Austerlitz

Just finished reading Austerlitz, and everything the reviews say is true. Sebald really did manage to come up with a whole new genre of book, neither memoir nor novel nor concatenation of postmodern digressions. Austerlitz is a great and haunting work, but I shall leave the superlatives and the exegesis to the professionals. I would just like to point out a parallel which seems obvious to me but which I haven't seen drawn elsewhere: to the post-war German artist Anselm Kiefer. Both Germans reinvented their artforms in order to deal with WWII and its aftermath, the guilt-ridden silence into which much of Germany fell. Austerlitz was written by an expatriate German and centers on an Anglified Jew who never sets foot in Germany or learns about the Holocaust until well into middle age. It is hard not to see Austerlitz's inability to face up to his past – something which accounts for his neurasthenia and eventual nervous breakdown – as an allegory for Germany as a whole.

Austerlitz had another effect on me, too: I intend to go out later today and purchase a small pocket camera which I can load with black and white film and carry around with me at all times, in much the same way as Sebald did. My little Canon APS camera is better for snapshots, and my 35mm compact is too slow, what with all its autofocus nonsense and tendency to turn itself on by mistake, dirtying the lens. I'm thinking of getting an old-fashioned rangefinder. There's a Japanese one I've got my eye on: I think I'll check it out before my Spanish class this afternoon.

Posted by Felix at 1:05 EST | Comments (0)

Talk, with hindsight

I went out and bought the final issue of Talk yesterday. I wondered if, with hindsight, one might be able to look at it and see where it went wrong. I thought I would read through the articles and try to determine what worked and what didn't, that sort of thing. As it turns out, there was no need: the inevitability of the demise of the magazine can be summed up in the pair of numbers (20, 120). There are 120 pages in the book; the last paid-for ad is on page 20. Sorry, Mr Galotti, but that ain't gonna cut it.

Posted by Felix at 1:07 EST | Comments (0)

Talk, R.I.P.

When I interviewed Tina Brown just after the first issue came out, she told me that "people didn't necessarily know they wanted something, but I think that when you produce something that is entertaining, smart, fresh and new, they will want it, and they have responded very, very positively."

The problem was, she was deluding herself. People responded to the opening-issue hype, but didn't like the unfamiliar format, which didn't last long. By the time it folded, it looked like little more than a low-rent Vanity Fair. Magazines tend to either make shedloads of money or lose shedloads of money, and Talk had an aura of being one of the latter. Its editorial grasp always exceeded its ad-revenue reach, and the reading public somehow picked up on that.

As a magazine journalist, I probably pay more attention than most magazine readers to things like quality of advertising, quantity of pre-masthead ad pages and advertising-editorial ratios. But I think the reading public picks up on these variables even if they don't realise it. Advertisers certainly do: I've never quite worked out why they would prefer page 474 of Vanity Fair or Vogue rather than page 78 of Talk, but they do.

Still, it would be wrong to blame Ron Galotti for Talk's failure. He did his job admirably, while Tina Brown eventually put together a book that was a more enjoyable read, most of the time, than Vanity Fair. Both magazines had excellent journalism, but Talk didn't have as much boring journalism as Vanity Fair does. (On the other hand, Vanity Fair won hands-down every month on the photography front.)

The problem, of course, was that Harvey Weinstein is no Si Newhouse, and once Cathleen Black decided she wouldn't continue to bear her share of the $50 million losses, it became obvious that he wouldn't subsidise the magazine on his own.

Everybody I've told about this so far has expressed no surprise or regret whatsoever, which saddens me a little: I think it's good for Vanity Fair to have a little competition, for there to be more than one general-interest title on the newsstand. But Talk failed to capture the general imagination, and for that it paid the price.

Posted by Felix at 1:08 EST | Comments (0)

Andrew Sullivan, Paul Krugman and Enron

I'm worried I might be getting old. My 30th birthday is fast approaching, and I've recently been reminded of that old canard about how if you're not a socialist when you're young you don't have a heart, and if you're still a socialist when you're old you don't have a brain.

