Toads

Now viewing Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) with Daniel, a.k.a. Toad. He likes movies with “little animals.” We rotate through various David Attenborough productions. The reptiles-and-amphibians series (Life in Cold Blood) has been an especial hit. Hence my search for more toad-content. Cane Toads, dir. by Mark Lewis, is basically what an animal doc would be if helmed by Errol Morris. (I guess Morris has made a couple of near-animal docs: Gates of Heaven, and one-third of Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.) The toad movie has talking heads (politicians, scientists), historical “re-enactments,” dramatizations of humans’ encounters with toads, and sentimental old Queenslanders on their back lawns waxing lyrical and tearful about the cane toad’s essential decency.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The next stop on my fantasy reading tour is The Hobbit, to which I’m returning after some decades. The first 120 pp. have been pretty much as I remember them, almost line-for-line. Disappointing, in a way. But then comes the “Beorn” chapter with quite the wittiest passage so far:

“If you must know more [said Gandalf], his name is Beorn. He is very strong, and he is a skin-changer.”

“What! a furrier, a man that calls rabbits conies, when he doesn’t turn their skins into squirrels?” asked Bilbo.

“Good gracious heavens, no, no, NO, NO!” said Gandalf. “Don’t be a fool Mr. Baggins if you can help it … He is a skin-changer. He changes his skin: sometimes he is a huge black bear, sometimes he is a great strong black-haired man with huge arms and a great beard …

There is a fearful hour – 9:30pm, more or less – when, his brother having dozed off, Daniel – normally so sweet, so docile – a virtual Dr. Henry Jekyll – transforms into someone (or something) more like the wicked Mr. Edward Hyde.

That hour is now upon us.

Some reading combining culture and science

One of the funnier book descriptions I’ve come across:

From Cambridge University Press. I like the gratuitious bit about the “long period of stagnation through the Middle Ages.”

Usually, I come upon humanists who pretend to be scientists, or scientists who pretend to be journalists, or scientists who pretend to be humanists of a more grandiose sort (i.e., gurus) … not scientists who adopt this sort of workmanlike – dare I say, paint-by-number – humanistic idiom. “This strangely neglected topic,” writes the historian Lucky Jim in his sad-sack article on medieval shipbuilding; this is an exemplar of the idiom I mean. I don’t imagine that precipitation is a neglected topic, though I can guess why not all of this material was previously gathered into one book.

There are various book series by Reaktion that do the “natural-‘kind’-as-cultural-artifact” thing rather well. This is not exactly the sort of book that Precipitation is. Precipitation is more scientific.

Speaking of offbeat humanistic treatments of the sciences, today I learned that the great documentarian Errol Morris has written a book about Thomas Kuhn, who once threw an ashtray at him. According to Tim Maudlin, the book has considerable merit. (The other book that Maudlin reviews looks good, too.)

Karin is reading and getting a kick out of the first “Bridgerton” book, which is not my cup of trash, though I can respect it. I certainly do admire the titles in that series. “The Duke and I.” “The Viscount Who Loved Me.” “An Offer from a Gentleman.” Etc., etc.

Movies of the 2010s

The honor roll, continued.

1. Tabloid (dir. Errol Morris, 2010)
2. We Are the Best! (dir. Lukas Moodysson, 2013)
3. L’illusionniste (dir. Sylvain Chomet, 2010)
4. Another Year (dir. Mike Leigh, 2010)
5. It Follows (dir. David Robert Mitchell, 2014)
6. Bridesmaids (dir. Paul Feig, 2011)
7. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (dir. Brad Bird, 2011)
8. Hail, Caesar! (dir. Ethan and Joel Coen, 2016)
9. The Trip (dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2010)
10. 56 Up (dir. Michael Apted, 2012)
11. Queen & Country (dir. John Boorman, 2014)

Several of these movies were released in the previous decade, in the last weeks of 2010. So, clarification is in order.

To qualify for the list, a movie needs to have ended its first run in U.S. theaters no earlier than January 1, 2011. This is a fair criterion because I wouldn’t have been able to see several of these movies as soon as they appeared in theaters, in 2010.

Besides, if I hadn’t adopted this criterion, this would’ve been a sorry list indeed. Like the previous list, this one makes it clear that I stopped paying attention to art and culture halfway through the decade. I guess I no longer view the world with wide-eyed wonder.

Or maybe the new stuff really does lack freshness. A common complaint, nowadays, is that too many movies are sequels or prequels or adaptations. As it happens, this list includes three sequels: Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, 56 Up, and Queen & Country. And the first two of these would go on to have sequels of their own (as would The Trip).

But the three sequels on the list are pretty darn cool. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol revitalized an ailing franchise. Queen & Country, which seems never to have held much commercial promise, is a self-contained appendix to Hope and Glory, which was a minor hit in 1988; its very existence is miraculous.

56 Up is, of course, a part of the greatest string of sequels in documentary history; that they are sequels is their whole point.

Tabloid is not a sequel, but it’s quintessential Errol Morris. This means that it’s what 75% of those true crime docs on Netflix are trying to copy. They are Tabloid’s spiritual sequels, or they would be, if they were good enough.

Tabloid is my no. 1. I thought long and hard about making either We Are the Best! or L’illusionniste no. 1. They may as well all be tied.

The Trip and 56 Up first appeared on British TV.

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