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By now, we’ve heard the phrase “Dances With Samurai” applied to this movie. It’s a fine phrase, wholly appropriate: a American Civil War veteran finds the native Other more compelling and joins up in their fight against industrialization/Westernization/Progress-with-a-capital-P. But being somewhat like another movie is not necessarily a flaw, and taken for itself, The Last Samurai is perfectly fine, though probably not memorable. It’s unlikely we’ll be making references to it more than a dozen years after the fact, beyond any use in Tom Cruise trivia contests.

As noted, a disillusioned Westerner finds honor and spiritual fulfillment among the natives in an alien land. The pristine rural/pastoral Other of the natives is a rejection of all that modernity offers; in this film conception, Progress’s gifts always have dark linings, making the gifts themselves questionable, while the old ways’ virtues have no vices. It is only by embracing these old ways that the lost Westerner finds himself. Or something like that. We’ll gloss over the fact that the last samurai, Katsumoto (loosely based on the real-life Saigo Takamori), was fighting for his feudal privileges, haiku writing and Zen philosophizing aside. Fundamentally, this is about Tom Cruise’s character’s personal growth and fulfillment.

And in the six months during which he is a prisoner/guest of Katsumoto, there is much growth and fulfillment. Being a veteran calvalryman, he knows how to use a sabre, but it’s, uh, somewhat surprising that he can wind up matching up against the best samurai swordplay by the end. That, and he’s able to take a sword from someone despite being unarmed. (My best theory is that Tom Cruise’s character is the Highlander: mysterious survivor of battles where everyone else dies, able to keep fighting after suffering numerous stab and gunshot wounds, using a katana to lop off other people’s heads with centuries-old technique taught by Sean Connery.) Never mind that: the important thing is that he appreciates the simple way of life practiced by the feudal Japanese, in particular their culture of honor and striving towards perfection. He adopts these practices himself, and joins the samurai in their revolt against modernity.

They’re, of course, defeated, overwhelmed by numbers and guns. But it’s a glorious, honorable defeat, which resonates greatly with the soldier-peasants who defeated them. In this sense, the revolt succeeds: the Emperor doesn’t forget about the samurai code and the old ways in pursuit of Westernization and a stronger Japan that can stand up to the imperialist powers (Though I couldn’t help but think that the simple formula is Industrialization + Budo = World War 2. Yes, Tom Cruise sets us on the path to Pearl Harbor.)

It’s a competently made movie, full of both spectacle and quiet moments, with some beautiful photography. I particularly liked our first view of the samurai, charging out of the mists. It’s technically among the best epics Hollywood can offer in this day and age. But it won’t be memorable, and it may not be particularly memorable by Oscar time: Japan chic isn’t the same as Sioux chic.

Regarding the spectacle of set-piece battles, back when Kubrick made Spartacus, he actually had to get a few thousand people to drill and look like Roman legions on maneuver. There was drama to that, both as visual spectacle and realization that all those people formed up on the hill are real people. We had similar scenes at the end of The Last Samurai, with Civil War-era regiments lined up on a hill or charging as a Napoleonic column down the road, as well as the samurai army, with their banners all a-flutter. But some scenes don’t look real — the big melee after the samurai calvary charge looks particularly fake — and you realize that at most there are a few score extras marching down that road, multipled many times by CGI. The technology isn’t quite there yet, and we know that it’s not real: the spectacle is diminished compared to what Kubrick pulled off.

Update: David Edelstein in Slate’s 2003 movie roundup notes that Tom Cruise’s characters action bear some resemblance to John Walker Lindh’s joining the Taliban. Heh. Certainly, Dances With Wolves wouldn’t have been made after Little Big Horn, nor Last Samurai after Pearl Harbor. I suppose the mystical Other in these cases just have to be the ones that are no longer seen as medievalist tyrants. Could there be a time fifty years from now when the “positive” side of the Taliban is appreciated? I hope not.

I’ll wait until the extended versions come out late next year before passing final judgement on Peter Jackson’s rendition of the Lord of the Rings. I found the extended versions much, much better. My opinion of The Two Towers was turned around by seeing the DVD the night after seeing FotR: there are still some quibbles, like the idiotic Ents and Aragorn’s near-death experience, but on the whole it’s a fantastic rendition of Tolkien, especially after seeing it more than one time.

