I’ve just written a substantive comment on a post by Michael Ruhlman about foie gras that’s not force-fed. See, Ruhlman uses the existence and deliciousness of (more) humanely produced foie gras in support of an “Oh, lighten up!” attitude about force-feeding. I expected the opposite.
As you might think, his argument is weak and sometimes quite weird. You might get an interesting read out of the original post and my (and other) comments; let me know what you think. Or, better, let Ruhlman know.
It’s not so much that I think Lynn Hirschberg’s Oscar portfolio piece, “Breaking Through,” doesn’t get the job done. In her triangulation of the cinematic breakthrough performance, she does showcase a dozen-plus nominees.
My problem with the piece, instead, is its lack of reach. In looking for the origins of classic actors’ “templates”—which, she says, can be formed by breakthrough performances—she doesn’t look far enough. Though she convincingly locates some decades-old breakthroughs (e.g., Diane Keaton’s; see below), her aim is off with many more recent career- or character-making moments.
For example, Hirschberg names the performance in which Vince Vaughan created his primary comedic personae—”the brilliant motormouth”—as Wedding Crashers. In an age where IMDB is a click away, how can she (or her editors) not look further back than 2005? In 2004, they’d find Vaughan revising the role—already become a cliché, if an enjoyable one—in Starsky & Hutch. A year earlier still, one can find his rapid-fire banter in Old School. (“All you gotta do is say ‘earmuffs’ to him…”) Indeed, there’s a strong case to be made that it all goes back to 1996’s Swingers.
Hirschberg traces Owen Wilson’s “slacker deadbeat extraordinaire” back to Starsky & Hutch. I’ll allow a dismissal of Bottle Rocket [1996] on the grounds that nobody saw it; Hirschberg makes a similar argument about Diane Keaton’s breakthrough being Annie Hall, despite her appearance in three prior Woody Allen films. (She writes that “as with almost everything else in life, context is everything.”) But what about 2001’s Zoolander and The Royal Tenenbaums?
The list goes on: Harrison Ford “has never strayed far from men like Indiana Jones” (which is to say, men like Han Solo); George Clooney went “debonair” as Danny Ocean (after he did so as Bruce Wayne and Doug Ross, among others).
If this all seems of little consequence, consider each example in terms of the creative and financial circumstances of its production. When you slight Swingers for Wedding Crashers, you slight every pair of Hollywood outsiders who ever broke in with sheer creativity: not just Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughan, but Damon and Affleck, Smith and Mewes, and so on.
The same goes for the Owen Wilson question: Wes Anderson may be the most important American filmmaker to emerge in the last two decades, and his writing with Wilson, alongside his landmark cinematic point-of-view, made his career. That legacy is nowhere to be found in a discussion of Starsky & Hutch.
In George Clooney’s case, it’s not the buddy system but television that’s getting overlooked. I understand Batman & Robin (1997) wasn’t Clooney’s best work, but he simply couldn’t have been the Bruce Wayne he was without the charming precedent of E.R.‘s Doug Ross character. These days, one can hardly accept the argument that a cinematic breakthrough can’t happen on television, not after James Gandolfini, Dennis Franz, and, well, Clooney.
What we have here, in other words, is a failure to acknowledge changing circumstances of star production: Stars can make themselves, with the right combination of luck and talent, and television is as important in making movie stars as are the movies. Neither change is reflected in Hirschberg’s piece; it is telling, indeed, that she spends so much time looking into the past—at Keaton, De Niro, and Nicholson; but also Cary Grant, Bette Davis, and Clark Gable —in an article so pointedly “about” the up-and-coming.
Half of group of NYU students said they’d give up their right to vote forever for $1 million.
My question is, what about the other half?
Let’s say I could earn just 6% per year (after taxes) on $1 million. Isn’t $60,000 in contributions to the party of my choice worth more than my vote?
What about to non-profits dedicated to advancing the causes that I’m essentially voting for in the first place?
I understand the question is about the societal worth of one’s vote as compared to some measure of personal gain, but even if we stay altruistic, shouldn’t one make the trade in every case?
[Via Kottke]
Swivel.com, which visualizes user-provided data, has a new dataset on the mainstream transition from vinyl records to cassette tapes to compact discs to iPods.
It’s a neat graph, but the story changes when you click the “absolute” link above the graph. Looking at the default format, relative values, one gets an inflated sense of the effect of iPod sales. This problem is compounded by the fact that the iPod data are cumulative, unlike the rest. I guess it has to be accounted for that one iPod can hold many albums, but I’m not sure this is the way.
Separately, what about non-iPod digital music players?
Still, interesting stuff, and worth a nod to Swivel anyway.
There’s a fascinating piece in the Washington Post right now about a stunt involving Joshua Bell playing at a Metro stop to see how much people would notice.
Bell is one of the most well-reputed classical violinists in the world, but that didn’t matter:
“At a music hall, I’ll get upset if someone coughs or if someone’s cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change.” This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.
The article is well written and fascinating throughout, including interviews with passers-by, a famous conductor, and of course Bell himself. But I particularly love the excerpt above and Bell’s comments immediately following it, about getting stage fright only because commuters hadn’t requested his presence (as opposed to the “crowned heads of Europe,” each of whom paid for a ticket).
Don't Look Now 