Moot Point

1. Brown Sugar (Rick Famuyiwa, 2002): This is one of those movies that the idea of sounds better than the actual thing of. Loosely inspired by Common’s “I Used To Love H.E.R,” it is basically a love story where Sanaa Lathan’s love of hip hop and her love of Taye Diggs are intertwined. Lathan’s character is a music writer and is working on a book; Diggs’ character is a producer who quits his major label job after he’s asked to produce a remake of “The Girl Is Mine” for a black and white rapper duo, called “The Ho Is Mine.” Diggs abandons his shiny suits to start his own label, with Mos Def’s character as his first artist. The whole thing is Diggs and Lathan, childhood friends, realizing they love each other as more than friends, despite the fact that they’re involved with other people. Anyway, the idea is fantastic, and I loved both the lead performances — Diggs is way better than I thought he was based on not really having seen him in much, really charming and funny and like, oozing with charisma, and Lathan has the harder part, needing to seem cool and smart and grounded, and she does a great job — but the dialogue occasionally gets bogged down in the “our love is a commentary on the sad state of hip hop!” stuff. The best bits were the early scenes, where you get a documentary-style section of various hip hop greats talking about when they fell in love with hip hop, and a great flashback scene with, like, Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh.
2. Evita (Alan Parker, 1996): I have had a weird nostalgic obsession with this movie lately. It came out when I was 13, and I bought the soundtrack and listened to it constantly, to the point that I still know most of the words. Seeing the movie again, there was a lot that I didn’t remember about it. Parker has a tendency toward using the songs as opportunities for montages that doesn’t always work. It’s great when you can contrast Eva’s self-glorifying with all the actual horrible things going on, seeing shots of newspapers being blown-up and riots contrasted with the glamour of Eva’s life, but since the whole thing is songs, it occasionally gets a bit MTV-ish for me. I know this is a “rock opera,” not a traditional musical, so the rules about numbers-as-spectacle don’t really apply, but still. At the time, I thought Antonio Banderas was having the most fun, and I still kind of do. Jonathan Pryce is great in this and Madonna is fine, but I still love Antonio Banderas’s performance the most; everyone else is kind of dour and serious and going for naturalistic, but Antonio’s completely giving it 110%, switching from sarcastic to giddy, his brow constantly furrowed with cynical rage. It’s hilarious and amazing. That sequence is still one of my favourites, not just because of how much I liked the use of the film projector in staging it. His character, Che, isn’t really a character, he’s the narrator, so Parker basically has him skulk around in the background, playing servants or whoever happens to fit the scene. The whole play relies on the counterpoint of Che’s cynicism biting through Evita’s celebrity self-myth-making, so having Madonna — generally known for her ambition and sexuality outstripping her talent, an icon before she’s a singer, though she sounds her absolute best here — play Evita is brilliant in a way that I completely missed when I was 13.
   It’s also strangely appropriate to this year, the election being more about theatre and entertainment than ever; I kept thinking about the Emmies and Sarah Palin and Tina Fey and stuff.
3. Matilda (Danny DeVito, 1996): I loved this book when I was little. I can’t imagine why I would have adored a book about a smart, bookish girl who proves that small people can be better than big people because they have magic powers in their brains, except, oh wait. Obviously flattering to Roald Dahl’s smart, bookish readers. The other, real reason I loved it was that it had a very dark side; the horrible stuff that could happen was actually horrible, like being locked in “the Chokey,” by the totally unhinged principal of your elementary school. “The Chokey” is this tiny room full of sharp things that poke at you and there’s a dripping pipe and anyway it’s actually really scary, something that the “scary” stuff in kids’ books often weren’t. The movie adaptation was remarkably faithful to the book as I remember it, even keeping the mean principal throwing a little girl by her hair, granted in a cartoonish way. The one choice I question was having Danny DeVito narrate, not because I have a problem with his voice, but he was so good as Matilda’s awful TV-obsessed, used-car salesman father, and the narrator’s voice is obviously the same. He really shouldn’t have decided to do both. While I’m at it, Rhea Perlman is also hilarious as the mom, especially when she tells Miss Honey (Embeth Davidtz, who I spent the whole movie thinking was Sarah Paulson) that going to college was a bad move for Matilda, their insanely gifted daughter: “You choose books. I chose looks.” Picture Rhea Perlman with her hair dyed really bad blonde saying that, and you get the comedy. But getting back to DeVito, he did a pretty good job of getting the feel of the book right without making it too dark; the Wormwoods’ house is unambiguously ugly and awful, but in a tacky way; the school has the right mix of awfulness and, uh, watchability.
4. Trans-Europ-Express (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1966): So Robbe-Grillet is best-known as the writer of Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad and also of several nouveaux romans, including The Erasers, which plays on the detective novel, but isn’t actually a detective novel. Anyway, he also directed a handful of movies. This was his first, and it’s kind of a slightly less complex Charlie Kaufman thing, about a writer (Robbe-Grillet) writing a movie about a drug smuggler, on a train; the smuggler keeps showing up on the train, and the film-within-the-film kind of reflects the confusion of the friends that the writer is working with. “Wait, so what’s up with the prostitute?” “Uh, I dunno.” But then of course she totally becomes a key part of the story.
5. The Man Who Lies (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1968): We saw these in a double feature, and this was the weirder of the two, and therefore the one I preferred. This is about Jean-Louis Trintignant, who was the smuggler in the first film, a dude who is getting chased by some soldiers and then rolls into a quiet Slovak town, where he tells a lot of lies to a lot of ladies about his friendship with the town’s resistance hero. It’s a weird movie, because you realize by the end of it that most of the film is literally just Trintignant talking; his voice mostly controls what you see, but slowly the visual track starts to break from the soundtrack. The other interesting aspect of the soundtrack, besides that one male voice, is the fact that it’s scored with a series of weird, hard-to-identify sound effects instead of music, creating this great, confusing, otherworldly effect. These kinds of effects accompany scnes like the otherwise silent scenes showing the resistance leader’s wife, sister, and maid, who live in this female-dominated household, playing these odd sexual games. Robbe-Grillet has been accused of gratuitous porniness in the past, because of his clear bondage fetish, but I think the way these scenes were staged was just wonderful. It showed these three women communicating with each other, in a way that is kind of obscure but at the same time very obvious; it made me think about all those French feminist theories of women’s sexuality as being defined by proximity and closeness, and the idea that conventional language isn’t really appropriate to women’s experience. There was a little bit of écriture feminine in there, especially when contrasted with Trintignant’s almost exhausting verbosity.

The three best things about last night’s Gossip Girl. Continue Reading »

I really thought that I’d be able to get a bunch of reading and writing and movie-watching done, but mostly I have just been being bored and very broke.

1. Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968): You guys, this movie is amazing. I didn’t really realize, but this is in the grand tradition of paranoid-lady Gothic stories, like Rebecca and Suspicion. Rosemary’s bedroom even has yellow wallpaper. Most of the film is set in the apartment. She even tries to tell her doctor what’s up, and he assumes she’s crazy, so she’s trapped by the people who are supposed to be caring for her. But it’s interesting because her suspicions of her husband are…totally founded. He actually lets the devil rape her. It’s really disturbing the way they do it too, because she has this weird kind-of dream sequence that’s actually real, and then when Rosemary wakes up and finds scratches all over herself, her husband is just like “Yeah, I may have had sex with you while you were asleep, I hope that’s cool, lol.” Horrifying. I love it. Also all the aging-actors playing the coven. It’s kind of interesting when you read it against the usual texts of female hysteria, because this time Mia Farrow’s crazy paranoia is completely justified by the crazy reality of her situation, being then, not crazy at all. There is also an interesting argument to be made that you could place this movie in the context of more specifically political masculine conspiracy movies of the 1960s and 1970s; plus you know, the growing importance of second-wave feminism making marriage and family kind of feel like a conspiracy against women. So, interesting!
2. Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004): I remain unsure why I decided to watch this this week. I think Rosemary’s Baby reminded me of it. Because look: Other than the leading ladies with short haircuts who live in New York apartments with wallpaper, this movie’s kind of the exact opposite of Rosemary’s Baby, in that it tries to make you believe in something supernatural (in this case reincarnation) in order for you to make a weird, not really complete moral leap to seeing this little boy as more than a little boy, but then it pulls the rug out from under you. I’m not saying the film really makes people accept that this ten-year-old boy is somehow Nicole Kidman’s husband, and it certainly makes that impossible to actually be on board with the whole thing when you see a grown woman kiss a young boy on the mouth. The thing is, it kind of plays with making you think this kid is somehow magically reincarnated, but then it does stuff like the kiss or the scene where Nicole Kidman’s grown-up fiance, Danny Houston, totally attacks the kid and spanks him, to remind you forcefully of his childhood. It’s hard to be totally sure what it’s trying to say, the whole thing is so tense and mannered and upper-crust, but those things all make it really fascinating. Plus it’s gorgeously shot.
3. Burn After Reading: I feel like I read a comment by someone who said that although the tone is completely different from No Country For Old Men, the way it sees the world is very similar. I think that’s true, and I want to tell you why. Diary of an Anxious Black Woman (whose movie posts I always really like) talks about how cynical and sadistic a film it is, but I would read the film with a different inflection. It’s a film against the grand conspiracy, against the myth — this time it works against the Cold War version of a political world where there’s a Big Brother watching at every turn. That’s why Linda and Chad make the patently ridiculous decision to take their CD full of documents to the Russians. That’s the world it seems to be setting up, but it slowly breaks down, as a few things happen by coincidence (like Linda and Harry meeting) and others turn out to be brought on by the characters themselves (like when Harry realizes the car following him isn’t a shady government agent, just a PI for a divorce firm). The film begins with a familiar kind of zoom, from a map-like view of the country from space, to the CIA headquarters in Langley, and then ends by pulling back out; at the beginning of the film, it seems to be narrowing things down, promising us something important, but by the end it’s clear that we’re pulling back out because we’ve just seen a random, messy sample out of the random, messy world. I’m a big fan of the melodrama, of which the whole point is to give people’s everyday stories