I think I'm still as left-wing as I always was, but I have noticed in myself an increased tolerance – even admiration – for right-wing pundits of late. A couple of weeks ago I sent out an email circulating a column by Mark Steyn; and recently I've been finding myself reading andrewsullivan.com more than once a day.

I think I can explain away the Steyn column by saying that it's appealingly contrarian, at least to a lefty like me. We liberals are far more reluctant to question the motives behind statements from NGOs than we are to wonder why the average Republican (or even Democrat) politician is saying something. Jeremy Paxman once said that the question he always had in the front of his mind when interviewing politicians was "why is this liar lying to me?"; and somehow I can't imagine even him thinking the same kind of thing when interviewing the head of the UNHCR.

But charity officials are people too, as anybody who's ever worked in a non-profit will attest. And when you stop to think about it, it's easy to see how UNICEF might exaggerate and spin just as much as any politician: after all, they know they're on the side of the angels. (I'm reminded of that line from William S Burroughs: "If you're doing business with a religious sonofabitch, Get It In Writing.") In general, charities are much less accountable than governments, or even large corporations. And a lack of accountability inevitably leads to a dangerous sense of infallibility.

There are pundits I love, all on the left: Kinsley, Krugman, Hitchens. Whenever I see one of those bylines, I get very excited and drop whatever I'm doing to read whatever it is they've written. Most of the time, I'm extremely impressed, although Kinsley does sometimes give the impression that he's been a little bit short on inspiration that week, and Krugman is a lot less impressive when he's writing about the one subject I know a lot about, Argentina.

Sullivan is in many ways very similar to Kinsley: they share a fondness for carefully-constructed arguments laced with sarcasm. Most of the time I disagree with what he's saying, but his arguments are cogent enough that at least I can see that he has a respectable point of view. (Other right-wing pundits generally just drive me batty with their wrongheadedness.) He also likes to spend a lot of time commenting on other commentators, rather than just on the news. Today, for instance, he's taking a swipe at Paul Krugman.

Sullivan's first posting came at 1:15am, just after Krugman's column hit the web. Finding nothing to argue with in the article itself, Sullivan instead lambastes Krugman for his failure to tell us that he was paid $50,000 by Enron in 1999 to sit on "an advisory panel that had no function that I was aware of," in Krugman's own words elsewhere in the paper. Personally, I would have slapped Krugman for his rather gratuitous swipe at the Bush Administration at the end of his column: if the present Administration "doesn't get it," in Krugman's words, then the Clinton Administration certainly didn't. The worst charge that Krugman can find against the present lot is that the new chairman of the SEC wants auditor independence; that hardly compares to, say, Al D'Amato's abolition of Glass-Steagal just so that Travelers could merge with Citibank.

Fast forward to 12:46pm, and after a good night's sleep, Sullilvan is back, pointing out Krugman's disingenuousness in a column last year when he said that he did serve on the advisory panel, but wasn't really sure why. Now, of course, it's obvious: the small matter of $50,000, which Krugman saw no need to disclose at the time. Sullivan follows this good point up with a piece of disingenuousness of his own, however: he proposes Krugman "follow many others' example," and donate the $50,000 to charities set up for the benefit of employee-shareholders whose pension funds have been wiped out. The examples cited, however, it transpires upon following Sullivan's link, are all donations to politicians or political parties: none of them involve remuneration.

By 2:38pm, Sulllivan's obviously on a roll. He's now found an article Krugman wrote in 1999, in which he lauds the free-wheeling entrepeneurial structure of Enron. Asks Sullivan: "Now tell me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this structure, which enabled Enron to hide all sorts of shenanigans, exactly what Krugman is now bemoaning?"

