Well, now I have a reason for that roadtrip to Calgary that I’ve always wanted to take….
(link via Julie Winningham.)
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I’ve caught up on some animated films during the past week. (When a member of one’s immediate household is three years old, one quickly becomes conversant on animation.)
:: Dinosaur. This film, which combines computer animated dinosaurs with live-action backgrounds, is visually amazing — and narratively boring. There is a wonderful opening sequence, detailing the “adventures” of an unhatched dinosaur egg after its mother is driven off and its brethren stomped upon. The egg is stolen by some kind of dino-mouse, taken into the woods where it is dropped into a stream, bobs along in the water somehow not being eaten by dino-crocs or stepped on by brachiosaurs (I think), and plucked from the edge of a waterfall by a pterodactyl. Then it ends up on a peaceful island populated by fuzzy, mammals that I think are lemurs. (I’m no paleontology expert; were there mammals during the time of the dinosaurs?) All this is told only through seamless visuals and a wonderful music score by James Newton Howard. However, then the egg hatches, and we then discover that all the animals speak English (except for the villainously ravenous carnotaurs, who only eat other dinos and roar a lot). And thus, after one of the more impressive opening sequences Disney has ever done, we’re right back in the midst of what could almost be termed the “Standard Disney plot”: plucky orphan with the heart of gold finds a loving family that is nevertheless not his own, and over the course of many adventures he saves his adopted family, learns his heritage, earns the respect of the Gruff Chieftain, and in the end has his own family. We get the obligatory “Young guy knows what to do, but the Gruff Chieftain won’t listen to him and takes it as a challenge to his authority” business, and there are the obligatory outcasts and misfits who don’t fit in but who end up being Our Hero’s closest friends. It’s all very slickly handled, although I felt a bit of a pall hanging over the proceedings — after all, I know that none of it really matters because all of these beasties are going to end up dead, with some of their bones on display in a museum millions of years hence. The film is probably best for young kids who are fascinated by dinosaurs (what young kid isn’t?) but who aren’t ready to see other young kids nearly torn limb-from-limb in Jurassic Park. Dinosaur isn’t bad, but it’s really nothing special.
:: Hercules. I can’t believe it took me this long to see this movie; maybe it had something to do with the baggage of that Kevin Sorbo television series or something. Anyhow, this is Disney’s take on Greek mythology, and it’s smart and funny. This is a frothy, light entertainment that is probably the most fun bit of traditional animation Disney has done since Aladdin. (Disney’s best entertainments these days seem to be coming from the Pixar division, where the Toy Story films are made.) The film opens with portentious narration by Charlton Heston (very sad about Mr. Heston’s illness, by the way) that is interrupted by the Muses, who demand to tell the story themselves. After Mr. Heston says, in that wonderful Heston fashion, “You go, girl”, the Muses come to life and become a Greek Chorus by way of a Gospel Chorus, commenting on the action throughout the film. (A nice in-joke is that the Muses are first images on a Grecian urn.) You normally wouldn’t think to hear Gospel-style music in a film about a Greek hero, which is part of the charm of this movie: it cheerfully mixes-and-matches so many genres, and is packed with so many witty asides and in-jokes that after watching it one almost wants to see it again immediately just to see what was missed. For instance: two children who are in danger before they are saved by Hercules yell out, “Somebody call I-X-I-I!!”. Hercules has a personal trainer, voiced by Danny Devito, who is just like all those cynical old trainers in boxing movies, right down to the “This guy was my best, but he couldn’t get it done” bit. (That “best guy” turns out to have been Achilles; later on, some townsfolk jeer him: “Hey, nice job with Achilles, especially his heel. Ya missed a spot!). The villain of the film is none other than Hades, the Lord of the Dead (above whose domain a sign reads “Over 50000000 Served), and he is voiced by James Woods. The drawing style of the film is markedly different from many of the other Disney films, and yet is somehow perfectly fitting with the story. The music and songs are surprisingly good. Hercules seems to be an underrated film in the Disney pantheon.
