"Boring, boring Arsenal." -- an old, semi-derisive chant mocking Arsenal's mastery of the 1-0 win.
Read that quote, file it away into the recesses of your mind and by the end of this (experimental) essay it should make a boatload more sense ... and even have a soccer point or two tossed in for good measure, that or maybe it's 20-straight days of 90-degree heat have finally melted every synapse in my cranium.
You, the reader, will ultimately be the judge.
* * *
Ah the summer cineplex, if there's a better slice of America at the moment I'd like to see it ... don't be a wiseguy and say the Gathering of the Juggalos, either.
What better way to spend your hard earned money than on our dearly beloved Hollywood stars? And how about the communal guffaws we get during the hilarity of the latest Zach Galifianakis vehicle.
Wait, what's that you buzzing you hear in your ears? The sarcasm police sirens? Good, the sarcasm in the previous paragraph was dripping about as thickly as the slowly congealing buttery substitute atop movie theater popcorn.
Long-time readers here know my recent aversion toward watching movies.
In a nutshell, with the advent of Netflix, Hulu, big screen televisions, etc. it's simply a better value to watch a flick at home. Even then, my mind tends to get bored by most movies, so with the wealth of quality television on DVD I'd rather, say, watch back-to-back "Mad Men" episodes than your typical Hollywood cinema fare.
But that's just me. Admittedly this is an odd position to take and a difficult one to articulate. Bear in mind, the last movie I saw that I enjoyed was a Comedy Central broadcast of "Hot Rod" and lately I've been unable to avoid HBO re-airing "Red Dawn," so take my opinion with the smallest grain of salt possible, in fact take it was an atom of sodium.
The thing is, if I'm going to devote 90+ minutes to something it better be good, or present a world that gets my imagination working. As it stands, CGI special effects have left me totally burnt out, making most big screen action/adventure flicks an exercise in tedium. 3D? Pass.
My biggest issue is there's nothing that bothers me more than "chase" elements of movies. They leave me looking at my watch, since 99 percent of the time we already know the protagonist is going to avoid the bevy of bullets, bad guys and other pratfalls and walk off into the sunset happy.
Maybe what it all boils down to, is with a good serialized television show, at at the end of 44 minutes, the story has moved forward. When I watch a movie, half the time I just want it to end.(*) Many times, too, watching a world created in a film part of me wishes that it was the setting for a show, yet budgetary restrictions make that impossible.
(*) Cue the Jerry Seinfeld, "We alllll get it" voice. Actually the only joys of actually going to the movies is making sarcastic, obvious statements during the trailers.
All that said, Tuesday night I found myself in the movie theater watching "Inception."
You see, after a day of moving furniture across four different venues for my parents in a U-Haul truck when my brother suggested we go see "Inception" the prospects of a comfy seat and air conditioning were too good to pass up. It didn't hurt, either, that nearly anyone with a forum has been raving -- 9.3 on Imdb.com, let's settle down folks -- about the Christopher Nolan film(*). My friend Mike, who's opinion hold's more water with me than Roger Ebert or Peter Travers, told me on no short terms: I have to go see it.
(*) For what it's worth, I'm like one of seven people on Earth who thought "The Dark Knight" was nothing spectacular. Also, thought "The Prestige" was tedious.
Well, I did.
My one word review: Okay.
"Inception" was a fine, well-acted, technically proficient, aesthetically pleasing summer blockbuster with a couple good action set pieces and a little deeper plot points than your typical jive-talking/fighting robot fare. The idea of alternate reality has become a fairly common Sci-Fi trope in recent years and watching "Inception" I couldn't help but think of two other movies, the low-fi time travel flick "Primer" and the Charlie Kaufman weird-fest, "Synecdoche, New York."
For me, it fell into my usual trap. No matter what happened, I knew that with the subject matter and the way it was getting buzzed up, that there was going to be some kind of "twist" involved. The concept of shared dreaming(*), or "dream police" was neat and original, but I'd have liked to see a different story than the two main plots, which didn't engage me all that much. To borrow a line from Roman on the dearly-departed, "Party Down", "hard sci-fi" this was not.
(*) I'm sure this point has been made, but was "Inception" all that different than "Total Recall", well, except Ellen Paige didn't sport a three-breast prosthetic, now did she?
So yeah, "Inception" fit the bill for a summer flick.
In fact it left me feeling sort of the same way I did in the immediate wake of the 2010 World Cup final when Spain beat Holland 1-0 in Soccer City, South Africa. Sort of shrugging my shoulders, accepting it for what it is was.
