Moot Point

Everyone, I have found a new TV love and it is called Mad Men. When I saw the ads on AMC I thought it looked intriguing, but I also thought “it’s on AMC, that’s not promising.” But I decided to check it out.

It’s about the gross, entitled lives of ad executives in the 1950s 1960; it’s kind of like Far From Heaven, but less consciously borrowing from Sirk and more about men. It’s this kind of anti-nostalgia thing that I have been thinking about a bit lately; it’s like “You call those the good old days?! We’ll show you good old days!” Women get sexually harassed, everyone’s kind of anti-Semitic (they find a Jewish guy from the mailroom to trot out for a Jewish potential client, to make her feel comfortable), everyone drinks all the time, and the only black people you see are in the service industry. But, you know, it’s also about how tobacco companies want to circumvent the evidence that cigarettes kill people (hey, wait, that still happens) or how doctors are paternalistic and won’t just give women contraception (hey, wait). Anyway, it is also gorgeously shot and styled. I love that, the push-pull: the show is super-caustic about all the crappy things that went on at the time, but it makes the whole thing look so attractive.

Anyway, good TV.

1. Klimt (Raúl Ruiz, 2006): Man, this movie was good. It’s the least bio-y biopic ever, which I mean in the best possible way. I’d never seen a Ruiz movie before, and I was totally mesmerized by his crazy “moving camera and putting people on casters and swinging them” cinematography. I further loved all the clever bits where Ruiz broke the fourth wall, like when the baron guy is watching Klimt and this actress through a police lineup mirror, and we’re on his side of the mirror, and Klimt comes up to the mirror and rubs his eyes or something? Also, the fact that George Melies was in it. I like movies about art.
2. Time Regained (Raúl Ruiz, 1999): Nothing follows up a difficult movie about a dying artist like…another difficult movie about a dying artist. Only this one is almost three hours long! This was totally incredible though. They managed to cast a guy who looks so much like Marcel Proust — he was an embodiment of this portrait — and I thought the film did a pretty credible job of capturing Proust’s prose cinematically (noting, of course that I have not read the actual volume of The Search for Lost Time this was based on, I only made it halfway through Swann’s Way). There were some just fabulous moments — there’s this scene when he’s in a cafe where a newsreel’s playing and starts reading a letter, then he’s like, lifted up in his chair, onto the screen, which is showing the area where the woman writing the letter is (this is during WWI). And this beautiful close-up when he’s listening to this concert, and the everyone starts moving (in a surrealistic way), and Proust is overwhelmed and he starts crying, but just a little. Anyway, it was amazing and made me want to start reading Proust again.
3. The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown (Norman Taurog, 1957): This movie — about a movie star who gets kidnapped and everyone thinks it’s a publicity stunt because she has a movie about getting kidnapped opening but then she falls in love with her kidnapper and the conflict is whether he admits it’s a real kidnapping and goes to jail or she says it’s a fake kidnapping and then loses her career — is really not very good. The conflict doesn’t really get resolved at all, but of course her hardwon movie career didn’t matter because it was the fifties. But Jane Russell is fantastic in it. I’ve seen big hunks of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on TV recently and I’d forgotten how much I love her. She has a body like a Barbie, but she also radiates intelligence and wit, and the whole movie is basically an excuse for her to be awesome.
4. The Simpsons Movie (David Silverman, 2007): Okay, it was pretty good. It made fun of government (“President Schwarzenegger” heh), of the Fox TV network, of religion, and it was mostly about Homer and his relationship to the family. The downside was how little play all the townsfolk got: there wasn’t much Apu or Principal Skinner or Lenny and Karl or even Mr. Burns (which I found tragic). Also, I like brainy cynical annoying self-righteous Lisa a lot more than giddy lovestruck Lisa. But it was basically like three and a half episodes of the show strung together, but with better animation, except for the one scene when Marge thinks that maybe she can’t put up with Homer anymore was actually really raw, emotionally. Continue Reading »

1. Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933): TCM showed the full version of this, one of the last pre-Code movies — it apparently got people so mad that they started actually applying the Production Code. It’s kind of great. Barbara Stanwyck (never hotter) is this young girl whose dad runs a speakeasy and pimps her out, then she gets away with him and learns (via Nietzshe, of all places) that she should use her womanly power to get what she wants from life. So she does: they use “St. Louis Blues” to indicate that she is sexing up various business guys in order to get better jobs and stay out of trouble. The thing that’s awesome about it is how little guilt she feels and how jauntily it’s paced. Good times.
2. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates, 2007): I thought this was totally one of the best movies, movie wise. Yates tightened up a lot of the lagging and the Harry Potter’s Boring Angst that plagued the book, and did a fantastic job with the banally evil Dolores Umbridge. I really thought he got the tone of the book right.
3. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón, 2004): After OotP, I decided I should go back and watch the middle couple of movies, which I missed. I wanted to like this one way more than I did. I hated the children’s choir right at the beginning, when they get to Hogwarts. It’s obviously better than the first two movies — and I love climax with the Time Turner, but I felt like it took too long to get there.
4. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell, 2005): Honestly, this book had some of the weakest and some of the best bits in the series, and it turned into one of the best movies, for sure. The stakes are high, you get a way bigger sense of the non-wizarding world, and I loved the short version of “Harry and Ron don’t understand girls.” In general, I think the movies are really well-cast, which is nice, because they don’t always make it clear who everyone is or what’s going on. I don’t think they’re incomprehensible, but I was talking to a friend who saw OotP, but didn’t know the whole series or the books really well and he said there were moments when he assumed things had been more fleshed out in the book.
5. Hairspray (John Waters, 1988): Love. I missed the beginning, it was on TV when I got home from the bar on Friday, but I think I got most of it. I just kept thinking about how much the new version (which I don’t plan on seeing) will suck: what made this movie good was Tracy’s unerring optimism in contrast with the fact that most of the Baltimore in the movie looked like kind of a shithole and no one was really as conventionally attractive as that creepy High School Musical kid. This was way more upbeat and less confrontational than most John Waters movies, but it still had that kind of unpolished thing, plus the clever camp, not the bad Hollywood camp.
6. The Princess Diaries (Garry Marshall, 2001): On “The Wonderful World of Disney” and I just couldn’t look away. I don’t have any huge commentary on it or anything, but I did find Ann Hathaway’s performance really charming. I liked how relatively little of the plot revolved around silly misunderstandings, and everything was more or less centred around the character’s figuring out who she was. So it was well-constructed, and charming.

Oh, I also read the last Harry Potter book; I am a casual fan, not a manic one, but I figured it would be really hard to avoid reading what had happened and also, everyone else in the world is talking about Harry Potter, why not just go with it? Moderately (but vaguely) spoilersome thoughts inside. Continue Reading »

(Please note, if this is horribly written, it’s because there are roofers at my house, banging around the roof and the deck and everywhere, SO LOUD and irregular. I am running away as soon as I finish my coffee.)

I was really pleased to read Amanda from Pandagon’s rejoinder to the “Harry Potter is bad literature, adults who read kids’ books are stupid” snobby book critic editorial. This is basically that not everyone has the luxury to spend time contemplating Serious Literature.

But what I find more interesting about this passage is that his friends say they simply don’t have time to read and contemplate Serious Fiction. I say to take them at their word—Americans work more hours and have less leisure and make money than we have in the past, which leaves very little time for the leisurely reading of novels. An 800 page book of Serious Fiction—which I love, mind you, so I’m not picking on the pleasures of it—takes much, much longer to read than it takes to breeze through a Harry Potter book. If people are turning to Harry Potter, it’s because they want to have the joys of reading a narrative within the time that’s been allotted to them in our capitalist society to read.

