Colin Marshall

Critic critique

A Roger Ebert blog post about critiques of him and my usual low-level continuous line of thought about film writing combined to make me want to get my thoughts straight about my personal favorite critics. (Note that I specifically mean print critics; if we include the net ones, we'll be here all day.) They are as follows:

I am forever indebted to that very same Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times for what, over at least thirteen years of reading his reviews every Thursday, amounts to not just a remote mentorship in film appreciation but an extended article-writing master class. His influence has undoubtedly crept into my own prose style in thousands of subtle, hard-to-detect ways; classic Ebert lines pop into my head on a daily basis. His thinking has shaped me too; not for nothing do I often quote his dictum about a movie not being about what it is about but how it is about it.

I do find, however, that, like any quantitative rating, the "stars" he assigns pollute his signal with noise. (To be fair, he himself rails against them on occasion.) I feel they also contribute to a genre-relativist slant that I don't quite understand. He's often quoted as writing that "when you ask a friend if Hellboy is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to Mystic River, you're asking if it's any good compared to The Punisher." Except that I probably am asking if it's any good compared to Mystic River — or more like compared to Ran, Solaris, Maborosi, and so on.

I meta-applaud Ebert's undying championship of Werner Herzog and of all the rich, unusual films he so often stands for, though I can't help but feel troubled at the suspiciously high praise he's been giving the average release lately. And I could not forgive a mere mortal's dismissal of Abbas Kiarostami, Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man and most of David Lynch's career. But Ebert is no mere mortal.

I wish the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum wasn't in semi-retirement, because he's got some of the finest cinematic tastes I've ever seen. His top hundred list comprises, in equal measure, films I would be unlikely to have heard of otherwise with ones I've seen and found life-changing. Close-Up, Stalker, Barry Lyndon, F for Fake, Playtime: they're all there. And if that's not enough, he's got an essential thousand for you to chew on.

In contrast to Ebert, Rosenbaum not only loves Kiarostami and Dead Man but has written freakin' books on them. Unfortunately, I also recall him being pretty down on Herzog, so he's kind of Ebert's negative. Read them both and you'll stay on an even keel, I suppose.

Almost every time I discover a film that I love and consider underseen, the New York Times' Manohla Dargis turns out to have gotten there first. When I got turned on to Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy, I found she'd reviewed and loved it too:

There are roughly 90 viewing days left till Christmas. By that point most of the big studio movies will have opened for the consideration of the paying public and Academy Award voters, and untold numbers of words will have been spilled about the same handful of serviceable or perhaps even brilliant films of the sort that dominate the discourse every fall. Odds are that none of those contenders will capture the tenor of these difficult times with more sensitivity or greater attention to beauty than Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy,” a triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year.

Same deal with Aleksandr Sokurov's The Sun:

Even so, Mr. Sokurov seems to me far less interested in Japanese history than in creating a world that in its perverted and closed logic conveys the psychology of power, a reasonable endeavor for a filmmaker born under Soviet totalitarianism. The sense of imperial decay is exquisitely conveyed by the eerie and sui generis beauty of Mr. Sokurov’s images — here he serves as his own cinematographer — which at times suggest the soft-focus style of some 19th-century photography. At other times, however, you might as well be staring at a neglected exhibition in a natural history museum, a vision of life shrouded in dust and cobwebs. What strange world is this, you might wonder, even as the all-too-human figures, the horrible facts and catastrophic battles gradually come into focus.

Same deal again with Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Blissfully Yours:

As the filmmaker freely indulges in the forest's voluptuousness and his own feel for composition, his characters — freed from work, the city and everyday life — shed their clothes and tentatively bump against one another with both pleasure and frustration. In this secret place, where even the smallest gesture becomes an epic of emotion, these three people finally find a moment of quiet by letting the earth swallow them whole.

I'm quite tempted to call Dargis the smartest working film critic, although she's subject to odd false positives, as with Richard "Darko" Kelly's Southland Tales. Despite such indiscretions, it remains that, if I wasn't spoken for, I'd be all, plz marry me manohla, k thx

The Boston Globe's Wesley Morris seems to be to be way, way underappreciated. Every one of his reviews that I've read makes me think, "Hey, this guy Gets It." He gets Ming-liang Tsai:

The send-off is King Hu's 1966 swordplay epic ''Dragon Inn," which on the night we see it screened plays to a crowd whose density seems, mysteriously, to swell then shrink. The man behind ''Goodbye Dragon Inn" is the Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-Liang, who's one of the coolest things going in the movies (in Asia or anywhere else), and he's arranged the whole picture in the Fu-Ho theater, a vast, leaky behemoth that's part dungeon, part Dickensian mansion, part armory, and, as far as I'm concerned, completely alive.

He gets Charles Burnett:

[Killer of Sheep] is a major landmark in American moviemaking: a vivid ballad for life as it was lived by people whom movie cameras could rarely seem to find. Pam Grier's house wasn't terribly far from this place, but she may as well have been living on Pluto.

He gets Gus Van Sant:

[Elephant's] lingering question is why. Also up for consideration is what Van Sant intends in his refusal (or is it his inability?) to tell us. We spend time with Alex and Eric as they sit around Alex's bedroom, which we're tempted to canvass for the Marilyn Manson posters or the drug paraphernalia. They're not there. These boys are clean. Still, Van Sant tempts us to assign a motive to their crime. Is it the target-practice videogame Eric plays? Is it the instructive Nazi documentary that the boys passively watch? Is it the kids who bully Alex? Or is it his parents, whose heads never make into the camera frame? Could it be the kiss the boys share in the shower on the morning of their spree, or the Beethoven Alex practices on his piano? It's all inconclusive and ultimately irrelevant. With a daring that some will call irresponsible, Van Sant challenges us to lay blame for an act that at its core is absolutely senseless. Nazi, queer, gameboy: It doesn't matter what a killer is, only that he has killed.

I wish Morris would write a book or something, 'cause I'd really like to interview him and get a first-hand view — or listen — into the workings of his critical mind. Maybe I'll just ask anyway.

I have already composed a post in praise of the New Yorker's Anthony Lane, but I simply cannot emphasize this enough: the man's the best writer in the game. In the context of film criticism, some of his sentences qualify as superhumanly brilliant. I have re-read certain of his reviews so many times, seeking the possibly mythical wellspring of his prose quality, that they're committed to memory. (I suspect the wellspring has two components: hard work, and a lot of it.)

But we can't ignore the fact that, despite the sheer joy of reading his pieces, Lane regularly takes heat from cinephiles for appearing to lack any kind of critical or theoretical framework. I think this charge sticks, though in some other, greater sense, I feel that it's somehow "cooler" not to have a theory, that he's escaped some sub-realm of weeniedom in refusing to develop one. Perhaps this contributes to the difficulty I have in using him as any sort of guide, but damn, can he ever integrate a joke smoothly.

I also really like where the Village Voice's J. Hoberman comes from, which I suspect owes much to his past as an experimental filmmaker. Also, his first-ever review was of Eraserhead, so, promising start. I don't have a huge amount to say about him, other than that whatever he likes, I feel I must watch. Maybe that's the best compliment I can give a critic.

Hail Anthony Lane

I think many thoughts about film criticism, and have single working critics defined as my "go-to" for each particular sub-purpose in my reading of film reviews. Roger Ebert is an evergreen all-rounder, never failing to pen a solid short essay on whatever comes down the pike while almost unfailingly championing films that are actually, like, interesting. (He missed the boat on Kiarostami, though.) Manohla Dargis, quite possibly the smartest active critic today, possesses an astonishingly acute eye for the very cream of the crop. Wesley Morris does much the same, though with a lower profile. J. Hoberman wields a refreshing appreciation for experiment — no surprise, given his background as an experimental filmmaker. If Jonathan Rosenbaum hadn't retired, he'd easily make the list (despite having missed the boat on Herzog).

Anthony Lane, though, sweeps all the style points. Never have I come away from one of his New Yorker pieces not fired up to write myself; his reviews merit reading, re-reading, re-re-reading and possibly even re-re-re-rereading. He's also supremely hilarious, repeatedly firing off casually brilliant turns of phrase within each of his articles that would be the witty centerpiece of other critics'. It must be said that, cinematically, I see eye-to-eye with him far less often than I do with my other favorites. But then again, I don't worship their sentencecraft.

On Adrian Lyne's Indecent Proposal:

The film bundles together all its desires and smelts them into one gleaming character: a billionaire named John Gage, played by Robert Redford. Gage thinks that money can buy you love — or, at any rate, the kind of sex that might, you know, sprout into love. So when he sees Diana in a Vegas boutique the wheels of lust start to grind, and before you can say junk bond he's asking her to kiss his dice and throw a seven. She wins, of course, whereupon he installs her and David — who have just lost all their cash — in an expensive suite. They look awed and pleased, although it's probably the nastiest hotel room ever seen on film: a steel-blue mess, rounded off with a delightful touch, at least in the print I saw — a microphone nodding from its boom at the top of the frame. Gage then makes his big offer: a million bucks for a night with Diana-no aftermath, no strings. "It's just my body," Diana explains. "It's not my mind." I was glad to have that cleared up, though it does raise an interesting question: How much would you pay for an evening with Demi Moore's mind?

