The author, most recently, of “The Man Within My Head.”

Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

The long debate over the National Football League’s handling of concussions is reaching the courts in a flurry of lawsuits, raising the possibility that dozens of former players will go before juries to outline the league’s medical practices and describe long-term cognitive problems they say were caused by the sport.

More than a dozen suits, filed since July on behalf of more than 120 retired players and their wives, say that the N.F.L. and in some cases helmet manufacturers deliberately concealed information about the neurological effects of repeated hits to the head. Several suits also say that even if the league did not know about the potential impact of brain trauma sustained on the field, it should have known.

Taken together, the suits filed in courts across the country amount to a multifront legal challenge to the league and to the game itself. While the retired players, including stars like Jim McMahon and Jamal Lewis, face a time-consuming and difficult battle, the N.F.L. will have to spend heavily on lawyers to fend off the chance that juries might award the retired players millions of dollars in damages.

The league must also grapple with unflattering publicity as former players claiming to be hobbled by injuries and, in some cases, suffering from financial problems sue their former employer, the steward of America’s most popular sport. The stakes will only get higher if any of the cases go to trial, where details may emerge about what the N.F.L. knew about concussions and when, how it handled that information, and whether it pushed manufacturers to make the safest helmets possible.

“I don’t think the N.F.L. can consider these cases nuisances,” said Mark Conrad, who teaches sports law at Fordham University. “They will take them seriously because if it goes the wrong way, it could be a bombshell.”

The N.F.L. is no stranger to the courts. In the past few years, it has tangled over merchandising, drug testing and antitrust exemptions. But those issues were largely alien to the average fan and barely slowed the league’s primary mission to put on games.

The notion of retired players telling a jury the league is at least partly liable for their dementia and other cognitive disabilities is an entirely different matter, legal experts say, because the players’ testimonies are bound to get a sympathetic audience and cast a shadow over the league.

“We believe that the long-term medical complications that have been associated with multiple concussions — such as memory loss, impulse anger-control problems,disorientation, dementia — were well documented, and that factually the N.F.L. knew or should have known of these potentially devastating neurological problems, and yet it didn’t take any active role in addressing the issue for players,” said Larry Coben, who represents seven retirees, including McMahon, the quarterback who helped lead the Chicago Bears to a Super Bowl victory in 1986.

Brad Karp, an outside counsel for the league, said: “The N.F.L. has long made player safety a priority and continues to take steps to protect players and to advance the science and medical understanding of the management and treatment of concussions. The N.F.L. has never misled players with respect to the risks associated with playing football. Any suggestion to the contrary has no merit.”

A trial is not imminent, however, and may never occur, legal experts said. The league will try to get the cases dismissed, they said, and the former players must hope a judge will allow the cases to proceed.

In a sign of the high hurdles facing the retired players, the league has successfully convinced at least one federal judge that any claims by the players should be handled under the collective bargaining agreements that they signed during their N.F.L. careers.

The retired players, naturally, disagree. They argue that as retirees, they are no longer party to those collective bargaining agreements and that only since they stopped playing did they unearth evidence that they were not adequately warned of the dangers of concussions.

The debate over this issue may be settled in Philadelphia after the league and many of the plaintiffs ask the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, a federal board, to combine all the cases and move them to federal court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The N.F.L. prefers this approach because it allows its lawyers to focus on a single case that will produce a single resolution, and reduce the possibility of inconsistent rulings by different judges.

Assuming the players can persuade a judge to let their case go forward, they will most likely argue that the N.F.L. rejected widely accepted science on head trauma for years, and that the league’s doctors produced research that later was found to be severely flawed.

Several suits note that in 2007, the league distributed a pamphlet to players that said, “Current research with professional athletes has not shown that having more than one or two concussions leads to permanent problems if each injury is treated properly.” The league left open the question of “if there are any long-term effects of concussion in N.F.L. athletes.”

The cases also note that in October 2009, Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the N.F.L., was criticized by lawmakers for neglecting the league’s handling of active and retired players with brain injuries. A month later, the two directors of the N.F.L.’s committee studying concussions who were accused by the retired players of whitewashing the issue stepped down.

