

Sent from my iPad

Analysis Of The Gambler (With James Caan)

1. I haven’t done this in a while. 

So here goes. 

I watched the last half of (James Caan) The Gambler. 

My estimation of it increased as I watched it to its end.

2. It’s ultimately a dark, upsetting film relentlessly tracing the descending arc of an emotionally crippled, neurotically driven, perverse man, Axel Freed.

3. It shows his addicted gambling to be an unreal abstraction informed by a bullshit sophomoric psychology/philosophy.

4. His idea is that picking winners is too easy. 

He picks losers because that has him dancing with loss and (somehow) testing his ability to will impending loss into victory.

5. The utter incoherence of this way of him seeing his gambling finds its equivalent in the sophomoric lectures Freed gives to his NYC literature class in big part on the theme that we can will two and two into being other than four.

6. Freed is a literature professor teaching at a New York City university. But this is so unrealistically depicted as to be but an unreal prop as meaningless as his addiction, as what drives it and as foolish as the content of his lectures.

7. We never see him preparing for a class or anything else that evidences what goes into teaching. 

He simply drops what he’s doing when it’s time and goes to teach his class. 

It’s artificially done and is a flaw in the film.

8. Caan’s acting is good. 

He effectively conveys the full repulsiveness and diseased impulsivity of Freed. 

Lauren Hutton, his girl friend, by contrast, is wooden.

She fails to make her character come alive.

9. Caan’s character is coherent as is his progression through the movie. 

It lays naked his bullshit personal credo by depicting his degenerating self destruction, which involves him repudiating that credo and becoming corrupt and corrupting.

10. He gets deeper into debt and, so, into trouble with the mobsters tied to his incessant gambling.

This even when he has means to absolve himself.

He loses the money he coerces his mother, a doctor, to give him, $44,000.00.

And he loses his hot streak Las Vegas winnings.

11. In the end Freed fails to live up to his jousting with loss and to will loss into victory. 

Near physical danger by the mobster he’s indebted to, Freed betrays any pretence of honour.

He agrees to corrupt a basketball player in his class by getting him to shave points.

12. In fact, that he really can’t live up to his own code is foreshadowed by coercing his mother to bail him out of debt and is after-shadowed by whining in disappointment to his wealthy grandfather for refusing to bail him out of subsequent debt.

13. When Lauren Hutton stands statue stiff as he tries sexually to coax her into responding to him, two and two stay adding to four despite what Freed wills.

He’s left mired in utter humiliating futility, as if embracing and kissing a fencepost. 

Finally, he just walks away.

14. In a near to final scene, Freed doesn’t know till the last minute whether the bought basketball player will shave the points.

He does.

But Freed then learns it’s not one and done.

He and the player will have to do more on pain of pain.

The mob has its hooks into them.

15. In a culmination of Freed’s perverse self loathing and degenerate self destruction, he gets into a vicious fight with a pimp, whose whore has dissatisfied Freed. 

While he’s beating the shit out of the pimp, taking his self hatred out on him, she slashes Freed across his face.

16. In the last scene, after staunching  the bleeding, Freed staggers to a mirror.

He smiles in perverse satisfaction at his bloody scarred face.

It’s the apotheosis of his sick self destruction, a perverse anti redemption of triumphant self punishment at his own putrid emptiness.

17. Freed temporarily expiates his fury with himself, sprung from finally seeing clearly what a scum he actually is.

18. My judgment is that The Gambler isn’t about a gambler or gambling. 

It’s more centrally about a mentally-diseased, intellectual-type man who acts out his pathetic neuroses and self-destructiveness through the medium of gambling.

19. Finally, Freed repudiates gambling by complicity in fixing games. 

His credo has shattered like a thin glass pane. 

His anti redemption is his perverse pleasure in the evidentiary visibility of being severely facially slashed, desirable punishment expiating self hatred.

20/20. And in the end, no one lives happily ever after.

The End

Notes On 2022 Film, Causeway

 I haven’t done this in a while. So here goes. 

Just saw 2022’s Causeway. 

Spoilers alert. 

Mixed feelings. 

Wonderful acting in an engaging, never boring, small movie. 

Theme, most broadly, is finding a bit of human meaning amidst pervasive personal tragedy and chaos. 1

But film punks out in many places that makes it seem contrived. Some of them: 

Glides through too slickly, ie contrives, Jennifer Lawrence’s recovery from severe Afghanistan war injuries. 

Can’t resist, while not wanting to glamorize her, showing off her body in scenes of her 2

…in bra and skimpy panties. 

Uses her lesbianism to simplify and make less vexing her relationship with car mechanic Brian Tyree Henry. 

We never find out exactly what JL’s mother has done to disappoint her yet once more. 3

How is that BTH, running an auto repair business, always has time to come running anytime JL needs some help or company?

