So it's finally over. I'm less elated than relieved. But a little bit elated too. Since I've been trying to give up the dark art of punditry, a fundamentally useless activity that takes up too much of the time of too many smart people, I'll confine myself to a few empirical observations.
1. Barack Obama won this election decisively. As of this writing, with around 97% of the votes counted, he has received over 52% of the popular vote, the second-highest portion for a new president in the past 40 years, and the highest percentage of any Democratic candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. If his 12,000 vote lead in North Carolina holds, he'll wind up with 364 electoral college votes, a two-to-one supermajority.
2. The G.O.P. suffered a total wipeout in the northeastern third of the country, with McCain losing the entire New England and mid-Atlantic regions, as well as a continuous stream of states extending as far south as North Carolina and as far west as Minnesota and Iowa. Normally close states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin went to Obama by double digits. Even Indiana went for the Democrats, for the first time since 1964. With the defeat of Connecticut's Christopher Shays, the Republicans now hold no House seats anywhere in New England (they still have both Senate seats in Maine), and only 3 out of 29 seats in New York state.
3. The polls were right. Obama won the election by about six percentage points in the popular vote, solidly within the range predicted by most pre-election polls. The only battleground states where results deviated significantly from pre-election polling averages were Nevada and Indiana, where Obama did about five points better than expected, winning a larger-than-predicted majority in Nevada and pulling an upset in the Hoosier state.
05 November 2008
05 October 2008
NYFF #3: Che
Possibly the most anticipated film of this year's New York Film Festival, Steven Soderbergh's Che gets its sole screening on Tuesday night. The film premiered at Cannes to a fair amount of controversy, largely centered on the film's alleged "omissions" of some of the less flattering episodes of Ernesto Guevara's life. Owing to an odd critical predilection for writing about what's on the screen rather than what isn't, as well as the belief that an artist is entitled to his/her own choice of subject, I'll leave such matters to others.
As for the entirely legitimate question of whether Che glamorizes Guevara, my answer would be a qualified no. Soderbergh's whole approach is based on a studied objectivity. Clocking in at 262 minutes, divided exactly in half by an intermission, Che may be the most plot-driven biopic ever made. The pace of this relentlessly forward-driving film (which certainly doesn't feel like four-and-a-half hours) remains brisk throughout, with a lot of short scenes and almost no time spent ruminating over character psychology. The film makes no explicit effort to valorize or condemn anything onscreen, but merely presents its version of what happened, mostly with as little expressionist fanfare as possible. (The film's first half, devoted to the years preceding the Cuban Revolution of 1959, jived with my scant knowledge of the period, although I'll have to plead ignorance on the second half, set in the wilds of Bolivia in the final year of Guevara's life.)
In its unaccented neutrality, Che is a fitting tribute to a Marxist revolutionary: collective struggle easily trumps individual heroism throughout. This conceptual coherence lifts the movie far above something like Walter Salles's 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries, which Jessica Winter aptly described as "a well-meaning but ostentatious display of solidarity with a vaguely defined ideal, not entirely unlike making the scene in your Che Guevara tank top."
Che avoids most of the obvious semiotic pitfalls, but only at the expense of refusing to define Guevara entirely, other than as the personification of collective struggle. The rich color palette and exquisitely unobtrusive framings make Che an attractive film to look at, but its superficial beauty eventually makes for an alienating experience. (This is perhaps the whole point.) The first half is sprinkled with black-and-white scenes from a 1964 trip to New York, mostly covering Guevara's appearance representing Cuba at the United Nations and an interview by a female journalist. But this too seems deliberately off-putting, more an excuse for Soderbergh to whip up some '60s-style cinema vérité than to provide any meaningful political or psychological insight into his subject. In a sense, the movie's not really a biopic at all; Che basically remains an icon, albeit one put back into historical context. It is a supremely withholding film. Nearly a week after seeing it, I can't decide if it was empty or brilliant.
As for the entirely legitimate question of whether Che glamorizes Guevara, my answer would be a qualified no. Soderbergh's whole approach is based on a studied objectivity. Clocking in at 262 minutes, divided exactly in half by an intermission, Che may be the most plot-driven biopic ever made. The pace of this relentlessly forward-driving film (which certainly doesn't feel like four-and-a-half hours) remains brisk throughout, with a lot of short scenes and almost no time spent ruminating over character psychology. The film makes no explicit effort to valorize or condemn anything onscreen, but merely presents its version of what happened, mostly with as little expressionist fanfare as possible. (The film's first half, devoted to the years preceding the Cuban Revolution of 1959, jived with my scant knowledge of the period, although I'll have to plead ignorance on the second half, set in the wilds of Bolivia in the final year of Guevara's life.)
In its unaccented neutrality, Che is a fitting tribute to a Marxist revolutionary: collective struggle easily trumps individual heroism throughout. This conceptual coherence lifts the movie far above something like Walter Salles's 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries, which Jessica Winter aptly described as "a well-meaning but ostentatious display of solidarity with a vaguely defined ideal, not entirely unlike making the scene in your Che Guevara tank top."
Che avoids most of the obvious semiotic pitfalls, but only at the expense of refusing to define Guevara entirely, other than as the personification of collective struggle. The rich color palette and exquisitely unobtrusive framings make Che an attractive film to look at, but its superficial beauty eventually makes for an alienating experience. (This is perhaps the whole point.) The first half is sprinkled with black-and-white scenes from a 1964 trip to New York, mostly covering Guevara's appearance representing Cuba at the United Nations and an interview by a female journalist. But this too seems deliberately off-putting, more an excuse for Soderbergh to whip up some '60s-style cinema vérité than to provide any meaningful political or psychological insight into his subject. In a sense, the movie's not really a biopic at all; Che basically remains an icon, albeit one put back into historical context. It is a supremely withholding film. Nearly a week after seeing it, I can't decide if it was empty or brilliant.
27 September 2008
NYFF #2: Wendy and Lucy
One of the highlights of this year's main program is Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, the follow-up to her justly acclaimed 2006 indie Old Joy. Michelle Williams plays Wendy, a twentysomething drifter passing through rural Oregon on her way to seek work in Alaska. Her sole companion is her dog Lucy, but the two become separated after Wendy is pointlessly arrested following a pathetic attempt to shoplift a few pieces of food. Most of the film's remainder is devoted to Wendy's efforts to find her dog.
If this scenario sounds unbearably sentimental, it doesn't play that way onscreen, thanks both to Reichardt's laid-back, assured direction and Williams's singular performance; beaten down by the world and constantly on the defensive, her Wendy is simultaneously aloof and sympathetic. Reichardt once again demonstrates a good eye for the landscapes of small-town America, but the setting is hardly romanticized. In some ways, Wendy and Lucy is less overtly political than Old Joy—there's no equivalent here to the earlier film's brilliant use of liberal talk radio as purveyor of both consolation and deeper alienation—but the many references to homelessness and unemployment are impossible to miss.
If this scenario sounds unbearably sentimental, it doesn't play that way onscreen, thanks both to Reichardt's laid-back, assured direction and Williams's singular performance; beaten down by the world and constantly on the defensive, her Wendy is simultaneously aloof and sympathetic. Reichardt once again demonstrates a good eye for the landscapes of small-town America, but the setting is hardly romanticized. In some ways, Wendy and Lucy is less overtly political than Old Joy—there's no equivalent here to the earlier film's brilliant use of liberal talk radio as purveyor of both consolation and deeper alienation—but the many references to homelessness and unemployment are impossible to miss.
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