In hopes that I can somehow magically impel my thesis to finish itself by leaving it untouched in the next room while I lie on the couch in front of the television, I am watching Breaking & Entering, a strange and beautiful film I’ve been meaning to Netflix* for a long time, ever since I bought its score simply because it’s by Underworld (actually, a collaboration between them and Gabriel Yared). This is always a strange and kind of lovely way to discover a movie, so that while watching it I am hearing music with which I’ve become intensely familiar—jogged to, slept to, included in mixes—cast in a new context.

Like I said, it’s a beautiful film, both for its music and its cinematography, but also for the pretty people who populate it, and who are pretty to look at. It’s a difficult film to describe or pin down—one moment an urban crime drama, the next a portrait of a troubled family, the next a postmodern morality play—a shapeshifter that grabs me in the manner of any art that resists simple characterization, like You Shall Know Our Velocity or For Hero: For Fool: I can’t quite say what it is I like about it because I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to hit “pause” and check to see if my thesis has typed “THE END” at the end of itself like I politely and magically willed it to.

Underworld & Gabriel Yared - “Happy Toast” (mp3)

* (”Netflix” here being a colloquialism meaning “to let a DVD languish in an envelope atop of one’s television for six weeks so that one’s Netflix subscription does rather the opposite of paying for itself.”)

Posted: April 18th, 2008 under Film, Music.
Comments: 3

Remember what I just said about really good movies making excellent moviemaking look easy? The same goes for Juno.

Either that, or I’ve just been an especially sentimental pile of choked-up moviegoer lately.

Mott The Hoople - “All The Young Dudes” (mp3)

Posted: January 10th, 2008 under Film.
Comments: 8

Over the weekend I finally got around to watching The Lives Of Others. Because it’s in German, with English subtitles, I couldn’t do crosswords while I watched it, which is what I normally do while watching movies at home. And so it had a much firmer grip on my attention than most movies viewed at home (on the warbly old eighties-vintage television bequeathed to me by one friend, while I lie on the surprisingly comfortable IKEA sofa bequeathed to me by another, in the comfort nook of my apartment, late at night, under a couple of blankets, crosswords in my lap) and, partly because of this and partly just due to the film’s tremendous impact, I found myself overwhelmed.

The Lives Of Others is one of those movies that makes it look easy to make excellent movies. Watching it, you wonder how anyone could ever make a bad movie, since this one is so effortlessly, organically good. But the effect is deceptive, I know, and I’ll never be a filmmaker but I know that when I’m reading a truly good piece of writing, it has a similarly effortless, assured quality, and I want to look under the hood to see how it’s done but of course there’s no latch to release the hood. You can’t even see the lines where the hood opens, or the stitching in the seams, or whatever other clumsy artisinal analogy I could make here. So it’s frustrating even as it’s inspiring. But I’ll take it.

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Posted: January 7th, 2008 under Film, Literature, Music, General.
Comments: 5

In the late eighties I began to become obsessed with seeing an R-rated movie. Most of my friends, despite being ten years old instead of seventeen, were already allowed by their parents to see these forbidden films, but my parents were holdouts.

However, there was hope: I’d been initiated into the PG-13 echelon when I was ten, and by my father, no less. Before taking me to see Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, he sat me down and gave me a very brief, very awkward lecture about how there might be parts of the movie I wouldn’t understand.[1]

So in fourth grade I mounted my first offensive in a protracted campaign with my parents over my right to see an R-rated movie. The film was Stand By Me, which seemed like a respectable gambit: Not too trashy, but still mildly salacious, if the television commercials were any indication. My parents stalled and dithered until I lost my passion for the enterprise and moved onto my next crusade.[2]

Around the same time, I saw my first parentally unsanctioned R-rated film when I attended a sleepover hosted by Ken Marker, whose parents had somehow allowed us to watch Night Patrol, which even at that age I could tell held no aesthetically redeemable qualities. But it contained nudity, so we were happy.

Early the next summer, I saw a teaser for Robocop one night on television, and as soon as my head completed a full 360-degree rotation on my neck, I stood up and demanded that my parents let me see Robocop. They shot that one down quicker than Peter Weller’s arm.