Probably, I’m reacting in the same way to The Return of the King: on first viewing, there were scenes I expected to see but didn’t, scenes there were there but were surprises, and a sense of being rushed towards the end. I got distracted after the first thing that didn’t conform well to the books (never mind knowing the filmed fate of Saruman and the Scourging of the Shire), and stayed distracted. Seeing RotK a second time should make most of these distractions go away, and I can enjoy the movie as a movie, rather than the hoped-for rendering of books I read twenty years ago.

Nonetheless, there are some problems that I can’t see being worked out from additional viewings or from an extended version. To start with, there are moment of dramatic punch that Tolkien delivers in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields that are missing from the film, and we never feel that doom hangs by a thread. Where is Gandalf facing the Lord of the Nazgul after the Gate is shattered? Where is the southern wind that parts the dark clouds at dawn, as the Rohirrim ride in to the sound of horns? Where is Eomer’s despair turned into joy when the banner of the King is unfurled? Oddly, the old Bass-Rankin kiddie TV movie effort — may it be eternally cursed for putting those godawful songs (you know which ones!) into my head forever — got this closer to the book than Jackson does, though my memory of the cartoon is fuzzy.

Regarding the Witch King and the rest of the Nazgul, they’ve been handled badly by Jackson, though I’m not sure of Tolkien does much better. The fundamental problem is that they’re, well, the Nine, agents of unspeakable terror, but were driven off Weathertop by Aragorn waving a torch, even though their prize was within reach. By the third volume, the Lord of the Nazgul seems about ready to take down Gandalf all by himself. It just doesn’t seem credible. Tolkien walked us past this inconsistency by building up the drama of great events unfolding over hundreds of pages, and by showing Aragorn to be the King of Men. Jackson has much less room to maneuver, and his Nine, beyond their winged steeds, aren’t awe-inspiring.

And this indicates the most important defect: there’s lack of… majesty. Granted, majesty, like the boogeyman underneath the bed, is hard to do on visually. Everyone has a different idea of how it looks, and most likely the on-screen depiction is going to look wrong, hokey or stupid to someone. We saw this, say, in Fellowship, when Frodo offers Galadrial the Ring. She is supposed to be full of terrible majesty as she describes herself as a Dark Queen, but instead looks like she got caught in an “I Love Lucy” episode set in some wacky beauty parlor where the hair dryers have gone crazy. But this scene from Fellowship is minor compared to what should be in the Return of the King, where displays of majesty and inner power follow one upon the other, all backlit by the glow of Middle Earth’s long history. Majesty is sometimes in the CGI — Minas Tirith and the White Tree are dead on, the armies outside the walls are awesome, but Gwaihir isn’t — but not in the actors. In the end, I didn’t believe Viggo Mortensen was Elessar, Elendil’s heir.

I may be too harsh on this movie, focusing on flaws while leaving out how I did enjoyed it, but flaws are much easier to find, and even if I don’t know Quenya and haven’t read The Histories of Middle Earth, I can nitpick with the best of them. Note that I don’t expect a perfect fan-boy rendition of Tolkien: for a movie, we can cut out a lot of the songs, drop some characters, repurpose others to some degree. I did like the movie — Shelob was fantastic, as was Cirith Ungol and Orodruin, and many other things both in the theatrical release and what’s expected in the DVD — but this wasn’t exactly the movie I had imagined twenty years ago, even if it was mostly so. And that’s the main problem right now, the dissonance between my expectations and the film we now have is larger than I would have liked.

Anyway, I am looking forward to the DVD, which will help matters, in particular by making the ending feel less rushed; there might be a lost weekend next November, when I watch all three back-to-back-to-back. We also should keep in mind the brilliant McSweeney’s article about the lost audio commentary on FotR by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, and the fact that there was no spectacular car chase scene around Mount Doom with vintage Minis. Things could be far, far worse.

Grace and I got married on November 24, 2003, in Sacramento, California.

Just to get the photo’s out of the way, since that’s what you all are here to see, click on the composite thumbnail below to go to the image viewer (assuming you’re not already in the image viewer):

If I were a heroic superblogger, I would have posted these from the road, stopping at T-Mobile Hotspots along the way to upload pictures and text. I had better things to do with my time, so we’ll have to settle for this three-week late post written over a couple of cold weekends in New York.
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I found this sports medicine journal article about stretching. My right hamstring is a bit tight — I seem to have about the same range of motion in terms of reaching my toes, but at the cost of a bit more discomfort at the beginning of the stretch — so I probably have to pay greater attention to it before jujitsu.