I get why he’s traumatized by having been in a car accident that cost his young nephew, Antoine, his life and has forever estranged BTH from his sister, 4

Antoine’s mother, also in the car. But the locus of his guilt over this is that he let Antoine, just a kid, sit in the front passenger seat over his mother’s objection. This as the basis for perpetual moral self flagellation makes little sense and is of a peace with the movie 5

not wanting to confront searing wrong doing, like, say, if he’d driven drunk. We’re told he’d had but two beers. 

Of course, we have the anticipated scene we know is inevitable —the acrimonious, enraged shouting match between JL and BTH, when they bore into each other’s 6

weaknesses, self deceptions and self evasions. It’s a contrived set piece that comes across as something scripted rather than what JL and BTH are genuinely saying. 

The culmination of all this contrivance is BTH telling JL that she speaks as if her brother is dead, 7

always in the past tense. This comes as shock to her. “He’s not dead,” she exclaims. “He’s a druggie and dealer in prison,” she explains. 

A problem with with all this is that nothing in the movie supports this. It’s just imposed on us by it being said. 8

In violation of rules for fiction writing 101, we’re told this, not shown it. So in the penultimate scene, JL shocked into self revelation, sees her brother in jail. Naturally, he’s mute. They sign lovingly. He’s beatific, smilingly happy to see her, sorry for her travails, and 9

topper, at peace with himself, happy in jail, the best place for him, he signs, given his drug habit. 

It’s so unrealistic as to be self parodic to the point of silliness.

Over-egging the release from unflagging personal misery pudding is what this scene and film come to. 10

I give the film 5.5/10.

My Defence of Liberal Democracy And Liberalism On Twitter

 

The Böckenförde Dilemma” is a little out of my price range. But thanks for your responses. I’ll try my best to offer a few thoughts at a better moment.

I approached this issue differently. Not to say, liberalism—and to be more precise liberal democracy—is founded on science, not to consider origins. Rather to say, when looking at all types of regimes empirically, how they have fared socially, 1

…how they have fared materially, both collectively and individually within them, which are most conducive to individual flourishing, liberal democracy on the *evidence* has produced the best results, however fraught, imperfect and problematic. 2

This is Frances Fukuyama’s argument in The End Of History And The Last Man, as he distinguishes between History and history. Liberal democracy accommodates all the variations on it within its fundamental markers. And it is, he argues, the culmination of History as History. 

The “Böckenförde Dilemma,” as you’ve defined it, doesn’t seem to the point. It makes the admitted fragilities and imperfections of liberal democracy the enemy of it—as in the perfect being the enemy of the good—as a good regime, as in the idea of “two cheers for it, but what’s the alternative?” 4

5/5 

Finally, I like this characterization of the ethos of liberalism by Alexander Meiklejohn:

Where does liberalism claim to be founded on science as opposed to being in its ideal or principled workings analogous to science in trying in policy to see what works, discarding what doesn’t and keeping what evidence tells us does, till it doesn’t? 1

I don’t know what it means to say science is grounded on a mechanical philosophy, save that its province is the way things are, what effects issue from which causes as a matter or falsifiable evidence. You may be conflating science with scientism. 2

When you fly in a plane, take an effective vaccine—two of infinite examples—you have examples of science, as opposed to scientism, proving itself. 3

Respectfully, your view, if I have it correctly, that Fukuyama erred from the jump may rest on a misconception of his work that I alluded to. He never claimed history ends. 4

Of course it goes on. His argument is that History understood as an overarching view of human development resolves itself in Liberalism. That can be argued with but he’s not saying history ends. 5

.

You quite misread me. My stance is neither utilitarian or metaphysical. Liberalism as opposed to utilitarianism seeks to balance in policy what is thought good for all with the value of individual liberty. 6

In its airier analysis, utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number, what conduces most to collective happiness, becomes so abstract as to be impossible strictly to apply. 7

8. There is nothing metaphysical in, as did Fukuyama, assessing all polities throughout history and concluding liberal democracy is superior when judged by the criteria I’ve mentioned. Nor have you told me what political vision is superior to it, again for all its imperfections.

9. Science’s success in materially improving our lives, reducing dread diseases, reducing poverty, eliminating or shrinking the vectors of human immiseration is a profound excellence. Not to be gainsaid. Morality and spirituality are not science’s prerogatives.

10/10 Material improvement in our lives offers us the best basis for individual flourishing, fulfilling our best capacities as we see them. There is no utopia here, no discounting of our perils and flaws. But of everything going, on the evidence, liberal democracy is our best shot. 

I’ll stop so not to re-repeat myself. In sum, people are “happiest” in liberal democracies, where others wish to be. We’re not talking past each other. I’ve made an evidenced-based case for their relative superiority. Noting our ills is no answer. Thanks for the civil exchange.

Ok 1 more. “Failed miserably” compared to what? If the best places to be are liberal democracies, then that ends the argument. You offer no better place or polity and may be too quick to dismiss, as noted, progress in reducing immiseration. Truly now, my last words. Thanks again.