review

I watched No Country for Old Men

February 27, 2023 /
Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) sitting at the kitchen table with his wife Loretta Bell (Tess Harper) in No Country for Old Men.

So I’m pretty sure No Country for Old Men is like, a film film about which lots has already been said. In which case it would be cliché for me to even start to talk about it.

Except that I haven’t read all of that stuff that’s already been written about it. It might at least be neat if I accidentally find something new to say. It also would be neat to say something that’s already been said, in like an independent invention sort of way.

  1. I’m familiar with Yeats’ poem, in passing. It’s of the same genre as “Ode to the West Wind,” right? That “I’m old but will live forever through my work” thing? Both poets worried the same way, which isn’t surprising to me, but it does surprise me a little that they came to the same answer. Both decided that enough of themselves exist in their art to stave off fears about mortality. Which is a really specific worldview, a really specific eschatology, when you think about it. Especially when No Country for Old Men seems to come to a really different answer, that when times change anything still tied to that previous time is obliviated.
  2. My favorite genre of movie is “people with interesting accents saying lots of things.” (The Banshees of Inishiren got me head over heels.) Because that describes most westerns, I guess my favorite genre is the western. (I actually love the western for lots of other reasons, too.) Anyway, every scene with Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Dillahunt hooked me. I can’t explain why exactly I get so smitten over that stuff, but for one thing it enforces the reality of the world. No surer sign that the characters are speaking to each other, not to the viewer, than being unable to understand them often. Also, it’s a well-deserved middle finger to accent discrimination. Folks with accents that fall outside of the journalistic or academic subset of “intelligent” accents deserve excellent writing, too.
  3. Another genre I love that describes No Country for Old Men: the slasher. Show me two differences between Anton Chigurh and Ghostface and tell you, “Yes Anton did have much better writing, now please return that mask to the Spirit Halloween you got it from.”
  4. The ending made me punch the air. Tommy Lee Jones deserves more than he got for that performance.
  5. The beginning also confused me — in a good way, like a “made me think about what I was watching” way — and I kept going back to Moss’s decision to return with water for the dying man as the whole theme of the movie in miniature. As in, I think if the movie was just those 10 minutes, you would’ve had a short film with the same basic message as the whole movie. Great setup.

Kaiju poker

February 12, 2023 / ,
Daniel Craig as James Bond and Mads Mikkelson as Le Chiffre play poker in Casino Royale.

I’ve been wanting to write about poker for a while. I played it for the first time in a long time while snowed out in Buffalo. Someone told me that beating young men at poker is easy: you just don’t be a dumbass. Gambling hijacks a part of the male brain. Thoughts like “How many Queens are left in the deck?” and “What hands are better than my hand?” turn into “All in? All in? Should I go all in? I should go all in. All in. I’m all in.”

Hope Poker is of the same genre as Hope Chess, in which you try and outwit your opponent rather than just playing the game that’s in front of you. That’s literally a line in Casino Royale. Bond says to Vesper,

“Then you’ll know that in poker you never play your hand…you play the man across from you.”

Which, that’s just silly. The only person you play in poker is the one sitting in your seat. Good poker players beat bad poker players because they actually know if their hand wins in most cases, and because they see far enough in the future to bail before making a stupid bet.

I’m not a great poker player. I’m not even a good one. But I did watch Casino Royale recently, and I just started reading Colson Whitehead’s The Noble Hustle. One is a poker movie, the other is a poker memoir.

Actually, that’s not even true. Casino Royale is a spy movie with poker themes. (And I guess, The Noble Hustle is a memoir with poker themes.)

The differences between the poker scenes in these two works are actually really instructive, particularly because one is fiction and the other is nonfiction.

Take hand probabilities. In Noble Hustle poker, we’re stuck with Wikipedia probabilities. 2.6% for a full house, 4.83% for trips, 0.0032% for a royal flush. So take a full house. In a five-player hand (and I’m taxing my memory of probability math here), the chances you don’t see a full house are 88%. Ish. In ten hands, odds are you’ll see one full house.

In the final hand of Casino Royale, something like three of the players at the table all show increasingly high full houses. Probability-wise, it’s more of kaiju movie than a poker movie.

Oh no, spy movies aren’t realistic. One detail, which I sort of love the filmmakers for including, is how each player’s stacks change dramatically between shots, implying that we’re cutting a lot of hands. Presumably the high card hands (17.4%) and the one pair hands (43.8%) just aren’t worth our time. Which, you know, it’s also not worth our time to watch James Bond get a good night’s rest, put on his deodorant, price shop for fresh produce.

Half of the difference between James Bond and Colson Whitehead is odds. The other half is that Colson, like the rest of us, has to live moment-to-moment, while Bond only has to live jump cut-to-jump cut.

Remember that next time you find yourself dazzled by a friend’s Snapchat story.

One other parting thought: On the morning I played poker in Buffalo, we also watched Moneyball. A friend of mine, a marrow-of-his-bones football guy, told me that the conflict of that movie — “sports are a number game” versus “sports have an ineffable, artistic quality” — is still very much at large. You figure poker players must feel this, too, behind their dark sunglasses. On the other hand, I think all chess is Billy Beane chess.

The difference is that a football or a baseball game could be decided by a rainstorm, by cheers, by elevation. Bluffs are always on the table in poker. Chess is surgically methodicalized. It’s a game of perfect information, and minimal chaos.

What does it tell us that chess is robotic, while poker and football are “intuitive” or “art forms?” It tells us that most people like to believe they can ride chaos upward.

I watched X-Men

February 12, 2023 /
A man's face stretching as he sticks it between metal bars, from X-Men (2000).
Ew. (From X-Men, 2000.)

I ended up watching to original X-Men movie today. Not sure how it crossed my desk, except that I’ve been watching a ton of video essays on film YouTube about the failings of modern superhero blockbusters — you know the ones.

I don’t think a lot about the MCU, except that all triple-A action movies are sort of caught in its orbit. X-Men wasn’t a scrappy production ($75 million USD). It does hail from a totally different period of superhero movie, particularly the superhero teamup movie, and that made it a really interesting watch.

Three things I loved (spoilers, I guess):

  1. A surprising amount of body horror. The premise, that mutants are a new and misunderstood phenomenon, is supported by how gross some of the mutations actually are.
  2. The end of the Wolverine/Mystique fight. Mystique pushes Wolverine away and escapes; Storm beats Toad (and says her iconic line, I don’t care what people say); Storm approaches Wolverine cautiously while he stands in the middle of the room, like he’s trying to sense something. What amazed me about this scene is how its dramatic tension exists purely for the viewer. A lot of movies in this position would have shown us where exactly the bomb is, then played the scene out. We, Dora the Explorer-like, point and yell, “She’s right there!” Those scenes can and do work. I liked being the benefactor of the suspense, though, rather than the characters on the screen.
  3. Wolverine (I love Hugh Jackman, can you tell) escaping from the metal restraints in the Statue of Liberty scene. Something X-Men movies are very good at is imposing psychological limitations, rather than physical limitations, onto their power system. We know Wolverine can survive stabbing himself through the chest, but he tells us earlier in the movie that he still feels pain like normal. At the climax, he endures that pain to save Rogue.

Anway, I liked it a whole bunch. Plan on watching X2 sometime, but I may or may not write about it. I’m interested in writing more review-y posts, though I realize they may only be useful to worldbuilders and Dungeon Masters like myself.

Tomorrow I’ll do some honest-to-goodness research. Scout’s honor.