Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - Posts
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The United States' 2-0 win over Spain in soccer's Confederations Cup semifinals was a colossal shocker: Spain hadn't lost since 2006, while the Americans looked horrendous in losing to Brazil and Italy in just the last week. ESPN.com immediately equated the victory with 1980's Miracle on Ice: "Do you believe in miracles?" the headline copy read, echoing Al Michaels' famous call of Team USA's win over the USSR in the Olympic hockey semis. Undercutting the comparison a bit was the poll that ESPN linked to in the next sentence: "Vote: Do you care?"
Within a few minutes, that leading question was softened to the less-suggestive "Vote." The original formulation, however, was a far more honest summation of the American sports fan's traditional relationship to soccer: tenuous at best, dismissive at worst.
That they-don't-score-enough-and-ties-are-dumb attitude is, in some measure, generational, as younger folk who grew up playing soccer and its video-game analogue certainly think more highly of the game. America's rising Latino population has also buoyed stateside interest, as has the increasing prevalence of the American soccer intellectual. (As Bryan Curtis argued in his 2006 Slate piece "Among the Brainiacs," footy has replaced baseball as the sport of choice for this country's scholarly sports fans.)
The sport's defenders can be seen, en masse, in the results of that "Do you care?" poll: 81 percent of the 41,000 respondents (as of 5:15 eastern) say they care about the U.S. win over Spain "a lot." But does the American soccer fan really care about American soccer? ESPN's ratings for the Euro 2008 tournament were higher than its figures for Major League Soccer contests and U.S. national team matches. This year, ESPN killed Major League Soccer's regular Thursday night slot on account of poor viewership; MLS games can now be seen scattered throughout the schedule on a different day from week to week. Meanwhile, the network just bought the rights to air games from Spain's La Liga. For American audiences, Spanish national team stalwarts like Xavi and David Villa make for more compelling television than America's Landon Donovan.
Don't blame American soccer fans for preferring the international product—foreigners play the game better, after all. (It's also true that the best domestic talent leaves the U.S. in search of better competition abroad. See: Tim Howard.) Still, the U.S. national team's titanic upset takes on a different cast when you consider that American soccer fans are more interested in watching soccer when Americans aren't playing. That's ultimately what makes this Confederations Cup win so different from the Miracle on Ice. In that hockey game, our guys heroically took on and overcame the indomitable, faceless Soviets. In Wednesday's match with Spain, our guys heroically took on and overcame an indomitable team—but the foe wasn't faceless. This time, we know our opponent better than we knew ourselves.
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To mark the release of Whatever Works, Woody Allen's 40th movie, Entertainment Weekly film critic Owen Gleiberman has ranked each of Allen's films. As a Woody loyalist—in my book, he's a member of a small club of artists who've made both tragic and comic masterpieces—I commend the effort. But the rankings are so preposterous I wonder whether the list is meant purely as a provocation rather than an earnest expression of preferences.
The first eyebrow-raising choice is Bananas at No. 3—it's a decent slapstick, but it's a slight effort even when compared with Woody's other comedies, like the autobiographically rich Radio Days, the more fanciful Alice (ranked at 32!) or Gleiberman's 10th-place pick, The Purple Rose of Cairo.
Equally shocking is Gleiberman's contention that Match Point is Woody's sixth-best movie. Match Point is nothing more than a poor man's Crimes and Misdemeanors (11th place), lazily shot by a director who obviously doesn't know London well.
One more puzzling decision: ranking September last. Not the greatest Woody Allen movie, I concede, but Dianne Wiest, Mia Farrow, and Sam Waterston all deliver solid performances, making September a perfectly watchable little drama. Certainly it's leagues better than the offensive Whatever Works, which Gleiberman mysteriously ranks at 26.
There is, however, one film Gleiberman and I agree on: Manhattan. Gleiberman gives it his No. 1 spot, and while I wouldn't go so far (I prefer Crimes and Misdemeanors), it's certainly Allen's most lyrical film—the most moving love letter ever sent to New York City, perhaps to any city. It's also a great counterpoint to Whatever Works, in part because it deals with the same May-December theme. The relationship between Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood in Whatever Works is perplexingly asexual and ends in a childishly easy fashion, with Wood explaining she's fallen for a lustier contemporary. Manhattan, on the other hand, is entirely forthright about Mariel Hemingway's sex appeal, the possibility of genuine, passionate attachment across generations, and also the older man's desperation when she's finally ready to move on. Here's the classic closing scene:
Have I been too hard on Gleiberman? Am I too easy on Woody Allen's Bergman knock-offs? Post your thoughts in the "Fray."
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Today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its intention to double the size of the best picture field for next year's Oscar race, from five movies to 10, for the first time since Casablanca won the award in 1943. In addition to ensuring that our national conversation about the Oscars now begins in frigging June, this move opens up the best picture field to movies outside the usual narrowly defined scope of high-minded Oscar-worthiness. It's uplifting to imagine that some of the newly created spots might go to the kind of smaller movie that usually goes under the Academy's radar for the big prize (something like, say, last year's Rachel Getting Married, or even a foreign film like Let the Right One In) but the likely outcome (and, no doubt, the Academy's intention) will be to make the Oscars more, not less, commercial. The expanded field will allow for the recognition of animated fare like Wall-E or popular summer blockbusters like The Dark Knight (neither of which made the best picture list last year.) This year, movies that may benefit from the roomier category include Star Trek, Up, and (if there's a just God somewhere) Drag Me to Hell.
This shift will also mean that at least a few of the best picture nominees will be likely to be movies most people have seen. (Let's face it, the great There Will Be Blood/No Country for Old Men faceoff of 2007 was thrilling for us film nerds but baffling to the average Oscar viewer.) The Big Money's Chadwick Matlin makes the point that the 10-movie field may also serve as a kind of Hollywood stimulus package, encouraging studios to spend more money on marketing, audiences to flock to more movies, and TV advertisers to buy more Oscar ad time based on expectations of higher ratings. But there are yet-unforeseen consequences of this shift: The opening song medley and the clip reel of best picture excerpts will both have to double in length, pushing Oscar-night bedtimes (and critics' deadlines) ever closer to the break of dawn.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 17: "Transformers 2 rotten tomatoes." The giant robot blockbuster starring Megan Fox as a beautiful woman opens today and it is, according to rottentomatoes.com, rotten (24 percent on the Tomatometer). The Awl's Choire Sicha has written a harrowing account of watching the film, which Slate's own Dana Stevens calls "loud ... long ... incoherent ... leering ... racist ... and rife with product tie-ins." Still, lukewarm reviews didn't stop Transformers from breaking the 2009 opening box-office record in the U.K. last weekend.
No. 49: "The Hurt Locker." The Hurt Locker is a different story. Opening June 26, media buzz has already crowned the film "The First Iraq War Movie That Doesn't Suck." Directed by Kathryn Bigelow ("Point Break," "K-19: The Widow Maker), The Hurt Locker follows a sweltering, Kevlar-clad bomb disposal unit as they make their way through Baghdad, circa 2004. Bigelow told The Onion A.V. Club, "I think of the film, in a way, as non-partisan. ... I think the script successfully looks at the humanity of these men and their courage, and shares with us what a day in the life of a bomb tech is."
No. 67: "Lisa Kudrow Web Therapy." When it had its online premiere last year, Lisa Kudrow's Web Therapy was hailed as a step forward in the genre Boingboing called "webcam narrative." Lisa Kudrow stars as a weirdo online shrink who consults with her patients via Webcam. The Lexus-sponsored show launched a second season this week on Hulu, but can Kudrow compete in our post-Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog Internet-video world?
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