There are three or four things I’d sort of like to blog a word about now — but there’s no time now to say much.  I’m sitting in the Aroma cafe, at the only table that was open, listening to an epic conversation between a biological and (wicked?) stepmother about whether or not the stepmother is indeed wicked.  Just this second: “I’ve never heard Tina tell me she’d had a problem with another adult besides *you.*”  I’m occasionally glad to be single and childless.

Anyway.  I’m just going to say a word or two about this year’s presumptive Oscar-Winner for “Best Picture” — The Aviator.  I have no striking revelation to make with regard to this film, except that it’s not particularly good. 

As the NYT has been observing, no one seems too interested in the Oscars this year.  After-all neither Passion of the Christ, nor F-911 are nominated for anything.  And none of the remaining films are were especially popular, controversial, or artistically compelling.  Not that I’ve seen most of them.  But I pronounce nonetheless. 

Scorsese’s _The Aviator_ is a soggy meandering period-piece with no really interesting features.  [Overheard just now: “I am not the hard-headed bitch that you’ve probably portrayed that I am.”].  We focus for a long time for unknown reasons upon Howard Hughes, who is mentally ill but purpose-driven.  He builds planes,  makes movies, and thinks big.  And he is increasingly beset with an obsession with cleanliness that we’re supposed to believe was somehow instigated during the film’s opening primal moment, where Hughes’s mother gives the young boy a bath and lectures him disturbingly on the need to avoid germs.  But why engage in such an obviously platitudinous explanation of Hughes’s obsession?  Unfortunately, it helps the film skirt any tricky (i.e. potentially interesting) questions about the nature of obsessive disorders, or about the actual creepiness of the lived world.  The scene introduces  a limiting sentimentalism that persists throughout the film.

Cate Blanchette (who we do in general adore) seems mostly wasted in a film in which all characters serve only as foils to the sentimentalized colossus of Howard Hughes.  She’s really reduced to doing a (very good) impersonation of Katherine Hepburn.  A neat trick, but there’s little sense in this film of why her relationship with Hughes should be interesting or compelling.

And then, towards the end of the film, we have long lingering scenes of Hughes in the midst of his mental breakdown — scenes in which woozy psychedelic collages are intercut with repeated viewings of rows of bottled urine, as a naked Leo DiCaprio rolls about on the floor.  Some of the most maudlin and embarrassing stuff I can remember seeing on film, and right in line with the  fake opening scene.

Kate Bekinsdale as Ava Gardner is probably the best part of this film, though she appears only briefly.

I probably won’t bother watching the Academy Awards this year, but if I do, it will be mostly to root against this monument to sentimental mediocrity.

Ick.

p.s. - The good news is that the mom v. stepmom battle at the next table has taken a turn for the better.  Mutual understanding, and so forth.  Wicked step-mom seems receptive to suggestions and duely chastised, while bio-mom has mostly eased-off the accusations.  Peace reigns, for now.  And moreover I’m impressed at how both parties managed the whole thing.  Moving from what seemed to be trainwreck of a confrontation into delicate consensus, based on a shared interest in doing right by the kids in the situation.  Impressive.

I’ve had perhaps just a little too much fun this weekend.  Out and about at the Esquire Friday night, and then spent yesterday grading with sarah in the afternoon, then viewing _The Grudge_ with Dana and Christina, finally kicking back at Sanjay’s birthday/Diwali party, before being carted home once again by the kindly rachel s.  But ok, about the movie…

The Grudge, I’ve decided is recommendable.  Takishi Shimizu directs this Americanized remake of his own Ju-On (which I missed when it was briefly at the New Art a few weeks ago).
Critical opinion on the film  is interestingly divided, and if you decide to see it, you might well decide that there’s not much there but a lot of Boo!-saying.  But I think I’d disagree.

As we left the film Dana asked why it was set in Japan, to which I lamely asked: “Well, why it shouldn’t it have been?”  And as we drove home, we mostly discussed various plot issues, and I found myself sort of defending the film from Christina’s questions about its plot.  My line was that the nature and capabilities of the Grudge couldn’t/shouldn’t have been spelled-out too specifically.

The film thematizes unintelligibility, which is one reason it’s interesting that this remake focuses on Americans in Japan.  As I watched the film, I kept being remained of the excellent _Lost in Translation_, where a kind of pleasure in keeping a kind of loose grasp on things and ideas and people is described.  But _The Grudge_ find  in such looseness a kind of helplessness in the face of people and realities that threaten to grasp one with a kind of deadly fixity.  Sexual obsession, childlike neediness, obsessional rage, and finally death here countervail the pleasurable dream-state of LIT.  (jeeze does Ebert miss the point on this one).

The film plays with this, as the Americans repeatedly struggle to communicate with people around them, or simply to obtain food or move about the city.  This gets racialized when a hapless white American professor doesn’t notice he’s being stalked by a person whom he fails to recognize among in sea of Asians who to him are apparently as indistinguishable as they are “inscrutable.”

Like LIT then, The Grudge is always in danger of slipping into essentialized or even racist descriptions.  When Detective Nakagawa tells S. Michelle Gellar about Japanese beliefs about the dead, the film veers close to an easy kind of exoticism, which also appears early in the film when Gellar’s character peers over a wall into a Shinto cemetery to watch the natives burn incense to help keep in touch w/their ancestors.

