SpoutBlog on spout.com

Burning Man, the infamous annual week-long neo-hippie desert sojourn, is partnering with a number of corporations in the name of getting green. Predictably, this has ruffled a few feathers, as it seems to fly in the face of at least one or two of Burning Man's core principles.

Brian Doherty, who literally wrote the (or, at least, a) book on Burning Man, says the problem lies in the fact that some members of the Burner community have watched a certain Cameron Crowe movie a few too many times. To quote liberally from an article published today at Reason Online, titled "Generation Dobler":

Emotionally, I don't understand why so many people get so upset at being marketed to, or at gleefully acknowledging the good that comes from crafting a social world that is dominated by people willingly exchanging skills, services, and goods. These types could be called Generation Dobler, after the famous quote from the sad sensitive man-child character, Lloyd Dobler, played by John Cusack in the 1989 film Say Anything.

Dobler certified his soulfulness by announcing that “I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.”

Which is lovely in its way, I guess, but the reason many people can indeed survive doing none of those things is because of the unprecedented wealth created by those who do. Most moderns, at least when pressed, recognize that commerce makes our lives richer in certain ways.

Admittedly, these kinds of libertarian takes on pop culture get me a little too fired up. But still: maybe here's where it's worth noting that Lloyd Dobler as character was, at best, proudly irresponsible, and at worst, totally delusional. He says he's "looking for a dare to be great situation," but seems to define "dare to be great" as "charming a woman of greater intellectual means into letting me follow her halfway across the world." (More simply, and more glaringly, he's a guy in a Clash shirt who tries to win back his lost girlfriend by blasting Peter Gabriel. Cameron Crowe's fans like to wank off to the filmmaker's "talent" for spinning romantic fantasies out of source cues, but has any cinematic moment of ostensible emotional nakedness ever felt less natural for the character at its center?)

In other words: for a generation of Lloyd Doblers to survive from one Burning Man to the next, they need a generation of Diane Courts--that is, brains trapped in the bodies of game show hosts--to lovingly foot the bill.

[Via BoingBoing]

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

I've spent much of the morning noodling around on the website for Francis Ford Coppola's upcoming film, Youth Without Youth***.

Sony Classics bought distribution rights to Coppola's first film in a decade last March; at the time, Anne Thompson offered this description:

Inspired by his daughter Sofia to make a low-budget personal film, Coppola opted not to take the festival route, preferring to fly under the radar. The indie-financed film, which Coppola shot last year in Romania, is set during World War II and stars Tim Roth as a 70-year-old professor who is struck by lightning, suddenly turns 40 and becomes brilliant. (He also sprouts a doppelganger.) His quest is to discover the origin of language and consciousness. By movie’s end he and his lady love (Alexandra Maria Lara) speak in tongues—sans subtitles...The movie has been compared to an arty Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In keeping with Coppola's apparent desire to keep the project personal, the web site functions as a kind of scrapbook documenting his inspirations for making the film. There are snapshots of his actors rehearsing, black and white photos of Bucharest, a bio of Mircea Eliade (the author of the novella on which the film is based) and, perhaps most significantly, three "diary entries" through which Coppola works through both his need to return to personal filmmaking, and his desire to reclaim a youthful exuberance for life and work. The diary entries are dated September 2005, so if they're genuine (in this day and age, no one is above suspicion when it comes to doctored bloggery), they were generated 4-6 weeks before Youth went into production.

In one entry, Coppola explains how he was begrudgingly goaded into inflating one Godfather film into three:

Originally, I didn't intend to make more than one Godfather film; yet economic forces at the studio were insistent: "Francis, you have the formula for Coca-Cola; are you not going to make more?" But the first film expended most of the arrows in my quiver or, more aptly, the slugs in my revolver. So, the second film had to stretch into new and more ambitious territory to show a few more; otherwise, it would have been weaker than the first. By the time the third arrived, the basic ideas that made the first fresh and excited were all but used up.

The diary is basically a manifesto. Coppola describes his predicament as typical for any aging artist--the temptation to keep draining the well that brought past success is too great, economic safety is too attractive to risk doing anything new. He decides that the only way to break that vicious cycle "is to become young again, to forget everything I know and try to have the mind of a student. To re-invent myself by forgetting I ever had any film career at all, and instead to dream about having one."

I'm not sure I buy the idea of the bright-eyed student risking it all to make a picture about an old man reclaiming his youth, but for the time being, I'll give Frank the benefit of the doubt. Considering the fact that he could very easily while away his final years living off his wine fortune, you've got to throw him a bone for refusing to go down without a fight. Youth Without Youth is currently scheduled to play at the Rome Film Festival in October, before opening here on December 14.

***Not to be confused with The Best of Youth, the six-hour Italian TV miniseries that, when released theatrically in the States in 2005, became the best reviewed film of that year (it swept me up, too, although for the first couple of hours, it was hard to fight the nagging suspicion that I was watching the Italian Forrest Gump.)

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

So you know how yesterday I posted about Michael Moore's appearance on CNN, and my basic take was, "Michael Moore's just looking for attention/I don't think the Gupta piece was that bad"? Well, yesterday afternoon, Gupta admitted to getting one fact wrong in his piece: he misquoted a number used by Moore in Sicko in regards to per capita health care spending in Cuba. Later, Gupta appeared on Larry King Live opposite Moore. The first of three parts of that segment is embedded below.

In this segment, Moore says his people spoke with Gupta's people on June 29th about inaccuracies in the piece; The Huffington Post posted email evidence of that conversation shortly before Larry King Live last night.

Was it irresponsible for CNN to re-run a clip that they knew contained inaccuracies? Sure. But post-CNN apology, what is Moore trying to achieve by continuing to beat this dead horse? It seems to all boil down to an issue of linguistics: Moore is upset because Gupta's piece said he "fudged facts." In reality, Moore probably didn't really "fudge" as much as selectively included statistics that bolstered his argument, and omitted facts that contradict or confuse his stance on the issues. CNN isn't guilty of libel, per se; can you sue a TV network for an imprecisely worded voiceover?

Bloggers have almost unanimously*** taken the filmmaker's side. "[N]o nonfiction filmmaker is scrutinized in the way that Moore is. Hell, no journalist is scrutinized the way Moore is (oh, but if they were)," writes A.J. Schnack. "If [Moore's] right about nothing else (and even if his appearance last night bordered on the wild-eyed, which I'm not saying it did), CNN has plenty to answer for." Rachel Sklar is more blunt: "Does it compromise my journalistic objectivity to say that Dr. Sanjay Gupta is a dick?"

At this point, it seems as though CNN is just embarrassing themselves by letting Moore and Gupta argue in circles. It's easy to peg Moore as the winner in all this--not only does he get the satisfaction of having made a major news organization look bad, but he gets hours worth of free publicity for his film--but the flip side to Moore’s triumph is the agony that is watching CNN dig their own grave.

**UPDATE: It's not all sunny skies in the blogosphere for Mr. Moore. When forced to choose which of the two great Satans to side with between CNN and Michael Moore, conservative bloggers are showing a surprising surfeit of sympathy for the cable news giant. "While I can agree that our media establishment does not always serve the public interest well, listening to Michael Moore rant and rave about them is rich," writes Pam Meister. Allahpundit calls Moore a racist and accuses him of beating on an easy target; Libertas also plays the "Mike's a bully" card ("[F]or Moore to get in a battle of wits with Wolf Blitzer of all people… That’s like getting in a kicking contest with a newborn kitten — Blitzer has been The. Dumbest. Person. On. Television. for years now," but shows more passion for jabbing at Sicko's box office numbers.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog