Moot Point

Apparently the RCMP locked down the Bio Sciences building at UBC. Apparently there’s a suicidal student with a gun?

I’m not at school today but I just talked to Alex who’s heading off campus and he said that there were 2 helicopters circling but everyone was kind of just going about their business.

It doesn’t sound like anyone was hurt at least? But CBC says there’s an explosive disposal unit there.

Holy shit you guys.

Oh, so I’ve found myself wanting to make brief snarky comments about links and stuff a lot lately. So I got a tumblr.

I mostly was just curious to try it out, because I read like 80 things about tumbleblogs. I’m not sure, we’ll see it how goes. It might be easier to keep up while I’m writing my thesis.

Oh and my new glasses came:

They are a little bigger than my old frames and more square and also more jade green. I’m pretty sure they’re actually men’s frames, but that’s okay, they fit my giant head really well.

The sad thing is that this means Alex and I both have Brooks Brothers frames now. I guess we’re at that point where couples start to look alike?

Subtitle: “I know three kinds of karate: jujitsu, aikidio, and regular karate.”

1. Lonely Boy (Wolf Koenig & Roman Kroiter, 1962): This might just be my favourite Canadian movie. It’s a documentary examining the stardom of Paul Anka in 1962, when he was 19 years old and still a mega teen idol. It’s like a revelation for its time in the way it acknowledges the total constructedness of Anka’s image. I love it when his manager says: “We had a nosejob.” It was also hugely influential in the verite movement, in that it never pretends that what it’s shooting is really “verite”: it constantly reminds you that the camera is there; the filmmakers even ask Anka to “redo a scene.” So to sum up: revolutionary in its form, and also really prescient in its subject matter. They shot this thing before the Beatles.
2. Nobody Waved Goodbye (Don Owen, 1964): This might be my least favourite Canadian movie. One of my students said it was “like Catcher in the Rye but less good.” Like, I get why it’s historically important: it’s a very early Canadian feature, it had commercial success, it would have been very timely. But seriously, it’s really hard to watch. The “realistic” acting style with the improvised dialogue hasn’t aged well, nor has the whole whiny “I don’t want to be just like my parents” line. (Speaking of which, how sad was it on Project Runway when they made prom dresses and one of the designers asked the girls what they wanted to do when they grew up and like eight of them were like “Nothing! I just want to sit around.” and one of them chimed in with “Public relations.” Youth of tomorrow, I fear for you.)
3. Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007): I was seeing this mostly out of duty, because of the whole Oscar nomination. I adored the book, so I was really worried about how they would translate a lot of it to film, and I didn’t really think it would make a good movie. I was wrong! The movie plays as much more of an old-Hollywood melodrama than the book did, but I mean that in the best way possible. I loved the typewriter sounds that morphed into music cues. I loved Keira Knightley’s costumes. I loved how Briony had the same haircut for like 70 years. Also, while I wasn’t totally blown away and I think it was a bit showy, I have to give Joe Wright props for that endless Dunkirk evacuation tracking shot.
4. Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975): Oh man, Dario Argento, where have you been all my life? This movie’s awesome. It goes from graphic murder scenes (with bright red 1970s movie blood, it always looks like paint) to these wacky romantic comedy sequences with the plucky girl reporter. So skillful, and so completely strange.
5. Suspiria (Argento, 1977): But not as strange as Suspiria. It’s got the gothic fairy tale aspect of I Know Who Killed Me, completely with insanely unmotivated red and blue light and stained glass all over the place, only amazing. What clinches it is when Suzy goes to see the psychiatrist Frank Mandel (played by Udo Keir, who was at that time as far as I can tell best known for playing Dracula) who helpfully tells her that the supernatural is totally just the result of feminine hysteria, and they meet in front of the most modernist building ever. It is obviously a real building, also, which contrasts with the crazy expressionist artificiality of the dance school where the movie takes place. So awesome, so scary. There are maggots! Nothing’s scarier than maggots.
6. Don’t Look Now (Nicholas Roeg, 1973): I weirdly didn’t remember the end of this movie when I suggested Alex and I should watch it. I seriously remembered “their daughter dies, they go to Venice, have sex, get lost, get separated, and then something deeply disturbing happens.” I guess I must have repressed the ending? This is such a classic. The sex scene is the most famous, but I couldn’t find it online. Here is the opening sequence, equally awesome:
7. Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarafian, 1971): The best way I can start to tell you about Vanishing Point is how awful it was that it got remade as a TV movie in 1997 with Viggo Mortensen and Jason Priestly (in the role of the deejay who in the original is named “Super Soul” and gets beat up by racists), but instead of him just racing across the country on a bet, he is doing it because his wife is in labour. Anyway, in the amazing 1971 version that we watched, he is a Vietnam vet and becomes a counter-culture hero as he constantly outdrives the cops, but checks to make sure everyone’s okay after every accident he causes. (This is one of the car movies that was a big inspiration for Death Proof.) What’s incredible is how there’s like 40 minutes of the movie that is almost like avant-garde, just him driving and all these side-long zooms in on his profile that go superclose. I was pretty sure that Super Soul was in fact a manifestation of Kowalski’s soul until like, halfway through. Honestly, you could still argue that he is, but the movie gives you enough of a sense of the world outside the car that basically everyone else in the movie would also have to be a hallucination or magic or something. Still, his radio station is KOW. Come on!
8. Hard Eight (PT Anderson, 1996): I honestly had no idea that PT Anderson had made a movie before Boogie Nights until the guy in the video store recommended it to me like two days ago. Who knew? It’s pretty great: I forgot when Gwyneth Paltrow was a good actress. It’s got this quiet tension that I couldn’t place, but I completely got what it reminded me of when I saw that Anderson cited Jean-Pierre Melville as an influence. The static shot compositions, the muted colours. He’s definitely still Anderson though: imagine John C. Reilly delivering the karate line I quoted at the top of this post. See? It’s like the ultimate John C. Reilly role: he’s a good guy, but kind of stupid. Everyone in this movie is, really, which keeps you at a distance, but it works. It creates sympathy, it doesn’t alienate you.