I would happily give away the rest of the plot, except that you can guess it anyway. Indecent Proposal induces a strange power in the viewer, a glow of prophecy: you can see every kink in the plot minutes, even hours, before it happens. Looking back at my notes, I found a scribbled menu of predictions — "He'll buy the dress," "They're going to lose," and the eerily specific "He'll find the copter taking off as he arrives" — each of them followed by a gratified "Yup."

On Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind:

This is a charming conceit, designed as a paean to the ramshackle; sadly, every minute of Gondry’s film is irrefutable proof that charm is not enough. The rule seems to be that whenever he directs other people’s scripts — as he did with “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” written by Charlie Kaufman — he is able to negotiate a truce, or even a merger, between the logical and the fantastic, whereas when he writes his own material, as in “The Science of Sleep” and “Be Kind Rewind,” anything that smacks of common sense is rejected as a gross inconvenience. To take the most basic of objections: how many video-only stores do you know? It would hardly have stretched the budget to set the action in the late nineteen-eighties, when video was rampant; in fact, the new movie has the flimsiness of a comedy from that era (remember the robot in “Short Circuit,” touched off by a lightning strike?), and half of the films that Mike and Jerry seek to revitalize are of similar vintage. If you can think of nothing more hilarious than Jack Black strapping on used auto parts and pretending to be Robocop, then here is the movie you want.

On Zack Snyder's Watchmen:

“Watchmen,” like “V for Vendetta,” harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear — deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation — is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along.

On Sangsoo Hong's Woman is the Future of Man:

Munho (Yoo Jitae) is a college lecturer in art, and a living, chunky rebuttal of the notion that art refines the soul. Whether his moral conduct is less or more offensive than his choice of knitwear is something I have yet to resolve, and even his longtime friendship with Hunjoon (Kim Taewoo), a struggling filmmaker, seems pitted by tetchiness and tantrum. Yet they continue to meet for meals, and I guess that any kinship that can survive raw squid and four bottles of rice wine deserves to last.

(I also like this line: "Sunhwa, in particular, is a disconcerting blend of the pliable and the numb, and her query, mid-intercourse, to Munho — “Can I moan?” — may be the saddest indictment of another culture that I have ever heard.")


On McG's Terminator: Salvation:

If you arrived late for “Terminator Salvation” and missed the name of the director, at what moment would you realize that you were not watching a Mike Leigh film? I would nominate the scene in which a rusty tow truck, armed with a wrecking ball, is pursued by a riderless robot motorbike, armed with automatic machine guns. A wrecked car falls into the bike’s path, at which point we are given privileged access to the display screen inside the robot’s brain. We get a blood-red projection of the obstacle ahead, and with it, for a second or two, the words “Analyzing alternatives.” Slide under the wreck, crash through it, or skirt around the side? I felt sorry for this anxious bike, which may have been having trouble at home, and it certainly delivers a more measured performance than some of the leading actors. Nonetheless, that brief digital readout gives the game away. The business of the film is not to tell a cogent story or earn the devotion of our sympathies but to analyze alternatives, and, when in doubt, pick whichever is louder.

On J.J. Abrams' Star Trek:

Here is a long-range backstory — a device that, in the Hollywood of recent times, has grown from an option to a fetish. I lost patience with “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” once we learned of Willy Wonka’s primal trauma (his father was a dentist, and forbade him candies, so guess how he reversed that deprivation?), and, likewise, with “Batman Begins,” from the moment that mini-Bruce tumbled into a well full of bats. What’s wrong with “Batman Is” ? In all narratives, there is a beauty to the merely given, as the narrator does us the honor of trusting that we will take it for granted. Conversely, there is something offensive in the implication that we might resent that pact, and, like plaintive children, demand to have everything explained.

The Colinments of Style: Ran review

This time round, we have the third and final user review of one of my favorite films of all human history. This particular reviewer takes on the (awesome) Criterion release of Akira Kurosawa's Ran:

Kurosawa's last undisputed masterpiece, "Ran" adapts "King Lear" (Shakespeare was Kurosawa's favorite writer) placing it during the 16th century in Japan. Like "Throne of Blood" (another Kurosawa classic that also adapts "Macbeth") "Ran" melds action with drama in a unique way that only Kurosawa was able to do. Sure there have been other directors that have made films about Japanese culture, Feudalism and the Samurai but none with the keen insight and profound glimpse into what makes a culture tick as well as Kurosawa.

Kurosawa had lost most of his collaborators prior to the shooting of "Ran". All of that informs the darkness and his identification for the main character. While Kurosawa freely borrowed from "King Lear", he also informed the film with many issues facing himself; he felt isolated from the Japanese filmmaking community and he was unappreciated in this late phase of his career having to scramble to get financing (frequently going overseas to get it). Kurosawa felt isolated and alone without his collaborators. The loss of his wife just prior to shooting meant that Kurosawa threw his raging emotions into "Ran" using the story of "Lear" as a means to examine his own personal situation.

Chris Marker's marvelous documentary "AK" is included as part of the package on the second disc. That by itself would also make this worth repurchasing if you're in doubt about it. However, coupled with the terrific restoration and transfer done by Criterion here it makes this an essential purchase for fans of Kurosawa's films. We also get an appreciation by director Sidney Lumet, an episode of Toho Masterworks on Kurosawa that's also quite good (although I prefer Marker's 74 minute documentary). "It is Wonderful to Create" focuses exclusively on "Ran" while Marker's documentary is a better overview of the director. Criterion has also used Kurosawa's original sketches and paintings to create sections of "Ran" as Kurosawa original saw it prior to actual production. Finally there's a new interview with lead actor Tasuya Kakadai. As usual Criterion has included an excellent booklet that includes a very good essay by film critic Michael Wilmington, a 1985 interview with Kurosawa about the making of the movie and a new interview with "Ran" composer Toru Takemitsu. This deluxe 2 disc edition makes the nonanamorphic previous edition look almost like a videotape by comparison in terms of the overall quality.

This is an essential purchase for fans of Kurosawa. Kurosawa's last epic is, perhaps, his darkest and one of his most accomplished. The extras would make this worth purchasing by themselves but the beautiful, rich high definition transfer makes this the best version of "Ran" that has ever appeared on home video. I highly recommend this film.

* * *

The writer first launches straight into the acclaim, dropping in the Shakespeare angle along the way:

Kurosawa's last undisputed masterpiece, "Ran" adapts "King Lear" (Shakespeare was Kurosawa's favorite writer) placing it during the 16th century in Japan. Like "Throne of Blood" (another Kurosawa classic that also adapts "Macbeth") "Ran" melds action with drama in a unique way that only Kurosawa was able to do.

Though a bit vaguer and less informational than I'd like — it boils down to "Ran, which puts Shakespeare through the Kurosawa lens, is great" — these sentences can be tightened into respectability. We'll first 86 the parentheses and integrate what they contain more closely into the surrounding text. Then, in the interest of avoiding deadening repetitiveness, we'll dial down the appearances of the word "Kurosawa". A quick run through the de-passive-voicifier after that, and we get:

In his last undisputed masterpiece, Kurosawa transplants "King Lear" into 16th century Japan. Like "Throne of Blood", his classic "Macbeth" adaptation — Shakespeare was the filmmaker's favorite writer — "Ran" melds action and drama as only Kurosawa could.

A somewhat separate point about the nature of Kurosawa's skill follows. It's kind of a non sequitir — we'd expect a further point about that action-drama fusion — but hey, whatever:

Sure there have been other directors that have made films about Japanese culture, Feudalism and the Samurai but none with the keen insight and profound glimpse into what makes a culture tick as well as Kurosawa.

Plenty of editors advice heartily against leading with "sure," but this review establishes a conversational enough tone that we'll run with it, albeit with an added comma for pacing purposes; if you're going for conversational vocabulary, never forget conversational rhythm. But let's go ahead and cut, with great relish, "there have been other directors that" in favor of "other directors" and "profound glimpse" in favor of nothing. (I mean, "profound glimpse"? Seriously?) I love how much it slims down:

Sure, other directors have made films about Japanese culture, feudalism and the samurai, but none have Kurosawa's keen insight into what makes a culture tick.

Now for some production background:

Kurosawa had lost most of his collaborators prior to the shooting of "Ran". All of that informs the darkness and his identification for the main character.

This point comes off a bit psychologize-y for me, but we're here to polish writing, not, alas, thinking. Purging what excess verbiage we can and trusting readers to remember that Ran's the subject of the article, we're left with a sentence that nevertheless includes the uncomfortable term "informs." But I'm sure we'll live:

Kurosawa lost most of his usual collaborators prior to shooting, which informs the film's darkness and his identification with its protagonist.

