Tuesday, June 1, 2010

A Day That Will Live in Infamy

It was inevitable, really, and yet I never truly believed until the last point was over. After 23 straight appearances in Grand Slam semifinals, Roger Federer lost today in a quarterfinal match against Robin Soderling, who is not coincidentally the same man who ended Rafael Nadal's 31-match winning streak at Roland Garros last year. Roger's streak was preposterous to start with, dating back over six years to May 2004, and it was longer than the second and third place streaks combined (Ivan Lendl and Rod Laver both reached 10 straight semis). Still, the very fact that it had lasted this long, during which time I've watched all 23 of those semifinal appearances, made it nigh impossible to believe that it could ever end. Even against Soderling, who was destined to forever be known as The Man Who Beat Nadal, I was confident; Federer had beaten him all 12 times they'd played, including in the final here last year and in the quarters at last year's U.S. Open.

But to use a boxing analogy, Soderling always has a puncher's chance, much like Tomas Berdych, who also gave Roger two five-set scares in the majors in recent years (and who just happens to be Soderling's opponent in the semifinals). And so it was today. It's hard to say that Roger even LOST the match. It's more like Soderling violently stole it from him, pounding shot after shot, asphyxiating Federer with the weight of his forehand. After the rain delay at 5-5 in the third (they split the first two sets, 6-3 each), which was all I got to see of the match, thanks to the perplexing intricacies of American television coverage, Soderling hardly missed a ball. And although the stat sheet shows that Federer hit almost as many winners as Soderling in that fourth set, it is misleading. Soderling's shots were much more punishing, pushing Roger around the court and never letting him reset the rally to neutral. Thus many of his shots were de facto winners; Roger may have gotten his racquet on the ball, but he no longer had any realistic chance of winning the point.

Even after Soderling broke for 5-4 in the fourth, even after he was up double match point on his serve, I still believed, deep down, that he'd find a way to claw out of it, as he's done so many times before. Never mind that the trouble he faced was much graver than any of his previous escapes. This is Roger Federer we're talking about, and he simply does not lose in Grand Slam quarters. But Soderling is no Tomas Berdych. He has been there before. He has beaten Rafael Nadal on the terre battue, something that no other human can claim. He never wavered, and his style of play was a driving factor. Every tennis player knows that the best way to conquer nerves is simply to swing as hard as you can. It prevents your brain from doing too much work.

I don't know if it makes it better or worse that Federer lost to someone as unlikeable as Soderling. As Peter Bodo of Tennis Magazine memorably said after his defeat of Nadal last year:

"It would be a lot different if Nadal had been beaten by some guy with curly chestnut locks, a sister dying of some rare disease, soulful baby blue eyes, and a foundation dedicated to saving the African rhino. Robin Soderling is not that guy: He's got dark peach-fuzz on his head, budding mutton chops on his cheeks, and bayonet-grey eyes. If he had a sibling, he probably choked her to death long ago, and can't you see him tooling around the cobbled streets of his native Tibro in Sweden, in a beat-up Mitsubishi bearing the bumper sticker: Caution: I Speed Up and Try to Kill Furry Little Animals."

He's known for being aloof toward other players, and he openly antagonized Rafa in their match at Wimbledon in 2008, which Nadal eventually won. When you're on the bad side of both Roger and Rafa, you're less than scum in the eyes of the tennis community, for as everyone knows, only one thing is certain in tennis fandom: half the people love Roger, half the people love Rafa, and everybody loves Marat Safin.

But perhaps that's overly harsh. I didn't hate Soderling when he graciously allowed Roger to beat him in the final last year. And even now, the disappointment is tempered by the knowledge that at least Roger finally won here last year. Now I'm faced with quite a dilemma. For the first time since 2005--barring a freak car accident or something--Rafa will be in the final of a major against someone other than Fed. I assume that Soderling will defeat Berdych, although Berdych won their last meeting, so does that mean I'll have to pull for Rafa in the final? I'm not used to making these kinds of decision. But one way or the other, one thing is certain. Robin Soderling will not defeat Rafa Nadal here again. Make a note of it.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Double Down Syndrome

It all started right after noon. When I saw somebody on Facebook post a status about the arrival of KFC's landmark new meal, the Double Down, my wheels started turning. I must have one. I will slay this beast. If it's made of meat, it doesn't stand a chance. I arranged to have Nora present as my medical counsel and photographer. The battle would commence as soon as I finished tutoring at 8.

It played out in a flurry of high intensity scenes you'd expect to only see on the big screen. Ordering at the drive-through, sitting at the window waiting on it for over ten minutes, not getting everything I asked for, you name it. Nobody could have scripted it better. When we finally got back home, I could no longer handle the suspense. It was time to take action.

