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Bright Star
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Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Friday, October 23, 2009
Friday, July 10, 2009
Saturday, April 18, 2009
The Class - Changing Web Redux
I went to see The Class the other night, and it has me wondering about possible changes to the web from a different angle.
In the movie a young bourgeois Frenchman is trying to teach French in a tough school. Despite a troubled relationship with a kid named Souleyman, there is a bit of a breakthrough half way into the film when the teacher allows the kid, who refuses to write an assigned self-portrait, to submit instead a collection of annotated photographs. The teacher promptly pins them to the bulletin board and invites the class to cluster around and look. The other kids had to read their self-portraits aloud, so Souleyman gets to participate in the self-exposure too. He stands in the background, half uncaring what anyone thinks, half pleased at the oohing and ahhing. You watch the half smile and his steady gaze at his own work, and you think, "shift." From this point on, supposedly, promise has been hinted at and must be fulfilled or rejected.
I don't want to give away the film for those of you eager to take in a slightly overlong look at French inner city education. But without giving away the ending there comes a moment when the teacher wonders aloud to other professors if the boy hasn't reached his "scholastic limits" in the school. I took this as condescension. The boy can't learn beyond a certain point. My friend took it as sympathetic. The school is imperfectly organized to develop the young and more scholasticism is not what the young man needs. Not more papers in other words, but maybe more photographs.
Schools are where we send the young to receive certain skills and a body of certain ideas we consider basic to function in the world. Public schools in particular spring out of a reformist century that felt the need to bring information to the isolated and bereft. The title of the movie in French, Entre les murs (Between the walls), emphasizes the box of the building as the locale where teaching happens. But for the children the idea of their exposure to the wider world as happening "between the walls" of school would be absurd. And not merely in the experiential sense but also in the most practical sense. Today the slipstream of information and even know-how exists out in a digital flow that transcends walls. Cellphones might be forbidden in class, but they represent content just as do books.
The movie, I should stress, is not at all interested in the students' relationship to new media. Its focus is on the students' relationship to the teacher. But I can't help taking the verité style at face value and wondering what the same kids learn outside the walls and inside the walls and down in the courtyard during break over the web. In the movie schoolchildren have two options (if they finish): university or vocational school. Maybe that does accurately describe what they can do, but it is not at all an accurate description of what they can know, and at least from the point of view of art, the view of a photographer say or a designer or a painter, that knowledge has a thousand different applications in and outside and around the structures of university or vocational schooling. In other words, Souleyman could quit the school any day and begin to work in visual media. He might be working odd jobs to support himself, but profession and means of support are often separate things anyway.
Could the openness of the web cause long term shifts in how the poor or underprivileged consider their options? It would probably take a long stretch of time with current web dynamics in place to tell one way or the other. And what if the perceived richness is temporary, at least at current levels of availability? Will the interaction be the same if more and more things require payment or subscriptions to access? Will alteration in profit models create dams that tamp down the spawning effect of information from site to site? Or will registered identity also transform to accommodate ease of use? I don't know the answers to these questions or even if they are in the right vein, but I do suspect that the students within the walls at poor schools are less confined by their physical circumstances than their teachers might give them credit for.
In the movie a young bourgeois Frenchman is trying to teach French in a tough school. Despite a troubled relationship with a kid named Souleyman, there is a bit of a breakthrough half way into the film when the teacher allows the kid, who refuses to write an assigned self-portrait, to submit instead a collection of annotated photographs. The teacher promptly pins them to the bulletin board and invites the class to cluster around and look. The other kids had to read their self-portraits aloud, so Souleyman gets to participate in the self-exposure too. He stands in the background, half uncaring what anyone thinks, half pleased at the oohing and ahhing. You watch the half smile and his steady gaze at his own work, and you think, "shift." From this point on, supposedly, promise has been hinted at and must be fulfilled or rejected.
I don't want to give away the film for those of you eager to take in a slightly overlong look at French inner city education. But without giving away the ending there comes a moment when the teacher wonders aloud to other professors if the boy hasn't reached his "scholastic limits" in the school. I took this as condescension. The boy can't learn beyond a certain point. My friend took it as sympathetic. The school is imperfectly organized to develop the young and more scholasticism is not what the young man needs. Not more papers in other words, but maybe more photographs.
Schools are where we send the young to receive certain skills and a body of certain ideas we consider basic to function in the world. Public schools in particular spring out of a reformist century that felt the need to bring information to the isolated and bereft. The title of the movie in French, Entre les murs (Between the walls), emphasizes the box of the building as the locale where teaching happens. But for the children the idea of their exposure to the wider world as happening "between the walls" of school would be absurd. And not merely in the experiential sense but also in the most practical sense. Today the slipstream of information and even know-how exists out in a digital flow that transcends walls. Cellphones might be forbidden in class, but they represent content just as do books.
The movie, I should stress, is not at all interested in the students' relationship to new media. Its focus is on the students' relationship to the teacher. But I can't help taking the verité style at face value and wondering what the same kids learn outside the walls and inside the walls and down in the courtyard during break over the web. In the movie schoolchildren have two options (if they finish): university or vocational school. Maybe that does accurately describe what they can do, but it is not at all an accurate description of what they can know, and at least from the point of view of art, the view of a photographer say or a designer or a painter, that knowledge has a thousand different applications in and outside and around the structures of university or vocational schooling. In other words, Souleyman could quit the school any day and begin to work in visual media. He might be working odd jobs to support himself, but profession and means of support are often separate things anyway.