An important point comes next, though you wouldn't know by how messily it's expressed:

While Kurosawa freely borrowed from "King Lear", he also informed the film with many issues facing himself; he felt isolated from the Japanese filmmaking community and he was unappreciated in this late phase of his career having to scramble to get financing (frequently going overseas to get it).

One "inform"? Tolerable. But two? Toss it. And if we're talking about a work and how the creator, uh, worked it, using the present tense comes off a lot smoother than trying to place the historical events of the filmmaking process and the film as "executed" in the viewer's experience on two different chronological planes. That's tricky in this sentence, though, because the writer discusses both Kurosawa's actions on Ran and how they draw on his experiences outside it. On close scrutiny, the end result kinda-sorta appears to suffer from mismatched tenses, but since the movie exists in the present, it reads fine:

While freely borrowing from "King Lear", he also imbues the film with challenges he faced himself: isolation from the Japanese filmmaking community, a lack of appreciation in the late phase of his career and having to scramble, frequently overseas, for financing.

The Passion of Akira, continued:

Kurosawa felt isolated and alone without his collaborators. The loss of his wife just prior to shooting meant that Kurosawa threw his raging emotions into "Ran" using the story of "Lear" as a means to examine his own personal situation.

Basically fine, if a tad herky-jerky. Let's perform a basic de-herking/de-jerking by combining these two sentences into one and excising all words not pulling their weight. We've already established the absence of Kurosawa's collaborators, so no need to do it again. We've already established that the piece is about Ran, so no need to deliberately re-indicate it. "Isolated" isn't really necessary if we already have "alone", it's obvious that "his" situation would be "personal", we know King Lear is a story, etc. The revision, even if it still includes the clunky emotion-throwing image, has at least substantially shrunk:

Compounding Kurosawa's aloneness, the loss of his wife just prior to shooting made him throw raging emotions into the film, using "Lear" to examine his own situation.

Seeing as I'm on record as an A.K. fan — and one of Marker in general — I could hardly disagree with the following:

Chris Marker's marvelous documentary "AK" is included as part of the package on the second disc. That by itself would also make this worth repurchasing if you're in doubt about it. However, coupled with the terrific restoration and transfer done by Criterion here it makes this an essential purchase for fans of Kurosawa's films.

Good baby Jesus that's bloated. We should write this as no more than a single sentence, one about A.K. and how it adds sufficient value by itself to make Ran worth buying twice. (Note: the non-Criterion release truly sucks, so it'd be worth it anyway.) Perhaps we don't even need to state directly that the DVD includes Marker's documentary — why else would we bring it up? — but we'll play it safe today:

Chris Marker's marvelous documentary "A.K.", included as part of the package on the second disc, itself merits a repurchase of the movie.

The writer continues on the subject of extras, of which there, indeed, are some:

We also get an appreciation by director Sidney Lumet, an episode of Toho Masterworks on Kurosawa that's also quite good (although I prefer Marker's 74 minute documentary). "It is Wonderful to Create" focuses exclusively on "Ran" while Marker's documentary is a better overview of the director.

These sentences comprise mostly a list of facts; it's not far from the "extra features" bullet-pointery on the back of DVD boxes. Let's keep this a statement about what we get with the Criterion edition — mostly because I can't think of a better angle off the top of my head — but perform some flow-facilitating rearrangement. We'll cut the parentheses, predictably, but note that we'll also — and this is a rare move — insert another parenthetical statement, since the writer's remark about A.K. doesn't quite fit anywhere into the existing text:

We also get an appreciation by Sidney Lumet, an episode of "Toho Masterworks" on Kurosawa — good, though I prefer Marker's documentary — and "It is Wonderful to Create", which focuses exclusively on "Ran". ("A.K." provides a better overview of the director.)

Here come the last feature details. Though always conscientious about what to filter out, Criterion neverthess packs 'em in:

Criterion has also used Kurosawa's original sketches and paintings to create sections of "Ran" as Kurosawa original saw it prior to actual production. Finally there's a new interview with lead actor Tasuya Kakadai.

First and foremost, though this has nothing to do with prose style: the guy's named Tatsuya Nakadai. He's also not, like, some obscure historical footnote on whom nobody would think to check. C'mon now. Other than that, I can't complain about too much here other than inelegance. A little rearrangement, a comma here and there, and we're solid:

Using Kurosawa's original sketches and paintings, Criterion also creates sequences as Kurosawa envisioned them prior to production. Finally, there's a new interview with lead actor Tasuya Nakadai.

On-disc features aside, we mustn't forget the physical niceties — the writer doesn't, in any case:

As usual Criterion has included an excellent booklet that includes a very good essay by film critic Michael Wilmington, a 1985 interview with Kurosawa about the making of the movie and a new interview with "Ran" composer Toru Takemitsu. This deluxe 2 disc edition makes the nonanamorphic previous edition look almost like a videotape by comparison in terms of the overall quality.

Ooh, the VHS comparison — burn.

"Very good" carries so little meaning that it's best used (a) ironically or (b) not at all. The writer says much in these sentences that doesn't quite merit saying: Kurosawa's interview being "about the making of the movie" (doi), Toru Takemitsu being the "'Ran' composer", that sort of thing. And we'll cut the year of the Kurosawa interview, since the writer hasn't produced it for the Takemitsu one, and simply consider the both of them as a pair of interviews. I'd recommend strongly against ever remarking on something's "overall quality," but especially when you can instead compose a sentence about the better item winning the comparison. (And no, you don't need to indicate that the comparison is a comparison.) The lines we wind up with retain a whiff of clunk, but compared to how they used to read, I can deal:

As usual, Criterion includes an excellent booklet with an essay by critic Michael Wilmington and interviews with Kurosawa and composer Toru Takemitsu. This deluxe two-disc edition makes the previous, non-anamorphic release look like a VHS tape.

Here's the big thumb-up finish:

This is an essential purchase for fans of Kurosawa. Kurosawa's last epic is, perhaps, his darkest and one of his most accomplished. The extras would make this worth purchasing by themselves but the beautiful, rich high definition transfer makes this the best version of "Ran" that has ever appeared on home video. I highly recommend this film.

PROTIP: to end a piece strong, don't go on about what stuff is, and position your qualifiers so that they muddy as small a section of the water as possible. Though I first assumed fixing those problems would amount to little more than a quick re-jig, it turns out we'll have to perform some real word surgery; seeing off those "is" statements necessitates a near-complete restructure. We'll turn these four sentences about the purchase, the film, the extras, the transfer and the recommentation into one about the disc's most notable qualities. We can guiltlessly bin "I highly recommend this film," which by this point goes without stating. The writer also seems to have forgotten the "last undisputed masterpiece" designation from the beginning, so we'll cut the redundant "last" here too. Arriving at the end rebuild takes some trickery, but I think it comes out both more striking and much clearer:

An essential for the director's fans, the extras alone on Kurosawa's most accomplished and perhaps darkest epic repay purchase, but its rich, high-definition transfer makes this the best version of "Ran" ever to appear on home video.

Here's the entire review, reassembled:

In his last undisputed masterpiece, Kurosawa transplants "King Lear" into 16th century Japan. Like "Throne of Blood", his classic "Macbeth" adaptation — Shakespeare was the filmmaker's favorite writer — "Ran" melds action and drama as only Kurosawa could. Sure, other directors have made films about Japanese culture, feudalism and the samurai, but none have Kurosawa's keen insight into what makes a culture tick.

Kurosawa lost most of his usual collaborators prior to shooting, which informs the film's darkness and his identification with its protagonist. While freely borrowing from "King Lear", he also imbues the film with challenges he faced himself: isolation from the Japanese filmmaking community, a lack of appreciation in the late phase of his career and having to scramble, frequently overseas, for financing. Compounding Kurosawa's aloneness, the loss of his wife just prior to shooting made him throw raging emotions into the film, using "Lear" to examine his own situation.

Chris Marker's marvelous documentary "AK", included as part of the package on the second disc, itself merits a repurchase of the movie. We also get an appreciation by Sidney Lumet, an episode of "Toho Masterworks" on Kurosawa — good, though I prefer Marker's documentary — and "It is Wonderful to Create", which focuses exclusively on "Ran". ("AK" provides a better overview of the director.) Using Kurosawa's original sketches and paintings, Criterion also creates sequences as Kurosawa envisioned them prior to production. Finally, there's a new interview with lead actor Tatsuya Nakadai. As usual, Criterion includes an excellent booklet with an essay by critic Michael Wilmington and interviews with Kurosawa and composer Toru Takemitsu. This deluxe two-disc edition makes the previous, non-anamorphic release look like a VHS tape.

An essential for the director's fans, the extras alone on Kurosawa's last, most accomplished and perhaps darkest epic repay purchase, but its rich, high-definition transfer makes this the best version of "Ran" ever to appear on home video.