Actually, Andrew, it isn't. Krugman is bemoaning the shenanigans, and not the structure which enabled Enron to hide them. After all, there are many investment banks out there who make quite a lot of money doing what Enron did: trading energy. The fact that they're out there doing that helps to make the energy market more efficient, and benefits society. What Krugman is bemoaning is the fact that Enron used its political connections to push through various bits of legislation designed to give it an advantage over the banks. Enron, uniquely among energy traders, was pretty much exempt from regulatory oversight. That's what caused the shenanigans, not Enron's "post-corporate free-wheeling e-economy."

Just like charities, companies suffer if they're not held accountable for their actions. Enron hid lots of nasty balance-sheet nuclear waste where Wall Street couldn't see it, and saw its stock soar as a consequence. Give me "hundreds of casually dressed men and women staring at computer screens and barking into telephones" any day: just ensure that I know when they're making money and when they're losing it.

For the ironic thing about Enron was that it wan't the off-balance-sheet losses which brought it down. Those were large, but still relatively small in relation to the size of the company as a whole. What caused the collapse of Enron was that no one would trade with it any more when the losses were made public. No trading entity can make money unless it has rock-solid counterparty risk, and when Enron's secretiveness came to light, no one had any faith in that any more. It wasn't a loss of money which killed Enron, it was a loss of trust.

Posted by Felix at 1:10 EST | Comments (0)

Legal lesbian marriage in Texas

It turns out that there are at least two legal lesbian marriages in America. Not civil unions in Vermont, mind, but fully-fledged bona fide marriage. And they're in Texas!

This fact emerges from an article in the New York Times today about a man in Kansas who's trying to stop his late father's bride from inheriting half his wealth, on the grounds that she isn't a woman. (She's a male-to-female transsexual.) Fast-forward to the fifth paragraph:

Since marriage is seen as a fundamental right, several legal experts said that if transsexuals like Mrs. Gardiner were barred from marrying men, they would probably be allowed to marry women. Indeed, after a Texas court invalidated a similar marriage in 1999, at least two male-to-female transsexuals have married women in that state.

Having spent a bit of time among transsexuals in New York, I can definitely say that lesbianism is really quite common among male-to-female transsexuals. I wouldn't want to start speculating why, but I have a feeling that it reflects a much greater than usual openness towards gender fluidity in that community.

Obviously, the fact that there are two legal gay marriages in Texas is no great victory for gay rights: most biological women are extremely unlikely to find love with a male-to-female transsexual, and it's unfair that they're the only ones allowed to marry other women.

But all the same, it's worth stopping to savor the irony of a judicial decision directed against transsexual marriage being the instrument by which gay marriage in the US finally became a reality.

Posted by Felix at 1:16 EST | Comments (56)

Donnie Darko

So I’ve just got back from seeing Donnie Darko at the cinema, and I feel as though I have to put my thoughts down here, in some kind of attempt to get them into shape. One thing is for sure: if it is possible to judge a film by the amount of time you spend after exiting the cinema trying to understand it, then Donnie Darko is a great film.

There’s certainly nothing easy or mainstream about this film, which centres on an eponymous high-school kid with psychological problems: his psychotherapist says that he’s showing advance symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. He hears voices – we hear them too, and they’re very scary and disturbing – which emanate from a hallucinated and extremely frightening rabbit.

At the same time, the director, 25-year-old Richard Kelly, paints a compelling portrait of suburban high-school life circa 1988. He keeps the directorial pyrotechnics to a minimum, although they are there; mostly, he confines himself to a simple skewering of an era most of us are only too happy to consign to memory’s wastebasket. Those who preach fearlessness, we learn, are those with the most to be afraid of; meanwhile, your worst fears really can come true.

The high-school scenes conform to type: there’s the bright but troubled kid, the shrill parent, the ostracised fat girl, the cool teacher who battles the authorities, and so forth. But at the same time we’re being led into a metaphysical conundrum which eventually takes over the whole picture.

The key to the film is not Donnie’s madness, but rather the fact that his rabbit saves his life at the beginning of the film. A jet engine falls, inexplicably, from the sky, and plunges straight into Donnie’s bedroom: were it not for the fact that he had heard voices drawing him outside that night, he would have been killed immediately by the impact. (It’s astonishing how the jet engine appears at almost exactly the same point in the film as the all-but-identical falling boulder in Sexy Beast.)