I was going to be all “How did I see 8 movies this week?” but one of them is 26 minutes long. This week the goal was to see some movies that don’t involve entrails. Maybe next week I’ll get to some actual comedies or something.

Hurray, it’s snowing in Vancouver!
Originally uploaded by mootpoint

It’s those big fluffy snowflakes, which we don’t often get.

People who know me in real life will note that I am not wearing my glasses in this photo. That is because they broke, and walking around and having everything be blurry is actually more appealing to me than walking around with glasses that are being (barely) held together with Scotch tape. I’m excited about my new glasses, but sad that I can’t actually see very well until they come.

1. 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (François Girard, 1993): This was a nice break from horror movies. I know a lot of people who found it dull, but I loved it. It was nice to watch something so cerebral and quiet after so many movies that you can kind of ruin if you think about. My favourite of the segments:
2. The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960): I can’t believe I hadn’t seen this before. I think it is the first rape revenge movie. I spent the last half-hour with my hand over my mouth; the actual revenge-getting scene is surprisingly violent and in a way that I wasn’t prepared for, even though I’ve been watching basically nothing but gorno for the last couple of weeks. It’s completely amazing when the bad guys try to sell the daughter’s dress back to the mother: she looks at it for a minute and realizes exactly what happened and then decides what to do and you can see it all in her face. The tree scene is pretty amazing; Bergman hardly uses any long shots, so it really stands out to see him all tiny taking down a tree with nothing but his bare hands and his rage.
3. Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages (Benjamin Christensen, 1922): You guys this was amazing. It had body horror and confusing postmodern blurring of documentary and fiction in 1922. There’s something so prurient about the way it starts out factually describing the backward beliefs of various situations and how witchcraft trials would be and then lingeringly portrays it with a surprising amount of nudity. Then there is the hilarious final chapter where they link medieval signs of witchcraft with “modern” notions of hysteria. Oh, Sweden.
4. There Will Be Blood (P.T. Anderson, 2007): So I guess the message is that capitalism makes people just as crazy as religion? The most awesome part is Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance. Which is good because it’s basically a character study in which the entire plot is “How would Daniel Plainview react to this? What about this?” It reminded me a lot of Citizen Kane, actually: Kane and Plainview aren’t that different, and they’re both Big American Myths About America, if you know what I mean.
5. Hostel: Part II (Eli Roth, 2007): This wasn’t as good as the first one, but it was still pretty awesome. One thing that sets Roth apart from the horror pack is how totally unapologetic the films are about the line between something funny and something that’s deeply offensive. Like, he has a guy actually slip with his circular saw and cut into this chick’s face. It’s awful, but there’s a way in which it’s just a joke taken too far. You’re either going to admire his balls or be totally disgusted. To be fair, the movie also features a graphic castration.
6. Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005): This isn’t as torture-y, but it does get points for the whole “based on a true story” thing, even if it’s only sort-of true (like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a clear influence in many ways), because that makes it seem more like the movie’s exploiting a real-life tragedy for entertainment value. Hence, more scandal! It’s not as graphic as a lot of the American gornos, but it kind of works better to only get a brief horrifying glimpse of a dismembered body; there’s the constant sense that you never know what’s just off-camera.
7. Saw II (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2005): I am probably in the minority, but I actually thought this was better than the first Saw. Having more people interacting with each other and having to watch the horrible tortures people are put through made the whole thing a bit more interesting. I wish that Bousman wasn’t so obsessed with the crazy rock video cutting. I realize the quick cuts are kind of a way to show creepy stuff with skin getting cut off and so forth, but it’s really annoying and just takes me out of the wincey-ness.

You know, I’m beginning to think I am desensitized to cinematic violence.

Please note: the first two movies are just regular, but then after that we’re into “Weekly Movies: Torture Porn Edition.” There aren’t a lot of graphic descriptions, but there’s still generally discussion of how I enjoy movies where people get killed in ridiculous ways; also, that Captivity billboard that started so much fuss. Also, foul language, but you guys should be used to that by now.

1. Last Night (Don McKellar, 1998): Man, I love this movie. It’s a bit cheesy, and I’d forgotten how neatly (almost) all the characters fit together, but so Canadian! This is the artsy, talky movie about the end of the world set in North York that came out just after Armageddon and Deep Impact. The scene where Don McKellar and Callum Keith Rennie totally kiss and then get all homophobic so they can pretend they didn’t just contemplate having sex with each other? Homosocial hilarity! Also, it has David Cronenberg. My favourite little throwaway bit is when the TV news has hundreds of people learning “Taking Care of Business” from Randy Bachman. I’m really not sure how well it would play to a non-Canadian, though. It’s like a two-hour in-joke.
2. Tenderness of the Wolves (Ulli Lommel, 1973): This is the beginning of my kind of horroriffic week. This is basically what would have happened if Fassbinder made a horror movie. He produced and it uses a lot of the same personnel he did — he even appears in it. So it’s based on a real serial killer from the 1920s, but it’s set in the post-WWII period, when everything was equally shitty in Germany. There is pedophilia! References to M (based somewhat on the same guy) and The Third Man! Creepy neighbours! A really bleak view of humanity! Cannibalism! I really liked how quiet all the murders are up until the very end, when someone finally screams and you’re like, thank god. Continue Reading »

So I was in somewhat of a media blackout in Hawaii. I read the newspaper, but that was it for like a week.

It was great.

(I will at least have vacation pics up at some point, I promise.)

I did see some stuff in Toronto though.