But I think I get why so many critics who spend their time reading Serious Literature are baffled by Harry Potter’s popularity. As someone who does have the luxury to spend time contemplating Serious Literature, I totally get that Rowling’s prose is often…kind of bad. Her phrasing is often clunky and it often feels as though she seems obligated to inform us of every event in Harry Potter’s life, even if no one really cares whether he or Ron won at the chess game they played over their totally uneventful Christmas break. I find myself kind of nodding when I read these columns because they’re right, as Serious Literature, Rowling is a failure.

But she’s a really rich, really popular failure, whose books are beloved by millions. Clearly those millions are unwashed idiots who don’t know what’s good for them. Or, you know, maybe the Harry Potter books are so popular because they appeal to a different literacy. In responding to the critical panning of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Henry Jenkins asserts that POTC’s appeal is in world-building storytelling: “…in many ways, the film’s heart is not in telling a classical linear story. This film wants to explore a world and much of its complexity emerges from the fact that we have been able to accumulate and master more information about that world through the first two films.” To my mind, that argument works even better with Harry Potter. Rowling may not be the most artful crafter of prose, but the appeal to most fans (including me) isn’t in that aspect of the writing: it’s in the wealth of detail, the richness and intricacy of the world created in the book (and which is expanded with each installment), in the way she makes sure that even tertiary characters have arcs, and the sense that there’s a whole lot more happening on the edges of the story.

Maybe it’s just because I’m an academic, and for me it’s more about interpretation than evaluation, but I think there’s a lot more to be gained by looking at the ways readers do engage with a popular text and the kinds of intelligence it engages than by pretending millions of people are engaged in some kind of bizarre self-delusion and incapable of making their own choices about entertainment.

One of my favourite websites lately is Jezebel. I think this, their uncovering of a non-airbrushed Redbook cover photo explains why; also, their “Why We’re Pissed” post:

Magazine-retouching may not be a lie on par with, you know, “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction,” but in a world where girls as young as eight are going on the South Beach Diet, teenagers are getting breast implants as graduation gifts, professional women are almost required to fetishize handbags, and everyone is spending way too much goddamn time figuring out how to pose in a way that will look as good as that friend with the really popular MySpace profile, it’s fucking wrong.

Which, hell yeah.

Also, I really enjoy their “Crap Email From A Dude” feature. It’s relateable! Who hasn’t gotten a crap email from a dude? I never got one this bad though: “How am I supposed to feel when you boast you smoked from your first hookah? Happy for you? When I’m feeling abandoned?” Heh.

1. The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdonavich, 1971): IMDB describes this movie as “The coming of age of a youth named Sonny in a small Texas town in the 1950s.” I’d avoided seeing this movie for a long time because, well, that sounds like the kind of movie I am not so much into. Usually, there is a bunch of stuff about how girls are aliens, and some other stuff about how great small towns were back in the old idyllic days, and then sometimes the hero (who is usually a semi-autobiographical figure) looks back upon said small town life from the pedestal of his great success, that has allowed him to rise above the “simple life” that he is now looking back on nostalgically, since he has now lost his innocence or something. This movie was really none of those things though. It was all sad and mournful, but it also had…perspective. Also, it was fantastically well-acted and the characters were really well-formed: I finally get why Cybill Shepherd is famous now, Ellen Burstyn is ridiculously gorgeous in every sense of the word, Cloris Leachman (who apparently won an Oscar for this) is wonderful, it was one of the first things Jeff Bridges ever did (in which he utters the immortal line “You ain’t that good a cocksman”), etc. etc. The force and realism of the performances is part of what saves the movie from being a sordid episodic. The other part is the quiet flatness of the black and white cinematography. It’s really beautiful to look at, but it’s also somehow dispassionate, if that makes sense.
2. Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, 2007): Holy crap. This movie is like the most intense survival story ever. Alex was talking about how weirdly Hollywood a project it was for Herzog, but it is 100% pure Herzog. I was thinking about why I liked it, beyond the way you get the sense of the struggle, the oppressive jungle, the disjointedness of the story, and I think Ebert hit on it in his review when he said that basically it’s an adventure film minus any of the happy parts: “Herzog makes no attempt to pump this story up into a thrilling adventure. There is nothing thrilling about dysentery, starvation, insect bites and despair.” I can’t think of any better-matched actor and director than Bale and Herzog. (Which is a sentiment I just realized I probably stole from the Pajiba review.)
3. Freaky Friday (Mark Waters, 2003): Okay, Lindsay Lohan is a really good actress. Seriously, she is great in this movie, and she spends half of it playing a responsible adult, something at which she sadly appears to have no experience. Waters — who also directed Lohan in the modern classic Mean Girls and the awesome, bizarrely cast The House of Yes — gets a lot out of the material, which could have just as easily been a thousand different kinds of bad. I could have done without Chad Michael Murray as the love interest, but Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis carry the story and actually made me care about the characters.
4. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Gore Verbinski, 2007): It kind of feels weird to be as invested as I am in a series of movies that’s actually based on a theme park ride, but I do love how much Johnny Depp and Verbinski have pushed a Disney-produced, apparently family-aimed adventure movie to the very edge of reason and good taste. I liked this one better than the second, because it had more of a no-holds-barred, almost screwball story progression. It’s almost schizophrenic. But I do take issue with the ending. (Obviously, if you read on, you will find spoilers. Lots and lots of spoilers. I give away the whole ending of the movie and a lot of stuff in the middle. ) Continue Reading »

