Just a quick note to draw your attention to recent pieces by pals for which I am in some way to blame.
First up, clever Vadim expanded upon a conversation we started in the comments chez Pullquote [I felt just like Girish!] about accents, regionalism, and the importance of local critics for a post [and points for its title] over at Green Cine:
How to watch movies and judge their regional authenticity? On a certain level it doesn't matter: it's a peripheral rather than a core part of the experience, and a nice bonus for locals, but not much more.
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It's certainly irritating if directors get your city wrong, more so when viewers of those films refuse to believe the movie is wrong.
Read the whole thing here. The Guardian's Danny Leigh did, which led him to examine what happens when the setting is as much a star as the cast from an across-the-pond perspective:
Now, sheltered limey that I am, it's not for me to say whether or not the town of The Town – in fact, the traditionally Irish-American neighbourhood of Charlestown – is authentic or not. But while newcomers have revelled in its geographical realism, critics in the city itself have been more suspicious.
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So does it matter if it's real or not? I know people whose stock response on this question is that no fictional film ever has to get the little things right – and no, I'm not suggesting anyone cares whether Marmaduke presents us with a verité account of life for a freakishly large dog in California. But when a movie knowingly trades on the specific tang of its locale, it does imply a certain honesty and accuracy.
Which is why it's unsettling to hear that with The Town you might actually only be seeing what Burr calls "Movie Boston", just as Goodfellas might be Movie New York, or Chungking Express Movie Hong Kong. To do so is to sense you've been treated as a dopey tourist...
Hey, at least no one's expecting you to speak Navajo! Which brings me to piece number three. The cinetrix makes a smart-assed comment one morning, and later that same day finds herself paraphrased [and characterized] as the lede to Glenn Kenny's take on Film Socialisme.
"Enjoy the the Navajo and the anti-semitism!" an impish friend commented on Facebook at my mention that I was seeing the new Jean-Luc Godard, Film Socialisme, this morning. Well, as one might have predicted, I enjoyed one but not the other. Let's deal with the "Navajo" first. For the English-language distribution versions of this film, Godard has put on the film subtitles that he's referred to as "Navajo" English. Instead of providing whole literal translations of entire patches of dialogue—and the dialogue is, in descending order of prevalence, in French, German, Russian, and English and maybe one or two other tongues I'm not remembering, and the soundtrack is layered in such a way that will not be unfamiliar to lovers of Nouvelle Vague and King Lear, which means in effect a very deliberate effect of artfully contrived Babel—he'll put up a series of key words, mostly nouns, sometimes invented compound words such as "nocrime" followed by "noblood" with, as seen here, nocaps. It doesn't take very long for the effect to stop feeling like subtitles at all and to play like a sort of running discrete text of its own, one made up in large part of what could be Twitter hashtags.
Hmmm. Maybe the next time I check in here I'll write something of my own, rather than be the wise-cracking Helen launching everyone else's ships. Meanwhile, gotta go teach and grade now. Ciao.