You should send along any and all 100-700-word samples of prose with which I can dick around to colinjmarshall at gmail. These should preferably not include the author's name or any source information.

The Colinments of Style: 2001 review

Now let's whip into shape a user review of another film that floats around the top of my eternal-favorite list, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Because when a re-view comes along, you must whip it:

In the summer of 1969, when I was all of ten years old, Mom & Dad bundled all us kids into the white Oldsmobile stationwagon and drove to the Rockville (Maryland) Drive-In to see "2001: A Space Odyssey." I didn't know much about the film, but as a budding sci-fi fan I was already champing at the bit to see it. Needless to say, "2001" rearranged my universe. I can't say I understood the movie completely at the time, but I do recall talking my parents' ears off about the film during the drive home.

"2001" is personally my favorite movie of all time. I've seen it more times than I can count, purchased the soundtrack several times (vinyl and tape wear out, you know), read Arthur C. Clarke's novelization several times, and read every other piece of literature about the film I've been able to get my hands on.

And recently my partner Greg purchased this "Stanley Kubrick Collection" DVD from Amazon, and it was just last night that we sat down to watch it on our new 32-inch TV and in 5.1 digital sound. What a treat! First of all the print is about as pristine as anything I've ever seen; this movie probably looks better today on DVD than it did in many suburban movie theatres back in 1969. I was immediately struck by how sharp the image was, especially the clean lines of the monolith that appears mysteriously amongst our australopithicine ancestors 4.5 million years ago. While watching this film last night, Greg lamented the fact that kids today who grow up on nothing but CGI effects in science fiction movies may never have a true appreciation for the fine art of model-building; the Orion shuttle, the Discovery ship and its attendant space pods, are stunning examples of elegance in design. The Aries 1-B moon shuttle looks like it ought to have been built and flying by now. The docking sequence with the rotating space station, to the oddly appropriate strains of "The Blue Danube Waltz," look just as clean and modern as anything being filmed today.

The pop cultural impact of "2001" cannot me overstated. Is it any wonder that over 30 years after the film's initial release, Richard Strauss' tone poem "Also Sprauch Zarathustra" is still associated with space travel?

That having been said, my only qualm with this edition is that the sound editors involved with the DVD transfer may have taken a few too many liberties. The most glaring example is during the closing credits of the film: In the original print the "Blue Danube" reprise ends with snare drum roll and finish when we see the words "THE END." ... But in this edition the waltz continues merrily on its way long after the screen fades to black. Amazon's website notes that Stanley Kubrick approved all this audio tweaking; I guess I'm just going to have to take their word for it. Granted, the sound is very nice and crisp, the conversations are clear, the bass has a lot of extra "oomph" during Gyorgy Ligeti's atmospheric score. If you are not too much of a Kubrick purist and can overlook the tweaking of the sound, you'll have to admit that this edition of "2001" sounds damned good.

"2001: A Space Odyssey" was released at a time when there was still a huge sense of wonder and optimism about space travel and exploration. Alas, in the intervening years shifting economic, political and military priorities have eroded much of that wonder and optimism. I wonder if any of us will ever again be able to look up at the stars with as much hope and exhilaration as we had when "2001" first hit the screens.

Sound foundation, clunky expression. The writer has clearly done his thinking about the film, but his review has a dashed-off feel that does the thoughts injustice.

Opening with a personal anecdote, let alone one headed by season and year, runs the risk of making writers sound like windbags right out of the gate. (It ranks just barely above quoting Webster's.) In this case, though, I do think it's an appropriate way to get this writer's lifelong love of 2001 across:

In the summer of 1969, when I was all of ten years old, Mom & Dad bundled all us kids into the white Oldsmobile stationwagon and drove to the Rockville (Maryland) Drive-In to see "2001: A Space Odyssey." I didn't know much about the film, but as a budding sci-fi fan I was already champing at the bit to see it.

Like stray grains of sand that slow every gear in a machine, insertions like "all of" and "all us" kill rhythm, momentum and suchlike. Let's strip 'em out as we correct the various, more mundane "stationwagon"s and "champing"s. Take note also of the switcheroo pulled on the second sentence; I submit that the writer's budding sci-fi fandom leads more strongly than his lack of 2001-specific knowledge:

In the summer of 1969, when I was ten years old, Mom and Dad bundled us kids into the white Oldsmobile station wagon and drove to the Rockville, Maryland Drive-In to see "2001: A Space Odyssey". As a budding sci-fi fan, I was chomping at the bit to see the film despite knowing little about it.

Now witness the writer's life forever and irrevocably altered:

Needless to say, "2001" rearranged my universe. I can't say I understood the movie completely at the time, but I do recall talking my parents' ears off about the film during the drive home.

People disagree about "needless to say." Some consider is a useful piece of rhetorical subtlety; others believe that it is or indicates something that, uh, doesn't need saying. As it emphasizes the picture's impact — it rearranged this guy's universe, but hey, whose didn't it rearrange? — I elect to leave it in. Your mileage may vary. Starting a sentence with "needless to say," in some readers' eyes, merits even more serious punishment, but in this context I see no other way.

As we've established that this is a memory and thus an event in the past, we can trust the reader to get by without "at the time" and the folksy "I do recall":

Needless to say, it rearranged my universe. I can't say I understood the movie completely, but I did talk my parents' ears off about it on the drive home.

The obsession grows:

"2001" is personally my favorite movie of all time. I've seen it more times than I can count, purchased the soundtrack several times (vinyl and tape wear out, you know), read Arthur C. Clarke's novelization several times, and read every other piece of literature about the film I've been able to get my hands on.

Trust Thine Reader. Let's make that this post's mantra. Have faith that readers will understand that 2001 is personally your favorite movie of all time even if you write that 2001 is only your favorite movie of all time. (Or even just that it's your favorite movie, period.) When judging whether or not to include a word, especially an adjective or adverb, consider whether you really must distinguish your statement from the version using that word's opposite. How much should the writer worry about making sure the reader understands he doesn't mean that 2001 is impersonally his favorite movie of all time?

The last bit of the ungainly second sentence needs the most help, specifically in the form of a stronger conceptual link between Clarke's novel and "every other piece of literature" about the film (and for the record, I believe the book, crafted concurrently with the movie, is less a novelization than the missing link between novelization and adaptation):

"2001" is my favorite movie of all time. I've seen more screenings than I can count, purchased the soundtrack more than once — vinyl and tape wear out, you know — and read Arthur C. Clarke's novel several times, as well as every other piece of related literature I've been able to get my hands on.

Flash forward:

And recently my partner Greg purchased this "Stanley Kubrick Collection" DVD from Amazon, and it was just last night that we sat down to watch it on our new 32-inch TV and in 5.1 digital sound. What a treat!

I overuse "recently" myself and thus am hypersensitive to its overuse by others. Here, as almost everywhere, it serves no substantive function. The point is that they watched this 2001 DVD; the facts that Greg recently purchased it or that they watched it the night before the review's composition — let alone "just" the night before, or that they "sat down" to watch it rather than stand up — have relatively little relevance. Let's clarify it:

Last night my partner Greg and I watched this "Stanley Kubrick Collection" DVD he purchased on our new 32-inch TV in 5.1 digital sound. What a treat!

And lo, Kubrick's masterpiece blows the writer's mind once again, this time with its edge definition:

First of all the print is about as pristine as anything I've ever seen; this movie probably looks better today on DVD than it did in many suburban movie theatres back in 1969. I was immediately struck by how sharp the image was, especially the clean lines of the monolith that appears mysteriously amongst our australopithicine ancestors 4.5 million years ago.

A print being "about as pristine" as anything the writer has ever seen likely falls on the "reader doesn't care" of the great "reader cares"/"reader doesn't care" divide. Too equivocal. But if it's simply as pristine? Just interesting enough. And since the writer's childhood memory already indicated 1969 as the year of 2001's theatrical run, we don't need it mentioned again.

The sluggish "I was immediately struck by how sharp the image was" becomes, when put through the de-passive-voiceifier, the beginning of a statement about what the sharpness of the image did (strong!) rather than about who was struck by the image which was what (weak!). The benefit is both sizable and obvious:

As pristine as any I've seen, the print probably looks better on DVD now than it did in suburban movie theatres then. The image's sharpness, especially the clean lines of the monolith that mysteriously appears amongst our australopithicine ancestors, struck me immediately.

Greg weeps for future generations, coming up as they do in our tragically aestheticized-down age:

While watching this film last night, Greg lamented the fact that kids today who grow up on nothing but CGI effects in science fiction movies may never have a true appreciation for the fine art of model-building; the Orion shuttle, the Discovery ship and its attendant space pods, are stunning examples of elegance in design.

Again with the "last night." And Trust Thine Reader: he'll remember you watched the movie even if you don't restate as much. This is about Greg's lament, so words aren't well-spent on rebuilding a background. I considered changing "elegance in design" to "design elegance," but on second thought, nah, it's fine:

Greg lamented that kids who grow up on CGI-heavy science fiction movies may never appreciate the fine art of model-building; the Orion shuttle, the Discovery ship and its attendant space pods are stunning examples of elegance in design.

