Moot Point

So I have had some stuff to do that I don’t want to jinx by posting about until I have more information. But, movies!

1. An Education (Lone Scherfig, 2009): So my feeling on this is that Carey Mulligan is delightful, and I walked out with a smile on my face and a skip in my step, since it’s a happy story about Learning Life Lessons and Growing while wearing fabulous 1960s clothes, but it seems a little insubstantial? I guess it didn’t really blow my mind that a teenager having an affair with a much older man who literally picked her up in the street turned out to be not such a great life choice for our hero. I don’t think it’s bad that she emerges more or less unscathed instead of as a ruined woman or whatever, but that combined with the whole glamorous fun times of having a guy take you to Paris and having your first sexual experience be all French cigarettes and Chanel no 5 makes the whole thing seem really awesome and less scarring than it probably should? It’s not so much that I need didactic storytelling here, so much as I think this movie was maybe too light-hearted. I liked the story of a girl, bored and stultified by the pressures of accomplishment and school and normalness, self-consciously making a mistake because it’s more fun and because the Times They Are A’ Changing, but like, pretending that you’re free when you’re letting yourself pretty much be bought, it is not really free. Jenny learns that, and Carey Mulligan’s so full of life that she covers up a lot of the films’ flaws, but it’s all a bit obvious with the life lessons and the Oxford and the so forth.
2. DiG! (Ondi Timoner, 2004): This is a documentary about relationship (friendship turned to rivalry) between the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols, which basically means that I have no idea why I put this on my rental queue, since I don’t really care about either of these bands. But! It turned out to be really interesting. Because the filmmakers spent years filming these guys, you have all this footage of the real stuff that happened. On the one hand you have the well-adjusted Dandy Warhols, who started out indie but signed with a big label and, being moderately talented, eventually found a place for themselves with moderate success. (They never really got big in North America but they’re apparently pretty huge in Europe.) On the other, you’ve got the totally fucked-up BJM, a ’60s revival-type band with like a zillion rotating members, most of whom seemed to be on really a lot of drugs at all times, but who are headed by visionary and asshole Anton Newcombe. It’s totally amazing: you get footage of the two bands partying and performing together in the good old days, and of Anton Newcombe kind of stalking them to try to drum up a kind of rivalry, and of the BJM beating each other up and spoiling their big shot at an industry showcase, and of Anton Newcombe fully kicking an audience member in the head. It’s more or less from the point of view of Courtney Taylor, who narrates the film, and apparently some of the BJM were upset at the way they were portrayed. But I felt like a lot of the choices TImoner makes undermines Taylor. You come away with the sense that the Dandies did kind of sell out, they get really slick and still try to kind of have the Brian Jonestown coolness rub off on them, but you can’t really have it both ways. On the other hand, Anton Newcombe kicked a guy in the head. At some point you have to compromise something to exist in the world. (I was heartened to read on Wikipedia that a lot of the members who left the BJM in the movie had come back after the release, and that they actually played a couple of songs with the Dandy Warhols at Lollapalooza in 2005, so that’s nice.)
3. Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945): So I decided to watch this after reading this lame, hateful list of “overrated directors”. One of the directors he lists is David Lean, whose movies are supposedly overlong, and apparently none of his movies are really masterpieces. Brief Encounter is one hour and twenty minutes of perfect. They meet in a train station, they fall in love, it can never be, he touches her shoulder. The narrator describes falling in love by saying “I never knew such violent things could happen to ordinary people.” The just-too-overwrought piano of the score. Celia Johnson’s breathless voiceover. Absolutely fucking perfect.
   
4. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009): Wow. We saw this Saturday, and I don’t have a lot to say other than complaints about the people down the row from me who couldn’t make even the simplest plot connections without discussing them. Some movies you can maybe murmur to your seatmate without distracting people. The White Ribbon is not one of them, it’s so quiet it’s almost painful. One thing that surprised me, for such a hard, hard movie to watch, is how much people were laughing at the “light” moments (like a father tying up his adolescent son to keep him from masturbating LOL). It’s not that I blame them — it’s not the way I felt uncomfortable watching Inglorious Basterds, which deals with the spectre of Nazis in a completely different way — it’s more that everyone was kind of grasping for any kind of release, the whole thing was so tense. It starts out in black, black silence and then slowly dissolves to an almost impossibly bright white. It almost hurts to look at for a minute. It’s set in a German village in 1913, and it’s basically about this town suffused by cruelty. Mysterious, awful things start to happen. We don’t really get an answer to who’s doing those things, but I think we mostly know the answer from the beginning, no matter how much we try to deny it. It is actually much nicer than any of the other Haneke movies I’ve seen.