:: Kiki’s Delivery Service. And then, we have a masterpiece. This Japanese anime is by the magnificent Hayao Miyazaki, who is sometimes called “the Japanese Walt Disney”. The film tells the story of a young witch named Kiki, who has just turned thirteen. Thus, by tradition, it is time for her to leave home and go into the world. This she does, taking her cat Jiji with her as she flies away on her broom to seek her fame, fortune, or merely her life. She settles in a city by the ocean, where she is befriended by a pregnant couple who own a bakery. Moving in with them, Kiki starts a delivery service, making her deliveries by flying the parcels on her broom to their destinations. And, she makes friends: a boy who adores aviation and is totally fascinated by Kiki and her ability to fly via broomstick; an old lady who is blissfully unaware of her granddaughter’s lack of appreciation for her; a painter who lives in the country. The locations of the film seem to be European, but it’s a Europe where dirigibles are still in use and apparently World War II never happened. (None of this is really clear; one of the charms about the film is that it is totally convincing of its setting precisely by not spelling out any of its details, but by simply showing it and the people who live there.) Kiki is a charming character whose problems seem real and difficult, although not insurmountable. There is no evil threat here to be surmounted, only the normal difficulties that arise from maturity and dealing with other people. Miyazaki has a wonderful eye for the way people speak and behave; it’s a testament to his skills that he can make a movie about a witch who comes to live in the city and not a minute of it feels contrived or implausible.
The animation is, of course, wonderful; that goes without saying in a film by the man behind Princess Mononoke and My Neighbor Totoro. Here, Miyazaki captures the essence of flight to such an amazing degree that I have to wonder if he actually has experience with broomstick flight. In any event, the way he depicts flight in this film is completely convincing, far moreso than the broomstick flights in, say, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
The Disney Company now owns the distribution rights in the United States for all of the Studio Ghibli films (Ghibli is Miyazaki’s production company). They are bringing these films out fairly slowly — they’ve had a dub of Laputa: Castle in the Sky in the can for a couple of years now — and with relatively little fanfare, which I find surprising. (I only learned of the US release of Kiki when I spied it in the video section of my local supermarket.) Disney’s intention seems to be to capture a fairly sizable share of the anime market in this country, but beyond that seems to have little interest in expanding that market by promoting Miyazaki’s films as the first-rate family films that they are. Not all anime is about robots that fire lasers from their eyes and the cyberpunk teenagers who battle them; the films of Hayao Miyazaki not only reveal the breadth of anime but also provide beautiful alternatives to watching Peter Pan or The Lion King for the tenth time in one week. Princess Mononoke probably isn’t appropriate for very young children, with its violence and fairly dark storyline, but Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro are family films in every sense of the word. So, for God’s sake, see these movies!!!
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In keeping with my recent retrospective on the James Bond films, I found this site — linked by the picture above — that is devoted to all manner of 007-related artwork, from the original covers of Ian Fleming’s novels to the poster campaigns for each film and an analysis of the main title sequences of each film. It’s a great site. I always wondered if the incredibly long legs on the poster for Octopussy were intentional; now I know. (They are, and the reason is one I wouldn’t have suspected. It has to do with forced perspective when viewed from below.)
(By the way, playing Bond in the image above is an actor named Bob Simmons. His version of the “gunbarrel sequence” was used on the first three Bond films; a version wasn’t filmed with Sean Connery until Thunderball.)
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In the “Wild, Wacky Stuff” Department:
There was a young man hight Jaquandor
Who wished he were born in Numenor.
When advised it had drowned
He made nary a sound
But fell in a faint to the bar floor.
That was written by, of all people, Guy Gavriel Kay on the message boards over at Bright Weavings. It seems that GGK (as he is known to his fans) has a book of poetry, entitled Beyond His Dark House, coming out in April of 2003. This is exciting news, but not nearly so exciting as my finding myself immortalized in verse by such a fine writer as Mr. Kay. (Although, a limerick?! Of course, I brought it on myself by suggesting on the message boards my hope that none of his works begin, “There once was a man fron Nantucket….” I offered a bit of proper poetical response; the thread can be read here. Mr. Kay is from Toronto, by the way — it’s part of my joke.)
In the absence of a new novel by GGK (that will probably be another year to eighteen months in the offing), a book of his poetry will be fascinating. Here is a bit of his verse that I have loved since I first read it. It is from his novel, A Song For Arbonne (currently out-of-print, but a reissue in trade paperback is due out this fall):
Even the birds above the lake
Are singing of my love,
And even the flowers along the shore
Are growing for her sake.
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It’s a funny thing about people who decide to tempt fate: what happens if they take up Pascal’s Wager and lose?
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The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has existed for over one hundred years. How many of its musicians, in that time, have been African-Americans?
One.
And in what year was that musician hired by the orchestra?
2002.
That is simply amazing to me. More on it here, courtesy Norman Lebrecht.