The aftermath of the final left many wanting to sing the praises of Spain for winning, "the right way"(*), while vilifying the Dutch for overtly physical tactics, which kept them in the match until Andres Iniesta's 116th minute winner.
(*) Having just finished Jonathan Wilson's "Inverting the Pyramid" -- the best soccer book I've ever read -- my conclusion, there isn't a "right way" to play. You can scrap by to get results by any means necessary like the Estudiantes teams of Carlos Bilardo or the Helanio Herrera Inter Milan sides, or you can soar like Brazil of 1970. With the flexibility of the XI men on a soccer field, there are infinite ways to play the game, rightly or wrongly to get results. It's a matter of how you apply those tactics to the given situation.
What strikes me as odd, from a sporting standpoint, is how we look at important soccer matches or teams and apply an aesthetic quality to them, much like we do a movie. A common refrain after a match is, "so what did you think?" as if it's an open-ended question, which the scoreboard itself can't answer.
The result, while important, is to some not as important as how that result was achieved. Perhaps that's part of the fun, yet you'd never debate the technical merits of a World Series or Super Bowl, now would you? American team sports are nine times out of 10 explorations in black-and-white, while soccer thrives all these years later in shades of gray.
In America the result seems to trump all else, which might help to explain why mindless Michael Bay movies bank hundreds of millions of dollars, while a 90-minute soccer game is considered too boring. Granted, this is a story for another day.
Countless fans around the globe want soccer to be 11 v. 11 art on grass.(*) This, however, might be a dying notion, especially over the last 20 years with advancements in training, scouting and the overall homogenization of playing styles.
(*) This is part of the reason I tend to think the would-be explosion of statistical analytics aren't as readily applicable to soccer as they are to baseball, the NBA or even the NFL.
Still, it explains why Arsenal were chided, back in the day, for strings of uninspiring 1-0 victories. Or why we still celebrate the Dutch team from the 1970s, despite the fact they never won anything, losing in consecutive World Cup finals.
We want our soccer teams to play with style and panache, to lift spirits and inspire the imagination, even if it's just one fleeting moment of brilliance ... getting results in the process, lest we forget. That part of why we sometimes called it the "beautiful game."
Only in soccer do the aesthetics of victory seem to count and lead toward the overall romanticism of the sport. We ask ourselves after a match if the right team "deserved" to win.
So? Is the conclusion of the semi-rambling mid-summer posting that "Inception" was the Spain or summer blockbusters, or that Spain was the "Inception" of World Cup winners? That would be one way to look at it. Again, if soccer is indeed art, there isn't a right or wrong way to interpret it.
Back to my original screed against watching movies. The World Cup is a lot like a movie. It's relatively short, we know it's going to end in a reasonable amount of time, and we draw a lot of ideas from it. The level of play on the field might not be the greatest, but its at least dramatic.
Writing this only 10 days after the final, though, and the World Cup feels like old news. We're rapidly bearing down on the club season, which to complete my analogy is a lot more like watching a television series. There's time to develop story arcs, characters, etc., instead of cramming major action set pieces like most summer movies.
Allow this to be that transition into full club season mode, which is fitting since "Mad Men" season four returns to the air this Sunday.
And hopefully some of this made a least some sense. This idea, after all, did come to me in a dream.
Read that quote, file it away into the recesses of your mind and by the end of this (experimental) essay it should make a boatload more sense ... and even have a soccer point or two tossed in for good measure, that or maybe it's 20-straight days of 90-degree heat have finally melted every synapse in my cranium.
You, the reader, will ultimately be the judge.
Ah the summer cineplex, if there's a better slice of America at the moment I'd like to see it ... don't be a wiseguy and say the Gathering of the Juggalos, either.
What better way to spend your hard earned money than on our dearly beloved Hollywood stars? And how about the communal guffaws we get during the hilarity of the latest Zach Galifianakis vehicle.
Wait, what's that you buzzing you hear in your ears? The sarcasm police sirens? Good, the sarcasm in the previous paragraph was dripping about as thickly as the slowly congealing buttery substitute atop movie theater popcorn.
Long-time readers here know my recent aversion toward watching movies.
In a nutshell, with the advent of Netflix, Hulu, big screen televisions, etc. it's simply a better value to watch a flick at home. Even then, my mind tends to get bored by most movies, so with the wealth of quality television on DVD I'd rather, say, watch back-to-back "Mad Men" episodes than your typical Hollywood cinema fare.
