June 2008

More on Hide and Seek

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Years ago, wrote this for Joe McKay's preReview site, where we reviewed movies without seeing them:

Man on Fire
Denzel Washington, who doesn't have a mean bone in his body, once again tries to play an angry tough guy in this movie about a bodyguard who f-s up and lets a megacute kid get kidnapped on his watch. After he recovers from the bullet the baddies put in him, nothing will stop him as he tracks down every one of the sick scum who took that beautiful little girl. Or boy. (It's hard to tell.) Of course, it's going to turn out that the kid is in cahoots with the kidnappers, and is actually a small adult masquerading as an ambiguously gendered child. And it's going to turn out that Denzel is actually the mastermind behind the scheme, only he doesn't know it because he has multiple personalities and it was one of the bad "alters" who ordered the child-snatching. At the climax, the small adult, who is also a therapist, will cure Denzel and the two will run away together.
prereviewer - Tom Moody, 11/19/03

Never saw Man on Fire but the later Dakota Fanning vehicle Hide and Seek (2005) is almost as nutty as the above prereview. Nevertheless, it kind of works.

[Spoiler:] Throughout most of the film psychologist Robert de Niro is caring for his daughter after the suicide of his wife (her mom). The girl acts spooky and hostile and talks about her imaginary friend Charlie. De Niro courts pretty neighbor Elizabeth Shue but the daughter misbehaves to drive her away. We don't know if the girl has the Sixth Sense or a weird relationship with another neighbor, a creepy older man who might be Charlie.

The twist is de Niro suffers from a split personality. He killed his wife and unknown to himself, talks to his daughter in the guise of his "alter," Charlie, who uses her to drive his sane self crazy. At one point a therapist friend of de Niro's asks the girl: "what game did Charlie ask you to play?" (Girl gets evil look.) "Upsetting Daddy."

So, as we piece it together post-twist, at a given moment the daughter has had to determine which Dad she is talking to and play the appropriate role to survive--grief shattered child or willing accomplice. Sane herself (of course), she fakes madness in a (failed) attempt to make Dad less attractive as a mate for Shue before "Charlie" kills Shue. Picture Hitchcock's Psycho with a daughter of Anthony Perkins having to navigate between nice older brother and...Mom.

Before the twist, in subtext you think it's a movie about a father coping with a his daughter's autism (she often acts as if others are not in the room); after it you realize it's about a daughter coping with a father's alcoholism ("Charlie" is Dad on a bender). Thus are two intractable social problems mapped onto each other in some impossible, inverse Kleinian pairing. Whether they're actually related is irrelevant: they're linked in the screenwriters' exploitative topology, in order to wring two hot button movies out of one.

Different Kinds of Permanent Bases

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Jim Henley:

[W]hen McCain and Lieberman et al try to liken an indefinite, massive presence in Iraq to the country’s lengthy deployments in Germany, Japan and South Korea, the politically potent rejoinder is probably, “Oh. And when can the troops’ families join them?” While I think the US could easily bring its soldiers home from Germany and South Korea, and should bring them home, that’s a minority opinion. But the fact is, American military personnel have been able to raise entire generations of families on bases in Europe and the Western Pacific. Everybody knows that the Defense Department is never going to authorize family housing in Iraq, for practical values of never. When McCain and Bush plan to keep The Troops in Iraq indefinitely, they’re planning a completely different experience for military families than basing troops in Europe or the Pacific entails.

The reason Cheney wants 58 permanent bases in Iraq is to "keep the peace" so the US can control the oil. Cheney thinks history will vindicate him, as gas prices continue to climb, that he laid an early claim on the remaining big spigot. He is a madman but his "reasoning" should be more out in the open, instead of these dodges such as comparing Iraq to Korea.

more vvork narration on twitter

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copied and pasted:

"palette" of isometric photoshopped bricks made into Sol LeWitt-less arrangements
boring photo of classical statue cubistically scrambled using cloning/morphing tech
line of Venice tourists arranged in Spiral Jetty for photo op
unidentified colored ring and tracing of adam & eve expulsion, both against black backgrounds
cady noland-esque arrangement of aluminum frame, concrete, sawdust, beach towel, radio with nylon strap
sunglass lenses on ball chain, hanging on painted screw attached to white wall
x-rays and laser scans supposedly revealing contraband--image sources unknown
leafy plant lit by three neon tubes on microphone stands
flowers growing under neon ceiling lamp dangling at 45 degree angle
sayings by soccer players inscribed in astroturf (commercial poster series)
soccer trading cards defaced by turning players into hairy nude guys fondling themselves and others
altered newspaper image--soccer ball is "camouflaged" to look like the surrounding grass
photo of Parisian street waste in found composition: soccer ball on pipe, plaster lion on column, chalk marks on sidewalk
scale model stadium made with fruit crate boxes, fruit, wood, light stands, halogen work lights, grass carpet
installation with model of a soccer stadium and all 2006 championship games transmitted live over radio (supposedly)
soccer match with players removed (text description of video)
bridges as musical instruments 2: sounds of multiple bridges make symphony
vibrations sensors on London's Millennium Bridge convert bridge movements into sound art
wallpapered gallery--the pattern is the words "conceptual decoration" in 10 pt block capitals repeated gazillions of times
photo of guys perched on iron gate making fountains with their mouths at each other
Pathfinder Sojourner photo of Mars landscape appropriated with permission from NASA
walrus habitat painting (repost)
oil painting of random dot autostereogram
murals of jungle flora and nude bow hunters in rooms with classical and nouveau furnishings (photos)
video monitor swings on pendulum, image on screen has corresponding side to side camera movement, swinging motion shapes digi-soundscape
cut-up Le Corbusier illustrations, floor installation of laminate samples, Eiffel Tower bed of nails
electronic sound piece based on Magritte's non-pipe (with recursive non-explanation)
satire about the "recent transmutation of language into a global market ruled by Google et al." doesn't actually use Google
post-painterly abstraction as room environment with door and "window" grid of paintings--documentation or digital mockup?

Hide and Seek

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Hide and Seek, cable fodder with Robert de Niro, isn't great but has a nifty twist that turns the movie inside out. It's better than The Sixth Sense's twist because there is no supernatural element.

[Spoiler]

Prior to the twist it is a movie about a father coping with his daughter's autism. After the twist it is about a daughter coping with her father's alcoholism. I stopped watching after the twist but appreciated that the plot dealt with real world social problems and not emanations from the spirit world.