Only last year, the retired players say, did the N.F.L. begin alerting current players to the long-term effects of concussions. One poster created by the league used words like “depression” and “early onset of dementia.” Another document warned players that repeated concussions “can change your life and your family’s life forever,” a nod to retired players’ wives who have spoken out on the issue.

The league, though, is expected to point out that these publications are part of its continuing efforts to care for players, and that the league provides medical benefits for retired players. The league will also argue that the players knew that the sport was dangerous when they played and yet they did not stop.

“The N.F.L. will try to convince the court that the game is inherently risky,” said Matthew J. Mitten, the director of the National Sports Law Institute at Marquette University. “There is this warrior mentality in the N.F.L. where you play through pain.”

A far murkier obstacle for the players is proving that the concussions they sustained in the N.F.L. caused their current health problems. It will be difficult to prove that any impairment is not a result of head trauma sustained while playing in high school and college.

“The proof problems will be enormous,” said Paul Haagen, the co-director of the Center for Sports Law and Policy at Duke University. “Everyone who has played in the N.F.L. has played in the lower levels and suffered some injuries that are consistent with these.”

The retired players may also have difficulty proving the league deliberately hid information from them. Even if they do, legal experts said, the league will point to the rule changes it made to outlaw spearing and other dangerous practices involving helmets, and the millions of dollars it has spent over the years to study head trauma.

“The problem is there isn’t necessarily a smoking gun,” said Robert Boland, who teaches sports law at New York University. “The N.F.L. will say we found out about it when you did, and we never saw this kind of damage before.”

When Ibrahima Traore takes his sons to a park in Montclair, N.J., he often sits on a bench and reads. He reads English, French and Arabic, but most of the time he reads N’Ko, a language few speakers of those languages would recognize. N’Ko is the standardized writing system for Mande languages, a family of closely related tongues — among them Traore’s language of Mandinka, but also Jula, Bamana, Koyaga, Marka — spoken, for the most part, in eight West African countries, by some 35 million people. N’Ko looks like a cross between Arabic and ancient Norse runes, written from right to left in a blocky script with the letters connected underneath. Traore types e-mail to his family on his laptop in N’Ko, works on his Web site in N’Ko, tweets in N’Ko on his iPhone and iPad and reads books and newspapers written in N’Ko to prepare for the N’Ko classes he teaches in the Bronx and for his appearances on an Internet radio program to discuss cultural issues around the use of N’Ko.

For years, the Web’s lingua franca was English. Speakers of French, Hindi and Urdu, Arabic, Chinese and Russian chafed at the advantage the Internet gave not only American pop culture but also its language. For those who lived at the intersection of modern technology and traditional cultures, the problem was even worse. “For a long time, technology was the enemy,” says Inée Slaughter, executive director of the New Mexico-based Indigenous Language Institute, which teaches Native Americans and other indigenous peoples how to use digital technologies to keep their languages vital. Heritage languages were being killed off by increasing urbanization, the spread of formal education and the shift to cash crops, which ended the isolation of indigenous communities. Advances in technology seemed to intensify the decline. “Even in 1999 or 2000, people were saying technology killed their language,” Slaughter says. “Community elders worried about it. As television came into homes, English became pervasive 24/7. Mainstream culture infiltrated, and young kids want to be like that. It was a huge, huge problem, and it’s still there. But now we know ways technology can be helpful.”

For many tiny, endangered languages, digital technology has become a lifeline.

When Traore was born, N’Ko had already been in use for several years. But growing up, he did not know it existed. At 6, he was sent from his village of Kiniebakoro in rural Guinea to live with a brother in Ivory Coast, where he learned to read and write in French, the language taught in school in both countries. He never saw a book, newspaper, medicine label, store name or street sign in N’Ko.

And yet, N’Ko was invented to allow Mande speakers like Traore to read and write in the languages they spoke at home. In 1943, Solomana Kante, a teacher’s son who worked as a merchant in Ivory Coast, resolved to develop a written form for the Mande language family. (N’Ko means “I say” in Manden languages; speakers of Manden languages can typically understand one another even if they don’t use all the same words for the same things.) He tried using the Arabic alphabet, then the Roman alphabet, but found that neither one could express the tonal variations of spoken Manden languages. So in 1949, he invented his own script — one flexible enough to capture any Manden language in writing. Among the first books he translated into N’Ko was the Koran. He later compiled a history of Manden languages and culture.