My next effort came a few months later when, for whatever reason, I decided I really wanted to see Broadcast News. Don’t ask me why; I think I just latched onto the next R-rated movie I saw a commercial for. (Maybe the nascent adolescent in me found Holly Hunter enticingly sassy.) Of course, had my parents actually let me see this one, I would have been bored out of my skull.[3]

[4]

By seventh grade, my parents’ resolve was starting to crack. My peer group had initiated a weekly ritual of attending whatever film was showing at Grinnell’s one movie theater, whether we wanted to see it or not.[5] The theater’s attempt to keep kids under seventeen from seeing R-rated movies was pretty halfhearted; it was a simple matter of wending one’s way through the crowd and hopping over the velvet cordon by the theatre’s entrance. One night that summer, I managed to catch the last ten minutes of Total Recall simply by walking into the lobby and standing in the hall that led to the theater.

But I still oozed enough Catholic guilt to ask my parents for permission before trying to attend an R-rated film. Pretty Woman was, much like Broadcast News, a strange one to invest my efforts in. I calmly and articulately stated my case, and my parents weighed my argument. Finally my father said they’d let me go if I promised to read at least one book that summer, preferably from the Charles Dickens box set he’d given me as an early birthday present. (His expectations for his sons were ambitious, if a little unrealistic.) I reluctantly agreed to the terms of our deal, and sped off to the theater on my bike.

What ultimately cowed me, and kept me from seeing Julia Roberts’ career-defining turn as a prostitute with a heart of gold, was not really the daunting prospect of spending the summer before eighth grade reading Bleak House. Rather, I think it was the inherent deviousness of hopping that velvet rope in the lobby; the chilling prospect of getting caught in the act by one of the scary-looking high schoolers who staffed the theater. I let the cooler, braver kids go on ahead, and went back outside to my bike.

[1] I had no idea what he was talking about, of course. Foreign languages? Advanced particle physics?

[2] “Mom, can I get a drum set? Please? It’s all I want! It can be my next four Christmas presents! Please? Please? Drum set? Christmas? Mom?”

[3] I imagine it would have been like the time that Bart and his friends emerged, disappointed, from a theatre showing Naked Lunch (there’s Peter Weller again) and Nelson said “I can think of two things wrong with that title.”

[4] I recently Netflixed Broadcast News and found it funny, intelligent, and alarmingly prescient about journalism’s losing battle with infotainment marketed towards America’s short attention span. Highly recommended.

[5] (This is how I ended up seeing Spaced Invaders, Men At Work, and several other utterly forgettable movies.)

Posted: March 27th, 2007 under Film.
Comments: 7

I liked it, but it’s no White Possum Scream.

Posted: March 8th, 2007 under Film, Video.
Comments: none

I’ve spent the last couple of nights watching examples of a subgenre of documentary film I’ll call “feel-good documentary.” These films are firmly in the realm of Spellbound and Mad Hot Ballroom, and firmly not in the realm of, say, An Inconvenient Truth, or Jesus Camp. They’re both films I should’ve probably seen a lot sooner, so forgive me for being a Johnny-Arrive-Recently.

The first is Wordplay, which it’s ridiculous I didn’t see sooner, considering how much of a crossword junkie I am.

One thing this film drove home, however, is that I’m a downright novice compared to some of the endearingly obsessive fanatics who convene every year at Will Shortz’s annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. These are people who do the Monday crossword in under a minute and the Saturday in under twenty. These are people who create puzzles and mail them to Will Shortz for publication in the Times. These are people who look at a road sign reading “Intercoastal” and immediately say, “That’s an anagram for ‘altercations.’”

And then there are the appearances from celebrity puzzle solvers like Bill Clinton and Jon Stewart. Every film, no matter what it is, would benefit from cameos by Bill Clinton and Jon Stewart.

What I’m saying is that, as much as I’d love to attend the tournament, I’d get my ass handed to me right quick. I’ve done the Monday in six minutes, and I’ve finished the Sunday in under forty-five, but otherwise I don’t time myself. Still, though … I may just book myself a flight for Stamford CT next March.

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Posted: March 6th, 2007 under Film, Politics, Music.
Comments: 3

And while we’re conversing, can we talk about Children Of Men for a minute?

Jesus Christ. Shit fucked me UP.