In any case, the main points of the article are that:

PNF stretching is a two-man stretching technique; a stretching partner may be hard to find at the gym. We do two-man stretches in the dojo once in a while, but not in the PNF sense of having the partner (tori) applying pressure to cause the stretch while the stretcher (uke) is “resisting”. Next time we do two-man stretches, I’ll try to resist first, then relax into it. I can try this with the locks, also, but these tend to put much more stress on the joints than would be comfortable while resisting.

An article cited on Gizmodo talks about how some TiVo owners suffer from anxiety because their machines record so many shows that they experience a viewing backlog. The owners then feel a desperate need to watch everything to catch up before recordings get deleted.

Arguably, this is a problem that can be solved with much more disk space, so that shows can be watched during those dead zones in the broadcasting schedule where all there is are re-runs. That, and a more conservative selection for Season Passes. But even so, you still get that psychic tug as the episodes pile up.

I had that happen with Firefly before it got cancelled. I wound up just watching one episode and then ditching the rest. I also had a number of Angel episodes pile up last season, but I did eventually watch all of them, over a few weekends of full couch potato mode. Right now, what’s piling up is Carnivale. I’ve seen the first two episodes so far; I haven’t decided whether to ditch it or not. Fundamentally, it’s only TV, and having an existential crisis over TV isn’t productive. That, and TiVo is “technology” in the sense economists use the word: it expands the range of possible actions and choices available to a consumer. You can chose to watch Carnivale or ditch it, and it’s better to have this choice than not. In the cited article, no one suffering from TiVo Anxiety Syndrome was willing to ditch the TiVo itself.

Easterbrook just posted a notice that a new Tuesday Morning Quarterback is up at Football Outsiders. Football Outsiders will be hosting TMQ for at least a little while, until the column finds a more permanent home.

Easterbrook basically donated his column to the site, to help a struggling site “establish itself as the Web’s leading indie football site”. In return, Easterbrook has an additional, football-only forum. Most interestingly, TMQ has a link to an archive that someone has kept of TMQ’s ESPN days. The return of TMQ illustrates a couple principles about information in this age: one is the old statement that the Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it. The other is that widely dispersed information is incredibly hard to destroy.

The former principle makes me relatively sanguine about media consolidation: we have this amazing technology that allows anyone to publish for minimal cost. This technology allows ways around repressive governments, but also helps destroy privacy; I like to believe that the benefits far outweight the costs, especially if we’re interested in liberty. The second principle is harder to evaluate. Criminals will leave electronic footprints for investigators to follow (such as Enron email), and may find it difficult to sweep away these footprints. Also, the ephemera of this most ephemeral medium may also be preserved, somewhere, though perhaps this is a bit more hopeful than we should allow. What are the downsides? Again, privacy probably gets reduced or becomes more difficult, because once the information goes out into the world, it can’t be retrieved or destroyed. This changes the way we interact with people: off the cuff remarks made by email may come back to bite people. Such issues are a bit deeper than I want to think about right now. All I can say is that I’m glad TMQ is back.

Update: TMQ’s more permanent home is at NFL.com, which looks more big-time than any other place he’s been before. I suppose we can go into the whole “when a door closes, another opens” thing, but we won’t.

I’m not a crossword puzzle maven: I’m unable to rip through a Friday NYT puzzle during my morning commute, and I’ve finished the Sunday puzzle only a couple of times; it’s not as hard as Friday or Saturday, but it’s a marathon of words and phrases. The first Sunday I finished was in college, and the theme of the day was horse racing. For some reason, the names of old racehorses popped out from the depths of the subconscious, giving me the long clues quickly, making the short ones easy. I don’t know how or when the names of thoroughbreds were planted deep in my mind. I know nothing about horses and racing. And yet there they were — Man O’ War, Seabiscuit, Secretariat — perhaps breathed in with the cultural fog we all pass through day to day.

So, while I knew the name “Seabiscuit”, I knew nothing about what this horse — was Seabiscuit a “him” or “her”? — had done to be famous. The Seabiscuit movie was then a surprise: it’s a very good film about a slice of America I knew next to nothing about.