But that's just me. Admittedly this is an odd position to take and a difficult one to articulate. Bear in mind, the last movie I saw that I enjoyed was a Comedy Central broadcast of "Hot Rod" and lately I've been unable to avoid HBO re-airing "Red Dawn," so take my opinion with the smallest grain of salt possible, in fact take it was an atom of sodium.
The thing is, if I'm going to devote 90+ minutes to something it better be good, or present a world that gets my imagination working. As it stands, CGI special effects have left me totally burnt out, making most big screen action/adventure flicks an exercise in tedium. 3D? Pass.
My biggest issue is there's nothing that bothers me more than "chase" elements of movies. They leave me looking at my watch, since 99 percent of the time we already know the protagonist is going to avoid the bevy of bullets, bad guys and other pratfalls and walk off into the sunset happy.
Maybe what it all boils down to, is with a good serialized television show, at at the end of 44 minutes, the story has moved forward. When I watch a movie, half the time I just want it to end.(*) Many times, too, watching a world created in a film part of me wishes that it was the setting for a show, yet budgetary restrictions make that impossible.
(*) Cue the Jerry Seinfeld, "We alllll get it" voice. Actually the only joys of actually going to the movies is making sarcastic, obvious statements during the trailers.
All that said, Tuesday night I found myself in the movie theater watching "Inception."
You see, after a day of moving furniture across four different venues for my parents in a U-Haul truck when my brother suggested we go see "Inception" the prospects of a comfy seat and air conditioning were too good to pass up. It didn't hurt, either, that nearly anyone with a forum has been raving -- 9.3 on Imdb.com, let's settle down folks -- about the Christopher Nolan film(*). My friend Mike, who's opinion hold's more water with me than Roger Ebert or Peter Travers, told me on no short terms: I have to go see it.
(*) For what it's worth, I'm like one of seven people on Earth who thought "The Dark Knight" was nothing spectacular. Also, thought "The Prestige" was tedious.
Well, I did.
My one word review: Okay.
"Inception" was a fine, well-acted, technically proficient, aesthetically pleasing summer blockbuster with a couple good action set pieces and a little deeper plot points than your typical jive-talking/fighting robot fare. The idea of alternate reality has become a fairly common Sci-Fi trope in recent years and watching "Inception" I couldn't help but think of two other movies, the low-fi time travel flick "Primer" and the Charlie Kaufman weird-fest, "Synecdoche, New York."
For me, it fell into my usual trap. No matter what happened, I knew that with the subject matter and the way it was getting buzzed up, that there was going to be some kind of "twist" involved. The concept of shared dreaming(*), or "dream police" was neat and original, but I'd have liked to see a different story than the two main plots, which didn't engage me all that much. To borrow a line from Roman on the dearly-departed, "Party Down", "hard sci-fi" this was not.
(*) I'm sure this point has been made, but was "Inception" all that different than "Total Recall", well, except Ellen Paige didn't sport a three-breast prosthetic, now did she?
So yeah, "Inception" fit the bill for a summer flick.
In fact it left me feeling sort of the same way I did in the immediate wake of the 2010 World Cup final when Spain beat Holland 1-0 in Soccer City, South Africa. Sort of shrugging my shoulders, accepting it for what it is was.
The aftermath of the final left many wanting to sing the praises of Spain for winning, "the right way"(*), while vilifying the Dutch for overtly physical tactics, which kept them in the match until Andres Iniesta's 116th minute winner.
(*) Having just finished Jonathan Wilson's "Inverting the Pyramid" -- the best soccer book I've ever read -- my conclusion, there isn't a "right way" to play. You can scrap by to get results by any means necessary like the Estudiantes teams of Carlos Bilardo or the Helanio Herrera Inter Milan sides, or you can soar like Brazil of 1970. With the flexibility of the XI men on a soccer field, there are infinite ways to play the game, rightly or wrongly to get results. It's a matter of how you apply those tactics to the given situation.
What strikes me as odd, from a sporting standpoint, is how we look at important soccer matches or teams and apply an aesthetic quality to them, much like we do a movie. A common refrain after a match is, "so what did you think?" as if it's an open-ended question, which the scoreboard itself can't answer.
The result, while important, is to some not as important as how that result was achieved. Perhaps that's part of the fun, yet you'd never debate the technical merits of a World Series or Super Bowl, now would you? American team sports are nine times out of 10 explorations in black-and-white, while soccer thrives all these years later in shades of gray.