At the time, Guinea had a close relationship with the Soviet Union, and Kante managed to have two typewriters made in Eastern Europe with N’Ko letters. (He was given another one by the president of Guinea, according to a Guinean newspaper.) “If there was a typewriter, ink and ribbons were hard to find,” says Baba Mamadi Diané, a student of Kante’s who now teaches N’Ko at Cairo University. Almost all of the books and papers in N’Ko in Guinea were copied by hand by Kante’s students, like medieval monks, but with several sheets of carbon paper below.

Designed as a language for the common man, N’Ko seemed destined to remain a code used by an elite. Then came the digital revolution.

Heritage languages like N’Ko are taking on new life thanks to technology. An Internet discussion group, Indigenous Languages and Technology, is full of announcements for new software to build sound dictionaries and a project to collect tweets in Tok Pisin, a creole language spoken throughout Papua New Guinea, or Pipil, an indigenous language of El Salvador. “It’s the amplification of Grandma’s voice,” Slaughter says.

Whether a language lives or dies, says K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, is a choice made by 6-year-olds. And what makes a 6-year-old want to learn a language is being able to use it in everyday life. “Language is driven from the ground up,” says Don Thornton, a software developer in Las Vegas who specializes in making video games and mobile apps in Native American languages. “It doesn’t matter if you have a million speakers — if your kids aren’t learning, you’re in big trouble.”

Of 6,909 catalogued languages, hundreds are unlikely to be passed on to the next generation. Thornton, who has worked with more than 100 Native American tribes, says that some are already using sophisticated programs to preserve their languages. “Other groups,” he says, “we ask about their language program, and they say, ‘You’re it.’ We look at it from their standpoint — what are the coolest technologies out there? We start programming for that.”

For the vast majority of the world, the cellphone, not the Internet, is the coolest available technology. And they are using those phones to text rather than to talk. Though most of the world’s languages have no written form, people are beginning to transliterate their mother tongues into the alphabet of a national language. Now they can text in the language they grew up speaking. Harrison tells of traveling in Siberia, where he met a truck driver who devised his own system for writing the endangered Chulym language, using the Cyrillic alphabet. “You find people like him everywhere,” Harrison said. “We are getting languages where the first writing is not the translation of the Bible — as it has often happened — but text messages.”

Traore, who left Guinea for New York in November 1988, did not discover N’Ko until a 2007 trip to visit his parents in his native village. When his wife, Greta, a software developer, went into his brother’s room, she noticed books in N’Ko on his shelves. Puzzled, she called her husband in. “You said your language was not written. So what are these books?” Traore was shocked. (He and Traore did not grow up together.) When he came back to New York, he googled N’Ko. “That was the big wow,” he said. He found a teacher in Queens. “When I listened to the alphabet, I listened to our history. Now I can read the same words my mother would say to me.”

N’Ko first moved from hand-copied manuscripts into the digital age two decades ago. In the early 1990s, Diané, the teacher of N’Ko at Cairo University, was collating an N’Ko text in a copy shop when he was approached by an employee. “Why are you killing yourself?” the man asked him. “Don’t you know about DOS?” The employee explained to Diané that using computer software, he could write a new script and generate as many copies as he wished. Together with information-technology experts at Cairo University, Diané developed a rudimentary font to use on his own computer. But creating a font that anyone could use was a much more complicated task.

First, it meant getting N’Ko into Unicode — the international standard that assigns a unique number to each character in a given writing system. Then Microsoft picked up N’Ko for its local language program — sort of. N’Ko was included in Windows 7, but the ligatures were misaligned, and the letters were not linked from below as they should have been. “The original plan was to fully support it, but we just didn’t have the resources,” said Peter Constable, a senior program manager at Microsoft. For Windows 8, which is still being tested, Microsoft has fixed the problem. Most writers of N’Ko download the font for use with Open Office’s Graphite program, developed by SIL International, a Christian group with an interest in seeing the Bible reach every hut and yurt on the planet.