1. 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, ): I’m not going to write a whole long thing about 8 1/2, but I am mentioning it because I watched it on a plane. I generally equate plane movies with “terrible,” so it’s nice to see that I am a niche group someone is marketing to.
2. Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007): Okay, so for the first half hour, I thought that I had made a horrible mistake. It’s so, so overwritten. The convenience store scene — “That ain’t no etch-a-sketch. This is one doodle that can’t be un-did, homeskillet.” — what? Then she tells her friend she’s pregnant on the phone and the girl utters one of the worst lines in the history of ever: “Honest to blog?” Ugh. Ooh, and also, all of Juno’s pop culture references were way too old for her. The Blair Witch Project was a media phenomenon in 1999. When Juno would have been 8 years old. No one’s that culturally with it when they’re 8 years old. Anyway, it kind of eventually won me over with the good acting and the sweet relief of characters having quiet moments, like when Juno sees Jennifer Garner’s character playing with a kid in the mall.
   I don’t really talk about actors’ performances a lot when I talk about movies, because I think it’s overemphasized in the press, etc., but I don’t think you can understate the importance of the ensemble in Juno: every actor was working really hard (but not trying really hard) and doing fabulous stuff. I’ve liked Ellen Page since Hard Candy and I’m glad she’s getting famous from this, and Michael Cera takes a character I would have hated had any other actor played him and actually makes him real and sympathetic and wonderful.
   Also, and I want to phrase this right, because I made fun of someone who had these complaints about Knocked Up¹, but I don’t really know what to do with the way abortion was portrayed. Not like, she should have had an abortion. But now that “unplanned pregnancy movies” are a trend, they are kind of giving me pause. Individually, the handling of abortion in Knocked Up or Waitress or Juno isn’t bad — though Juno’s bugged me personally the most — but taken as three relatively successful, well-reviewed, newsworthy movies, it’s kind of sending a weird message, especially given the place American society is right now. None of these movies is particularly conservative in terms of its message, its filmmakers’ reputations, or even who it’s marketed to, but as a whole, it’s kind of…weird. I’m not sure what it means, if anything, all this baby-based energy, but like I said, it’s giving me pause.
3. Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton, 2007): My official line on this is that I’m not really sure if it’s that great a movie, but that I really liked it. I thought Johnny Depp was freaking great, I’m not really sure that it was totally successful as a musical or even as a movie. My hypothetical essay would either be on how everyone in the movie (even the ethereally beautiful wife and daughter) was kind of funny looking, or on how hard Tim Burton worked to make it clear that the blonde women in the film are just these fungible markers for the male characters to act out their various crazy issues. I have never seen a character have less agency than Joanna does in this movie, and I have to think Burton did it on purpose for irony’s sake.
4. Helvetica (Gary Hustwit, 2007): I really wanted to like this movie, because I think a lot of the issues it brings up about graphic design and ideology and society and the connotative versus denotative (or I guess purely graphical) elements of type were really interesting. Hustwit also clearly got a really diverse and impressive set of important designers to talk about their work and their philosophies, many of them really intelligently. However, I thought a lot of it could have been better-presented. It seems to have been made with the assumption that its viewers would all know enough about design to know who all these people were and why their words had weight; I wish the filmmakers had done more to give us context. On the context note, I also wish they had made a bit more effort to talk larger social context. The designers weren’t particularly hermetic in their comments, but the film really didn’t do much to create a larger sense of historical (or even artistic or hell, architectural) context. Talking about architecture in particular would have been pretty on-point, given that I think the same kinds of art-commerce discussions happen there as in the design world. Finally, and maybe this is just me, but I really wish the film had been more self-reflective. There is a point to be made about the trendiness and fetishism inherent in the act of making a movie about a font, and it would certainly have been significant to the discussion they were having. I guess it was effective because it made me think a lot, but a lot of that thinking was about how the movie could have been more interesting. Alex said maybe it was a subject for a book, and I’m not sure he’s wrong.
5. The TV Set (Jake Kasdan, 2006): This definitely wasn’t like, a significant achievement in film art, but it does have: a great cast (David Duchovny, Sigourney Weaver, and Judy Greer!) , a script that’s full of insidery TV industry fun, and a pretty dark core when you come down to it. Jake Kasdan, the director, is the Jake Kasdan who worked on Freaks and Geeks (definitely on my to-watch list if the strike keeps up, but I still have half a season of Dexter³ and The Wire to get through), so he’s working from experience. Definitely worth a rental, especially if you’re a TV nerd; it’s pretty harsh on networks.

So that’s it. I’m deciding what to order from Chapters with my $60 gift card. So far my list is:

• Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson
• The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi

I am kind of torn between getting responsible books (either big things that I “should read” by people like Frederic Jameson or things that I would actually use for school) and getting fun books (novels? maybe Tree of Smoke? Harper’s really liked it).

Other than that, I didn’t get very many presents for Christmas. My parents’ main present was a lavish family trip to Hawaii, but they felt the need to buy me a DVD player as well, despite the fact that I already own a DVD player. So I exchanged it for an apple green iPod Shuffle.

Oh, and Alex bought be a glorious KitchenAid mixer in cobalt blue (on sale, thank goodness). I haven’t baked anything with it yet, but expect endless amateur closeups of cookies and airily whipped cakes in the near future. FYI.

¹ Which I still think was a really good movie and, moreover, a really terrible example around which to centre a discussion about sexism in comedy. Apatow certainly doesn’t get it right 100%, but the movie is clearly trying and I feel like the way the edges show is a good thing, and I think that’s what people are responding to.^2
2 I should totally write an essay about Knocked Up and reception. I think it would be good.
³ OMG did you guys read that Michael C. Hall is dating Jennifer Carpenter who plays his sister are a couple?! It would be weird and confusing to play siblings with someone you are sexing. Or to sex someone who plays your sister.