The Double Down, for those who aren't familiar, is a "sandwich" that, instead of having buns, consists of two pieces of fried chicken with two strips of bacon and two slices of cheese crammed in between. It, in short, is an affirmation of everything True and Right about the American character. The most pragmatic approach would be to eat it with a knife and fork, but that would somehow remove all its majesty, strip it bare of its symbolic power. It must be eaten with the hands.

When I finally took that glorious first bite, it reminded me why I love my country. Only here could we proudly display such decadence; we revel in it, unabashedly celebrating the death and mayhem it will wreak upon our populace. For the Double Down is nothing if not an openly deadly item. Even the most nutrionally illiterate must know that nothing good will come of eating it, and yet it will succeed, if for no other reason than our desire to relish in excess.

I couldn't finish all of mine, but I made a major dent, ignoring the nausea that began to set in halfway through. We must fight through the pain, aware--consciously or not--that it is our patriotic duty to do so. Nora wouldn't let me give a bite to her cat, believing it to be unfit to eat, even for the lower animals, which is incontrovertible proof that we will continue to prevail over nature and rise to unimaginable heights. After all, I kept it down.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Armond White

I was reading film reviews at work the other day, as I often do, when I ventured to Armond White's recently reviewed movies. Armond is, to put it mildly, a contrarian, which is fine. But he's a contrarian for the sake of being of contrarian.* How else to explain his panning of Inglourious Basterds ("QT manipulates WWII horror into hip pornography"), which was preceded the week before by a rave review of G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra ("There’s more realpolitik here than in the now-overrated The Hurt Locker")? Since I discovered him almost two years ago, when he was at that point the only critic to give a negative review to Wall-E, I've revisited him on about a monthly basis, mostly to annoy my roommate by quoting White's reviews to him. By the way, the best line of that G.I. Joe review? "[Director Stephen] Sommers isn’t quite in Michael Bay’s directorial class, but he has the ability to envision a nightmare and spin it into a provocative coup the Surrealists wouldn’t dare." Coming from any other critic, that's a devastating insult.

An interesting thing has happened over those two years, though. I've come to genuinely enjoy reading Mr. White. That in no way means I endorse or agree with any of his asinine opinions, but he has a certain flair about him that I find irresistible. His writing style is derivative but enjoyable (take a few minutes to compare his writing style to his mentor, Pauline Kael, and you'll see what I mean), at least in the sense that it evokes an emotion out of you, positive or negative, in much the same way as Ann Coulter's work. And that really is the only adequate comparison I can make; White is certainly more intelligent, but their writing has the same visceral impact. This is not necessarily meant as a compliment.

My original idea was to pick out movies Armond and I agree about, but that's a pretty narrow list indeed. He's a fairly prolific critic, having reviewed over 100 films in 2009, and I have by no means seen that many, but the only ones we feel the same about are It's Complicated, Avatar, Humpday, X-Men Origins, The Soloist, and Obsessed (negative) and Coraline, Tyson, and The Hurt Locker (positive). That's it. We both liked only three of the same movies in all of 2009, and even on The Hurt Locker, he claimed that G.I. Joe was better. Make of that what you will. I'll call his negative review of Antichrist a push, since I still have no idea what I think about that movie.

Just on a lark, let's see how he felt about this year's Oscar nominees.

1. Avatar: "Avatar is the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt."
2. District 9: "District 9 represents the sloppiest and dopiest pop cinema—the kind that comes from a second-rate film culture."
3. An Education: "The film’s 1961 setting is a pretense by which pop novelist Nick Hornby’s screenplay (from Lynn Barber’s memoir) panders to his usual hipster market."
4. Up in the Air (he really hates this one): "Jason Reitman’s movies come in three forms: Rubbish (Thank You For Smoking), Crap (Juno) and Swill (Up in the Air)."
5. A Serious Man (he liked it!): "Any critic’s suggestion that a film as lovingly, emotionally precise as A Serious Man typifies Jewish self-hatred is ridiculous."
6. The Hurt Locker (likes it almost as much as G.I. Joe): "Bigelow conscientiously streamlines her filmmaking. Avoiding portentous Kubrickian camera dynamics—which are only about self—she’s evocative and focused, unlike the showy, undisciplined Apocalypse Now."
7. The Blind Side (he loved it!): "All Bullock’s films promote an edifying sense of human experience—she has an instinct for what people like to see—and that gift makes The Blind Side the perfect, God-sent antidote to Precious." (Which leads us to........)
8. Precious (and this line only scratches the surface): "Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious."
9. Up: "Pixar disgraces and delimits the animated film as a mushy, silly pop form.What used to be ridiculed as sentimental excess in old Disney animation now comes disguised in the latest technology."
10. Inglourious Basterds: "Only the most gullible film geek will think QT is confirming cinema’s righteous social influence."