Digital technology has already transformed how Traore communicates with his family. When his father died in 1994, his family in Kiniebakoro sent news of the death to cousins in Ivory Coast by going to the bus station and looking for a passenger heading toward their city; the cousins then mailed a letter to Traore in New York. It took two months. Now communication with Kiniebakoro takes a day: Traore sends an e-mail in N’Ko. His nephew, who works in the nearby town of Siguiri, checks his e-mail at the town’s Internet cafe, prints Traore’s letter and then goes down to the dock where canoes ferry people across the Niger River to Kiniebakoro. He asks someone on the boat to take the letter to Traore’s family’s house.

For Traore and others, the most pressing reason for making N’Ko available to Mande speakers is that only a small percentage of Guineans can read and write. The United Nations puts the rate of adult literacy at 39 percent, but that figure counts mostly those who live in major cities — in rural areas, it is much lower. Schooling in rural Guinea is often conducted in the open air, with no chairs, perhaps a blackboard, maybe one book. But most discouraging to students, it takes place in French, a language they don’t speak at home.

“The only hope for literacy in Guinea is N’Ko literacy,” Traore says. For Mande speakers, he says, N’Ko is extremely simple to learn. He and his fellow N’Ko advocates have sponsored hundreds of informal schools throughout Guinea that teach in Manden languages and N’Ko. This year, for the first time, N’Ko will be taught side by side with French in an official school — the pilot program will be in Kiniebakoro, Traore’s hometown.

People had been working on breathing life into N’Ko for years, but they found out about one another only when they began to put up N’Ko Web sites. There is Traore’s site,kouroussaba.com, Diané’s kanjamadi.com and fakoli.net, the project of Mamady Doumbouya, a Guinean who worked as a software engineer in Philadelphia and is devoting his retirement to N’Ko. He also runs a small organization called the N’Ko Institute of America. Diané’s students in Cairo are subtitling DVDs for West Africa in N’Ko. Among the first was a season of the TV show “24.”

If you have an iPhone, tweeting and e-mailing in N’Ko is now easy. Eatoni, a company based in Manhattan that has created software for cellphone keyboards in some 300 languages, released an N’Ko app earlier this year. The iPhone keyboard app works on the iPad too. Eatoni’s C.E.O., Howard Gutowitz, developed it after months of tests and advice from Traore, Diané and other N’Ko users. But iPhones are too expensive to be widely used in rural Africa. Almost every African villager owns or aspires to own a conventional cellphone (equipped with only a number pad) — even if he or she has to travel to town to charge it.

Africa is the world’s fastest-growing cellphone market. Texting allows farmers to check crop prices. Nurses can send health information. People can do their banking. With airtime prohibitively expensive, texting is the preferred mode of communication. “Text messages would be a lifesaving tool for us in Guinea,” Traore said. He also says he believes that the ability to text in their own language would give people a powerful reason to learn to read. “Before, men in my village used to brag about their wristwatches,” Traore said. “Now they brag about their cellphones.” When he shows N’Ko speakers his iPhone and tells them, “This is your language,” they are dumbstruck. An N’Ko newspaper published in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, recently crowed: “Don’t look for N’Ko under a cabbage leaf any more. It’s on the iPhone now.”

Those old cellphones don’t have apps, of course. You use the language the phone comes with; in West Africa, that is French. The market for an N’Ko phone would be, potentially, tens of millions of people. But getting manufacturers to add new alphabets to cellphones isn’t easy. Gutowitz has had a long and frustrating experience trying to do so. “Most manufacturers roll their eyes,” he said. “I spent a decade running around the world talking to cellphone manufacturers — everyone I could think of — saying, ‘Look, we can support 100 languages, it’s a big market.’ They didn’t care. People say, ‘Why don’t you go talk to Nokia?’ I have talked to Nokia. Again and again and again.”

Lamine Dabo and Nouhan Sano, Guineans who live in Bangkok, where there is a prosperous and close-knit Guinean community, have had a similar experience. They have been trying to persuade manufacturers to develop an N’Ko cellphone since 2007. Dabo and Sano’s gem-importing businesses take them all over Asia, and all over Asia they bring their list of more than 17,000 N’Ko words. Dabo says it’s possible to build a cheap cellphone with N’Ko as its language, a camera and slots for two SIM cards — a necessity in Africa, where reception is often spotty. When he went to Guinea and Mali to discuss the phone with distributors, he said, he was mobbed with interest. But his briefcase was filled with rejections from manufacturers. Some asked him to put up the money himself. “Everyone says it’s possible, but the money is not enough for them to make it a priority,” he said.

