Monday, July 30, 2012
What Happened Next?
My new favorite critic, The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum, on serial storytelling, melodrama, cliffhangers and soap opera. A nice note: The upcoming book she refers to, "Complex TV," is being published serially on its author's blog.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Jane
In her brief essay on "Lolita," in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel," Jane Smiley tweaks Vladimir Nabokov for "working as hard as James or Tolstoy to promote a theory of art and of the novel that led straight to him and his sort of greatness." But of course this is what Smiley herself is doing in "Thirteen Ways." Probably any novelist writing about novels would be so inclined. Any painter writing about painting, any critic writing about criticism. The number of professional commentators who could resist the temptation to equate excellence with their own practice could be counted (as I believe Pogo Possum once said) on the fingers of one finger.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Spend an hour with the guys
Henry Jenkins and Dave Kehr at the Lost Cinema festival in Italy. Looking at Jenkins makes me wonder if there's a factory someplace.. (h/t Howard Rodman)
INCONTRO CON LA CRITICA AMERICANA from cineteca on Vimeo.
....
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
I wrote "So true!" in the margin
New "Spider-Man" director Marc Webb:
It's all about regeneration. "I kept on going back to the single moment where Peter Parker was left by his parents," Webb suggests. "Realistically, anybody's whose parents disappeared in a very urgent or chaotic manner when he was six or seven-years-old, that's going to have a huge emotional impact. And that moment is more definitive than even the spider bite. It defined the character and the movie in a very specific way for me."As far as the orphan story, Webb refers back to Dickens. He finds the whole notion of these kids having a generosity of spirit yet distrust for the world around them very provocative. "It brings up questions of identity and in the last part of the film I inserted a lecture that my high school teacher had given me about there being [only one story] in fiction: 'Who am I?' I find myself when I watch movies or read books thinking that it's the soul of so many stories that I really enjoy. This idea of a kid who puts on a mask and becomes somebody else and has to lose part of his identity and sacrifice other parts of his life: it's the right question to ask."
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Wired
Harry Edgerton was the model for the character Frank Pembleton, played by Andre Braugher on “Homicide.” Ed Burns was David Simon’s co-creator on “The Wire.”
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Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (David Simon)
- Highlight Loc. 1540-51 | Added on Monday, July 02, 2012, 10:33 PM
(Harry) Edgerton’s detachment from the rest of the unit was furthered by his partnership with Ed Burns, with whom he had been detailed to the Drug Enforcement Administration for an investigation that consumed two years. That probe began because Burns had learned the name of a major narcotics trafficker who had ordered the slaying of his girlfriend. Unable to prove the murder, Burns and Edgerton instead spent months on electronic and telephone surveillance, then took the dealer down for drug distribution to the tune of thirty years, no parole.
To Edgerton, a case like that was a statement of a kind, an answer to an organized drug trade that could otherwise engage in contract murder with impunity. It was a persuasive argument. Close to half of Baltimore’s murders were believed to be related to the use or sale of narcotics, though the solve rate for drug murders was consistently lower than that for nearly any other motive. Yet homicide’s methodology hadn’t changed with the trend: Detectives worked the drug-related murders independently, as they would any other homicide. Both Burns and Edgerton had argued that much of the violence was related and could only be reduced—or, better still, prevented—by attacking the city’s larger narcotics organizations.
By that argument, the repetitive violence of the city’s drug markets betrayed the weakness in the homicide unit, namely, that the investigations were individual, haphazard and reactive. Two years after that initial DEA case, Edgerton and Burns again proved the point with a year-long probe of a drug ring linked to a dozen murders and attempted murders in the Murphy Homes housing project. Every one of those shootings had remained open after detectives followed the traditional approach, yet as a result of the prolonged investigation, four murders were cleared and the key defendants received double life sentences.
It was precision law enforcement, but other detectives were quick to point out that those two probes consumed three years, leaving two of the unit’s squads short a man for much of that time. The phone still had to be answered and with Edgerton reporting to work at the DEA field office, the other members of his squad—Kincaid and Garvey, McAllister and Bowman—would each be handling more shootings, more questionable deaths, more suicides, more murders. The fallout from Edgerton’s prolonged absences had served to push him further from the other detectives.
True to form, Ed Burns is at this very moment detailed to a sprawling FBI probe of a drug organization in the Lexington Terrace projects—an investigation that will eventually consume two years. Edgerton originally went with him, but two months ago he was shipped back to the homicide unit after a nasty budget dispute between federal and local supervisors. And the fact that Harry Edgerton is now back in the standard rotation, pecking away at a 24-hour report on something as menial and undramatic as a suicide, is a source of glee to the rest of the shift.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
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