More unforgettable imagery invoked:

The Aries 1-B moon shuttle looks like it ought to have been built and flying by now. The docking sequence with the rotating space station, to the oddly appropriate strains of "The Blue Danube Waltz," look just as clean and modern as anything being filmed today.

First sentence: dandy. Second: less so. It's another case of segments coming in what feels like the wrong order. And what's a statement about music doing in a string of observations about the purely visual? We won't go far as to remove the "Blue Danube" reference, but its out-of-placeness demands consideration. It's not as disruptive in this revision, though, where it comes first in its sentence:

The Aries 1-B moon shuttle looks like it ought to have been built and flying by now. Set to the oddly appropriate strains of "The Blue Danube Waltz", the rotating space station's docking sequence looks as clean and modern as anything filmed today.

An oddball short paragraph follows:

The pop cultural impact of "2001" cannot me overstated. Is it any wonder that over 30 years after the film's initial release, Richard Strauss' tone poem "Also Sprauch Zarathustra" is still associated with space travel?

Perhaps editorial opinion drives this, but "pop cultural" panders to a false divide; "cultural" will do. (And if you really want to separate the "high" and the "low," who would ever file 2001 under the latter?) A part of me says this whole chunk should be cut, but let's not do quite that much violence to the original; we'll graft it to the final paragraph instead.

The cultural impact of "2001" cannot be overstated. Is it any wonder that over 30 years after the film's release, Richard Strauss' tone poem "Also Sprauch Zarathustra" is still associated with space travel?

But back on the subject immediately at hand, the writer has to grant that the disc sounds swell:

That having been said, my only qualm with this edition is that the sound editors involved with the DVD transfer may have taken a few too many liberties.

I'm willing to get hard-and-fast on this: nobody should use the phrase "that having been said." Not as long as they're capable of writing "that said," anyway. We discussed the de-passive-voicifier; "that having been said" is what you get after running "that said" through the regular passive-voicifier. (The modern working writer could make few worse investments than purchasing a regular passive-voicifier.) And we can streamline the revision further still by turning it into a statement about his having a qualm instead of about what his qualm is:

That said, I have a qualm with the liberties taken by this edition's sound editors.

The blasphemy revealed:

The most glaring example is during the closing credits of the film: In the original print the "Blue Danube" reprise ends with snare drum roll and finish when we see the words "THE END." ... But in this edition the waltz continues merrily on its way long after the screen fades to black. Amazon's website notes that Stanley Kubrick approved all this audio tweaking; I guess I'm just going to have to take their word for it.

This passes structural muster, but the devil's in the details. (He loves him some details.) Better, as usual, to talk about the action rather than the identity or nature of this "glaring example." And again, Trust Thine Reader: they know 2001 is a film, they know it's viewed on a screen, and they know Amazon is a website. (And if at this point they don't, seek a new readership.) Also — and this is totally general — excise all excisable instances of the speed bump "going to." This should read much more smoothly:

The most glaring example comes during the closing credits: in the original print, the "Blue Danube" reprise ends with a snare drum roll and finish under the words THE END, but in this edition the waltz continues merrily on its way long after the fade to black. Amazon notes that Stanley Kubrick approved this tweaking; I guess I'll have to take their word for it.

But hey, this tweaking ain't so bad, in the scheme of things:

Granted, the sound is very nice and crisp, the conversations are clear, the bass has a lot of extra "oomph" during Gyorgy Ligeti's atmospheric score. If you are not too much of a Kubrick purist and can overlook the tweaking of the sound, you'll have to admit that this edition of "2001" sounds damned good.

"Nice" is a red flag; "very nice" is an even worse red flag. A maroon flag, if you will, indicating serious meaninglessness. "Nice" aside, I find the first sentence ill-formed in that it spends two-thirds of its time saying what a couple things are, which necessitates a near-teardown/rebuild and merging of both sentences:

But if you aren't too much of a Kubrick purist, you'll have to admit that the clarity of the conversations, the extra "oomph" in the bass of Gyorgy Ligeti's atmospheric score and the overall crispness sound damned good.

"Overall crispness" remains a flat thing to comment on, but there it is.

Finally, the writer takes a turn for the wistful:

"2001: A Space Odyssey" was released at a time when there was still a huge sense of wonder and optimism about space travel and exploration. Alas, in the intervening years shifting economic, political and military priorities have eroded much of that wonder and optimism. I wonder if any of us will ever again be able to look up at the stars with as much hope and exhilaration as we had when "2001" first hit the screens.

Not a bad ending, but certainly a leaden one in the original formulation. Luckily, we can slim it down to half its size like a slow-news People magazine cover story. Most obviously, we don't need the movie's title twice in one paragraph. Nor should we write about what there was in the late 60s and how it's changed since when we can write simply about what the ensuing decades have done to the mood that characterized that time. Performing the aforementioned transplant of that one wonky standalone little paragraph, we have a surprisingly admirable wrapup:

The cultural impact of "2001" cannot be overstated. Is it any wonder that over 30 years on, Richard Strauss' tone poem "Also Sprauch Zarathustra" remains associated with space travel? The film was released at a time of optimism and wonder about space exploration, which shifting economic, political and military priorities have, alas, eroded. I wonder if we'll ever again look up at the stars with the hope and exhilaration we had when "2001" hit the screens.

The revised 2001 review in full:

In the summer of 1969, when I was ten years old, Mom and Dad bundled us kids into the white Oldsmobile station wagon and drove to the Rockville, Maryland Drive-In to see "2001: A Space Odyssey". As a budding sci-fi fan, I was chomping at the bit to see the film despite knowing little about it. Needless to say, it rearranged my universe. I can't say I understood the movie completely, but I did talk my parents' ears off about it on the drive home.

"2001" is my favorite movie of all time. I've seen more screenings than I can count, purchased the soundtrack more than once — vinyl and tape wear out, you know — and read Arthur C. Clarke's novel several times, as well as every other piece of related literature I've been able to get my hands on. Last night my partner Greg and I watched this "Stanley Kubrick Collection" DVD he purchased on our new 32-inch TV in 5.1 digital sound. What a treat! As pristine as any I've seen, the print probably looks better on DVD now than it did in suburban movie theatres then. The image's sharpness, especially the clean lines of the monolith that mysteriously appears amongst our australopithicine ancestors, struck me immediately. Greg lamented that kids who grow up on CGI-heavy science fiction movies may never appreciate the fine art of model-building; the Orion shuttle, the Discovery ship and its attendant space pods are stunning examples of elegance in design. The Aries 1-B moon shuttle looks like it ought to have been built and flying by now. Set to the oddly appropriate strains of "The Blue Danube Waltz", the rotating space station's docking sequence looks as clean and modern as anything filmed today.

That said, I have a qualm with the liberties taken by this edition's sound editors. The most glaring example comes during the closing credits: in the original print, the "Blue Danube" reprise ends with a snare drum roll and finish under the words THE END, but in this edition the waltz continues merrily on its way long after the fade to black. Amazon notes that Stanley Kubrick approved this tweaking; I guess I'll have to take their word for it. But if you aren't too much of a Kubrick purist, you'll have to admit that the clarity of the conversations, the extra "oomph" in the bass of Gyorgy Ligeti's atmospheric score and the overall crispness sound damned good.

The cultural impact of "2001" cannot be overstated. Is it any wonder that over 30 years on, Richard Strauss' tone poem "Also Sprauch Zarathustra" remains associated with space travel? The film was released at a time of optimism and wonder about space exploration, which shifting economic, political and military priorities have, alas, eroded. I wonder if we'll ever again look up at the stars with the hope and exhilaration we had when "2001" hit the screens.

You should send along any and all 100-700-word samples of prose with which I can dick around to colinjmarshall at gmail. These should preferably not include the author's name or any source information.

The Colinments of Style: "The media with its hellish ideas"

Ben Casnocha wrote to suggest that the excerpts I've edited so far have been a bit too inept, and thus not particularly instructive for writers who have spelling, grammar, rudimentary organization and the ability to feed and dress themselves pretty much down. I agree. This, however, is what they call Crappy Version One of my editing-in-public project; I should be iterated well away from it soon.

However, I do need additional pieces of prose to make that shift. So if you stumble upon any 100-700-word samples of prose that hit that magic spot of not-particularly-awful-but-not-particularly-sparkling, send 'em to me, with no author or source information, at colinjmarshall at gmail. Some Metafilter people suggested that my fodder include fanfiction, copy from .gov sites, and the better class of Amazon reviews, and these are all solid ideas, but I'd like to minimize the effect of my own selection filters, recognized or unrecognized. (Fanfiction is a particularly good recommendation, since I've always wanted to make Harry the power bottom, not Ron.) I want to be hit with text from odd, unexpected angles.