Dabo and Sano are still trying. It might seem strange that the fortunes of N’Ko and of indigenous languages around the world should depend on the ability to subtitle “24,” to write with Windows and, above all, to text. But for hundreds of heritage languages, a four-inch bar of plastic and battery and motherboard is the future of the past.

Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

The Year Cinema Became Both Really Chaotic and Not Quite Chaotic Enough 

By Alex Pappademas

 

Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” touched off a debate in film-blogger circles: does this assaultive approach to action-film-making signal the coming annihilation of narrative logic? Or the emergence of a visual grammar that’s 2 fast and 2 furious for fusty old movie grumps to understand? In a much-passed-around video essay, the critic Matthias Stork even gave this aesthetic a name: Chaos Cinema.

I kept flip-flopping on Chaos Cinema. On one hand, I’m philosophically opposed to any standard of movie quality that penalizes filmmakers for letting music videos and video games shape their way of seeing; on the other hand, I’m morally opposed to Michael Bay. I’m now convinced, however, that the only thing wrong with Chaos Cinema is that nobody has taken it far enough. I feel that way because of the trailer for “2016,” a possibly nonexistent sci-fi movie from Ghana. In the 30-second clip, a crudely-rendered C.G.I. version of the alien from “Alien” fights humans and a Terminator! A cellphone explodes! A person explodes! The alien throws a car! Something goes wrong in a lab! The alien kicks a baby like a football!

The standard knock on Chaos Cinema filmmakers is that they’re constructing narratives entirely from rupture and collision. But if movies are going to go there, they should really go there. Let’s stop asking directors who clearly have no affinity for story or character to pretend otherwise. Instead, let’s let the alien kick the baby, and see how far the baby will fly.

Best Performance by a Gold Chain: The Gold Chain In ‘the Future’

By Starlee Kine

 

In “The Future,” Miranda July’s character has an affair with a man, played by David Warshofsky, who wears a thin gold chain around his neck. Normally, a gold chain is a reliable cinematic signal that says “mobster” or “disco enthusiast” or “generic downmarket cheesy tough guy” — the most recent example, perhaps, being Christian Bale in “The Fighter.” But Washofsky’s character is not the type you’d normally imagine would wear such an accessory. He’s a middle-aged, practical-minded man who lives in a house with carpeting and tends to dress like your dad. And the chain isn’t obvious; you barely glimpse it at first under his shirt. Which is exactly what made the gold chain the perfect touch: it isn’t meant to signify his whole character, just the most subtle, unexpected part of it.

Tomorrow’s Iconic Villain Today: Cate Blanchett As Dubya In A Dress

By Mark Blankenship

 

If you want to be literal, then the action film “Hanna” is about a child assassin fleeing the government agents who created her, specifically Marissa Wiegler, played by Cate Blanchett as, more or less, George W. Bush in a dress. But that reading misses the sinister, tainted-fairy-tale spirit of the film, with Wiegler as the movie’s deliciously wicked queen: a pearl-necklace-wearing menace with a strawberry bob and a Southern drawl, who flosses her teeth so hard as to draw blood. She fears and loves and seeks to devour the young Hanna with equal fury, all of which is made manifest in the film’s best image: during a chase scene through an abandoned amusement park, Wiegler emerges from a tunnel shaped like the jaws of a giant wolf, her eyes flaring and pistol drawn, the star of a primal nightmare served up in primary colors.

The Kid-Driven Blockbuster You Should Have Seen Instead Of ‘Super 8’

By Gaby Dunn

 

This summer, two movies told the tales of precocious children defending their corners of the Earth from alien invasion. One you probably heard about — “Super 8,” directed by the Spielberg-approved auteur J. J. Abrams — and one you maybe didn’t: “Attack the Block,” a movie produced by Edgar Wright (“Shaun of the Dead”) about a group of teenage hoodlums and a female nursing student, all living in a British housing project, who come together to repel an alien blitz from outer space. Whereas “Super 8” relied on bombastic special effects and incipient dawn-of-the-’80s nostalgia to tell an overly familiar story (suburban kids forced to grow up fast after an amazing encounter), “Attack the Block,” on a fraction of the budget, delivered a sharp and poignant message on race relations, the spiral of urban violence and the understanding that can blossom when we’re forced to forget our divisions and band together, simply, as humans. “Super 8” wanted badly to be “E.T.” crossed with “Cloverfield.” Instead, it should hope to be “Attack the Block” when it grows up.