Holly Golightly: You know those days when you get the mean reds?
Paul Varjak: The mean reds, you mean like the blues?
Holly Golightly: No. The blues are because you’re getting fat and maybe it’s been raining too long, you’re just sad that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?
Paul Varjak: Sure.
Holly Golightly: Well, when I get it the only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany’s. Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there. If I could find a real-life place that’d make me feel like Tiffany’s, then – then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name!

This was so me this morning. But my mood was fixed by cooking and then eating corn and sausages.

Discovery: Vancouver in the summer is awesome, yo. Unlike in Toronto, where summer means like “extreme heat warnings” and “going to the mall every weekend because at least it’s air conditioned,” Vancouver in the summer is a great place to be. It is warm, sure, but it is in the mid-20s, so you can comfortably wear a sundress, but you won’t spend the whole day feeling as though you are about to melt. You even need to bring a sweater if you’re going out at night

Vancouver has many many many flaws, but the availability of delicious food at reasonable prices is not one of them. The photo above shows where Alex and I enjoyed the most ridiculously good lunch ever. There is this place, called Go Fish, that is located on the actual fisherman’s wharf, and you go down, and they serve you amazingly fresh fish, all tender and delicious and in various formats (sandwich, taco, battered and fried) which you can then eat while looking at boats and the blue glass condo towers across False Creek.

Anyway, I am trying to enjoy summertime idling as much as I can, drinking various minty cocktails and trying to work through some Kant. I fear I will run out of money if I don’t find some kind of paying work soon. This would help pay off my summer tuition and help me not starve while I’m hoping student loans will come through. In other news, Alex moved way up the waitlist, so I may not be lonely and miserable and have to move this fall. Hurray!

The downside of Vancouver summer is the incredibly large concentration of tourists. Unlike my old place in Toronto (Bloor and Ossington not being a tourism hot spot), I live in an area where tourists seem to turn up (ie. there is a large hotel 4 blocks away from my house). Last night, Alex and I were waiting for the bus home across the Cambie Bridge. A couple of (I’m guessing) affluent middle-aged Americans walked up to the other guy at the stop and asked him a couple of questions. The woman then walked over to us on the bench and pointed across the bridge, saying “TWELTH AVENUE?” in the over-enunciated loud way people talk to those for whom English is not a first language. Alex and I were like, “Yeah, Twelfth is that way.”

So weird.

1. Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007): I really liked this. It’s very charming, and it’s gorgeously animated. Like, beautiful, definitely the best-looking Pixar movie yet. They kind of manage to walk the line wherein they acknowledge how weird it is to have a story about a genius rat chef, but not to make it totally disgusting, which is kind of a danger. I don’t know how well it would play to really young kids though; there was a lot of stuff that was kind of complex and subtle, and a bunch of foodie stuff, that might not really play very well to young kids. I saw and loved Bird’s other two films (The Iron Giant and The Incredibles) as an adult, but I can imagine showing them to my future hypothetical children or grand-nieces or whatever. But a lot of Ratatouille plays out in these sort of unspoken relationship moments that would sail over a lot of kids’ heads. Also, I kind of question the mixture of the democratic “anyone can cook,” joys of food message with the weirdly exceptionalist “some people are great artists and they should get to live by their own rules” message? It’s not as obviously Randian as The Incredibles, though. That said, I loved the way they rendered taste, with Remy’s fireworks, and Ego’s Proustian moment (you’ll know it when you see it).
2. Monsters, Inc. (Pete Doctor et al, 2001): I’d forgotten how much I loved this movie. It’s all bright colours and sweetness. It’s one of Pixar’s slighter efforts, I think, but it still looks pretty great — I remember how impressive Sully’s fur was in 2001. John Goodman’s voice work totally makes this movie for me; I love him so, and the relationship between Boo and Sully is so charming and innocent and feels real. If I’m playing imaginary essay topics, I’d be saying that Monsters, Inc. is kind of a defanged critique of a capitalism (that in the film, thrives on children’s fear); instead of suggesting any kind of viable alternative, a happier version of capitalism is created, wherein the polis thrives on entertaining children. Then I would trenchantly mention how it was released by Disney.
3. Divine Secrets of the Yaya Sisterhood (Callie Khouri, 2002): Okay, this was…not as bad as you would think. I though the flashback structure worked well, and honestly, if they’d cast someone better than Sandra Bullock in the all-important lead role, it might have been better. Also, if some of the accents hadn’t been so laboured? I am constantly fascinated by the mother-daughter melodrama, so I am pretty patient with what are usually derisively termed chick flicks. I thought the whole thing kind of worked: the flashbacks slowly revealing what made the mother who she was, but not really letting her off easy. I dunno, there were still a lot of cringe-y moments, most of them involving Sandra Bullock, and James Garner, who doesn’t really do anything except be saintly a lot. Like, they talk in the movie about how saintly he is, and stuff.

I am kind of embarrassed that I admitted to watching the Yaya Sisterhood on TBS on the internet, but I am committed to reporting my weekly movie-watching habit, and I barely write anything else on my blog anymore.

This is a short one, because I went home for a long weekend and spent time with my parents instead of watching movies on TV.

1. Mr. Brooks (Bruce A. Evans, 2007): This was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I wound up seeing it by accident because the movie that I was going to see was pushed out by Die Hard (which I thought Alex wanted to see so I thought I shouldn’t just go see it). I did like Kevin Costner’s performance; he’s great at being an ordinary guy (see The Upside of Anger, anything where he’s a baseball player), and this is one of those ordinary guy serial killer movies, which is a thriller staple. I also really enjoyed Demi Moore, who was a cop going through a bitter divorce with a Smith from Sex and the City — she’s all bitchy and tough. Furthermore, I enjoyed the way class and wealth were emphasized throughout (Mr. Brooks is ridiculously rich, as is Demi Moore the cop), suggesting that a certain amount of money somehow creates a different moral playing field. There were some major things I didn’t like, though: William Hurt played Costner’s “muderous side” and it was supposed to convey his internal conflict about being “addicted to murder,” but it really felt lazy and it never actually paid off. Also, Dane Cook was in it.
2. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (Adam McKay, 2006): How much did I love this? Quite a bit. Alex thought that the takes that were held until just before the cast started laughing detracted from it or something, but I didn’t really notice so much. Also: a Nascar movie that ends with two dudes making out! How great is that?