All of this, of course, is mere run-up to Bad Writing Example the third (and last):

Within our society, there is an individual. An individual with individual thoughts and actions. But who determines whether or not that individual is correct in their choices? Are our thoughts brain washed through the media with it’s hellish ideas or our closet friends that try to direct us in the right direction? No one may ever know what is right or wrong.

So what is ethical relativism anyway? And who is behind all of the madness of ethical relativism? It is my understanding that relativist’s are believed to think that relativism is true. Ethical Relativism is of a mind to say that whatever one’s culture says is right is the right thing for him or her to do. This world we human beings live in is not without a variety of many different and diverse cultures with different cultural practices and hence different moralities. Studying ethics from a philosophical point of view, ethical relativist’s might conclude that your wasting your time just like philosophers have always wasted they’re time.

I'm beginning to wonder what sort of assignment, specifically, these were written for. Casual remedial philosophy term papers? Like, real casual remedial philosophy term papers? At least there aren't many misspellings or serious syntactical abuses; perhaps that should be a baseline excerpt selection criterion from now on. (The breathtaking juvenility, however, is another matter entirely.)

The writer first makes the perilous choice to open grand:

Within our society, there is an individual. An individual with individual thoughts and actions. But who determines whether or not that individual is correct in their choices?

Madelaine and I have a joke about this sort of leader, calling it the "Through the annals of time..." maneuver; it's about one rung up the great ladder of rhetoric from opening with a definition from Webster's dictionary. I've got a feeling that, were it my job to revise undergrad papers, I'd make de-grandification the first phase of the routine. That means 86ing many words and all pronouncements about "society":

Who determines whether the thoughts and choices of individuals are correct?

And as we all know, if you open grand, you'll want to follow with uncritically reconstituted proclamations:

Are our thoughts brain washed through the media with it’s hellish ideas or our closet friends that try to direct us in the right direction? No one may ever know what is right or wrong.

Leaving mostly untouched this second layer of handwaving, now about the "media" and its legendarily "hellish" brainwashing, we can at least make the statement less confusing. This, however, is a taller order than at first it seems. I think the writer meant to write "closest friends," though closet friends might have proven more interesting. It is between these friends and the hellish-idea'd media that he sets up a dichotomy: which controls our minds? Surely one must. (Funny how many papers are written from the perspective of the only conscious human in a world of sheep.) "Brainwashed," I submit, is a bit too heavy to apply to both. The jump from there to "no one may ever know what is right or wrong" is unfollowable, but there's little we can do to improve it; the writer's intention isn't clear enough.

Are our thoughts influenced by the media or by our friends? No one may ever know what is right or wrong.

Then, oy, the writer keeps making with the rhetorical questions:

So what is ethical relativism anyway? And who is behind all of the madness of ethical relativism?

PROTIP: If dropping question after question after unanswered question doesn't work for august French cultural theorists, it's unlikely to work for you. I'd like to work more rhetorical questions into my own writing, admittedly, but here I've got an object lesson in what happens when you bang the VUs doing so. Condensation will help thin the barrage:

What is ethical relativism, anyway, and who is behind the madness of it?

He's undermined the question by calling the thing questioned "madness" — clearly, his made-up mind seeks no answer — but I dare not corrupt his underlying points with an overzealous red pen.

What comes next is a classic case of misreading Strunk and White's cardinal rule as "include unnecessary words":

It is my understanding that relativist’s are believed to think that relativism is true. Ethical Relativism is of a mind to say that whatever one’s culture says is right is the right thing for him or her to do.

Fine, proverbial red pen; get zealous:

It is my understanding that relativist’s are believed to think that relativism is true. Ethical Relativism is of a mind to say dictates that whatever one’s culture says is right is the right thing for him or her to do, is.

I should thank the writer: "It is my understanding that relativist’s are believed to think that relativism is true" is, in this context, possibly the perfect example of a meaningless phrase. It's your understanding? Implied by the fact that you're stating it. Relativists believe relativism is true? Implied by the word "relativists." I once thought understatement the great pitfall of writing; now I know it's overstatement. We're left with this:

Ethical relativism dictates that whatever one’s culture says is right, is.

A similar malady afflicts the following:

This world we human beings live in is not without a variety of many different and diverse cultures with different cultural practices and hence different moralities.

"This world we human beings live in?" You mean, this Earth? The one I'm on? And that you're on? And that we're both human beings on? The very same? The Earth that bears not just one culture, but many? Different cultures, yes. But diverse, too? Really? Because on the Earth I'm talking about, there are a variety of many different and diverse cultures — which have not just different and diverse practices, but different and diverse cultural practices — and it doesn't just have them; it's not without them. But if you think we're talking about the same world, well, I suppose I'll take your word for it. Thought I'd make sure. One never knows. Can't assume these things on faith.

This revision won't help you reach word count, but it sure saves the reader's brain cycles:

This world's cultures have different practices and, hence, different moralities.

Ah, the home stretch. Unlike the rest of the paragraph, most of the final sentences are right out of the grammar book. Apostrophe confusions, that sort of thing:

Studying ethics from a philosophical point of view, ethical relativist’s might conclude that your wasting your time just like philosophers have always wasted they’re time.

Nevertheless, the old signal-to-noise ratio still isn't exactly heartening. I divine that the writer means that ethical relativists think studying ethics, and philosophy in general, is a waste of time. A bold statement to be sure, but it's hard to tell that upon first, tangled read. Rearrangement is job one, reduction job two:

Ethical relativists might conclude that, in studying ethics from a philosophical point of view, you're wasting your time.

Here's the reassembled paragraph:

Who determines whether the thoughts and choices of individuals are correct? Are our thoughts influenced by the media or by our friends? No one may ever know what is right or wrong.

What is ethical relativism, anyway, and who is behind the madness of it? Ethical relativism dictates that whatever one’s culture says is right, is. This world's cultures have different practices and, hence, different moralities. Ethical relativists might conclude that, in studying ethics from a philosophical point of view, you're wasting your time.

And here's what we get with slightly less mercy:

Who determines whether the thoughts and choices of individuals are correct? The media? Our friends? No one may know what is truly right or wrong. Ethical relativism dictates that whatever one’s culture says is right, is. As different cultures have different practices and hence different moralities, an ethical relativist would consider the study of ethics from a philosophical point of view to be a waste of time.

Well, that... isn't anything, is it? But I suppose that's the beauty of brevity and clarity in writing: it communicates your point more efficiently, but it also reveals when you don't have one.

The Colinments of Style: "According to Marx"

Bad Writing Example the second:

According to Marx, he read utilitarianism and he disagreed with it. He feels humans are alienated from the following nature,body,others ,and one’s own intellectual ability. Marx believes that people are alienated from nature or comes to hate the object he or she creates. In some cases you can say this is true although people are at times happy and pleased with the product of his or her labor. Alienation of the body stregnth, agility are all controlled by the capitalist for hid benefit. Alienation of others says workers see other workers simply as competitors for the rewards they are offered. Finally intellectual alienation is faced with contradictions. In Marxist terminology a contidiction is a notion that is correct by everyone around you but clearly false if thought about in any length of time by yourself.

Hoo boy. Let's see what we can make sense of after a rudimentary cleanup of spelling, grammar, punctuation, quantity agreement, etc.:

According to Marx, he read utilitarianism and he disagreed with it. He feels humans are alienated from the following: nature, body, others, and one’s own intellectual ability. Marx believes that people are alienated from nature or come to hate the object he or she creates. In some cases you can say this is true although people are at times happy and pleased with the product of his or her labor. Alienation of the body: strength, agility are all controlled by the capitalist for his benefit. Alienation of others says workers see other workers simply as competitors for the rewards they are offered. Finally intellectual alienation is faced with contradictions. In Marxist terminology a contradiction is a notion that is correct by everyone around you but clearly false if thought about in any length of time by yourself.

The clause "According to Marx, he read utilitarianism" suggests a nonnative English speaker, but the odd verbosity is evidence against. (People still learning English tend to use too few words, not too many.) Rework the confusing bit, trim the rest of the first two sentences and we get this:

According to Marx, he read utilitarianism and disagreed with it. He feels humans are alienated from nature, the body, others, and their own intellectual ability.

Moving on, we see a deep, pervasive confusion about tense, quantity and pronoun agreement. I notice a distinct absence of commas as well, too, though that's a lesser evil. Here's the cleanup:

Marx believes that people are alienated from nature or come to hate the objects they create. In some cases you can say this is true, although people are at times happy and pleased with the products of their labor.

This is actually pretty clear, but let's still tighten it up:

Marx believes people are alienated from nature, coming to hate the objects they create. In some cases this is true, although people are sometimes pleased with the products of their labor.

Basic repairs on the next two sentences give us this:

Alienation of the body: strength and agility are controlled by the capitalist for his benefit. Alienation of others says workers see other workers simply as competitors for the rewards offered.