Unjustly Overlooked Action Sequence of the Year: Michel Gondry’s Gossip Explosion

By Dan Kois

“The Green Hornet” won’t be remembered as the director Michel Gondry’s greatest film. But it did feature arguably the year’s most jaw-dropping action sequence. The villain Chudnofsky tells a henchman to spread the word of a bounty on the Green Hornet’s head. We watch in wonder as the news, tracked by multiple cameras in seamless shots, seeps across the L.A. underworld. The henchman tells two killers in cocktail dresses, and the screen splits to follow them; they each tell two compatriots, and the screen splits again. And so on. It’s an exponential expansion of Gondry’s antics in the music video for Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water,” and a reminder that, even fighting mediocre material, Gondry can often find a way to surprise and delight.

An Excerpt From The E-mail Alex Pappademas Sent Immediately After Seeing ‘Sucker Punch’

Imagine what would happen if you took a comic-book-store clerk and a tattoo artist who only inks faces, locked them in a GameStop with a possession-with-intent-to-distribute supply of Ecstasy and told them they couldn’t come out until they came up with a treatment for “Girl Interrupted” meets “Inception” but more virginal-schoolgirl-creepy.

Seven (More) Ways To Talk About ‘Drive,’ The Most (Over)Talked-About Movie Of The Year

By Alex Pappademas

 

1. So maybe the world wasn’t ready for a car-chase movie that was so short on actual car-chasing. But maybe that’s the whole point! You have to love a car-fetish movie that steers into the Los Angeles River — that famous storm drain that has backdropped auto-action set pieces in everything from “Grease” to “Terminator 2,” not to mention “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” the video-game antecedent to “Drive” — just so the characters can find a sun-dappled glade to picnic in.

2. “Drive” is the year’s best long-form music video. That score! Ambient murder-drone and wineglass-rim whine, plus some mid-2000s electro-disco (that is itself totally “Take My Breath Away”-era ’80s), all throbbing like a big flamingo-pink neon heart. Throw the soundtrack on your iPod, and you’re instantly a wounded warrior with an intense Zen internal monologue, even if all you’re doing is walking to the corner deli to buy dish soap. I don’t plan menus. I don’t cook. I wash up.

3. “Drive” is the year’s best “Batman” adaptation. “I just felt like I wanted to make a superhero movie, too,” Ryan Gosling told The Times back in May, and while “Drive” isn’t based on an actual comic book (the best comic-book movies never are), you can imagine the graphic novel anyway — some elliptical take on the usual urban-vigilante canned ham, with lots of inkpot blood-spatter, black space in the gutters between panels instead of white and “For Mature Readers” plastered on the cover, not to warn people away but to lure them in.

4. “Drive” is the year’s best men’s-fashion movie. That Filson overnight bag. Those plastic aviators. And that scorpion jacket around which a thousand Halloween costumes took shape. Gosling is running from the mob, but he looks as if he’s hoping to run into the Sartorialist.

5. That elevator scene. Not for where it goes but for how it starts. Gosling gets between Carey Mulligan and the hitman, shielding her from him and from the camera, from us. When the light from the wall sconce hits her, it’s the only moment when Mulligan gets to look prettier than Gosling; when they kiss, it’s Gosling’s most movie-kiss-like movie kiss since “The Notebook,” an MTV Movie Awards Best Kiss winner in 2005. What do you want to bet that’s not the only award “Drive” is robbed of next year?

6. Also, that mask! Very Uncle Fester, very “Total Recall.” Very Leatherface, too, even before you know Gosling’s wearing it to get in the proper headspace for a rampage. “Drive” tools around the underpopulated industrial borderlands among half a dozen genres, at least — like Albert Brooks’s avuncular crime-boss character, it gets Chinese food delivered to a pizza place, aesthetically. But the director Nicolas Winding Refn has said that “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” was the movie that made him want to make movies, and slasher-flick horror is a major spice in the chili of “Drive.” Until it becomes the meat.