From then on in – for, essentially, the rest of the film – Donnie is beholden to the rather evil rabbit. Frank (the rabbit’s name) not only gives Donnie’s life meaning, he gives Donnie life. The effect on Donnie is to turn him into a person who is totally unafraid, a person who stands up to bogus authority and suffers no qualms or guilt after performing criminal acts of surprising severity. Living, as he is, only by the grace of a hallucinated rabbit, Donnie eventually finds it relatively easy to give up everything for the sake of saving the girl he’s just fallen for.

What that says about schizophrenia, or 1988, or suburbia, or love, I’m not entirely sure. A lot of the film I’m perfectly happy to say I don’t understand at all. This is one of those films where a first-time director bites off a bit more than he could chew, but shows huge potential: you know that Kelly is going to make better and more accessible films in the future. (I hope, too, to see a lot more of Maggie Gyllenhaal, Donnie’s older sister both in the movie and in real life.) In this it is much better than the equally incomprehensible Planet of the Apes, which was made by someone who really should have known better.

Donnie Darko is a very disturbing and confusing film, and most of the credit for getting it made must surely lie with Drew Barrymore, who co-produced it, stars in it, and almost certainly brought Patrick Swayze and Noah Wyle on board. It falls quite happily under the general heading of good films which did badly in 2001 (see below). If you’re not afraid of being puzzled and disturbed – if you enjoyed Memento, say – I can recommend you go see this.

Posted by Felix at 1:18 EST | Comments (0)

Felix at the movies

I’m disappointed. 2001 was a bad year for movies. Bad films did well, good films did badly, and there was very little that was exceptional. The Oscar race is wide open, not because there were so many good films (as in 1999), but because there were so few. The only possible upside, as I see it, is that the Academy might be forced to recognise the art-house cinema it tends to shun just because the big studios put out so little of Oscar caliber.

If you had high hopes for the rash of year-end Oscar contenders, you will be disappointed by now. I saw Ali and Gosford Park on the same day. Both have great performances.Will Smith, as Ali, shows that he’s managed to keep the acting chops he showed in Six Degrees of Separation and which he’s been hiding ever since, while the entire cast of Altman’s epic is outstanding. Upstairs, we have Maggie Smith, who is just delicious: she grabs the film at the outset, and never lets go. Michael Gambon does his curmudgeon act perfectly, as one would expect, while Jeremy Northam demonstrates an admirable tenor voice as Ivor Novello. Downstairs, the all-star servants (Eileen Atkins, Helen Mirren, Clive Owen, Richard E. Grant, Emily Watson, and even a woefully little-seen Derek Jacobi) more than hold their own. My friend Camilla Rutherford deserves a medal just for daring to appear among such exalted names; in the event, she comes through with an excellent performance of her own.

But both films ultimately fail when compared to their peers of recent years: Ali is not as good as Malcom X, nor as good as The Insider; Gosford Park is second-tier stuff compared to The Player. Both are overlong, especially the Altman, which suffers greatly from the absence of a plot. (It certainly fails miserably as a murder mystery.)

The one truly excellent film of the year was Monster’s Ball, which premiered at the one truly excellent cinema in downtown New York, the brand-new Sunshine. Both Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry are top-notch, but for my money the real credit belongs with director Marc Forster and cinematographer Roberto Schaefer. Forster gives Schaefer’s beautiful images time to register, just as he lets the camera stay on its subject long after most directors would have turned away in discomfort. It’s a tough film to get through, especially at first. There are no easy answers here, no Hollywood ending. But there is a moving faith in the ability of everyone to transcend the largest obstacles and reach some kind of redemption – even if they do so slowly, haltingly, and with a few missteps along the way.

Monster’s Ball is, in short, everything that the broad mass of films in 2001 wasn’t. 2001 was the year of the hype-fuelled opening: the year when films made money not by being any good, or even by being particularly popular, but because so many people went to see them on the opening weekend.