Still a bumpy ride. The writer doesn't seem to have decided whether he wants to rattle off the qualities of the various types of alienation after colons or to do it in normal sentences, a sort of careless formal inconsistency common to low-quality prose. Here's my fix, hammering this in line with what came before:

Alienated from the body, their strength and agility are controlled by the capitalist for his benefit. Alienated from others, workers see other workers simply as competitors for the rewards offered.

I'm not quite sure what these final two sentences are trying to say, but I'll be the problem lies almost entirely in the first:

Finally intellectual alienation is faced with contradictions. In Marxist terminology a contradiction is a notion that is correct by everyone around you but clearly false if thought about in any length of time by yourself.

Like a cubist painting, this paragraph tries to come at its subject from a bunch of different angles at once. What worked for Picasso, alas, isn't quite as effective on a term paper. By saying that "intellectual alienation is faced with contradictions," I guess — and it is a guess — that the writer means that intellectual alienation is about being faced with contradictions. I'll try to get this expressed properly:

Finally, the intellectually alienated are faced with contradictions. In Marxist terminology, a contradiction is a notion thought correct by everyone around you but clearly false if thought about by yourself.

So let's reassemble the paragraph:

According to Marx, he read utilitarianism and disagreed with it. He feels humans are alienated from nature, the body, others, and their own intellectual ability. Marx believes people are alienated from nature, coming to hate the objects they create. In some cases this is true, although people are sometimes pleased with the products of their labor. Alienated from the body, their strength and agility are controlled by the capitalist for his benefit. Alienated from others, workers see other workers simply as competitors for the rewards offered. Finally, the intellectually alienated are faced with contradictions. In Marxist terminology, a contradiction is a notion thought correct by everyone around you but clearly false if thought about by yourself.

At least that's readily understandable, but where's the élan? I'll attempt to add some by, as usual, cutting whatever can be cut:

Marx disagrees with utilitarianism. He feels humans are alienated from nature, the body, others, and their own intellectual ability. Alienated from nature, they come to hate the objects they create. (In some cases this is true, although people are sometimes pleased with the products of their labor.) Alienated from the body, their strength and agility are controlled by the capitalist for his benefit. Alienated from others, they see fellow workers simply as competitors for rewards. Intellectually alienated, they face contradictions, which, in Marxist terminology, are notions widely believed true but clearly false if considered by oneself.

This is the guy you college freshmen are so excited about?

You should send along any and all 100-700-word samples of prose with which I can dick around to colinjmarshall at gmail. These should preferably not include the author's name or any source information.

The Colinments of Style: "No lying, no exceptions"

I begin this project with five short "bad writing samples" I've been linked up to on some school's site. Though these have been pre-filtered for their badness and as such aren't 100% what I'm looking for, most any starting point is a serviceable one. Excerpt the first:

As that there are alot of people (weather they are philosophers or not) there are many exceptions to moral rules or laws. One thing I find interesting about Immanuel Kant, are his strong feelings toward not lying at any time ever no matter what and not to deal with the consequences and the considerations of individual situations and circumstances and possible exceptions that need to be accounted for when making a decision of morality and ethics. Immanuel Kant felt strongly that lying was always wrong, he was against it. But whose to say? Wasn’t lying just Kants biggest how shall I say "pet-peeve"? "No lying ever, no exceptions" needs to be addressed more seriously in the future by later philosophers, if you ask me its worth a try. Immanuel Kant was probably one of the most supportive philosiphers of absolute rules in the ethical and moral decision-making systems of thought I have studied.

Hey, it still beats Judith Butler.

The basic spelling and grammatical errors indicate a more thoroughly shoddy paragraph than I'd like, but a few basic repairs Windex any glass, even if the ideas behind it turn out to suck. I was very nearly demoralized by the first sentence alone, a dog's breakfast whose meaning took me about five beats to discern:

As that there are alot of people (weather they are philosophers or not) there are many exceptions to moral rules or laws.

Cosmetically, I'm obsessively — and compulsively! — driven to fix the misspellings and non-word first. (If you could tell me the story of how "alot" gained currency, I'd be terribly grateful.) We can do without the parentheses, since they break the flow — I say we go comma. And the strip of tire spikes that is "As that there are" will be mostly de-toothed by the removal of "that." So:

As there are a lot of people, whether they are philosophers or not, there are many exceptions to moral rules or laws.

This reduces to the unsound proposition that a large number of moral exceptions follow from a large number of people, but if I get into that we'll be here all night. Now to trim the fat:

As there are many people, philosophers and otherwise, there are many exceptions to moral laws.

To clarify the thought process behind what I'm doing here, my goal is to cut down the word count while at the same time changing the words that remain as little as possible. I could probably make what remains of this sentence fancier, but then I wouldn't be far from performing not just the editing but the writing itself.

One thing I find interesting about Immanuel Kant, are his strong feelings toward not lying at any time ever no matter what and not to deal with the consequences and the considerations of individual situations and circumstances and possible exceptions that need to be accounted for when making a decision of morality and ethics.

This writer's teacher would most likely ding him for the personal pronoun, but I'm of the mind that most prose should be more personal, not less, so I'll treat this less as part of an objective analysis than as a subjective, more or less conversational essay. (Never mind that subjective essays are really the only form in which I'm competent to work.) This second sentence, while superior to the first, is a bloated, rambling mess, much like a dissolute uncle at Christmas. Let's see how much we can reduce it:

One thing I find interesting about Immanuel Kant's are his strong feelings toward not never lying at any time ever no matter what and not to deal dealing with the consequences and the considerations of individual situations and circumstances and possible exceptions that need to be accounted for when making a moral or ethical decisions of morality and ethics.

Thus:

I find interesting Immanuel Kant's strong feelings toward never lying and not dealing with the consequences and considerations of individual circumstances and exceptions to be accounted for when making moral or ethical decisions.

Still a line only a mother could love — "I find interesting" grates, but to pull it would require a purpose-defeating teardown and rebuild — but at least it's, in theory, understandable.

Immanuel Kant felt strongly that lying was always wrong, he was against it. But whose to say?

Ladies and gentleman, I give you the High Philosophy Undergrad parodic style. But other than the misspelling and the choppiness of two separate sentences, this one needs little in the way of mechanical improvement:

Immanuel Kant was against lying, feeling strongly that it was always wrong, but who's to say?

And, oh my, this:

Wasn’t lying just Kants biggest how shall I say "pet-peeve"? "No lying ever, no exceptions" needs to be addressed more seriously in the future by later philosophers, if you ask me its worth a try.

Part of me wants simply to put that first sentence out of its misery, but my respect for authorial intention demands otherwise. It must be said, however, that the paper has at this point devolved into an overheard bar conversation. About Kant. "No, no, dude. Dude. Wasn't lying just one of Kant's, like, pet peeves? We gotta take a look at that shit ourselves, you ask me." There also seems to be some confusion about chronology, but I'll just cut through that particular Gordian knot. My revision:

Wasn’t lying just Kant's biggest — how shall I say — "pet peeve"? Future philosophers must address "No lying, no exceptions" more seriously; it's worth a try, if you ask me.

I know, I know; semicolons were forged by Lucifer himself. I've been trying not to lean too hard on them, but this seems like a place for a semicolon if I've ever seen one. This next sentence shouldn't need its magical powers, though:

Kant was probably one of the most supportive philosiphers of absolute rules in the ethical and moral decision-making systems of thought I have studied.

It's bad news when a philosophy student to employs the spelling "philosiphers," sure, but we're here to help this guy. (Though the text is posted on a page called "Examples of Bad Writing", so I feel as if I can be a bit harsher, a bit snarkier than I normally would.) The whole paragraph displays an unnervingly common tendency to qualify statements down to nubs: witness the use of "probably one of the most," at which point you're better off not writing anything at all. I submit it would profit by having its qualifiers trimmed back, which I accomplish like so:

Kant is one of the philosophers most supportive of absolute rules in ethical and moral decisionmaking I have studied.

Ehh. An flaccid sentence with which to end a paragraph, that's for sure, and still not one amenable to uncharitable reading. But still, better than before!

Here's the paragraph fully revised:

As there are many people, philosophers and otherwise, there are many exceptions to moral laws. I find interesting Immanuel Kant's strong feelings toward never lying and not dealing with the consequences and considerations of individual circumstances and exceptions to be accounted for when making moral or ethical decisions. Kant was against lying, feeling strongly that it was always wrong, but who's to say? Wasn’t lying just Kant's biggest — how shall I say — "pet peeve"? Future philosophers must address "No lying, no exceptions" more seriously; it's worth a try, if you ask me. Kant is one of the philosophers most supportive of absolute rules in ethical and moral decisionmaking I have studied.

And here's a more radical edit:

Just as there are many people, there are many exceptions to moral laws. I find Immanuel Kant's strong feelings about never lying despite the considerations of individual moral and ethical circumstances interesting. Kant felt that lying was always wrong, but who's to say? Wasn't lying just Kant's pet peeve? If you ask me, philosophers must address "No lying, no exceptions" more seriously in the future. Kant is more supportive of ethical and moral absolutes than most any philosopher I've studied.