My intention was specifically not to write a piece excoriating Armond White; that'd be too easy, and it's been done way too much. But it's what this has turned into, so let's try something a little different. Maybe his standards for Oscar movies are just a lot higher than that. Let's just pick a movie at random and see what he has to say:

"No matter how many people get verklempt over the lugubrious Benjamin Button, I know in my soul that history will avenge the Wayanses’ superior age/masculinity farce Little Man and fans who have already forgotten Eminem’s 8 Mile will one day catch up to Damon Wayans’ insightful hip-hop burlesque, Marci X."

Ah, yes. That's from his review entitled "Dance Flick: Marxian Brothers parody subverts Hollywood." Perhaps I should say no more on this matter.

*I discovered after writing this that that description was used almost word for word on Wikipedia. I swear I didn't plagiarize it.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Gunfight at the D.C. Corral

Over the past few days, I've been observing the reactions that have been spurred by the passage of the new healthcare reform bill. Not elite reaction, which is totally predictable, but rather reactions on Facebook and Twitter, which are also somewhat predictable but much more interesting. It gives a nice glimpse into the psyches of people you actually know, in some cases much more clearly than you'd like.

In the interest of full disclosure, I think the new bill is a Good Thing, which is not the same as it being a Perfect Thing. If anything, I'd have liked for it to go farther down the road of single-payer, universal coverage. The irony isn't lost on me that while most critics are accusing Obama of being some kind of secret socialist, I am arguing that he isn't socialist enough.

But it's not the specifics of the bill that interest me. As I said, it's the reactions. As soon as it was announced that the bill had passed, Facebook was deluged--at least amongst my friends--with outrage, vitriol, and scorn, not to mention what seemed like dozens of appearances of the word "comrade." The passage of relatively minor changes to the healthcare system apparently will lead to the imminent collapse of our society. Which seems strange, but I'm clearly out of touch.

The situation leads to several questions. First of all, why are people so opposed to changes in healthcare? Surely they can't believe the system's already perfect, and surely they can't believe the solution is to have LESS government control. I'm sure there are other reasons I'm not aware of, but the cynic in me sees an unbridled contempt for the poor and unemployed, which is bad enough by itself but made worse when so many of the complaints are coming from people who are themselves poor and unemployed. Could it be racism? It's prima facie plausible, but this bill will affect many more whites than it will any other race--although it should be pointed out that several of the people I know who've opposed healthcare are, in fact, admitted racists. It's an unfortunate reality of living in Mississippi, but it's one you learn to live with.

Or perhaps it's that I'm unable to look at it from an economic point of view. For me, providing healthcare for everyone is a moral necessity and can't be viewed from the perspective of dollars and cents. I thought this was a truism, but maybe I'm in the minority on this one. Am I the only one who believes that the closest thing to a real-life "death panel" is an insurance company denying coverage to a patient? To be fair, I didn't see any commenters use the term death panel, though I'm sure quite a bit of their rhetoric came from the same source. There are conflicting reports on what effect it'll have on the economy, but that just doesn't matter to me. There are ways to afford it. Canada affords it. France affords it. Every other industrialized nation affords it. Maybe if we, as a nation, could make healing our sick a higher priority than killing brown-skinned people, we could do it too. (Whoops! There's 2004 Chris coming out.)

Overall, the hysteria--and I don't think it's overreaching to call it that--has just seemed very peculiar to me. I wonder where these people were seven years ago when we started a war (two wars? three? who can keep track?) in a far-off country (countries?) for no real reason. A war that, incidentally, put American lives in a lot more jeopardy than the current healthcare bill. I know it's apples and oranges and times have changed and all that, but still I wonder... if it'd been our Hussein vs. theirs, would the support have been the same? I'll leave it to you to answer.

I like to believe that Americans are less selfish than recent days have made them seem. I like to believe we are a people that takes the injunction to "love thy neighbor" seriously, and as it's really meant. The neighbor is the poor, unemployed slacker, but it is also you and me and all the rest of us. The neighbor is the person you don't know, you aren't comfortable with, you don't understand. If "love thy neighbor" means anything, it includes them too. And for me, at least, loving thy neighbor means helping him in any way I can, even if it means contributing a few of MY hard-earned dollars to the cause to help them see a doctor. I feel no coercion, no tyrannical power forcing me to do this. It comes easily.

After all, I'm sure they'd do the same for me.