Wow, 2010 is shaping up to be a killer year, blog-updatingwise!

Posted: January 12th, 2010 under Film.
Comments: none

Over the weekend my special ladyfriend and I took in a modest, small-budget, indie film documentary called 2012. If you live in a major metropolitan area or college town you should seek out a small art-house theater that, with any luck, might be screening this instant sleeper classic.

The premise of 2012 is simple: The ancient Mayan calendar predicts that the world will end on December 12, 2012, the (pseudo)scientific basis for which is causing much consternation for geophysical scientitian Adrian Helmsley, played with quiet intensity by Chiwetel Ejiofor. I know, I know—you’re probably as sick of hearing the name Chiwetel Ejiofor as I am, what with all the overexposure he received on the heels of his star turn in David Mamet’s big-budget mega-blockbuster Redbelt. It seemed one couldn’t go anywhere without seeing Chiwetel Ejiofor’s name on the marquee of every multiplex in the country. But try to set aside your distaste with the starmaking hype-cycle that created the ubiquitous Ejiofor, because I have a feeling that as much as Chiwetel Ejiofor might be a household name, he is more than just a pretty flash in the pan face.

Ejiofor hurries to Washington where No One Will Take Him Seriously and he is Not Dressed Appropriately To Be Taken Seriously By These Very Important Beltway Insiders, but he eventually gets the attention of the president’s chief of staff by handing him a very thin document that apparently contains all the information needed to convince every major world power that Shit Is Fucked And The Apocalypse Is Real, and that they need to cluster around their Sony Vaio™ laptops and take immediate action. The president’s chief of staff is played by Oliver Platt, whom I am always heartened to see in movies because I believe that Oliver Platt is who I would look like if I put on a few pounds and became overweight. Simply put, Oliver Platt is my fat twin, and I am comfortable having Oliver Platt as my fattelgänger because Oliver Platt is a handsome man. Oliver Platt.

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Posted: November 16th, 2009 under Film.
Comments: 7

Over the past few months I’ve had the privilege of watching my friend Nathan work on a video installation that opened in Buffalo NY last month, and was honored when he asked me to compose music for it.

The resulting piece, Killing Rolando, is an installation that incorporates elements of documentary footage, autobiography, archival materials, and landscape photography, though it’s immediately apparent that the finished whole amounts to far more than those constituent parts. I was pretty thrilled that I was able to contribute even a scintilla of my own fitful stabs at amateur composition.

The piece is best digested in a large three-dimensional space, so the elegant website Nathan designed for it doesn’t quite do justice. But it’s still pretty fucking cool. You can hear my music by viewing the video in the top right-hand corner of this page, but definitely watch all the videos and read all the text.

Posted: April 26th, 2009 under Film, Images, Minneapolis, Music, Video.
Comments: 1

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.

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* (“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.

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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, General, Music, Reading & Writing.
Comments: 6

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, Music, Politics.
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