Miscellaneous Round-Up

Bravo to Green Bay Packers GM Ted Thompson for calling Brett Favre's bluff by indicating, No, we won't release you, and No, you haven't got a starting job if you choose to re-activate. Thompson is a planner who sticks to his plans, and who, having played Brett's game since coming on board with the Packers in 2005, is not going to take kindly to having his chain yanked now. The franchise is bigger than the player now no matter how big he is, and Thompson ably represents the franchise. Favre has miscalculated. And the way the winds are blowing here in Green Bay, the fan who commented online that "Brett should [be] treated like a God" is now actually in the minority -- people are fed up. Bully for Ted, I say...I have listened my way though almost the entire Barenboim set of Bruckner symphonies, only the 1st to go. The strength of my reaction to the individual symphonies is in this order: 7th, 9th, 4th, 3rd...and then I think I need to get to know the 8th, 6th, 5th, and 2nd better, in multiple performances, to determine where they land for me. The 4th has great tunes, the 3rd is expansive and confident, and the unfinished 9th is sui generis even for Bruckner -- one of the bleakest and most terrifying musical structures I've ever encountered. Not to be glib, but it sounds like a symphony the composer would die before completing: terminal...I've been making my way slowly and pleasurably though Barbara Tuchman's great The Guns of August, about the onset of World War I. A hundred pages in, as Tuchman arrives at the crucial eight day period of declarations of war, July 28 to August 4, 1914, the tension, and Tuchman's command of her narrative across multiple countries (England, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Serbia, and Belgium), is simply tremendous; every hour brings new drama...I re-invigorated my ongoing John Huston project by re-watching The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, one of the Hollywood films of its era (there were a few) that seems uncompromised; it can hold its own in any cinematic company. One measure of Huston's directorial brilliance is that he doesn't rush the denouement, as a hack director would; the last half-hour of the film unspools at just the right deliberate tempo, not even scurrying through a lengthy scene in Spanish with no subtitles...I also re-watched Sidney Lumet's marvelous courtroom drama The Verdict, in part because of the David Mamet connection (Mamet wrote the screenplay from a novel by Barry Reed), in part to compare it with Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, in part because I love Paul Newman's performance and hadn't seen it in a while. Interesting that Preminger forgoes closing arguments, while Lumet and Mamet give Newman perhaps the best closing argument scene in movie history:

You know, so much of the time we're just lost. We say, "Please, God, tell us what is right; tell us what is true." And there is no justice: the rich win, the poor are powerless. We become tired of hearing people lie. And after a time, we become dead... a little dead. We think of ourselves as victims... and we become victims. We become... we become weak. We doubt ourselves, we doubt our beliefs. We doubt our institutions. And we doubt the law. But today you are the law. You are the law. Not some book... not the lawyers... not the, a marble statue... or the trappings of the court. See, those are just symbols of our desire to be just. They are... they are, in fact, a prayer: a fervent and a frightened prayer. In my religion, they say, "Act as if ye had faith... and faith will be given to you." If... if we are to have faith in justice, we need only to believe in ourselves. And act with justice. See, I believe there is justice in our hearts.

The Catholic Church is, as in Ulu Grosbard's contemporaneous True Confessions, the ultimate villain in The Verdict: cold, corporate, political. Although Newman's Frank Galvin is clearly a believing Catholic, the movie makes a large and proper distinction between the faith and the institution (in which you can't have faith). It has always seemed perplexing to me that for centuries people made up conspiracy theories about Jews when Judaism notably lacks a central authority and a gargantuan structure for conspiracy to emanate from and hide in. The labyrinthine and secretive Catholic Church is much more apt soil for conspiracy theories, honestly, and in these latter days, popular writers such as Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code have spotted the possibilities in that. The fact that the Church under John Paul II re-asserted its centralized and authoritative style after the refreshing period of de-centralization and questioning under John XXIII and Paul VI has had a lot to do with this pop suspicion of the Vatican. Despite some groaning to the contrary, in my eyes this "anti-Catholicism" is not in the least like anti-semitism; it's more like criticizing Exxon or GM...By the way, I'm actually wearing flip-flops today, on the theory that if you can't beat them, etc. I was in an odd duck mood yesterday, and drifted over to the DSW Shoe Wearhouse, where I tried on quite a number of pairs of their vast inventory of flip-flops, and chose the most expensive, a dark brown pair of Clarks that actually aren't too bad. Maybe I was feeling sort of goofy or "undignified" (my earlier word for flip-flop wearers over 40), I don't know. In any case, this shows how authoritarian I am: I can't even obey my own rules.