Posted: February 19th, 2007 under Film.
Comments: 9

1. Saw Jesus Camp

2. Read “Through a Glass, Darkly: How the Christian Right is reimagining U.S. history” by Jeff Sharlet, in the current issue of Harper’s

Going into Jesus Camp, I had my reservations. I worried that it would be another pointed confirmation of cosmopolitan Blue-Staters’ worst fears; yet another chance for people on the East Coast and in Western Europe to have a good chuckle about those nutty, misguided fools in the flyover states.

And to some extent, it was that. I sat in a theatre full of young, liberal Minneapolitans who laughed at the wayward provincialism of the people in the film, at the homeschoolers who don’t believe in science and the youth minister who aerosols her frosted hair into submission before blessing her flock’s hands with Nestlé bottled water.

And I laughed with them. But not nearly as much as I cringed at the film’s scenes that clearly weren’t being played for laughs: specifically the ones where children, young children under ten years, were driven to tears and writhing on the floor and speaking in tongues as adults browbeat them and called them sinners and explained that everything they liked in life (Harry Potter, ghost stories, recess, fun) was a direct product of Satan.

That made my face red, made me sink further into my seat, made me grit my teeth, perhaps because it got in and needled at something deeper and personal about my own childhood and the history of my relationship with religion and religious types to a greater degree than I really would have preferred any film was capable.

Needless to say, I did a lot more seat-sinking than chuckling.

The second item is also disturbing, perhaps more intellectually than viscerally. It’s about the attempt on the part of fundamentalist Christians to literally rewrite history, using specially-commissioned textbooks for homeschoolers and religious schools, so that every historical event and person is and was working in the service of, or in reaction to, God’s will. For example, did you know that:

1. The British defeated the Spanish Armada with help from God’s “Protestant wind” so that “the New World would not be overly settled by agents of the Vatican”?

2. The two world wars, the Great Depression, JFK’s assassination, Vietnam, AIDS, 9/11, and Iraq are God’s punishment for the New Deal, Roe v. Wade, and various Supreme Court decisions favoring secular institutions?

3. Stonewall Jackson is a national and religious hero, practically a saint, because he was a civil rights pioneer who taught slaves to read and led a crusade for states’ rights? and that the North was going against God’s will by “striving to alter basic American structures”?

4. Alexis de Tocqueville was an Evangelical Christian in disguise? (Yeah, I don’t get that one either.) (UPDATE: In disguise as a Frenchman, as Meredith helpfully pointed out—but I still don’t get it.)

A good companion piece is Sharlet’s previous feature for Harper’s, about the Rev. Ted “Meth and Male Prostitutes” Haggard, whose appearance in Jesus Camp can only be described as the very quintessence of irony.

I need to go do something fiercely secular. I’m still gritting my teeth.

Posted: November 20th, 2006 under Film, Politics, General.
Comments: 4

I hereby heartily recommend:

1. French toast. Everybody loves French toast.

2. The new Bond movie. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m fairly confident I’ll like it because 1. It’s a Bond movie; 2. They’ve given the franchise a classy, high-concept revamp; 3. It’s got Eva “Naked in Nearly Every Scene of The Dreamers” Green.

3. Boot-cut anything. People—especially men—look infinitely better in boot-cut jeans than any other style of pants. And the last time I went shopping for clothes, I totally took it to the next level and bought boot-cut chinos. There is no reason for boot-cut pants to ever go out of fashion.

4. Zatarain’s New Orleans-style microwavable meals. It’s a meal in a bag! Perfect for cheap, lazy bastards like myself.

5. An album a year I love bands like the Hold Steady and the Pernice Brothers even more when they release an album at the rate of one per year. They rock my balls off, tour constantly, and are hard workers. Bands like U2 that only put out two albums a decade are rich, lazy jerks.

6. Taco night. Everybody loves tacos.

7. The 10-year-anniversary edition of Infinite Jest. With a new foreword by Dave Eggers. Just in time for my odd-numbered-year reread next summer.

8. Armchair remixing. There’s a newish trend of bands—most recently the Barenaked Ladies, but also some bands I actually like—making their source tracks available so people can download and remix them. I plan to give it a try during my holiday free time, beginning with these old favorites.