Sorry, internet, I totally dropped the ball on NaBloPoMo this year and then completely disappeared. I have an excuse that involved my energy needing to be elsewhere, but I’m not going to go into it. I’m not going to lie, I had some amazing stuff happen in 2009 (I went to London and Spain and Seattle and I made some cool friends and I learned how to make pizza dough), but I also feel like I’m in a bit of a rut. This is the absolute longest I’ve ever had a full-time job and it’s kind of made me complacent. There’s nothing really wrong with my job, but I’ve used it as an excuse for a lot of stuff. I am all, I work hard all day, I deserve to come home and watch TV and not really do much of anything. Not that there’s anything wrong with TV — it’s more that there’s something wrong with never “having time” to do stuff I actually like. Obviously this is a gross first-world problem — but I have nonetheless been in a funk. I don’t like talking about my feelings on the internet, but I have been having them, and they have mostly been frustrated with myself.

But is a new year, so it’s a good time to make changes. Positive changes. I have generally not been a believer in resolutions because I think they’re cheesy and they generally set you up for failure, but I could use some resolve this year, so I am making them anyway! Here are my changes of positivity:

1. Read more: Books, specifically. I read a lot of the New Yorker and the internet, so I’m not setting a number goal here, it’s really just about making time for all the stuff on my shelves.
2. Cook more: Try out at least 2 new recipes a month. I am a halfway decent cook, when I actually put in the effort and let myself be adventurous; also it is fun and happy making to come home and turn stuff into stuff you can eat and then eat the stuff.
3. Work out more: I bought a gym membership last year, and when I was going regularly I really noticed a difference. Not so much in losing weight, but in terms of muscle tone and energy and strength and stuff. It sort of fell apart when things got busy in September, but I need to get back on it. I’ve started saying that I’ll go whenever I don’t have something else going on after work; I’m shooting for at least twice a week, which seems sustainable.
4. Take more photos: I have an amazing camera that I don’t use nearly enough.
5. See more movies: Especially in the theatre. This year was not a big cinema attendance year for me. I used to see everything.
6. Write more: Um, update my blog. Maybe weekly? Maybe start doing the strict writing about every movie I see thing? I liked that thing.

I want to talk a bit more about Twilight, and why I feel weird about. Twilight is, no matter how you look at it, a pretty terrible movie that turns vampires into unicorns, but it still, at least for me, captures something pretty real about teen girlhood. Which is probably why it’s so popular with teen girls and the women who used to be them.

When the LRB covers pop-cult stuff, they usually get it really wrong, but Jenny Turner’s piece on Twilight is pretty great:

In accordance with the adage about the rubbishy book making for the better movie, Twilight the film is great. The mise en scène luxuriates in the dinosaur-age greenery of the temperate rainforest, the ugly rainwear from Wal-Mart dampness of school and diner and Main Street, day after day after day. Eighteen-year-old Kristen Stewart, Adjani-pale and massy-haired, somehow makes perfect sense of Bella: she has a particularly fine way of squirming around in her skinny trousers, and perhaps got her chin-out speaking style from Jodie Foster, with whom she co-starred a few years ago as the diabetic daughter in Panic Room. And all the girls are squealing at Robert Pattinson – the noble Cedric Diggory in the Harry Potter films – as Edward: hair quiffed, face powder a shade or two too light, modelled, I thought, on Prince William on a night out at Boujis, laughing fondly down at Kate Middleton when she can’t help herself being middle-class. There’s a little bit of martial-arts-type leaping, some tiny vampire flashbacks done, wittily, like Nosferatu, but that apart, the film is gloriously lucid, without flicker or gloss or shadow. I went to a West End matinée on a Saturday, with girls on their eighth and eleventh viewings, and a few women closer to my age with bags from Debenhams and Primark. It was the first time I’d been to the cinema for ages and I bounced out full of beans.