In America the result seems to trump all else, which might help to explain why mindless Michael Bay movies bank hundreds of millions of dollars, while a 90-minute soccer game is considered too boring. Granted, this is a story for another day.
Countless fans around the globe want soccer to be 11 v. 11 art on grass.(*) This, however, might be a dying notion, especially over the last 20 years with advancements in training, scouting and the overall homogenization of playing styles.
(*) This is part of the reason I tend to think the would-be explosion of statistical analytics aren't as readily applicable to soccer as they are to baseball, the NBA or even the NFL.
Still, it explains why Arsenal were chided, back in the day, for strings of uninspiring 1-0 victories. Or why we still celebrate the Dutch team from the 1970s, despite the fact they never won anything, losing in consecutive World Cup finals.
We want our soccer teams to play with style and panache, to lift spirits and inspire the imagination, even if it's just one fleeting moment of brilliance ... getting results in the process, lest we forget. That part of why we sometimes called it the "beautiful game."
Only in soccer do the aesthetics of victory seem to count and lead toward the overall romanticism of the sport. We ask ourselves after a match if the right team "deserved" to win.
So? Is the conclusion of the semi-rambling mid-summer posting that "Inception" was the Spain or summer blockbusters, or that Spain was the "Inception" of World Cup winners? That would be one way to look at it. Again, if soccer is indeed art, there isn't a right or wrong way to interpret it.
Back to my original screed against watching movies. The World Cup is a lot like a movie. It's relatively short, we know it's going to end in a reasonable amount of time, and we draw a lot of ideas from it. The level of play on the field might not be the greatest, but its at least dramatic.
Writing this only 10 days after the final, though, and the World Cup feels like old news. We're rapidly bearing down on the club season, which to complete my analogy is a lot more like watching a television series. There's time to develop story arcs, characters, etc., instead of cramming major action set pieces like most summer movies.
Allow this to be that transition into full club season mode, which is fitting since "Mad Men" season four returns to the air this Sunday.
And hopefully some of this made a least some sense. This idea, after all, did come to me in a dream.
Labels: 2010 world cup, Arsenal, movies., Soccer, Spain, the beautiful game
I'll think about this more. But it seems to me that part of the reason why Spain's triumph seems easily forgotten (for the non-Spaniards) is that their win didn't 'mean' anything. Despite the recent 'tiki taka' narrative, in this WC, Spain didn't really have a specific style that triumphed over the Dutch. Many thought the Germans were the best side, but Spain played best in semis and final. Even the best player of the tournament was not a clear cut decision.
The tournaments wasn't about the triumph of Pele or a new formation sweeping the field. Most tournaments are not that. We remember some Olympic 100m champions and not others for similar reasons.
The best team won, but there doesn't seem to be any extra significance - like if Messi had scored 17 goals or an African team had made the final. Most of the time, lightning DOESN'T strike.
i think sometimes you have to go to the movies to see more than just "advancing the plot".
take for example the argentina-mexico game from this year's world cup. it'll probably be remembered for an officiating mistake more than overall great play. but if you watched it, you got to see carlito bring out a little moment of brilliance (his second goal). in the end argentina won (as expected), but they lost in the next round anyway. it didn't directly affect who won the world cup as a whole.
in inception, the simlutaneous van falling into a river/j-g-l zero gravity hallway fight/bond-esque ski shootout sequence is tevez's screamer.
and as great as breaking bad or mad men are at dramatic moments, they simply can't put up a sequence as visually exciting as that one (or a couple others) from inception.
another example, this time in terms of acting: zidane against brazil in '06? that's toshiro mifune in yojimbo. a dominating, mature performance from a cagey veteran.
film, as an art form, can be more than just the plot or the script. it can be a great scene or an amazing visual or a rocky iv training montage. and sometimes soccer can be more than just who won. it can be a great goal or a goalkeeping blunder or a cruyff turn.
Cool answer Vince. Glad someone was able to make a little sense of my nonsense.
Guess I like idea more than visuals.
Good comment.
Interesting point about the relative importance of aesthetics in different sports. I think basketball is probably closest to soccer in this regard--I certainly remember that when the Knicks had their years of relative success in the mid- and late-90s, there were a lot of complaints about their bruising, "winning ugly' style; even some Knick fans (like myself) were uncomfortable with it.
I'm with you on chase scenes, particularly early in films when the stakes are so low (is James Bond going to be killed in the first ten minutes of a James Bond movie?). If anything, the situation is worse now, as the recent trend toward quick-cut editing has made chase scenes increasingly incoherent.