Films would burst onto the national consciousness, only to fade away as quickly as they came. It was a year of blockbuster openings: Seven of the top ten opening weekends of all time have been in 2001, but only in 2002 will Harry Potter squeeze into tenth place on the top ten grossers list. Take Planet of the Apes: it boasts the third-largest opening weekend ever, at $68.5 million, but its total gross of $179.8 million rates an all-time ranking of 55, somewhere below What Women Want. It made 38% of its total gross in its first three days of release.

Remember America’s Sweethearts? Neither do I. But it did better than Titanic on its opening weekend, when it came second on the box-office chart. It’s a typical story for summer 2001: a $48 million budget, a $30 million opening weekend, and a $91 million gross.

The front-loading of film grosses makes good economic sense. Films have always had an element of occasion about them: the glitzy premieres, the posters, previews, reviews, hype in general. Everybody would rather see a summer film in a packed movie theatre than be one of half a dozen lonely souls watching on a wet Wednesday afternoon. In a slogan, films are always better on their opening weekend.

But until relatively recently, there was a downside to trying to see a film on opening weekend: the long lines at the cinema, and the reasonably high probability that you wouldn’t get in. Now, of course, the rise of the multiplex has made it easy for cinemas to open a film on four or five screens, virtually ensuring that anybody who wants to see a film on the opening weekend will be able to.

Hollywood has finally found a way to extend its culture of instant gratification from the bangs and thrills of the film itself to the whole moviegoing experience. No more looking up showtimes in the newspaper: just go along to the local multiplex, and if you’ve missed one showing, there’ll be another along in 20 minutes.

The shelf-life of films has been getting shorter for a while, but now it’s reached the point where they no longer work as cultural objects, in the way that books or even television shows do. Rather, films have become cultural events, which happen at a certain point in time and rapidly lose their status thereafter. (Consider someone who really wanted to see Tomb Raider when it came out, but never got around to it: does that person still want to see it? No.)

That’s why the Oscar race is so hard to call this year: Hollywood has largely given up on creating great films, in favor of creating great opening weekends.

There’s a side-effect to the increasing reliance on opening weekends, and that comes from the fact that in order to create a great opening weekend, you need brand recognition. And that, in turn, means the rise of the Franchise Film.

The four top weekends of the year (which are four of the top five weekends ever) all came with built-in brand recognition: Harry Potter, Planet of the Apes, The Mummy Returns, and Rush Hour 2. This is a trend that is only going to get worse in 2002, what with new films coming out from the Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Matrix franchises, not to mention the usual bevy of sequels and threequels. (American Psycho II, anybody? Or might you prefer Blair Witch 3?)

In short, it seems that the hope and ambition that infused the film-going public after 1999 rapidly evaporated. None of the critically-acclaimed films this year have done well at the box office, genre films excepted. (I include here the fantasy of Lord of the Rings, as well as the children’s films Monsters Inc and Shrek). After all, there have been some good films: With a Friend Like Harry, Mulholland Drive, Ghost World, Memento, In the Bedroom and Sexy Beast, just to name a few. But they never caught the imagination of the public in the way that Being John Malkovich or American Beauty did in 1999. If Together had been released two years earlier, it would have been part of a great filmmaking renaissance. Now, it’s a quirky footnote, much loved by those who went to see it, but which grossed less than $1 million in the US, and which was showing in just 47 theatres nationwide at the peak of its popularity.

But maybe the biggest disappointment of all was A.I., the film which we all hoped would bring together the vision of Stanley Kubrick with the humanity of Steven Spielberg. I thought it did just that: I loved it. But for some reason it got a mixed critical reception and lukewarm word-of-mouth, and limped out of theatres having grossed less money than Harry Potter made on its opening weekend.

All I ask now is that Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones bombs at the box office and starts a general backlash against franchise dreck. Please, please?

Posted by Felix at 1:20 EST | Comments (0)

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