9. Doing essentially nothing all day except reading the new Harper’s and NYer and then dashing off a blog entry at the last minute. Like I already said: I’m a lazy bastard.

Posted: November 17th, 2006 under Film, Literature, Music, General.
Comments: 6

The past Sunday’s NYT magazine is all about humor—in film, mostly, but also just in general. They asked a bunch of ostensibly funny people what makes something funny. I know that, a lot of the time, explaining why something is funny is the surest way to neutralize its humorous impact, but I’ve always been interested in the philosophy of humor, and since I’m teaching a humor-writing course this summer, I guess I should probably make it seem like I’ve done my homework.

The magazine also asks several people to list their five favorite comedy films. My favorite response is, of course, David Cross’ list:

1. Monty Python & The Holy Grail (1975)
2. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
3. Jackass Number 2 (2006)
4. Homer & Eddie (1989)
5. Rent (2005)

I’m going to go ahead and assume the first two items are sincere, but the last three are almost certainly DC doing what he does best: being a smartass. I mean, Jackass seems too lowest-common-denominator for his taste; Homer & Eddie is a road-trip movie featuring Jim Belushi as a mentally retarded person; and Rent is Rent.

Anyway, it got me thinking about what my favorite comedies are. I don’t think I could narrow it down to five, so I’ve permitted myself ten. For the purposes of the exercise, I’m going to go ahead and define a film comedy as “a film whose predominant goal is to be funny” which is why I haven’t included movies that are not comedies but still make me pee my pants with mirth (e.g. American Psycho, Donnie Darko) and movies that are so dumb they’re unintentionally funny (any Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle). So here they are, in no particular order:

1. Ghostbusters
2. The Big Lebowski
3. Annie Hall
4. Borat
5. Kicking & Screaming
6. The 40-Year-Old Virgin
7. Rushmore
8. Waiting For Guffman
9. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
10. Kids In The Hall: Brain Candy

So that’s my two cents. Debate/concur as needed.

Posted: November 15th, 2006 under Film.
Comments: 14

It’s been a while since I did a movie review.

I finally got around to seeing the thoroughly enjoyable film adaptation of Jane Austen’s timeless social comedy, Pride & Prejudice. All the reviews and personal recommendations of this film raised my expectations considerably, but I was not disappointed. Also, it was a $2 matinee and I’m broke as fuck.

Austen’s novel, and this film (subtitled Papa, May I Please Marry This Hyperbolically Effete And Probably Inbred English Gentleman?), places us firmly in the bucolic English countryside during the early 19th century, which was, to be sure, a simpler time: a time when women were women, men were (extremely effeminite) men, and few diversions awaited the rural middle class besides reading, playing the pianoforte, falling ill with consumption, sending and receiving invitations to things, giggling, crying, getting married, attending balls, giggling and crying at balls, and being ever so excited about it all.

As the film opens, the eldest and most beautiful Bennett sister, Jane, is hoping to snare a suitable groom, a pursuit in which her parents and younger sisters are all too happy to lend their help. Austen’s headstrong protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, is here played by the lovely Keieriyiea Kneightkley, who brings a defiant radiance to her radiantly defiant role as the second-eldest and, compared to Jane, rather plain Bennet sister. (This was the only part of the film I found rather unrealistic, since it asks us to believe that Ms. Kneightkley could ever not be the hottest thing on legs in any given sampling of humans.)

The Bennets’ social universe seems to primarily consist of lavish balls, where young, accomplished suitors are dropped into rooms full of hundreds of shrieking virgins, from which they may choose a bride. It is here that Elizabeth meets the mysterious and brooding Mr. Darcy (played here by Trent Reznor who, along with Edgar Winter as Mr. Bennet and Beth Orton as Elizabeth’s best friend Charlotte, makes an effortless transition from the world of music to film).