I’m writing this long after seeing the movie during the summer but right after reading the book. The movie inspired me to read the book, perhaps the happiest outcome of film adaptations, rather than the grumpiness that usual occurs when seeing the movie after reading the book: in the former case, details are filled in rather than left out, characters become deeper, and, most importantly, horizons are expanded. As said, I knew nothing about horses or racing before the movie. After the book I read because of the movie, I know a little bit more.

(Speaking of adaptations, one of the previews before the recent Matrix movie was for the upcoming Trojan War mega-movie next summer. “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, Peleus’s son.” I have no idea what they’re going to do with one of the founding works of Western literature, but one can hope that some people will go pick up a copy of The Iliad and read it for the first time.)

From book and movie, we get the basic story of Seabiscuit: how he was rescued from the backwaters of racing to eventually defeat War Admiral, how both Seabiscuit and Red Pollard were grievously injured, but both came back to win the one big race that had eluded them. We also feel the texture of racing culture: the purgings and dangers jockeys go through, the tactical challenges of pace and positioning during the race, the unbelievable popularity of racing during that time in America (I guess something like Nascar’s popularity today, but nationwide instead of regional).

And we get a feel for the men around Seabiscuit, though more interestingly in the book than the movie. In the movie, all the men are linked together by a narrative hook: they all need to be redeemed from loss, be it Howard’s son killed in an accident, Red’s father abandoning him on the bush racetracks, Smith’s anachronism in an industrializing world. All need to be redeemed by the horse and each other. In the book, we learn that Howard, though badly hurt by the death of his son, did have another, older son, whom he engaged with in friendly competition in horse racing. We see that he started racing because of an old interest in horses, and because he had few other worlds to conquer after rising from poverty to wealth. Pollard, also, is far more interesting: Hillenbrand notes that, despite how physically inappropriate he was to be a jockey and how many times he had been severely injured, he was doing what he loved. In that sense, Pollard was more free, more alive, than many other people. As for Smith, he is as silent and enigmatic in both book and film, though the book illustrates his wicked pleasure at humiliating journalists, the respect he received at the height of his career, and his lonely death in obscurity long after Seabiscuit and Derby winner Jet Pilot. And we have a far better feel for how great a jockey George Woolf was, how he used pre-race planning and research decades before anyone else would, and how he raced despite his diabetes. These men didn’t need to be redeemed by Seabiscuit; what Seabiscuit did was bring out each man’s best, and then some.

Besides the narrative divergences needed in any adaptation, there’s one more difference between book and movie. The book was written during the boom, during a time of peace. The shadow of the Depression falls lightly through its pages: there are references, and actions undertaken because of it, but there’s no feeling that it’s throttling the nation. Perhaps it’s because we’re exploring a sport sponsored by the rich, and therefore spend a great deal of time at well-appointed race tracks and wealthy stables stocked with prized animals. The movie, on the other hand, was made after the end of a boom. The shadow of the Depression is darkest near the beginning of the film, — with Pollard’s family, the newsreels and David McCullough’s narrative — and remains tangible throughout. Here, Seabiscuit’s story rallies the nation less because of the wonder of his athleticism, but more because his indomitable spirit is a symbol for America: we will recover from injuries and Depression and the looming war; we will prevail against seemingly insurmountable odds. It’s a movie made in a time of recession and war, though its main themes of reinvention and second changes is universally American, during both war and peace.

Lastly, the version of the book I got was for “book clubs”. It included an interview with Hillenbrand, where she notes the difficulties in writing about this topic. While she can get a bare-bones account from contemporary newspapers, what was missing was the texture of the time. Most of her effort was devoted to recovering ephemera (niche magazines, board games and souvenirs; celebrity marketing existing then, too) and interviewing the few people still alive that worked with Seabiscuit or knew the men involved. Pollard’s blindness, for example, was something she discovered in her interviews, and is the most likely explanation for Seabiscuit’s inexplicable loss in the Santa Anita. Cultural history isn’t easy, especially at the edge of living memory. We should be thankful someone went through the effort to show this slice of life from a different age.