Ah, the lengths to which we go to refute the categorical imperative.

You should send along any and all 100-700-word samples of prose with which I can dick around to colinjmarshall at gmail. These should preferably not include the author's name or any source information. Bonus points if you somehow punk me into revising one of the pillars of western civilization.

Playing editor

I'd like to write more about the craft of writing itself, but other than reviewing books on writing or picking apart my own material, proper angles have been nonobvious. I did receive a lot of e-mails, however, on my diffing of Roger Ebert's style in his original review of La Dolce Vita against his current one, and I sense more opportunity down that vein.

A series of posts on improving individual pieces of writing could, I imagine, be both interesting and useful to anyone who happens by. Given that such an effort would work best with actual, real-life writing not authored or filtered by me, I put the call out to you, dear readers: please to be sending me any 100-700ish-word examples of writing that you think aren't perfect but aren't hopeless either — "problematic," say — and I will write posts attempting to rebuild it. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster. I have the technology.

These pieces of writing can be anything: reviews, blog posts, commentaries, ruminations, explanations, excerpts, stories, musings, tracts. Ideally, they'll have a solid core of ideas but express them less effectively than they could have. I will wield my suite of aesthetic Ginsu knives, possibly successfully, possibly failure-ly, but I think we'll all learn something in the end. When you've got 'em, you should send 'em (or links to 'em) either to colinjmarshall at gmail or post them in a comment here.

(Update: I don't mean send in writing of your own. You can, but my idea was more to get stuff you've run across.)

Re-peat/Re-model

I'm trying to repeat myself more than I have been. Though at one point this sounded to me like the exact opposite of what I should be doing — you gotta stay fresh, you gotta change it up, you make like the proverbial rollin' stone and gather no moss — it's become important with a shift in my thinking about the very nature of blogs and the broader class of work to which they belong. Before, I thought of blogs as ever-expanding books, snowballing accretions of discrete mini-articles. If a piece was posted, it was posted; anyone wanting to read what I have to say on a subject can dig up the relevant entry, so why post about anything I've posted about before? Over the last year or so, I've come to see blogs in a different way: they're not magic anthologies; they're places, and as such should be constructed with an eye toward what's interesting to inhabit, rather than what's interesting to consume, digest and excrete (intellectually speaking).

There are a stack of other serviceable metaphors I could whip out here — materials, symphonies, textiles — but after traveling back in time to 1996 and studying its grandiose articles on cyberspace, I find that terms of place seem to be most useful. If a blog is a place, what's its visual design? The paint and furniture and architecture, I suppose. (It probably comes as no surprise that I hew to minimalism, and hard, in all those elements in real life.) Who are the readers and commenters? Obviously, they're the locals; the hangers-out. (The metaphor also admits tourists and passers-through.) But what are the posts themselves? Trickier, but this is the meat of it: the posts are the very essence of the place, the driving energy — the "ineffable ancient mystical qi," if you like — that remains when you pull the humans and the physical infrastructure from the equation.

A blog whose posts drop off is like a place that somehow loses its underlying appeal. We've all seen how rapidly, and often inexplicably, hangouts fall into disuse and disrepute; it's almost as rapid and inexplicable as the tubes' staggeringly high rate of blog abandonment. So a blogger's job isn't particularly different from a place manager's: keep the subtle shifts rolling to attract interest, but don't flail around to such a degree that you alienate the clientele. Do indeed keep it fresh, change it up and gather no moss, but do it organically and iteratively.

And yes, there are those words again. I fear a developing dependency on them, but aren't they appropriate in this case? My

1. Pick a new topic
2. Post about the topic
3. Pick a new topic

blogging mindset has become a

1. Pick a previous topic
2. Post about the topic from a new angle or extend it in a new way
3. Pick a topic from the now-slightly-expanded roster of previous topics

blogging mindset. Where I used to step from subject to subject to subject, a wake of intellectual descruction behind me, I now find myself visiting and revisiting ideas, mutating my treatment of them a bit each time and following the most promising branches of the tree. What could be more biological way to go about it? Reader Dan Owen also put it in a way I liked:

I love the deeply self-reflective approach you both take, even though you're working in very different fields, and I love the thinking-out-loud structure, which tends to be more circular than linear. You open the subjects you write about, rather than narrow them down to a point.

"Circular" instead of "linear." Choice.

This links up with thoughts I've been thinking about cultural projects more generally, and how circularity in creation might just lead to more effective stuff than does linearity. Many of my favorite filmmakers — a Wes Anderson, say, or a Sang-soo Hong — and even some writers — your David Sedarises, your Haruki Murakamis, (to an extent) your Alexander Therouxs ("Therouxes"?) — hold the superficial qualities of their work constant, continually doubling back to the "same" sort of material in order to explore it in different second- and higher-order ways. This draws the criticism of always "[verb]ing the same [noun]," but who ever made something incredible listening attentively to that sort of nonsense?

Xgau

I've spent the past three or four years approaching writing, my longest-pursued craft — and, tragically, my most remunerative one — as a game of packing maximum meaning into minimum word count. (Some denizens of LJ-land scoff hard at that, but what are they doing?) This mindset is likely what kept me up into the wee hours last night reading Robert Christgau's capsule record reviews when I should have been reading something else. Christgau, the self-styled "Dean of American Rock Critics", has thoughtfully archived an impressive number of his famously dense, to-the-point assessments on his web site, free for the browsing, and though I rarely agree with him — his tastes run more toward rock-qua-rock than do mine, and I suppose I barely ever like rock-qua-anything — I bow down before his ability to convey so much opinion in so little text.

To give you a taste of what I mean, here are Christgau's reviews of five near-randomly selected albums with which I'm intimately familiar:

Bobby Brown, Don't Be Cruel
It's the eternal fast one/slow one problem--when he states his prerogatives and tries to make the world dance he's irresistible, when he masks his motives and tries to make the tenderoni moan he's an obvious con. But he earns his prerogatives: the internal rhymes and voice-electrobeat patterning of the title track are so tricky they're hooky. And since I've never been much of an expert on tenderoni, I'm willing to suspend judgment on the half that leaves me unmoved.

Steely Dan, Aja
Carola suggests that by now they realize they'll never get out of El Lay, so they've elected to sing in their chains like the sea. After all, to a certain kind of reclusive aesthete, well-crafted West Coast studio jazz is as beautiful as anything else, right? Only I'm no recluse. I hated this record for quite a while before I realized that, unlike The Royal Scam, it was stretching me some; I still find the solo licks of Larry Carlton, Victor Feldman, et al. too fucking tasty, but at least in this context they mean something. I'm also grateful to find Fagen and Becker's collegiate cynicism in decline; not only is "Deacon Blues" one of their strongest songs ever, it's also one of their warmest. Now if only they'd rhymed "I cried when I wrote this song" with "Sue me if I play it wrong," instead of "Sue me if I play too long." Preferring long to wrong could turn into their fatal flaw.

Fleetwood Mac, Tusk
A million bucks is what I call obsessive production, but for once it means something. This is like reggae, or Eno — not only don't Lindsey Buckingham's swelling edges and dynamic separations get in the way of the music, they're inextricable from the music, or maybe they are the music. The passionate dissociation of the mix is entirely appropriate to an ensemble in which the three principals have all but disappeared (vocally) from each other's work. But only Buckingham is attuned enough to get exciting music out of a sound so spare and subtle it reveals the limits of Christine McVie's simplicity and shows Stevie Nicks up for the mooncalf she's always been. Also, it doesn't make for very good background noise.

Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, (No Pussyfooting)
Although art-rockers praise Fripp's undulating phased guitar and Eno's mood-enhancing synthesizer drones, they also complain that it all gets a little, well, monotonous after a while. That's the problem with art-rockers--they don't know much about art. I think these two twenty-minute duets, recorded more than two years ago, are the most enjoyable pop electronics since Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air, achieving their goal with admirable formal concision. What do the bored ones want? Can't have meter shifts 'cause there's no beat, can't have bad poetry because there's no vocalist, can't have fancy chord changes 'cause there's no key center. What's left is tranquility amid the machines, more visionary and more romantic than James Taylor could dream of being. Highlight: the unrestrained snake guitar on the unfortunately titled "Swastika Girls."

Pet Shop Boys, Very
Fey and ironic naturellement, but I wasn't ready for baroque — techno synths, massed brass, Village People chorus boys. And I also wasn't ready for sincere. For all his "I've been a teenager since before you were born," Neil Tennant finally seems, well, ready to love — finally seems to comprehend that needing another human being is more than an experiment you perform on your feelings, a way to insure that you'll not only be ravished but ravished exquisitely. Convinced cornballs may still find his emotions attenuated, but I say the production values suit the tumult in his heart and the melodies the sweetness in his soul. And I dare anybody who still thinks he's just talking to notate his high notes.

I'm still unpacking just how he does it.