I recently started listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers: The Story of Success. I’ve enjoyed his other books, and a New Yorker Conference video on the same subject as this book, so I downloaded this one from Audible.
I’m not very far in, but I’m quite enjoying it. I do have one little complaint about a shocking mistake that Mr. Gladwell makes. He opens the book, to my bemusement, with a story about the Vancouver Giants and their recent Memorial Cup victory. Have a listen and see if you can spot the problem. That’s the author narrating:
“Third quarter”? “Third quarter”? Seriously, Malcolm. Surely you attended at least one or two hockey games while growing up in Elmira, Ontario. And maybe a young Malcolm glanced up from his McLuhan studies to avoid a wayward puck and note that a hockey game has three periods. Truth be told, he does correctly reference the “second period” in the previous sentence, so I expect it was just an oversight. Or an over-zealous sub-editor. But it set off my born-in-Canada alarm.
This got me wondering about the production process of the audio book. When do they record it? What is Mr. Gladwell reading from when he narrates the audio book? And when did they identify and correct this tiny yet egregious error?
Note: This website is habitually G-rated when it comes to language (okay, maybe 14 Years). By necessity, this post features use of the F-bomb. If that troubles you, skip ahead.
Yesterday I saw Young People Fucking (here’s the trailer), a charming Canadian sex comedy. It’s a highly-structured movie, following five couples through five stages of an evening of sex (from ‘prelude’ to ‘afterglow’). The couples represent a variety of typical relationships–the first date, the exes, the friends, the couple and the roommates.
So, we end up with a movie in 25 short scenes exploring and poking (heh) gentle fun at the foibles, morays and politics of sex. It’s a reasonably witty film, with enough laughs to sustain the formal structure. Despite the title, there’s actually very little nudity in the film–you’d see as much on an average episode of The L-Word. Roger Ebert sums up the film nicely:
No great lessons are learned. There is little high drama. As it stands, the screenplay could supply fodder for countless theatrical companies. It’s…engaging, that’s what it is. These are all essentially nice people. Canadians, you know.
The ensemble cast is generally good, with Callum Blue (previously seen in the excellent and gone-too-soon “Dead Like Me”) and Carly Pope (previously seen in “Popular”) standing out. I think Ms. Pope has gotten a bit of a short shrift from Hollywood, she can punch well above her current weight class. Plus, she has terrific eye brows. I did have a trivial complaint about the title. Nearly everyone in the cast is on the wrong side of 30, so I’m not sure it’s fair to go with ‘Young People’. I rather like the shorter title People Fucking.
It’s no great masterpiece, and it’s a bit risque for a first date movie, but I recommend it. The movie had a ridiculously short run here in Victoria, and probably won’t last in other cinemas across the country in the busy summer season. Seek it out or rent Young People Fucking. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
The Film Club by David Gilmour is a true memoir of three years in the life of the author and his son Jesse. In the introductory pages, Gilmour explains how his sixteen-year-old son was having serious difficulties with school. He was failing courses, cutting classes and was generally (though not unusually) frustrated by the process.
Gilmour and his ex-wife, Jesse’s mother, decide to take their son out of school. Gilmour makes a deal with his son. Jesse can live at home and doesn’t have to get a job as long as he’ll watch three movies a week that his father selects. Hence, the film club of the book’s title.
The rest of the book is one part film criticism and one part parenthood memoir with a pinch of home-schooling. Gilmour tells us about their pre- and post-film conversations, and we get little tidbits and trivia about famous movies. Meanwhile, we learn about Jesse’s girl troubles, his aspirations to be a rapper, and his dubious (thought not unusual) teenage habits of sleeping late and experimenting with drugs and alcohol. Gilmour is also struggling a bit–he’s can’t find work.
An Irksome Read
I found The Film Club a particularly irksome read. I wanted to, but I couldn’t get interested in or sympathize with either of the main characters.
First off, Gilmour comes off as a pretty irresponsible parent. He devises this film club strategy on page four of the book. What are the alternatives he considers before letting his son quit high school? Private school. That’s it. There’s no mention of other alternatives, of which I’m sure there are dozens (private tutors and work-study programs spring immediately to mind). After all ‘kid frustrated by high school’ is hardly an unusual problem.
And once Gilmour decides to home-school his kid, what curriculum does his choose? Movies. His only pedagogical tool is Some Like it Hot and Full Metal Jacket? It’s no coincidence that Gilmour is a former film critic. The author seems to say “heck, this is the thing I know about, so I’ll just teach my son about that”.
To his credit, Gilmour frets over his own shortcomings as an instructor. Halfway through the book a sixteen or seventeen-year-old Jesse asks his father where Florida is. Florida! That’s one of the easy states. And yet, Gilmour doesn’t change his approach.