Then afterwards I found myself feeling wretched, in a way I really haven’t for years and years and years. Why can’t I be freed of the need for food and sleep, why can’t I squirm exquisitely in skinny trousers, why can’t I be for ever beautiful and young? Awful memories were dislodged, of being young and full of longing – a really horrible feeling, a sickening excess of emotion with nowhere, quite, to put it. ‘I wish I could be a vampire,’ I actually said out loud at one point, though once I’d said it, I knew even that didn’t get to the heart of the problem. But the internet is great for discharging all this discontent and discomfort. I watched trailers and out-takes, I browsed on Twilight Moms, I read the interview with ‘Stephenie’ in the latest issue of American Vogue – she is ‘obsessed with the Greek salad’ in her local deli. I read somewhere some interviews with Kristen Stewart, who finds the Twilight craze ‘psychotic’.

For me, it went deeper than longing; watching Bella figure out to deal with her relatinoship with Edward, the vampire who’s constantly trying to “control” himself around her — I related to that, related to it like crazy. Now, watching it I may have been thinking about how the author is Mormon and that her Mormonism influenced the story in a lot of ways, but I feel like it most likely would have been potent for me anyway, in part because when I was Bella’s age, I dated a Mormon dude. I want to be careful writing about this because it was a private relationship that we had a long time ago — but suffice it to say that chastity was a big concern for him. This was okay with me, because I wasn’t really to go any further than we did, and I really cared for him a lot and wouldn’t really want him to do something he was ashamed of. But at the same time, I was a teen girl with hormones and feelings, and obviously I…wanted more. Don’t get me wrong, my high school boyfriend was nothing like Edward — he didn’t watch me sleep, and he was fun and interesting to be around.

Twilight is basically about that feeling — about wanting something you feel you shouldn’t want, about wanting someone to give into desires they really don’t want to, about how when you fall in love at 18 it basically seems like the most important thing in the world — and it does it really well. When Edward tells Bella how “dangerous” he is (main danger skill: overacting), she still pushes toward him. “I’m not afraid of you,” she says, kind of hoping he’ll “lose control” but mostly knowing he won’t.

When he appears (totally creepily) in her bedroom window one night, he tells her not to move. “I just want to try something.” They start kissing, and as soon as he’s opened the door, she goes for it — until he pushes her away. “I’m stronger than I thought I was,” he says. “I wish I could say the same,” she gasps back. I don’t know what the consensus is on Kristen Stewart’s performance, but I think she really takes the Bella on the page and gives her all the desire without really understanding what you’re desiring — the sense that there is something sublime if you could just cross over this one line (which for her is represented by these flashes of Edward biting her neck, which doesn’t really even seem to sublimate the sex thing all that much), but… you just can’t.

It’s sort of awful, because it’s so confusing and guilt-ridden, but at the same time there’s a kind of romance to it, a kind of bigness and stakes that nothing else will ever really have.

Oh, I don’t miss being a teenager at all.

I was planning to write a longer thing about Twilight and my adolescence and the relations between the two tonight, but I was busy with other things! High culture things.

I maybe somehow went to an Opera gala concert tonight?¹ Culture! Opera’s one of those things that you would think I would like, since I like pretentious stuff and when people sing things they would normally say (or that are their heart’s unspoken desires) and also melodrama, but I really know very little about it.

(Stuff like this is weird for me because I’m a big enough fan of all the aforementioned to enjoy the performing of dramatic songs without a lot of foreknowledge. But I obviously spend a lot of time with “low” culture, but I honestly can’t see that big a distinction between opera and like, a soap opera, besides oldness and the fact that one is performed in a foreign language. They both really are these sensationalist, stylized dramatic forms with ridiculous stories and overwrought emotions expressed through song and other totally artificial behaviours. Though opera does have the whole vocal virtuouso thing. Which is to say, the more I think about it, the more I think opera is probably awesome and is just waiting for me to discover it.)

Then Pamela Martin (of local CTV news fame) came out and said “May all your news be good news.” Then we ate our free cake and tried to have a drink at the Cascade on the way home, but there was a 25-minute wait, so we just bought some IPA since we’re trying to catch up on Mad Men before the season finale Sunday.

…I only wish I had talked Alex into wearing his bow tie.

So I’ve been thinking about the deal with Gossip Girl this year. It’s not really suffering from the “high school show goes to college” Veronica Mars-type problems, more from “the first couple of episodes of every season feel a little off, until some Secrets have time to Build Up and cause Tension that needs to be Resolved.” For me it hit its stride around Rufus and Lily’s wedding, with the reappearance of Scott, and his big revelation leading to the reaffirmation of love at the centre of the show. And Sonic Youth.

