Ever here of the flack strategy called "sheer balls"? It is where you tell an obvious and flagrant lie to the press so that the reporters go scrambling for their notes. By the time they can confer the lie the press has moved on to something else. This was one of Nixon's many tactics for keeping the press off balance. Here it is as practiced by Ari Fleischer.
Christopher Nolan is a very good director.
He was excellant and original with Memento and Following. His new movie, Insomnia is more conventional yet still so artfully done that I think him to be the most promising driector available.
His movies are masterpieces of psychology, both emotional and analytical. In Memento he showed himself to be adept with both scientific and intuitive psychology. His movies are filled with episodes where characters manipulate each other, struggle for self control and attempt to throw their lives into order using shrewdness training and logic.
Usually calling a Director 'philosophical' is an abjuration. Anyone who has read a fair amount of philosophy knows that quite a lot of it (even that from the canon of accepted greatness) is bad, when a director uses it to adorn his movie he is usually sacrificing drama for windiness and emotional punch for pretentiousness. Directors who subjugate themselves to philosophies are like those who slavishly kowtow to political ideology. The audience knows that it is cheap, it is the moral equivalent of the zipper on the back of the monster.
The philosophy that appears in Kubrick is always hinted at but never confronted. In Coppola and Jarmusch it is something in the background, mere mood and lighting. Guys like Gilliam and Bergman are seriously drawn to contemplative issues but are thankfully mostly preoccupied with matters emotional. Only very bad directors, think they can answer big questions with cinema.
Nolan draws dramatic tension from the perspectives of the cop and killer as they try to reconstruct stroies about murders. Anyone who's read a little bit of Richard Rorty can see the hinting going on about narratives and metanarratives, where each antagonist is trying to make his narrative into the "right" one.
Thankfully Nolan doesn't tip his hand as to what he thinks of the issue. He merely exploits it to create anxiety in the audience. A very pragmatic thing to do for a director and something Rorty would approve of.
Well now . . . first posting.
We will see how you and I work, blog.
Things have started badly. My modem has decided that there is no dialtone tonight. thus i post via my roomates computer.
Things will start slowly, too. I near graduation, and must wrap up classes and etc.
so we start unglamourously