Category Archives: Visual

not exactly a wonder

Posted on by under Visual

Did anyone actually expect Tim Burton’s new version of Alice in Wonderland to be good?  It seems to me like the kind of thing Wal-Mart shoppers think is elegantly “weird.”  Burton has been washed up for years, Johnny Depp is a wang, and CGI is fucking boring, especially when compared to the lushly psychotic animation in the 1950s Disney version (which I actually prefer to Carroll’s original boooks, awesome as they are).  Anyway, Dana Stevens has whipped her pen out and slashed Burton in her typically persuasive, compact way.  Git git it.

-TGR

Prosody = Sexxxy

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Pooms/Poetry, Visual

We English teachers aren’t supposed to care about such things anymore, but fug it: knowing something about the basics of poetic form will enrich your understanding of poetry. In other words, it will make poetry more pleasurable for you. It’s like taking a basic music appreciation class and then going back and listening to records you already dug. Scansion is like dancing: it is all about learning how to follow the beat.

With this fact in mind, some good English Dept. folks at the University of Virginia (which I believe is the school Mr. Jefferson founded after he got his degree at my alma mater, William & Mary) have launched a wonderful new website for poetry nerds to waste time on. It’s called “For Better of Verse” (yeah, I hope you like puns, too), and in addition to an excellent glossary of poetic terms (teachers take note), it has a very, very cool interactive prosody widget. Doesn’t that sound fun?! Trust me, it is, even if you don’t think you care or need to know about iambs.

Using various canonical lyrics as well as passages from longer works–and I mean really canonical: it’s heavy on people like Milton and the Romantics, with some Yeats thrown in–the site allows you to practice your ability to spot the accents (i.e. the metrical emphases) and other key formal features in lines of poetry. The site will even “grade” your efforts.  Scansion is an imperfect technique, because it is often possible to place the accents in one line several different ways, and the whole deal might sound stuffy and academic at first, but trust me, this is like an addictive video game. Learning to scan “traditional” accentual poetry will in turn help you detect and savor the sonic features of “free verse”: once you can pick up the difference between, say, a trochee and an iamb, you will notice yourself paying more attention to things like internal rhyme, alliteration, and syllable counts, formal features which remain crucial to free verse, even though f.v. mostly dispenses with traditional meter. Scan away!

-TGR

A New Map of America?

Posted on by under Other Critics, The Moronic Inferno, Visual

What would the U.S. look like if the Senate weren’t designed so that large rural places with low populations have more power than compressed urban centers where, you know, lots of Americans actually live?  What if all the states were about the same size in terms of residents?  James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly has posted a cool “thought experiment” map (designed by Neil Freeman) on his blog, in which state borders have been redrawn the same way Congressional districts are–as population changes–without hugely altering the existing cultural / ethnic make-up (fragmented and complex as those are).  I would live in Mojave and be a native of Allegheny (I think–the map is kinda small).  You?  I especially like the new provincial names.

Keep Trippin’

Posted on by under sports, Visual

It’s hard to pitch a baseball well.  It’s even harder to throw a no-hitter in the Major Leagues while tripping balls on acid, which is what the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Dock Ellis did on June 12, 1970.  Thanks to the Internets, you can get the animated story, narrated by the man himself.  Even if you’ve already seen this (I think it might have gotten mentioned in fuggin’ Time), I’ll bet you need to see it again, not least because Ellis is a good storyteller.  [Hat-tip to Dan Pecchenino for this.]

Spring training starts in a little over two months!

-TGR

Solid film crit in The New Yorker (as usual)

Posted on by under Other Critics, Visual

I’m not sure which New Yorker film critic it’s fashionable to dislike now, but David Denby has a remarkably good column in the January 4 issue, where he reviews two films you may have heard about, Avatar and the latest Sherlock Holmes (the former has been getting good press at McDonald’s).  Denby is always a capable critic, but this piece caught me for some reason.

Reflecting on Avatar, Denby quickly and humanely underscores its annoying aspects–the corny idealization of aboriginal culture, the irony of a quarter-billion-dollar techno-thriller being about the evils of technology–then calmly celebrates the galvanic, sensuous accomplishment of the production, the way it does what blockbusters are supposed to do: entertain lots of different people a lot for a couple hours.  He slips in some Deleuze–“this world is as much a vertical experience as a horizontal one, and the many parts of it cohere and flow together.  The movie is a blissful fantasy of a completely organic life”–and tempers his philosophical reservations with unashamed popcorn joy:

Well, actually, life among the Na’vi [the spear-wielding, blue good guys], for all its physical glories, looks a little dull.  True, there’s no reality TV or fast food, but there’s no tennis or Raymond Chandler or Ella Fitzgerald, either.  But let’s not dwell on the sentimentality of Cameron’s notion of aboriginal life–the movie is striking enough to make it irrelevant . . . The movie’s story may be a little trite, and the big battle at the end goes on forever, but what a show Cameron puts on!

Coming to the “hyperbolic” Holmes, Denby is at his sharpest when demonstrating how the visual characteristics of a film inform its narrative quality (or lack of that):

[Guy] Ritchie’s visual style, aided by the cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, is graphic-novel Victoriana [!]: there are steampunk interiors–iron-works and infernal machines with a retro-futuristic look–and dim laboratories in which everything looks rank.  The movie is grimly overproduced and exhausting, an irritating, preposterous, but fitfully enjoyable work, in which every element has been inflated.

And he’s absolutely correct about another thing: Robert Downey, Jr. is probably the most charming weasel of an actor since Bogart.  He makes any crap worth watching.  Remember Iron Man?  The Soloist?  Ally McBeal?

-TGR

Best Names from “The Simpsons”

Posted on by under Visual

There are many reasons to love the first, oh, ten seasons of The Simpsons. One of those reasons is the character naming (especially for minor figures) the writers did.

Now thanks to some great soul’s Rain-Man-level obsessive research (and via Gawker), you can hear all the best all at once.  Can’t decide if my favorite is Gladys the Groovy Mule or Professor Horatio Hufnagel (or the Bort/Bart bit).  Anyway, get at it.

UPDATE: The names-supercut link is dead, and I cannot find the video online anymore, so here is another Simpsons supercut, this one of every fake video game in the show. My Dinner With Andre!

-TGR