Since then, the stakes are getting weirdly higher. The theme of this week was basically “we’re not in high school anymore,” at least in the A-story. The B-story centred around Dan and Olivia’s one-month anniversary, which is actually one of the most charmingly eighteen-year-old things that ever happened on Gossip Girl and still managed to feature Jimmy Fallon.¹ But I can think of at least three different characters who pulled the “this isn’t high school anymore” line: Vanessa, to Nate when he asks her to sit on potentially damaging video of his cousin who is running for public office because of their “friendship”; Chuck, to Serena, in explaining why she had to suck it up because she couldn’t just take Blair (or anyone) for granted now; and Blair, to Serena again (because Serena really needed it, I guess), about how Blair is trying to “make a life for herself” while S is just kind of treading water, alienating people over her stupid PR job, and fake dating Robert Pattinson, and that’s not really someone Blair Waldorf needs in her life.

The point is: the high school code isn’t working anymore, which is a problem, since for Gossip Girl, high school is supposed to be a sort of mini-life, where you learn to deal with being a public person when that’s something you can’t really control the boundaries of anymore. But the “real world” isn’t so tight or so easily controlled.

My spiel has always been that Gossip Girl’s about letting go, about realizing that “privacy” was out over and has been replaced with this new gossip-surveillance-world. But that this is okay, and that this configuration allows for its own various pleasures and games. You see it in the way that Blair’s liberation started with a public striptease; in the way Serena uses the paparazzi for her own gain, in the way Nate and Chuck and everyone instinctively manage public perception. But that’s easy when it’s as schematic as it is within the high school setup, where Gossip Girl basically stands for the media. It gets messier when the knowledge and power isn’t so centralized; it’ll be interesting to see how Gossip Girl deals with all this.

So remember how I used to post regularly to my blog? And then I graduated grad school and basically stopped blogging, because having a full time job makes it hard to devote an hour or two a day to blogging and to keeping up with a full TV schedule? (And as I write I am weeks behind on Mad Men.) I do miss regular posting, but once you get out of the habit it’s hard to get back in. So I will be doing the National Blog Posting Month thing for November. I have some stuff going on this month, so I can’t promise that some of the posts won’t just be YouTube videos and exclamation points as opposed to thoughtful cultural critique, but I will do my best to make sure something goes up every day.

I hope everyone reading this had a good Halloween. I didn’t really do anything this year (which is lame, but I am Old and have been very Tired lately) except watch the Guy Maddin Dracula Ballet. It was pretty amazing, in that it was shot in classic silent film style (intertitles, coloured filters to set the mood, irises everywhere), but was also Guy Maddin so it was an adaptation that was subtly funny and self-aware in terms of the issues of scary foreigners and the threat of female sexuality in the original. (The ship arrives to intertitles saying “Immigrants!” “Others! From Other Lands!” I love Guy Maddin so hard.) Also, it had dancing.

So I sort of fell off with the Gossip Girl blogging this year for two reasons: 1) I’ve sort of fallen off with all my blogging and 2) it got really hard to come up with things to say besides “So, Dan and Serena got back together and then broke up again. Again.” Though I loved parts of this season, there was definitely an ebb around the period of Blair getting kicked out of Yale (twice) for (as TWOP’s Jacob has pointed out) inviting someone to the opera at the wrong time, and the aforementioned Serena-Dan relationship yo-yo, not to mention basically the fact that disgusting Aaron Rose was ever on the show. It’s like they had 19 episodes worth of story, but they had to shoot 25.

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Hi everyone! What’s up. I’ve been kind of taking an internet vacation from everything but facebook and email and food websites, mainly since I’d started finding all my free time eaten up with my car-crash-type fascination with nonsociety.com. It’s kind of nice, even if Alex now has to update me on all the dumb internet stuff.

But on to more important things.

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Obviously there are a thousand places on the internet you can get Gossip Girl recaps, so this one’s going to be all about the party dresses:

The most prominent last night, Vanessa’s is beautiful, belongs to someone else, and is transparent when you hold it up to the light.

Serena’s is everything at once. It manages to both be a big-skirted ballgown and show off her legs at the same time. Like her, it shouldn’t be that gorgeous, but it works. (And the less said about her no-tie boyfriend, the better.)

Jenny’s reflects her current situation all too well: she is a black-hearted little Dickensian seamstress. With fishnet tights, standby of any girl who’s trying to be more bad than she really is.

The mean girls are all forgettable in pastels.

Blair’s is a little harder to pin down. It’s more structured and old-fashioned, almost parodic of old-Hollywood glamour. It’s a bit too old for her, but she wears it like armor. (Chuck’s tux is like a normal tux, except that his dinner jacket is covered in sequins.)

Also, I know that many might decry the influence of Gossip Girl on teen girls, encouraging, as it does, bitchiness, acquisitiveness, and a complacency about an economy and culture that’s kind of broken. But I don’t know that Gossip Girl isn’t a step above many of the classic teen soap operas even by the measure of female representation. S & B are no Buffy (who had her own problems, but let’s not get into that now), but they’re not exactly passive victims either. They may be bitches, but that’s not a bad thing anymore, remember? Bitches get stuff done. The Gossip Girls, they go after what they want, even if means crazily running away from home to start their own clothing line.¹ Gossip Girls don’t let boys walk all over them. Gossip Girls masturbate.

And while I am mostly grossed out by the transformation of Chuck from would-be rapist to romantic hero, I do applaud that they made their gross alpha-male sex dude the most fey man on television.

Before I get to my sad weekly movie, I need to talk about the new Star Trek trailer: SO BAD.

I can’t even talk about how bad this looks. Alex showed it to me last night and I just started sputtering “SO bad. SO unbelievably bad.” Hoverbikes! Spunky children! (Just like those Star Wars prequels)! “I will not allow you to lecture me.” “Then why don’t you stop me?” It’s like Amok Time, but with a naked chick to quell the homoerotic subtext. (I like to think about the fact that slash fiction might not exist if it weren’t for Star Trek sometimes.)

Other movie trailer that makes me despair for all of cinema: Confessions of a Shopaholic.

It honestly doesn’t look like the same class of train wreck as Star Trek: The New Class, but I just get angry every time I see it. Something inside me just twitches, I think the part that wishes this kind of faux-Bridget Jones thing was over already. Also, most poorly timed movie ever, yes? The premise of the story is basically: “Credit card debt, LOL.” Actually, it might be the best timed movie ever, since the full premise is: “Credit card debt, LOL. Wait, cute girl with huge debts falls for rich guy! Problem solved.” It’s totally the new depression version of those golddigger musicals from the 1930s. We’re in the money, indeed.

Anyway:

1. Joe Vs. The Volcano (John Patrick Shanley, 1990): This movie managed to be both totally awesome and completely terrible at the same time. I kind of admire it for that, even though I can’t really excuse its astounding feats of racism. The story is — Joe is a hypochondriac who finds out he’s dying which allows him to finally start living. He does this by agreeing to jump into a volcano so an industrialist can buy minerals from a fictional island tribe who’ve got crazy superstitions. A magical black cab driver played by Ossie Davis teaches him how to dress. Then he meets some Meg Ryans (she plays three different characters, for no apparent reason). He and the third Meg Ryan go on a boat to the island — but then the boat sinks, so they ride his ridiculous steamer trunks until they drift to the appropriate island.

Then they realize they’re suddenly in love, so they jump into the volcano together. Then they get magically shot out of the volcano, the whole island civilization (a civilization that combines Polynesian, Hebrew, Italian, and other traditions to be equal-opportunity offensive to all ethnicities — seriously, Nathan Lane is involved) is destroyed, but it’s a happy ending, because they realize that blonde Meg Ryan’s dad actually defrauded Joe, by paying his doctor to tell him he was dying of a brain cloud, but actually Joe is totally fine and therefore just almost killed himself for no reason.
It jumps around in tone like crazy, and some of the parts are totally awesome.
The whole first part in the factory looks like Metropolis or Brazil. The way that Shanley creates the fluorescent light atmosphere is really great.

This opening image of the crooked path is pretty clever as an way to start the movie, as well. It’s interesting and German Expressionist-y, and it’s a pretty clear signal about how the narrative’s going to proceed.
I also found LA Meg Ryan really funny, almost despite myself. The bit where she recites the poem? Priceless. “Long ago, the delicate tangles of his hair… covered the emptiness of my hand.”

Of course, this is a movie where he’s a prince just for not boning her.
I totally get why it’s a cult movie, because it’s really unlike anything else I’ve ever seen, and it’s kind of a mess with flashes of greatness. But seriously.

I have no response to that.