The Grudge seemed a little flat to me at first, but is better on reflection.  I like how cramped and compact the evil house is — how you can never even see the house a whole.  And how the wide modern spaces of the City contrast with the convoluted neighborhood.  How the evil ghosts are so pointedly figures of the bitterly powerless.  The surly child or sullen girl, who’s look expresses a desire to devour and destroy that can be ignored only on  the assumption of this person’s powerlessness.  Of the wife, son, and dad who die in the house to inaugurate its evil ways, only the wife and son come back as grudgers.  Their scariness depends on their hostile helplessness.  The dynamic is familiar. 

Which brings us back maybe to the question of racial and cultural suspicion, which always lingers in this film (when first trying to find the evil house, Gellar approaches a Japanese mother and her child.  The mother politely answer’s G.’s question, but gently pulls her kid away from Gellar when G tries to be friendly).  In this context of hostility and and incomensurability, it’s hard not to read the film’s abiding preoccupation with eye-shape in terms that are at least partly racial. 

At the moment before the Grudge ghosts kill, and at other more random intervals, the eyes of the ghost become suddenly preternaturally wide.  This is automatically scary.  Normally one’s eyes narrow before attacking someone, and the reverse is horrifying in a Bataille kind of obscene way, race or no race.  But here eye shape is racialized, too.  Like anime-style animation, that draws figures in a way influenced by American post WWII cartoons, and that produces characters with weird more Caucasian-than-Caucasian eye-shapes, the Grudge presents its white victims with a last vision of a face that like Anime after WWII, offers back a spectacle of weird reflected whiteness to those it’s about to consume. 

So this then, is my answer to Dana about _The Grudge_ being set in Japan.

[p.s. reminds me of the BBC news report I heard a few days ago about Japanese nationalism.  The BBC announcer actually referred to the post-WWII provision in the Japanese constitution prohibiting a standing army as an act of “castration.”]

Erg.  That was surely the most grinding week of the semester.  Conferencing with all my rhetoric students in the morning and afternoon, and grading in the evening the papers to be handed back the next day.  Grade and discuss.  Grade and discuss.  With some occasional car-fixing errands in the late afternoon, and some reading and planning for my fiction class jammed into the cracks. 

But now, it’s done.  And I have time for a quick posting or two.  I must say that this week has been more than enough to inspire serious second thoughts in me about the whole academic project.  So much effort into the grading and conferencing, for such little recognition!  There are no classics of paper-grading.  My graded papers will not likely find themselves canonized and anthologized in the “Best American Paper Comments, 2004″ edited by John Updike.  Alas.

So, last week is gone.  And all that’s here now is an ickily warm Halloween weekend. 

But there is some good news.  My voip phone is up and running well so far.  My car has been somewhat repaired.  After getting the distributor fixed I drove the car home, where it promptly died again.  I had it towed to a new mechanic (who like the last one told the the problem was likely the distributor).  I had him replace the engine computer with the one I snagged from ebay, and the car to started right up.  So there.

Last weekend also I caught a couple neat spectacles.  Stanley Fish and Ann Kaplan came to town to debate with Cary Nelson on “The Future of the Humanities.”  Fish (is this man ever right about *anything*?) not only launched into a defense of a strictly apolitical humanities, but announced that if he were Cary Nelson’s Dean, he’d fire Nelson on the spot, for a classroom exercise in which Nelson said he substituted the names for Iraqi citys for Vietnamese ones, when introducing some anti-Vietnam War poetry from the 60’s.  (Fish recapitualted agruments you can find in the NY Times essay he published back in June).

Fish made a spectacle of himself and made useful discussion difficult.  He said some silly things about Samson Agonistes, too.  I may hunt down his article on the subject, although my dissertation studiously avoids Milton. 

The most interesting material from the talk came by way of reference to Bill Reading’s book on The University of Excellence, which seemed pretty useful. 

But more eloquent than Fish et. al. on the subject of the post-human and the post-humanities last weekend was the show I caught last Sunday by Captured by Robots!.  While the academics bemoaned the university of meaningless excellence, JBOT and his robotic captors delivered the post-human excellence via a gang of threatening robots and projections of sadly disturbing exercise tapes from the late 80’s.

The show was not musically amazing and was kind of frightening to watch.  JBOT’s band and captors are robots, which he must control (or, erm…be controlled *by,* I mean…) and speak for while playing his own instrument, making witty remarks, dealing with semi-heckling audience participation, and occasionally noting that “no, really” he *was* looking for a place in town to sleep for the evening.  He was good, vamping aptly, even if the whole thing had a kind of nervous tight-rope quality to it. 

The Humanities Lecture and Captured by Robots! exhibited the same eviscerated human figure,  surrounded by gleaming machine that present a hostile and meaningless excellence.  It was JBOT though, who’s entrails were literally hanging from his body,  who tightrope-or-no seemed to have more fun.

*-”Crudesence,” it seems to my surprise isn’t actually a word.  But it sounds good.  Not of course to be confused with “cruentation”–the bleeding of the wounds of the dead, that occurs when the murderer is brought near the body of his victim.