Jesse, for his part, seems to be your typical unmotivated, self-absorbed teenager. While he’s obviously special to Gilmour, he comes off as flat and ordinary. He mopes, he sleeps late, he gets his heart broken. He does seem to be quite a sensitive lad, but this did little to endear me.
My Dad (who read and liked the book with reservations) pointed out that despite never having a job, Jesse always seems to have money. This, like many aspects of their lives (where is Gilmour’s wife in all those? why do we see so little of Jesse’s mother?), goes unexplained or recognized by the narrator.
Gilmour spends a lot of time in the second half of the book describing Jesse’s love affairs with a couple of women. They are, again, the usual drama-filled teenage romances. And we only ever get second-hand accounts, which makes them all the less interesting. Gilmour has a kind of creepy disdain for Jesse’s girlfriends. His jealousy is pretty unflattering.
Jesse seems to mostly exist as a foil for Gilmour to hold forth on the things he cares about: parenthood, movies, his own ex-girlfriends, and so forth.
Two Guys Who Made Dumb Choices
I don’t have to like the characters to enjoy a book. But it helps to care about them, particularly when the book in question is a factual memoir. To me, they seemed like two guys who made some dumb choices and couldn’t (at least for most of the book) see their own mistakes. I’d sum it up as “teenager has ordinary crisis. Father devises ill-informed alternative solution and puts all his eggs in his only basket”.
To top things off, the film criticism was uninteresting. That’s not surprising. We receive the film discussions through the lens of teaching a reluctant teenage learner about famous movies. Even if you’re Pauline Kael, you’re going to simplify your rhetoric, and lace it with enticements that might appeal to a high schooler. I’m not accusing Gilmour of being a bad film critic–I just think his hands are tied by the circumstances he creates.
From a technical perspective, I admire Gilmour’s writing. The book is well-constructed, very cogently written and feels well-edited. Despite my feelings for the characters, I could see it being included on the syllabus of a creative non-fiction writing class.
The Film Club is, at its heart, a book about parenthood. I know three people who have read the book, and they all liked it. As it happens, they’re all parents. I am not. Maybe I’m just not in the target market for this book. It even feels a little risky criticizing Gilmour’s parenting decisions–that seems like sacrosanct territory in our culture. Even if you do have progeny, though, I can’t recommend it.
This is totally unrelated, but I went searching for an image to accompany this review. I searched Flickr for ‘film club david gilmour’. I got all of three photos in the results. It’s fascinating to me that there are more than two billion photos in Flickr, yet I see results like this all the time. What are all those photos of? Vacations? Endless loops of self portrait projects (”085 of 365: Me With No Pants”)? Or are the photos just under-described?
Because it features beautiful versions of MIT geeks counting cards, the theatrical trailer for “21″ is currently getting Dugg. Here it is:
It bears a striking resemblance to a half-decent Canadian film called “The Last Casino”. Here’s the plot summary from IMDB:
One deadbeat teacher discovers that three of his students are great math wizzes and decides to teach them how to count cards and make lots of money. As they learn how to play the casinos, things get tricky when the debt owing teacher informs them that their front man wants restitution for loses (of supposed $500,000 Canadian) in about a weeks time. The three students decide to hit all the major casinos in Ontario and Quebec until discovered.
Sound familiar? I couldn’t find a trailer online, but here’s a clip from early in the film:
Much like “Munich” and “Sword of Gideon”, it always bums me out a little when big budget movies replicate the stories of smaller and independent films. Most viewers never know that the apparent original work they’re watching is, in fact, highly derivative. And it’s a safer bet for the artists involved in the remake, because the creators of the original made many of their mistakes for them.
Via The Thinking Blog, I learned about Moola (that’s a referral link–here’s a vanilla one if you prefer). It’s a Canadian, online Flash game network that enables you to win money based on a ladder system. From Wikipedia:
Players receive free credits to wage against other players in return for watching a 10, 15 or 30-second video advertisement and answering a trivia question related to the ad. By extending credits to the viewer of the advertisment, players have funds to place bets against other players without risking any of their own money. These player may then ‘cash out’ the accumulated winnings for real cash once a suitable amount has been reached.
They have three games at the moment. I just played four rounds of Gold Rush, and finally won on the fourth attempt. Now I have two cents! There’s a bit of a thrill in playing against other humans for tiny amounts of money, but none of the games are as good or addictive as, say, Desktop Tower Defence.
Anyhow, I think it’s an interesting model. Essentially it’s a micropayment system where consumers are paid for watching ads. They just happen to be able to bet that money after they earn it. Is it, in legal terms, gambling? I’m unsure. Interestingly, you’re not allowed to access the site if you’re a resident of Quebec, Louisiana or Nevada.