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Apropos of the decennial Sight & Sound poll of the top ten films of all time is interesting article by Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News, in which he describes his general ambivalence to these types of listing exercises. Basically, he feels that it is folly to attempt to distill a lifelong love-affair with film down to a list of ten, and only ten, films. Knowles is at his best when he gives full flower to the passion he holds for the movies, as he does here.
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Ah, we’re three weeks into NFL Training Camp Season. Rosters are being shaped, we’re starting to get an idea of what our teams’ weaknesses will be (in Buffalo, guess what? It’s the offensive line….) as well as their strengths, and most importantly, the Tuesday Morning Quarterback has returned.
TMQ is the name of the weekly column by writer Gregg Easterbrook, who is a witty and knowledgable football observer. He is also brings a surprising amount of erudition to the table: this is a guy who composes haiku about football and peppers his columns with all manner of literary allusions. For a different slant on the sport of American Football, check his column out. (Fans of the Washington Redskins who are new to TMQ should check out next week’s installment, when Easterbrook says he will outline just why he calls them the Chesapeake Watershed Region Indigenous Persons.)
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I’ve linked to Steven Den Beste almost since I started this site, not because I agree with his viewpoints — more often than not, I don’t — but because even when I disagree with him I find him very thought-provoking, and generally enjoyable to read. It’s not uncommon for me to finish reading one of his posts and think, “He’s wrong”; but not until the last few days have I read a post of his — two, in this case, here and here — have I said afterwards, “How disappointing.”
Den Beste’s strength is almost always in the formulation of his arguments. He presents his viewpoints with a great deal of logical rigor; he shows that he has carefully considered his premises and frequently he’ll provide extensive justification for them alone before proceeding with his conclusion. This can lead to some very long posts indeed, but that’s fine with me. (For the most part, anyway. His recent epic analysis of the scientific plausibility of the film Reign of Fire went over the top, but even he admitted so.) I find it sad, then, that he so eagerly employs rhetorical misdirection, non sequitur, and argumentum ad hominem in a recent flap with Demosthenes.
He recently announced that he was planning to search for “an intellectually honest antiwar voice in the blogosphere”. Judging by the post in which this announcement appears, he considers “intellectual honesty” to consist of logical argumentation, presentation of alternative courses of action, and avoidance of fallacious reasoning and fuzzy thinking. And judging by the two posts that disappointed me, he has not found those things in Demosthenes. The problem is, he does not demonstrate this. Instead, he goes another route: he questions Demosthenes’s sincerity and background, now basically insisting that because Demosthenes does not post under his real name, nothing can be known of his background and thus his arguments cannot properly be evaluated. But more than that, he ascribes certain motivations to Demosthenes for wishing to remain pseudonymous, motivations that he creates out of whole cloth. Steven says the following:
When someone won’t even reveal his name, it should set off alarm bells unless he provides a legitimate reason for keeping it secret. If someone is confident about what they’re saying, they should be willing to own up in public to holding those opinions. A person who debates anonymously may not be wrong, but you should certainly be far more skeptical about anything they say.
All of this is, though, totally irrelevant. A logical argument is a logical argument, regardless of who advances it or why. I am disturbed that Steven, who is normally so stringent in his own logic and insistent on similar rigor in his opponents’ arguments, has drawn the line here. It seems to me that I should be equally skeptical of Steven and Demosthenes; not because one posts under his own name and one doesn’t, or because one uses a quality commercial program to update his blog on a server that he himself owns and one uses a free (if temperamental) blogging tool to update his blog that is hosted on a free server, or for any other reason. I should be equally skeptical of both because both are advancing arguments. That is the only reason for skepticism.
Now, knowing someone’s background can certainly illuminate their motives. Knowing the business background of George W. Bush, for example, I am skeptical of his motives for wishing to drill for oil in ANWR and for his general ambivalence about conservation strategies. But that still has no bearing on the actual question of whether we should drill there. Likewise, I am skeptical about President Clinton’s decision to launch a military strike on the very day that the impeachment vote was to be held — but that does not imply, in itself, that the military strike in question was unnecessary.
Secondly, Steven interprets Demosthenes’s decision to use a pseudonym as “shame”, as in, “D. is ashamed of what he writes”. This is simply not borne out by what D. has written of his pseudonymity. It could be true; but then, I could also think of any number of other possible motivations based on what he has said on the subject. Thus, in the absence of a definitive word on D.’s motivations, Steven employs a Strawman. (And as he demonstrates here, he is quite aware of what a Strawman is.) And still, it has no bearing whatsoever on the logical validity of his arguments or, more importantly, the moral authority of his arguments. This seems to be Steven’s real sticking point: he provides no analysis at all of D.’s arguments as logical constructs (at least, not in these posts; he has done so in the past and now I must wonder why he has suddenly stopped). Instead, he questions D.’s moral authority. This is a red herring. As Plato argued in the Euthyphro: “What is moral is not moral because the Gods love it; rather, the Gods love what is moral because it is moral.” Or, put another way:
Moral authority does not come from whether or not one uses one’s real name. Moral authority comes from advancing a view that is morally correct.
If D.’s position is the moral one, then that is all the moral authority that he needs. To insist that he provide background information, to properly demonstrate his moral authority, is to ignore the logic and instead focus on the person. This is utterly fallacious. In Steven’s words: Demosthenes would, I suspect, respond to that: “Listen to the arguments, not to the arguer.” But if the arguments are convincing, then why doesn’t the voice who presents them act as if he believes them? Well, consider the reverse: if the arguments are not convincing, then why does it matter in the slightest how the voice who presents them acts? If a token of sincerity is to be demanded before an argument will even be listened to, then I wonder how Steven can justify disregarding what might be the ultimate form of sincerity: the willingness of the Palestinians to blow themselves up, as long as they take some Jews with them. But, as Steven adroitly points out here, logic has little to do with sincerity. Or some illusory standard of “moral authority”.
Finally, I must ask one more thing: what would knowing D.’s real name actually prove? What would it establish? You don’t really know anything about D. right now, and knowing his real name wouldn’t change that (unless, of course, he happens to be someone famous — but then that would probably fall under Steven’s qualifier of “a legitimate reason” for pseudonymity). Steven says, By posting under a pseudonym, Demosthenes in his person is accountable to no-one. He can lie, cheat, distort, deliberately deceive, or libel with impunity, because there are no potential consequences for him in doing so. But all of this is true of people who use their own real names; witness some of the invective spouted by such shoddy thinkers as Jerry Falwell or Ann Coulter. A real name no more implies “truth” than a false one suggests the possibility of “falsehood”. In fact, this is something that Steven once even admitted in this post, in which he writes in part: You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me. You can’t tell what kind of person I am from what I write here. I only show you what I want to show you, and some of what I show you is deliberately faked. You can’t judge my behavior by what you see here, because you don’t know what I do in real life. Steven, it appears, wishes to have it both ways: when convenient, he can claim, “You know nothing about me because I make some it up”; and when convenient, he can ignore an opponent on the exact same grounds.
And finally: I myself post under a pseudonym, which I assume is OK with Steven because I rarely if ever delve into the political world. But even so, I feel I should perhaps say why I do so. It’s not out of embarrassment, shame, or anything else. I use this journal to explore my own ideas about art — mainly books, music and film. Just about all of my close friends know about the blog, and they know who I am. My pseudonym is taken from a comic book from the 1980s called Six From Sirius; I started using it as an AOL screenname and I’ve grown used to it. I don’t conceal my background, but I don’t include a bio, either; perhaps I should. Suffice it to say, though, a casual reader of my blog knows that I write fantasy and horror (although I am as yet unpublished) stories and am working on a novel; that I live in Buffalo, NY; that I am a fan of the Buffalo Bills an the Pittsburgh Pirates; that I love figure skating; that Berlioz is my favorite classical composer; that I adore film music; that my favorite author is Guy Gavriel Kay; that my favorite movie is Star Wars (and that I consider The Phantom Menace a good movie); that I attended college in Iowa (specifically, at Wartburg College; that I majored in Philosophy and minored in Music; and that I am married with a daughter who is three. I’ve probably revealed even more than that about myself, and I’m sure I will reveal more as time goes on. I’m not “concealing” my name; I just don’t find it terribly relevant to what I have to say here. Of course, that will change when I finally break into print, because I plan to publish under my real name — at least to start with, because there are vagaries of the publishing world that make pseudonyms necessary for business. (To assume that writers use pseudonyms as a means of “avoiding the pressures of fame” is, quite frankly, an example of ignorance of realities in the publishing world. Many authors use pseudonyms because their early works, published under their own names, didn’t sell and therefore publishers won’t take the chance on publishing more under that name. It’s an effect of the “blockbusterization” of publishing, where the backlist is nearly dead and the midlist is shrinking ever faster, and where authors used to be given six or seven books to get into best-seller territory, now they have to do it in two or three.) When that happens I will, of course, plaster a gigantic announcement to that effect here. And now, on with The Show.