"The tenuous moments in The Bourne Identity -- such as Bourne's karate disposal of multiple armed enemies, or a man bursting into a room through the window of a fourth-floor apartment -- soar on that innate power, because the essence of film is realism. Even trick photography photographs the tricks, sweeps them into the real. Digital maneuverings, special effects, are all embraced in the camera's ineluctable realism. The camera certifies the existence of what it looks at: the bedrock of film is factuality. When the Lumière brothers showed a train arriving at a station in 1895, there could be little question in the audience that this was a real train. They saw it. When Bourne disposes handily of three armed opponents, we see it, don't we? We may know in a corner of our brains that this action would be unlikely in life; but we accept it here because the camera's currency is fact. In a way we are grateful to the film medium for giving such moments their being."
And I'm grateful to CS Chicago correspondent Sam Hallgren for reminding me how good this movie was. One online source says The Bourne Identity will be released on DVD December 3. No word yet on extra features.
For readers who might be more interested in blogs than movies -- or, at least, my ramblings about movies -- there's a pretty great e-mail discussion about weblogging going on over at Slate between uber-media pundits Andrew Sullivan -- a senior editor at The New Republic and A-list blogger -- and Kurt Andersen, the author of Turn of the Century and the host of the public radio program "Studio 360." Sullivan started the exchange yesterday and Andersen responded. Sullivan's next post should be up this afternoon and the discussion will continue throughout the week. This feature on Slate -- take two intellectuals/pundits/writers/whatever and have a colloquium of sorts over e-mail -- has always been one of the zine's most endearing features, I think. The end of the year "Movie Club" between David Edelstein, Roger Ebert, A.O. Scott, and Sarah Kerr (and sometimes Jonathan Rosenbaum) is always provocative and entertaining. (Click here for last year's Movie Club). Slate asked Andersen and Sullivan to discuss the Weblog phenomenon in relation to two new books, We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture and The Weblog Handbook. Fortunately, they spend more time dishing their opinions on weblogging and how it has affected our culture than they do discussing the above-mentioned texts. Call me a geek, but is there anything more fun than reading really smart, arrogant individuals speak their mind while also taking pointed snipes at one another? For example, Andersen had this to say in yesterday's exchange:
"Too many bloggers remind me of Dennis Millers manqué or the comic-book store owner on The Simpsons ... combined, in the Rebecca Bloods of the world, with Mr. Van Driessen, Beavis and Butt-head's hippie teacher. In other words, passionate and smart but also irritating and smug and faintly, inescapably sad. (andrewsullivan.com is not a bit sad, of course, although as salutary as ad hoc, post-publication fact-checking by bloggers may be, your harping on Howell Raines—e.g., eight mentions in the last week—and the New York Times does seem unnecessarily predictable and self-congratulatory.)"
Of course, now that I read that passage again, I wonder how much of Andersen's blog assessment -- "passionate and smart but also irritating and smug and faintly, inescapably sad" -- could be used to describe CinemaScoped. Too much is my guess.
No comments:
Post a Comment