grand moral significance. I find films like this so compelling because they are the exact opposite of that. They’re also not really tragic, because tragedies are all about the fates and the restoration of order and the value of catharsis. The Coens certainly don’t give us that. They give us all this fun, kind of sweet, spy farce, but things never resolve into any kind of narrative logic. I have sort of been having an argument with this post on things what things. I like the way she describes it, but her argument that basically “The movie is intended to be fun to watch,” and I don’t really think it completely is. There’s too much that’s unsettling about it — the failure to meet any kind of generic expectations makes the whole thing kind of uncertain, the total shocking sudden brutality of the violence, how indifferent the camera is to the deaths of the characters — for me to think that the Coens want me to just have fun and go with it. But I do think they want me to have fun; I don’t think the “What did we learn?” “…” ending should negate the whole rest of the movie, because the fact is it was fun: the whole cast is pretty much a joy to watch, from McDormand meta-ing that they wouldn’t have her in Hollywood if she doesn’t get a bunch of surgeries; to Brad Pitt’s adorable dancing; to Clooney’s weirdly tan, running-obsessed womanizer; to Tilda Swinton’s performance as the World’s Worst Pediatrician; to Malkovich’s dissolute CIA analyst and self-parody; to Richard Jenkins’ sweetly affecting performance as the gym manager who Frances McDormand just doesn’t see. ¹ So, I don’t know. It’s kind of an unanswered question — like if it’s an occasionally fun movie that has no point, why did we just watch it? It kind of gets back either a) the meaning of life or, more answerably and more interestingly b) the meaning of entertainment.

This week on Gossip Girl: a blackout pushes dramatic action forward! What a novel plot twist! (Like it matters.)

Continue Reading »

Embedded below is Leighton Meester’s cover of “Bette Davis Eyes.”

It’s not laughably bad, but it’s resoundingly mediocre, which is something that Blair Waldorf would never allow.

(via Jezebel)

Oh wow, I completely forgive them for the slightly awkward season premiere, because this whole episode was magic.

Before I get to it, though, uh, Leighton’s making an album?! A music album? Oh, how I hope this is a lie; I don’t think I can deal with Blair Waldorf putting out a vanity project album, either of the Hayden Panettiere uncomfortable pop music writhing in high heels or of the Scarlett Johanssen pretentious Tom Waits cover, nuzzling Salman Rushdie variety. Continue Reading »

I watched the VMAs last night, even though every year, I say I’m not going to, and I mainly agree with Rich from fourfour about everything, except maybe Christina.

But I am starting to think Kanye’s performance was kind of good. I was initially underwhelmed, but I haven’t been able to get it out of my head all day.

Oh, mainstream music.

I am still out of blog practice, apparently, so you get two weeks of movies in one.

1. Hamlet 2 (Andy Fleming, 2008): I’ve read some very positive reviews of this and some very negative ones, so I have to conclude that is kind of a love or hate piece. I definitely fall on the positive side, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say I loved it. I did like it, though I did have a few complaints — mainly relating to the pacing and the Catherine Keener character’s fun-to-boring ratio. I think the movie needed it there to make Steve Coogan’s character’s emasculation super-clear (she is mean, and there is a fertility clinic involved) but I feel like having it in the movie instead of just being background info. is kind of a waste, especially since the class stuff is so much funnier. It’s sort of a twist on the “inspirational teacher” movie, with the twist being that the students don’t need the teacher, he needs them. Plus, the climax of the movie is the performance of Coogan’s masterwork, Hamlet 2, which inolves pop music, Jesus, a time machine, and an Elton John song, so you know I loved it. That aspect — the lauding of an amateur production with the sense of its badness being so great that it is transformed into amazing, which is made crystal clear when they have a character in the audience basically say exactly that — reminded me of Be Kind, Rewind, a connection I probably also made because the lovely Melonie Diaz is in both, bringing a wonderful sense of being game and the smartest person in the room.
   
2. Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998): I caught a bunch of this on TV last weekend, and, wow, this movie is way weirder than I remembered. The whole thing where Pleasantville — the idealized black-and-white nuclear family past — starts breaking down and turning to colour when confronted with real feelings about sex and art and books, that part is still great. The love scene with Jeff Daniels and Joan Allen where he takes off her grey makeup and sees the full-colour skin underneath is still absolutely beautiful. But things go bizarrely off the rails once that has happened. The division between “coloreds,” who listen to rock n’ roll and have to sit on a separate balcony in the courthouse in an obvious racial parallel, and generally have access to real authentic feelings, and the normal people is so, so weird. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to mean either about race or about racism, since the “colored” people in Pleasantville are not actually people of different races, they are glowingly white people like Reese Witherspoon and Joan Allen and Jeff Daniels. (Also, poor Reese apparently learns that sex is good, but whoring isn’t actually fulfilling, so she decides to stay in the ’50s and go to college? And her mom doesn’t seem to notice she’s gone when Tobey Maguire comes back?)
   
3. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (Adam McKay, 2004): I actually had managed to go the four years since this came out without seeing it, and to be honest…I am not sure if I can endorse Anchorman. It has some great moments, like “Afternoon Delight”: …and jazz flute! I also loved the way it captured the ugly 1970s aesthetic. And I have to admit that, more than most of those other “frat pack” comedies, this one was really very self-aware of the inherent sexism of dude humour. In the negative column is the fact that Will Ferrell, he tends to overdo it; shouting something doesn’t necessarily make it funny. Of course, on the other hand, it seemed to be set in the 1970s so that they could get away with lots of “funny” sexual harassment jokes. I kept comparing it to the way Mad Men handles similar issues — there’s the constant reminder that we’re in the past, and that things are different now — but Mad Men obviously has time to explore what that all means in way more detail, and is obviously working in a very different genre. Anyway, I know that a lot of this stuff is funny because it breaks rules, because it’s inappropriate, but I kind of grit my teeth when I think about why certain aspects of it are funny. I just keep coming back to the fact that it retells the story of women’s liberation — from an almost exclusively male perspective. And sure, it’s clear that it’s wrong when Tim Robbins is like “I’m totally for women’s lib” and then pushes Christina Applegate into a bear pit — but it’s also funny. The thing is, if comedy is a social release valve, then what exactly is Anchorman releasing? Because my instincts about that are not particularly generous.
4. In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008): I’m not sure how much intelligent commentary I have about In Bruges, but, so good! I didn’t really know that much going in, just “dark comedy” and “Colin Farrell.” But, the great thing is, I forgot that Colin Farrell is a really good actor! There are three great performances here, actually: Farrell’s, Brendan Gleeson’s (who I just realized is Mad-Eye Moody in the Harry Potter movies), and Ralph Fiennes. Farrell and Gleeson are gangsters who go to Bruges to wait for the heat to die down after a hit, and then they meet a dwarf on a movie shoot, and there’s all this hilarious self-aware play around dwarves and art movies and so on. It’s very funny, but there’s also an aspect of tragedy to it. Plus it’s lovely; Bruges seems like a beautiful city, and the cinematography does a commendable job of emphasizing all its old fashioned, fairy tale beauty, which is in marked contrast to all the murder and suicide in In Bruges.
   

I’m not sure I want to devote whole paragraphs to this show. It wasn’t very good. I will probably still watch this week. (On the other hand, this week’s ANTM was epic, so the CW has that going for it.)

• None of Jessica Walter’s lines are inherently funny, but she is so good she actually turns banal phrases into hilarity.
• Annie would be a better heroine if she had a flaw or if someone disliked her for a reason that was actually her fault.
• What kind of high school does Spring Awakening as its school play? It’s, um, not the kind of thing I would have wanted to perform in front of my parents.
• Jennie Garth has actually gotten prettier and more likeable as she’s aged.
• I hope Brandon isn’t Kelly’s baby daddy.
• What’s the point of bringing Brenda back if she’s going to be nice all the time?
• How much more would I like “Silver” if she was played by Willa Holland?
• Is “I’m breaking up with us” the new “I choose me”?

So, I was really excited that Gossip Girl is back for a new season. I have been rewatching the old season for …research (really), and I have to say that this was not exactly a top episode. Continue Reading »