7. The mask is also crucial to my dumbest “Drive” theory, which is that “Drive” takes place in the same universe as last year’s best guy-drives-around-L.A.-not-talking-much movie, Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere.” There’s a scene in that film in which Steven Dorff — playing an actor sentenced to spend eternity bored in the Chateau Marmont — has a rubber mold made of his head, and he has to sit for what feels like an hour of screen time all gooped up in a metaphor for the way celebrity mummifies the living. We never see what happens to Dorff’s mask. I like to believe a stuntman stole it.

How To Enjoy Movies That Aren’t Really Movies

By Katrina Onstad

 

The Avon Theater in Stamford, Conn., famously posted a sign warning customers this summer that there would be no refund for those seeing Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life.” Apparently disgruntled walker-outers had been wondering what a 139-minute film about the Big Bang, dinosaurs, Sean Penn, a dead kid and a wrinkled Brad Pitt had to do with their Saturday-night entertainment. Their first mistake was that they went in expecting to see a movie; “The Tree of Life” wasn’t really a movie at all.

In fact, at different points this year, that same warning sign might have been posted outside screenings of “Meek’s Cutoff” (settlers on a Sisyphean journey across the Oregon Trail) or “The Mill and the Cross” (a live-action restaging of details from Pieter Bruegel’s painting “The Way to Calvary”). These nonfilms formed a three-pointed constellation of excellence in the cinematic sky. They also helped touch off the great “cultural vegetables” debate of 2011 (in the realm of film critics’ blogs, at least), in which a writer who wrote a controversial essay in this magazine was branded, essentially, as a pimp for summer schlock and Jack Sparrow.

Part of the problem was that everyone was talking about these movies as movies. The debate might be better framed like this: “Meek’s Cutoff,” in which almost nothing happens but dread, is something closer to a feature-length video installation. The tiny details of “The Mill and the Cross,” a meditation on painting, require the kind of silent scrutiny usually reserved for paintings themselves. And the dinosaurs in “The Tree of Life” weren’t in service of a story so much as they lent visual weight to the film’s experimental poetics. These three films demanded great patience but also promised great beauty in return. They weren’t vegetables or video games, or even fully films, but simply art.

The One Special Effect Hollywood Still Can’t Get Right: Old-Person Makeup

By Dan Kois

Movie magic can do amazing things. Create worlds. Revive dinosaurs. Make brawny Chris Evans into scrawny Chris Evans in “Captain America.” But the one trick Hollywood still can’t pull off, apparently, is making Emma Watson look 38. Or Leo DiCaprio look 70. The second half of Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” was flat-out ruined by Armie Hammer’s horrifying liver-spotted death mask. Old-age makeup: still tragically hilarious.

Goosebumpy Exchange Of The Year (From ‘Contagion’)

 

FIRST CORONER, during dissection of a dead person’s flu-ravaged brain: “Oh, my God. Should I call someone?”

SECOND CORONER: “Call everyone.”

Things That Add Up to Only 51 Percent: Ryan Reynolds Summerus Horribilis

“Green Lantern” release date: June 17. Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes (i.e. percentage of positive reviews): 27 percent.

“The Change-Up” release date: Aug 5. Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes: 24 percent.

Sandler Versus Sandler

By Katrina Onstad

 

In 2011, Adam Sandler gave voice to a sassy monkey in “Zookeeper”; played a horny plastic surgeon in “Just Go With It”; and tackled dual roles in “Jack and Jill,” as a generic dad and his grating twin sister. The weirdest part of “Jack and Jill” was how eerily interchangeable it is with the comedy sausage Sandler parodied in 2009’s “Funny People,” in which he played a millionaire comedian with a career full of junk like “Re-Do,” about a guy who turns into a baby “to realize what it means to be a man.”

Sandler has proved that he can mine his volatile boyishness for something emotionally resonant, as in ‘‘Punch Drunk Love.’’ Yet at this midcareer point, Sandler seems incapable of choosing: ambitious adult actor or farting baby- man? If the choice wereup to his accountants, it wouldn’t be a choice: ‘‘Jack and Jill’’ earned more in its opening weekend than ‘‘Punch Drunk Love’’ did in its entire run.

