Greg Brown
I'm a student affairs professional working in the woods of northern Michigan. To put it plainly, I help high school kids learn all the life-lessons that they don't teach in class. (I also blog and stuff.)
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Battleship is a movie that surprisingly very few people will see in theaters, having had the misfortune of coming out so soon after The Avengers titanic success. So this probably sounds crazy, but in my estimation it bests The Avengers in every category but fan-service: more action, genuinely fascinating antagonists, minimalist world-building in service of mystery, actual emotional arcs for characters, and a plot that actually coheres for more than five minutes at a time. I was very worried going in—enough to get drunk beforehand with two friends—but exited the movie genuinely elated at how good it had been.
One of the things Battleship does strangely well—better than any other film of its kind—is capture how essentially inscrutable first contact would be. After the very opening skirmish, there’s a strange détente, neither side willing to move against the other as they try and guess their motives and plan out their next goals. Berg even shows us glimpses of their faces through the helmets, imbuing them with just enough difference to be alien, but enough humanity to make us constantly search their faces for clues of emotion. It’s like they’re warring against an enemy barely on the good side of the uncanny valley, and it weirdly works.
And that’s the thing: we never really get any solid clues that the bad guys are really all that bad! They zap in from space, lose a ship because we have tons of space junk, almost immediately get fired at, try to set up a shield to keep shit from getting too crazy, and try to call home so that someone can come and pick them up. They even have IFF-systems more advanced and discriminating than any of our drone weaponry can claim, which the movie takes care to visually show you all the time.
But at the same time, the movie uses all the typical language of action films to set you in the usual moral stance: disaster striking cities and suburbs, rallying around shared convictions of honor and duty, elision of the atrocities in previous wars, even a damsel in distress. It is so serious and incidentally self-parodying that it’s hard to tell how far the director meant for it to go.
(I’m inclined to give Berg more credit than most because he directed the aggressively genre-breaking Hancock who most would at least agree had a fairly great premise and first act. In Battleship, in addition to liberal zooming around in space, he also pulls from a popular YouTube video. It all feels like a more thoughful, controlled, and deliberately-unpredictable version of the dominant Michael Bay aesthetic that you see shoveled into most action films.)
It’s hard to talk much more about it without spoiling the film—and delight at how strange the movie allows itself to become adds to the fantastic first-watch experience—but the film manges to brush up against a bunch of topics that you’d never expect to see in an alien-invasion film like this. For example, one of the main characters is a double-amputee veteran who is an odd reminder for a genre who tends to uncritically advocate solving problems militarily.
For another example that’s more of a reach, they start the movie engaged in exercises between over a dozen nations—principally among them the US and Japan—but end it deploying the same WWII weaponry against this entirely novel foe. It adds to the unease of casually deploying this hardware against an enemy they barely understand, when you step back to consider that the Allies did some deeply fucked-up shit during WWII (like firebombing hundreds of Japanese cities, and eventually dropping two nuclear weapons). The movie deftly sidesteps an overt raising of the issue by having the main character and his Japanese counterpart in a bro-partnership for most of the film, but it’s still weirdly there.
Some of these you can certainly disagree with, but there are a lot of examples—the unease with and ultimate uselessness of technology, alien technology that’s read The Power Broker and regards military bases and major freeways as the only dangers worth destroying in Hawaii, etc. All of these point to a deeper subtext to the film than there’s any right to be, and a subtext that’s more interesting and respected than The Avengers casual acceptance of a surveillance state manned by individuals of unparalleled power, and simple dismissal of trying to repliate that same sort of power under an institution more amenable to democracy.
And on top of all that, the scene where they essentially play the game Battleship against the aliens is one of the most gripping and effective scenes in the entire film. What’s not to like about that?
Can’t come across this video and not immediately share it with everyone, from your closest friends to strangers on the street. The finest bit of YouTube weirdness I’ve ever seen.
I mean, really, it sucked far beyond where the RT score and previous Marvel movies had led me to believe.
Pacing was awful, resulting in an end battle that was utterly exhausting and filled with only the vaguest of plot coherence. Tons of weird little turns of whatever that you’d think might go somewhere (Thor gets stabbed with a pointy key fob?) never really pan out.
Cinematography was boring at best. The directing actually got in the way as awful at key points, like every time Whedon decided that a dutch angle might be best to beat the viewer over the head, or when he decided to stage one shot in the reflection of a rear-view mirror for no real reason. Also in the age of CGI, long-shots have kind of lost ther magic as every director can do them for the most trivial of reasons.
So much of the movie showed the seams, like when one character made an incongruous line of dialogue that was just designed to set up a quippy quip 30 seconds later. Or as a friend pointed out, the scene where some filmmaker must have been “You know it would be really cool if Scarlett Johannsen jumped on one of the alien jet skis and flew it around! OR WAIT, IF SHE DIDN’T FLY IT DIRECTLY BUT FLEW THEY GUY FLYING THE JET SKI! BRILLIANT PRINT IT.”
The pacing and seams—and the fanservice dripping over evey part of the film—made me wonder if “best” these days has come more to mean “most”. Example: “The Avengers was the most comic-book movie so far.” See, that statement works. I can sit back and go “yeah there was lots of fighting and contrived ways for even the heroes to fight each other for silly reasons so I can see that!”
But best comic-book movie? Even if you exempt Nolan’s attempts, I’d still place IM1 above, IM2just barely above and Thor in this weird position where half of the movie was way better and the other half way worse. I guess basic narrative coherence and fan-service and five full-length advertisements beforehand is all it takes to get a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes?
And I’m just evaluating it here as a popcorn movie; there’s a lot of troubling (and hilarious in turn) undercurrents to the film that should give us pause too. Blasting through the same sort of surveillence scheme that almost leads a major character to quit in The Dark Knight? Check. Nuclear weaponry (and analogous guns) that’s bad until it’s good? Check. A villain who wants to cause the greatest, most public amount of destruction possible, placing their motives perilously close to that of the filmmakers themselves? Lol check. The Avengers is an entire film that uses quippy intertextual reference as a pancea for actual self-consciousness, all to avoid becoming horrified.
Also really disappointed they deleted the scene where Captain America calls Nick Fury “boy.”
Books & Beer: Episode 5 YA Literature and From Hell
Clarissa and I debated YA Literature: Clarissa on the pro side, myself on the con. But we took a break from fighting to both praise the graphic novel From Hell.
Finally, a long-overdue new episode! We could blame travel and health stuff as usual, but the real reason is because I’m a real laggard about my assigned reading. Also I got a bit more inebriated and vindictive than usual this episode, so lol?
Books Mentioned:
- The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins
- The Fault in our Stars by John Green
- A bunch of other YA books by Madeline L’Engle, Lois Lowry, and others
- From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
Pages Mentioned:
Rejected Beetles Cover for their Sgt. Pepper’s Old White Guys album. (Taken with instagram)
Some of you may be following along on Goodreads already, but here’s a long-belated accounting of the books I read the first few months of this year. Hoping to recount it month-by-month in the future.
January
- The Path to Power by Robert Caro
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte
- Means of Ascent by Robert Caro
- Inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky
- The World According to Garp by John Irving
I enjoyed most of all the two volumes this month of Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Robert Caro is genuinely one of the handful of people I’d consider for a Nobel Prize for Literature from the US—and possibly the most deserving, despite writing strictly non-fiction. (Is that allowed?)
Tufte and Irving were ok (though I was disappointed by the latter), and Lashinsky wrote the Apple book that the Steve Jobs biography promised (and failed) to be.
February
- Inverted World by Christopher Priest
- Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan
- The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin
- Feminism is for Everyone by bell hooks
After the barn-burner that was January—not one but TWO Caro volumes—this month seems slight by comparison, even considering the 29 days. All four books are tight little works, and I was surprised to see myself enjoying Priest as much as I did. NYRB Classics wins again. I read my first bell hooks book and she lived up to my elevated expectations, putting out a concentrated primer on what feminism is all about. And Smolin’s work was Brian Greene for adults, both a deeper examination of modern theoretical physics and a useful counterbalance to Greene’s enthusiasm for string theory.
Sullivan is talented as hell, but there are weaknesses and crutches.
March
- River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit
- Otherwise Known as the Human Condition by Geoff Dyer
- The Possessed by Elif Batuman
- Airframe by Michael Crichton
- The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
- Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
Four impressive-as-hell books this month in Solnit, Batuman, Barnes, and Benjamin. I basically ran around babbling the praises of River of Shadows for all of 2012 so far, and they’re well-deserved. Re-readng it was just as pleasurable as my first time two years ago. Elif Batuman is a hell of a writer, and makes me want to read Russian literature so badly. This was my first time reading Julian Barnes, after consuming that slim volume on memory and remorse, I want to read more of him now! And Walter Benjamin just owns owns owns. Dude is so quotable.
Geoff Dyer is ok, but too unfocused to really delve beyond the aesthetic attributes of any experience. That’s certainly his strength and niche, but seeing the bounds of his domain over 400 pages of essays was kind of depressing. Michael Crichton was still Michael Crichton, and I can see both clearly both why I eagerly read all his stuff in 6th grade and why I haven’t touched it since. Most hilarious/disappointing part was picking up Tom Wolfe for the first time afterwards and noticing he has the same sort of weaknesses; instant turn-off.
