May 7: Special "Real/Unreal" Edition

DNA analysis is having interesting effects on our knowledge of the relations of living things. Giant Pandas, which for years were considered a member of the raccoon family, have now to been shown to be true bears after all, which is what ordinary people always thought they were. The Lesser Panda, an equally beautiful mammal, has been split off from the raccoons into its own family:

Now word has come that orcas, previously thought to be one species, are actually three:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/orca-3/

And the white rhino is now believed to comprise two species, which expands the total number of rhino species to six:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/2-whites/

More animals to love; I'm there.

From the real to the unreal: Here is a gorgeous piece of science fiction animation, Sprance II by Gerhard Hoberth (hat tip to the Animation Blog):


Sprance II from Gerhard Hoeberth on Vimeo.

http://www.animationblog.org/2010/05/gerhard-hoberth-sprance-ii-2009.html

Woody Allen finds reality painful anyway:

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/woody

Matt Zoller Seitz thinks that super-hero movies, even viewed as pure escapism, have become a pox:

The comic book film has become a gravy train to nowhere. The genre cranks up directors' box office averages and keeps offbeat actors fully employed for years at a stretch by dutifully replicating (with precious few exceptions) the least interesting, least exciting elements of its source material; spicing up otherwise rote superhero vs. supervillain storylines with "complications" and "revisions" (scare quotes intentional) that the filmmakers, for reasons of fiduciary duty, cannot properly investigate; and delivering amusing characterizations, dense stories or stunning visuals while typically failing to combine those aspects into a satisfying whole.

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/iron_man_2/index.html?story=/ent/movies/film_salon/2010/05/06/superhero_movies_bankrupt_genre

Matt Zoller Seitz speaks as a fan of the super-hero genre, not a condescending high-culture crank (like, say, me), and is well worth attending to here. He is dissatisfied with the development of the genre, but he is fair and detailed. (I also like his conclusion: "The next superhero film should star Mickey Rourke. As himself.")

Continuing today's alternation of real and unreal, Sarah Weinman reveals her favorite true crime books:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-05-03/the-best-true-crime-books/  

I like Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher very much; a delightful fact I learned from it is that the word "detective" comes from the Latin "detegere, " to unroof: a detective takes the lid off a house and sees what really goes on inside (which is certainly what happens in her book).

Who can say whether Harmony Korine's world is real or unreal? I could scarcely decide, looking at Gummo, whether it was utterly fantastic, or the most depressing piece of social realism I had seen in many a day. Either way, great film. Korine is back to kick up controversy again with his new Trash Humpers:

Trash Humpers suggests a cretinous remake of John Water's Pink Flamingos or perhaps a musical created by the brain-eaters from the original Night of the Living Dead.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-05-04/film/harmony-korine-s-trash-humpers-captures-nashville-s-roving-gang-of-wilding-seniors

Watching Trash Humpers at the Toronto Film Festival, Mike D'Angelo objected to it on grounds that, even though I'm a Korine fan, I do understand:

....Harmony Korine’s fourth feature, Trash Humpers, will appeal exclusively to the handful of folks who derive their shaky sense of self-worth from enjoying films like Trash Humpers. Nor do these people actually need to see Trash Humpers in order to conclude that it’s awesome, since its perceived awesomeness is encoded in its conceptual DNA. Korine simply describing the idea in a couple of sentences would serve just as well.

http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/trashhumpers/

I'm not sure that I entirely agree with D'Angelo that "what Korine is doing in Trash Humpers can’t be done well, or done poorly, or done indifferently" -- conceptual art has been dismissed on that basis going back to Marcel Duchamp. He is right that a certain sort of audience for conceptual art can be indulgent and rather soft because they want to identify with the brilliance or anti-brilliance or trangressiveness of its ideas, but many audiences are indulgent of genres they like on similar grounds. That's part of what irks Matt Zoller Seitz about the reception of super-hero movies: Their perceived awesomeness by fanboys is encoded in their conceptual DNA, too.

The real danger from where I sit, and I definitely think that D'Angelo is getting at this too, is the matter of predictability and inadvertent self-parody. I have had many talks with friends over the years about the concept of "Bergman doing a Bergman" (a notion, I hasten to add, that we borrowed from Bergman himself; it's in one of his autobiographies). Well, if a film called Trash Humpers isn't Harmony Korine doing a Harmony Korine, I don't know what would be. And that can be a real trap for artists; it's one thing to develop a recognizable style or approach, another to be confined by it. Of course, every case is quite different. Ivy Compton-Burnett's 19 mature novels are all cut from exactly the same cloth, but the 19th is as intense as the first, so no one seems to mind. To work your niche over and over and over puts enormous pressure on an artist to sustain the inspiration that helped them create the niche in the first place, and when that doesn't appear to be the case, then the "Bergman doing a Bergman" criticism justifiably comes into play. Many Peter Greenaway followers, for example, feel that is exactly where Greenaway has placed himself: repeating the same strategies to diminishing effect. I hope Korine isn't at that point.

Among notables born on this date are composers Johannes Brahms and Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky, novelists Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Angela Carter, Peter Carey (Australia), Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali), Willem Elsschot (Flemish), and Wladyslaw Reymont (Poland), science fiction novelist Gene Wolfe, poets Robert Browning and Archibald MacLeish, philosopher/historian David Hume, icon Eva Peron, Irish folk singer Christy Moore, pop singers Teresa Brewer and Thelma Houston, film-makers Val Lewton and Amy Heckerling, quarterback Johnny Unitas, broadcaster Tim Russert, and actors Gary Cooper, Anne Baxter, and Darren McGavin. In discussions of the real and unreal, the Val Lewton horror cycle is especially interesting, because if I am remembering correctly, in only one of the nine films -- Cat People, the first -- is it reasonably clear that an actual supernatural element is operating. In many of the films, a belief in or worry about the supernatural comes into play; but the actual "explanations" are naturalistic.