There is almost immediately an indiscreet, adversarial chemistry between Elizabeth and Darcy, and their mischievous flirtation is only complicated by the arrival of the dashing Mr. Wickham, an honorable military man played by Heath Ledger, Orlando Bloom, or some reasonable facsimile thereof.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s freedom to marry the man of her choosing is challenged when Mr. Collins, who is apparently a gay Hobbit, comes to visit and ask for her hand in marriage. He is fiercely rebuffed, much to his own dismay and that of Elizabeth’s mother, who sees the marriage as felicitous since Mr. Collins stands to inhereit the Bennet estate, and his patron, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, is very wealthy. Lady Catherine’s vicious class snobbery is expertly conveyed by Judi Dench (as stipulated by the Shropshire-Hawleyfoot Parlimentary Accord of 1973, which states that Ms. Dench must appear in any and all English period pieces until the end of time).

A gaggle of homely and possibly retarded younger girls rounds out the lively group of Bennet sisters vying good-naturedly for these handsome mens’ affections. (They’re sort of like the Gilmore Girls, except shrill and obnoxious in a totally different way.) These younger sisters don’t get much screen time until the youngest, Lydia, runs away to London with Mr. Wickham to go clubbing.

Through a variety of social machinations so hard to follow that they could only come from an early-19th-century English novel, there are ever so many romantic misunderstandings. Darcy falls out of favor with Elizabeth; Jane’s engagement to Mr. Bingley, a cheerful leprechaun eunuch, is broken off; Charlotte marries Mr. Collins as part of a truth-or-dare game at a slumber party; and Elizabeth goes on a road trip with her aunt and uncle.

Eventually, the misunderstandings are cleared up, and the principal characters find happiness. Jane (Rosamund Pike) and Mr. Bingley (Simon Woods) are reunited, and the onscreen sparks between this real-life couple are palpable. (I must admit I possessed a slight resistance to their presence in the film, since the lascivious tabloid gossip surrounding these ubiquitous celebrities and their offscreen romance threatened to eclipse any merits the film itself possessed. Fortunately, my fears were allayed by their capable performances, and as long as I avert my glance from the magazine rack at the supermarket checkout, I can probably be spared their total media domination.)

Finally, during the film’s moving climax, Trent Reznor approaches Elizabeth through the mists of the country moors (”moor” is a chiefly British word, meaning “heath”) and says, “If you love me, please use GarageBand to remix my hit single, “With Teeth.” I won’t tell you exactly what happens next, but let’s just say that Elizabeth runs straight home and fires up her G5. I love happy endings!

Posted: February 23rd, 2006 under Film.
Comments: 1

Last night a small group of us convened at Andrew’s to watch the Aristocrats, which I’ve already seen, but could probably watch an infinite number of times, especially if Captain & Cokes are involved. Afterwards, the movie and the liquor definitely gave us an inflated sense of our own funniness, and we spent the next several hours pontificating on the nature of humor, trading bad jokes, and entering the first planning phase of our MFA comedy troupe. I even got some of it on video. Here’s Phillip launching his idea for a comedy troupe, and here’s me telling one of my favorite jokes (I didn’t come up with it, but I wish I had). Please try to disregard the tiny video quality and my unflattering hair-rendering.

Posted: February 5th, 2006 under Film, Video, General.
Comments: 2

Posted: February 2nd, 2006 under Film, Minneapolis, Images.
Comments: none

Saw The Squid & The Whale last night.

I wish I had, like, a thousand thumbs with which to make an upward gesture.

Posted: October 26th, 2005 under Film, Images.
Comments: 4

Last night I saw Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley, as part of the Sound Unseen film festival. It was a good film, if not obviously smitten with its subject. In fact, it was nothing short of hagiographic, as its interviewees, ranging from Sebastian Bach to Duncan Sheik to David Fricke, spoke of Buckley in the tones that evangelicals usually reserve for Jesus Christ. I didn’t mind that so much, since I’ve worshipped at that altar plenty of times myself. But there was a curious elision of the faults and foibles that inevitably accompany artistic genius, the unreliability and capriciousness for which Buckley was reportedly known (the sort of whimsy that, one could argue, compelled him to wade into the intersection of two rivers where the undertow was strongest). No one mentioned that he was occasionally too drunk to perform. Drummer Matt Johnson doesn’t talk about quitting the touring band because he was bothered by the other members’ drug habits. But, none of this really does much to diminish the beauty of the footage here, especially the performance clips. This is a very roundabout way of making an unequivocal film recommendation.

Posted: October 15th, 2005 under Film, Music.
Comments: none