I am excited about the rest of the year! Much better pace than 2011, which makes sense given my main weekend activity is reading until football shows up again in the Fall.
- Horn: He’s coming out the window right now, I gotta go, buddy. I’m sorry, but he’s coming out the window.
- Dispatcher: Don’t, don’t — don’t go out the door. Mr. Horn? Mr. Horn?
- Horn: They just stole something. I’m going after them, I’m sorry.
- Dispatcher: Don’t go outside.
- Horn: I ain’t letting them get away with this s--t. They stole something. They got a bag of something.
- Dispatcher: Don’t go outside the house.
- Horn: I’m doing this.
- Dispatcher: Mr. Horn, do not go outside the house.
- Horn: I’m sorry. This ain’t right, buddy.
- Dispatcher: You’re going to get yourself shot if you go outside that house with a gun, I don’t care what you think.
- Horn: You want to make a bet?
- Dispatcher: OK? Stay in the house.
- Horn: They’re getting away!
- Dispatcher: That’s all right. Property’s not worth killing someone over, OK?
- Horn: [curses]
- Dispatcher: Don’t go out the house. Don’t be shooting nobody. I know you’re pissed and you’re frustrated, but don’t do it.
- Horn: They got a bag of loot.
- Dispatcher: OK. How big is the bag ... which way are they going?
- Horn: I’m going outside. I’ll find out.
- Dispatcher: I don’t want you going outside, Mr. Horn.
- Horn: Well, here it goes, buddy. You hear the shotgun clicking and I’m going.
- Dispatcher: Don’t go outside.
- Horn: [yelling] Move, you’re dead! [Sound of shots being fired]
Books and Beer Episode 4
The Possessed by Elif Batuman
I convinced Clarissa to read a book about Russian literature, and now we’re teaming up to try and convince you too!
Despite the title, this is the second podcast in a row without beer! (You’ll find out the reason during the episode.) Also realized last night that it’ll be tougher to do the podcast this summer. It only got up into the low-80s, and the temperature still rose by a lot from turning off the AC to avoid background noise. Eek.
Books Mentioned:
- The Possessed by Elif Batuman
- Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier
- Reporting by David Remnick
- Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
- The Marrowbone Marlow Company by Glen Taylor
- Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson
- Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
- River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit
Pages Mentioned:
Like much of that era’s popular entertainments, ______ often featured material based on sophisticated, irreverent dissections of topical matter, public personae and fads, though the primary attraction was found in the frank display of the female body.
Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.
Critique is concerned with the truth content of a work of art, the commentary with its subject matter.
The relationship between the two is determined by that basic law of literature according to which the work’s truth content is the more relevant the more inconspicuously and intimately it is bound up with its subject matter. If therefore precisely those works turn out to endure whose truth is most deeply embedded in their subject matter, the beholder who contemplates them long after their own time finds the realia all the more striking in the work as they have faded away in the world. This means that subject matter and truth content, united in the work’s early period, come apart during its afterlife; the subject matter becomes more striking while the truth content retains its original concealment.
To an ever-increasing extent, therefore, the interpretation of the striking and the odd, that is, of the subject matter, becomes a prerequisite for any later critic. One may liken him to a paleographer in front of a parchment whose faded text is covered by the stronger outlines of a script referring to that text. Just as the paleographer would have to start with reading the script, the critic must start with commenting on the text.
And out of this activity there arises immediately an inestimable criterion of critical judgment: only now can the critic ask the basic question of all criticism—namely, whether the work’s shining truth content is due to its subject matter or whether the survival of the subject matter is due to the truth content. For as they come apart in the work, they decide on its immortality. In this sense the history of works of art prepares their critique, and this is why historical distance increases their power.
If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a funeral pyre, its commentator can be likened to the chemist, its critic to an alchemist. While the former is left with wood and ashes as the sole objects of his analysis, the latter is concerned only with the enigma of the flame itself: the enigma of being alive. Thus the critic inquires about the truth whose living flame goes on burning over the heavy logs of the past and the light ashes of life gone by.
Books & Beer: Episode 3
Alice Munro
Clarissa talks with Greg about one of her favorite authors as they try to pin down what makes her short stories special.
We upgraded to microphone stands and pop filters for this episode, meaning we didn’t have to scoot our only table to over by the couches! Unfortunately, I set the gain on Clarissa’s mic a bit too high so she clipped a little. My bad.
As always, previous episodes and a podcast feed are at BooksandBeer.net, and you can also find us on iTunes.
Books mentioned
- Selected Stories and Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
- Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson
- Wasted by Marya Hornbacher
- The Marrowbone Marble Company by Glenn Taylor
- Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks
- The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi
Only way to express my happiness at eating pizza is to make a pizza-smile. (Taken with instagram)