Could the openness of the web cause long term shifts in how the poor or underprivileged consider their options? It would probably take a long stretch of time with current web dynamics in place to tell one way or the other. And what if the perceived richness is temporary, at least at current levels of availability? Will the interaction be the same if more and more things require payment or subscriptions to access? Will alteration in profit models create dams that tamp down the spawning effect of information from site to site? Or will registered identity also transform to accommodate ease of use? I don't know the answers to these questions or even if they are in the right vein, but I do suspect that the students within the walls at poor schools are less confined by their physical circumstances than their teachers might give them credit for.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Second Thoughts
I take it back. Last year I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and called it great. Now I've listened to a podcast of another F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, "The Ice Palace." If F. Scott Fitzgerald could write a story that weak and cliched about the South, then one is forced to reconsider liking The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. What if my taste for Benjamin Button was really an indulgence of silly affectations of charm? Like those commercials where surprised diners discover their gourmet pasta was catered by Pizza Hut, I feel a little betrayed by the name on the door.
That's What YouTube Is For
I'll never have to buy the DVD to this movie, because after pining for it I finally went tonight and realized that the movie itself couldn't match the finely tuned anticipation seeing the trailer created in me. That trailer pretty much summed up everything you could want out of the movie with just a few images and some music. And I can get the trailer on YouTube.
In the promos before the film they showed the trailer for Che, which is in two parts and runs for hours and hours. That sounds like a director being self indulgent. I read somewhere that Director's Cuts are rarely improvements the original films because they tend to cram in a lot of extra footage whereas the rule is the slimmer the better. What if the ultimate "slim" film was just the trailer? Something that could make it's characters and scenario completely compelling to you in under two minutes?
In the promos before the film they showed the trailer for Che, which is in two parts and runs for hours and hours. That sounds like a director being self indulgent. I read somewhere that Director's Cuts are rarely improvements the original films because they tend to cram in a lot of extra footage whereas the rule is the slimmer the better. What if the ultimate "slim" film was just the trailer? Something that could make it's characters and scenario completely compelling to you in under two minutes?
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Mon Oncle on a Free Afternoon
"Mon Oncle (My Uncle)" is on TCM right now. The power is down at the museum and the afternoon is free. It seems fitting that when the electricity is out and business is no longer possible, Mon Oncle should be on TV. In the movie Monsieur Hulot lives in a strictly pre-modern Paris, but likes to visit his nephew Gerard, who lives in a fully modern and mechanized suburb. Monsieur Hulot bumbles around a world that has a button for every simple action and directional arrows for every possible track. It is a comedy like life is a comedy, where things can never always go according to plan no matter how fully scripted or technologically enabled they might be. There is a charming soundtrack, a single theme on the piano and accordion, that wraps up the old and new Paris in the same lightheartedness. In fact the contrast isn't so much old vs. new Paris as it is children (and small dogs) vs. adults, with the blundering Monsieur Hulot as the go-between. It reminds me of the French children book series Petit Nicholas. Monsieur Hulot has trouble navigating the modern world like the child has trouble navigating adult society, and they are united in their total lack of concern about it. Instead, the movie says, these are just the pratfalls and disconnections that make life what it is. No need to resent anybody.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Hello Philip Martin
On Fridays the Arkansas Democrat Gazette publishes its movie review section. Which means I will go by Community Bakery on my way to work in a minute and buy a paper with my cafe au lait. Reading movie reviews over my coffee first thing trivializes Friday into an extension of the weekend. Plus Oscar nominations came out yesterday. With any luck Philip Martin will be grousing about that in today's paper. Stephanie Zacharek has already started at Salon. So has Chris Orr at The New Republic. And Slate is so excited at the prospect of grousing it is making the process a continuing series.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Sight Unseen Movie Review
Rare is the movie that you love before ever seeing a single frame. But WALL-E is that way for me and I want to get this on the record before I go to see it. That way, when I exclaim that I loved it after walking out of the theater and somebody says something like, "You're only saying that because you just saw it!," I can reply, "No, no, no, no! I loved it before I saw it!" Which is true.
So why would you write a review to record your original Reasons For Loving before you go to the movie and have new reasons crowd the old ones out? Only to note that it is pretty impressive for Pixar to create a sense of beleaguered everyman-ness out of something that isn't even a man. On visuals alone, with its dumpy square body and patchwork parts, WALL-E has me at hello. Gazing up from the front page of today's STYLE Section in the paper, Pixar has coxed a soulful-eyed expression from a pair of binoculars on a swivel. My newsprint WALL-E has all the pathos of a portrait painting. When I finally do go see this movie I won't be sitting in the theater for an hour and a half being slowly convinced to care. Even if the story stinks and the dialog is lame (unlikely), I'll still care about WALL-E. Pixar is Pixar because despite all else it does well, it realizes that a good image, like a good actor, can make you care.
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