Things That Popped Off The Screen At You In 3-D This Year (A Partial List)

By Dan Kois

 

• A spinning beer-bottle cap

• A spinning red-white-and-blue shield

• Forty partly chewed bean buns

• Milk

• An out-of-control Lasik laser

• Brainy Smurf’s nose

• Sacha Baron Cohen’s face

• Justin Bieber’s outstretched hand

• Danny Trejo’s ejaculate

• Tiny flecks of Voldemort as he disintegrates

• A warthog

Pop Quiz: Which of these 2011 films starred Oscar-winner Nicolas Cage?

“Season of the Witch”

“Drive Angry”

“Seeking Justice”

“Trespass”

(A: All of them)

How ‘Bridesmaids’ Saved the Bridal Comedy from Itself

By Heather Havrilesky

Who knew that a box-office hit could come from locking Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy and Maya Rudolph in a small room with a bottle of cheap tequila and a Mr. Microphone? Yet for all the attention this trio (rightfully) received, the glory of “Bridesmaids” was in its ability to capture the peculiar folds of the übercompetitive girlie-girl (Rose Byrne) without falling into that rabbit hole where the excesses of modern wedding culture are treated as anything less than pathological. At the precise point where most bridal comedies abandon all skepticism for an earnest embrace of happily ever after, Byrne’s peppy perfectionism dissolves into a melancholy treatise on the miseries of marriage. This frees Wiig to focus on what’s really important (patching things up with her best friend) instead of chasing after flying bouquets. In other words, “Bridesmaids” is a movie that even a bridesmaid — that much-oppressed, unfortunate species — could love.

The Generous Marriage

Hammerpress

This column appears in the Dec. 11 issue of The New York Times Magazine.

From tribesmen to billionaire philanthropists, the social value of generosity is already well known. But new research suggests it also matters much more intimately than we imagined, even down to our most personal relationships.

Researchers from the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project recently studied the role of generosity in the marriages of 2,870 men and women. Generosity was defined as “the virtue of giving good things to one’s spouse freely and abundantly” — like simply making them coffee in the morning — and researchers quizzed men and women on how often they behaved generously toward their partners. How often did they express affection? How willing were they to forgive?

The responses went right to the core of their unions. Men and women with the highest scores on the generosity scale were far more likely to report that they were “very happy” in their marriages. The benefits of generosity were particularly pronounced among couples with children. Among the parents who posted above-average scores for marital generosity, about 50 percent reported being “very happy” together. Among those with lower generosity scores, only about 14 percent claimed to be “very happy,” according to the latest “State of Our Unions” report from the National Marriage Project.

While sexual intimacy, commitment and communication are important, the focus on generosity adds a new dimension to our understanding of marital success. Though this conclusion may seem fairly self-evident, it’s not always easy to be generous to a romantic partner. The noted marriage researcher John Gottman has found that successful couples say or do at least five positive things for each negative interaction with their partner — not an easy feat.

“In marriage we are expected to do our fair share when it comes to housework, child care and being faithful, but generosity is going above and beyond the ordinary expectations with small acts of service and making an extra effort to be affectionate,” explains the University of Virginia’s W. Bradford Wilcox, who led the research. “Living that spirit of generosity in a marriage does foster a virtuous cycle that leads to both spouses on average being happier in the marriage.”

Social scientists are now wondering if this virtuous cycle extends to children too. In a study of 3-year-old twins, Israeli researchers have identified a genetic predisposition toward generosity that may be further influenced by a parent’s behavior. Preliminary findings suggest that children with more-engaged parents are more likely to be generous toward others, which may bode well for their future relationships — and their parents’ too.

“We see meaningful differences in parents’ behaviors,” said Ariel Knafo, the principal investigator and a psychologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “In the long run we’d like to be able to see whether it’s children’s generosity that also makes parents more kind or the other way around. Probably it’s both.”

Do you have a generous relationship? Take our quiz to find out.

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 Top three predictors of a happy marriage among parents:

1. Sexual Intimacy.
2. Commitment.
3. Generosity.

 Portion of 18- to 46-year-olds with below-average sexual satisfaction who are “very happy” in their marriages:

Husbands: 7 percent.
Wives: 6 percent.

 

 

Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

Al Baker is a metropolitan reporter for The New York Times.

Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved