avengers23 - 30/50 books | 45/50 movies
Books
29.
Old Man's War, by John Scalzi
I've been reticent in reviewing this book (and a couple of sports documentaries I've seen) because I was afraid that I was running out of things to say. It's possible the process of reviewing every single movie and book I consume this year has taken some of the spark from the exercise of writing. Part of it might also come from the fear that I have nothing new to say; who wants to hear or read any opinion that's already been shared?
However, someone retweeted this
post on Twitter this morning about Israel, and I thought back to the former diplomat who was a point of modest ridicule in Old Man's War. The former diplomat, now in the same enhanced clone body as his fellow Colonial Marines, complained that the Colonial Marines were deployed too frequently because they represented the path of least resistance for the CDF. It's easier to use a hammer (though a more appropriate comparison would be a rifle, I suppose) to solve a problem by brute force than to try to negotiate with literally alien cultures. And in that way, I thought about how history and culture have created this apparatus for supporting a facade of negotiation in the Middle East, and how it's easier to build a wall or to attack neighbors who have been
systematically characterized as a dangerous Other even when the government should by all rights know the difference between a crime committed by citizens of another polity and act of war committed by a sovereign state. If we can't even begin to negotiate with other human beings, it should be no surprise that the humans of John Scalzi's work would choose to deploy the hammer or the rifle so casually in dealing with aliens.
30.
Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, by Joan Druett
Druett skillfully weaves a tale of the minutiae of castaway life from the survivors' memoirs; it helped that the survivors were eloquent writers. However, this isn't an account of courage and despair, though the survivors all feel courage and despair. History provides Druett with two two nearly simultaneous shipwrecks in the Auckland Islands, and Druett was able to create a narrative to compare the organized and unified party of the survivors of the Grafton shipwreck and the disorganized and fractured party of the survivors of the Invercauld. I could see companies using this book as a treatise on the importance of leadership, dedication to each, and collective strategic planning on survival; the compassion that the survivors of the Grafton showed to Francois Raynal would be rewarded tenfold by Raynal's skills and talents. Captain Thomas Musgrave, Raynal, and others supported each other, which allowed them to survive. The remainders of the Invercauld's crew were fractured by issues of rank and class, and they could not put them or the ethos of every man for himself aside to help each other survive.
Movies
43.
ESPN's 30 for 30: Bad Boys
It feels like the 30 for 30 series is falling into a bit of a rut. I don't expect ESPN to tap filmmakers to experiment with form, like Adam Kurland and Lucas Jansen did with
Silly Little Game or Brett Morgen with
June 17, 1994, but it seems like the recent 30 for 30 documentaries are getting trapped into the standard sports documentary format. This feeling was especially acute in
Bad Boys, which feels like the normal sports documentary that follows a championship team's beginning from misery through its struggles to accomplishment. In this case, it helped that the featured players - Isiah Thomas, Bill Laimbeer, Dennis Rodman, John Salley - are comfortable with the press and charismatic, so the story could be told in an entertaining, if familiar, way.
Nonetheless, it felt like a missed opportunity to explore some key questions about what those Detroit Piston championship teams represented. How does it impact you emotionally and psychologically to embrace the black hat and become the villains everyone thought you were? It was accepted as given that all the players were comfortable with it because the key players, the team leaders were. How did those Piston teams pave the way for the ugly way the Knicks and Heat of the early to mid 1990s played, and how did the Pistons' legacy affect the league as a whole? How did it feel for Laimbeer and Mahorn to hear Patrick Ewing, himself responsible for some of the dirtiest plays in college basketball history under John Thompson's tutelage at Georgetown, call them dirty? And most importantly, how did race play into how the Pistons were seen and the NBA's awkward position of marketing young black men to an increasingly international consumer base? Thomas, Mahorn, Rodman, Salley, Dantley, Dumars, and Aguirre are all black, but the biggest instigator was Laimbeer more often than not.
44.
ESPN's 30 for 30: No Mas
I watched No Mas a couple of weeks ago, and the part that stays with me was how condescending the film was to Roberto Duran because of its focus on Sugar Ray Leonard. The film is structured around Sugar Ray Leonard chasing down Roberto Duran to get an answer to why Duran quite their 1980 rematch, the infamous "No Mas" fight that gives the documentary its title, as if Duran owes Leonard an explanation. The filmmakers succeed in providing context for their first fight, the "Brawl in Montreal," where Duran beat Leonard by decision to win the WBC Welterweight championship, but its set-up of the rematch shows how far in the bag it was for Leonard. Leonard retired and then unretired to force Duran into a rematch only five months after their championship bout. Duran had to drastically cut weight in order to qualify for the fight, and the filmmakers portray as this a fair act of gamesmanship on Leonard's part because he's the American fighting against the Panamanian who disrespected him and beat him for the title. By the time the film finally gets around to focusing on Duran, it's too late; the film is definitively in Leonard's camp, from Leonard's perspective by that point, enough so that it gives Leonard a chance to provide a voiceover to tell Duran and the audience that Duran can let go of the No Mas fight. The filmmaker, likely hampered by Duran's hesitance to revisit the No Mas fight, focused on Leonard, who's undeniably more accessible, but it missed the more interesting part of the story: what Roberto Duran represented to Panama in 1980, and how the No Mas fight was an aberration. If only the film had explored the Duran side of the conversation with more time and energy, this could have been a standout 30 for 30 documentary.
45.
Lenny Cooke
For the past couple of years, I've taken part in horror movie marathons in October. I'm still wrapping my head around why I enjoy horror movies; there's something about how they attack primal parts of us like fear and bloodlust directly. Maybe they're best able to evoke superficial sympathy from us; it might be hard to connect to characters emotionally, but I think that most of us can appreciate the threat of violence and the fear of death that characters in a horror movie would face.
There's a line to be drawn between horror movies and wince and cringe-inducing comedies like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Da Ali G Show, or the BBC's The Office. Horror movies and cringe comedies both dare the viewer to avert his or her eyes from the physical or emotional carnage on screen, and subsequent horror movies and cringe comedies have to raise the stakes in order to break through to the audience. It's not enough to have awkward inventive kills/conversations about awkward subjects; now, you have to top the fantastic kill in the most recent commercially successful or critically acclaimed film/
two naked hairy men fighting through a hotel, including its auditorium where a real estate convention is taking place. Or maybe the zombie outbreak that was localized to an isolated town or a small group of people spreads to become a regional or even global threat. The name of the game is escalation.
Escalation isn't just the name of the game in fiction, obviously. Throughout last week, the anticipation about where LeBron James would sign on to play basketball for the 2014-15 NBA season and beyond grew. Everyone wondered how James would follow up
The Decision, his pre-packaged press conference in 2010 to announce that he was signing with the Miami Heat, and his four successful seasons with the Heat. On Friday, James one-upped himself and crafted a new narrative about a wayward son going home to improve his community's future.
Thinking about LeBron James, wincing and cringing, and escalation brought me to Lenny Cooke, a documentary about the titular high school basketball player who was expected to be drafted into the NBA alongside other straight out of high school basketball stars like James, Tracy McGrady, and Kobe Bryant. In 2001, Cooke was ranked above NBA superstars like Carmelo Anthony, Amar'e Stoudemire, and even LeBron James. The documentary, crafted from footage following Cooke shot in 2001 by Adam Shopkorn by Josh and Benny Safdie and supplemented with footage shot in 2012 by the Safdies with an older Cooke, attempts to lay Cooke's downfall at two pivotal adidas ABCD basketball camp games. In one, Cooke matched Anthony basket for basket to Cooke's delight. In the other, Cooke was outplayed by James, whose buzzer-beating, game-winning three point shot, the documentary argues, destroyed Cooke's chances at becoming an NBA star. Once Cooke aged out of playing high school basketball in New Jersey, he declared himself eligible for the NBA draft; he went undrafted. And that was that for Cooke's dreams of playing in the NBA and his dreams of returning to and uplifting the Bushwick neighborhood in Brooklyn.
The 2014 Emmy award nominations were announced last week as well, and Joe Morton was nominated for outstanding guest actor in a drama series for his portrayal of Rowan Pope on
Scandal. One of Rowan Pope's lines of dialogue has stuck with me; while upbraiding Olivia Pope, played by Kerry Washington, Rowan tells Olivia, "You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have." It's funny; this saying gets wrapped up with the disparity between team owners, who are billionaires, and the players, who at their peak can become multi-millionaires. Combined with the physical labor the players have to put in to earn their wages, you could literally say that the players have to work twice as hard to get a fraction of what the owners get. Part of the blame for Cooke's downfall comes from his reluctance to put in the effort; Cooke balked at a 6:30 am training session at basketball camp. Part of the blame probably comes from Cooke's feeling of entitlement, a sentiment fueled agents and would-be hangers-on who sensed that Cooke could make them money. Part of it came from the fact that Cooke was a teenager, a reality that's so easily forgotten, and so he was entitled to make some mistakes, like moving out of Debbie Bortner's home, that would cost him dearly because it made him seem erratic and increased his risk profile to teams that would draft him.
By the end of the documentary, the viewer is left with questions about what happens when someone doesn't realize his vision or perceived destiny. Cooke, older, heavier, and unable to pursue a career as a basketball player because of various injuries, seems adrift. There's a powerful moment when the older Cooke sees footage of his younger, more assured self. That reflective moment raises Lenny Cooke to stand shoulder to shoulder with the seminal
Hoop Dreams, which is as high an air a documentary about basketball can reach.