Derived from Culinary Cafe, using plain yogurt instead of milk, and with less sugar:

Cranberry Pumpkin Bread

1 cup canned pumpkin
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup plain yogurt
2 eggs
1/4 cup butter or margarine — melted
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 cup chopped walnuts
1 cup cranberries

In a mixing bowl, beat pumpkin, sugar, yogurt, eggs and butter. Combine dry ingredients; stir into pumpkin mixture. Fold in walnuts and cranberries. Pour into a greased 9x5x3″ loaf pan.

Bake at 350 degrees for 70 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
Cool in pan for 10 minutes; remove to a wire rack to cool completely.

How much better it would have been if Neo, in a last desperate attempt to defeat Agent Smith during the climatic fight, declared to his adversary, “This statement is false,” and then watched as Smith staggers around the muddy crater they’ve carved in the virtual street, muttering, “Does not compute…” until his head explodes? Arguably, this would have been better at keeping with first movie’s philosophical references than what actually did happen. Thus ends the Matrix trilogy, another movie series in which the sequels drag a truly innovative, enjoyable first film into the gutter. Yes, all things that have a beginning must also have an end. But does it have to end with such a whimper?

By now, the philosophical and religious threads from the first Matrix have all been worn through. So unexpected in a sci-fi martial arts movie, the Matrix’s koans and Cartesian doubt launched a thousand pop culture dissertations. But the koans had transformed into leaden monologues by the end. The writing in the first movie was like the bright grad student discussing epistomology late at night in the study lounge, with everyone just a little bit stoned. By the second movie, the conversation had become tiresome and repetitive, and you got the feeling that the grad student wasn’t so bright after all; the weed’s run out. And now, the suspicion has become conviction, you’re tired and hungry and just want to go home.

Yes, this posting is merely piling on. But what can really be said about a movie where there was a collective despairing groan from the audience when Trinity (so supercool from the first movie, so uninteresting in the third) said, “I have one more thing to tell you”? And where there was hearty applause when she finally (an eternity later, long enough for Neo to call 911, ride with her to the hospital, get the insurance statement in the mail for her ER visit, and contest the charges) expires from her wounds? By then, the audience had been fairly well tortured by this and all of the terrible dialog that had gone on before, but we still stayed because there was the glimmer of hope for redemption in a final Neo-Smith confrontation. We’re there for imaginative fight scenes, after all.

What we got was something that Superman II did better, and an unexplained mystical solution to everybody’s problems that just reeked of “we have no other way of resolving this” desperation among the writers. At least the semi-mystical solution in the first film was built up in a sensible progression, as Neo graduated from one metaphysical stage to another during the course of the movie. Here, the mystical was delivered without build up, merely as an afterthought to a muddily shot, computer generated game of human billiards that makes you long for the days of wire-fu and bullet time, days that were a mere six months ago.

The best, most imaginative effects were produced for the battle for Zion’s loading dock. Perhaps the high point was when you realized that this sequence would be what a 1st person 3D version of Galaga or Centipede might look like on the Sony PlayStation 5. Still, watching the big fight at Zion, you get the feeling that the US 4th Infantry Division could have wiped the floor with the human resistance. Like in Starship Troopers, the humans invariably got in close with oversized assault rifles to kill the bugs. We’ve lost the technology for stand-off weapons and explosives. No wonder the robot bugs win! In fact, humanity has lost the common sense needed to realize that one guy with an EMP device, whose sole job would have been to push the big red button on it every few minutes, would have stopped the whole machine invasion in its tracks. Clearly this is a future in which the bong has been passed around too much.

Well, we still have The Return of the King to look forward to. And no one has that sinking feeling before seeing the movie.

The Columbia Journalism Review has a page that describes who owns what in terms of media companies. For example, the New York Times owns a number of papers and TV stations around the country, as well as part of the Red Sox and the Discovery channel (this explains the editorial endorsement/treason when they hoped the Sox would win the pennant, as well as the surprisingly numerous NYT Television productions we see on cable, such as Resident Life). Certain bloggers may have wanted to consult this page before writing. Ah, well.

Anyway, it’s a useful piece of trivia, courtesy of a link from Gawker. From my point of view, media centralization, while a concern and a topic that bears watching, isn’t that high on the priority list right now: we have a few other big things to think about right now, such as the war and apocalyptic terrorism; we also have, with developing technology (i.e., the Internet), other outlets that can help bypass the larger conglomerates.