The rest of the series is here. The other pieces are pretty great, as well.

This was kind of a so-so episode for my personal enjoyment, even if it wasn’t actually bad in many respects, mainly because it centred on Jenny and Dan, who are way less interesting than Blair and Serena, the actual stars of the show. But there were some moments of greatness, by which I mainly mean Chuck stealing Dan’s shoes.

So the first problem is that this episode is about Dan’s writing career, which is totally, comically, ridiculous in every way, since he is just a high school student who writes about his girl problems. On the one hand, I like that in Gossip Girl, even being a writer is about uncovering deeply-held secrets, which means it’s about knowledge-as-power dynamics, as opposed to actually having any imagination at all. However, Dan’s ridiculous writing career allowed Chuck to abandon him in the streets of New York with no wallet, no cellphone, and no shoes, so I think we’re even. You don’t eff with an effer, Dan.

Also, this scene is amazing in displaying Chuck’s casual contempt for Dan:

Chuck Bass-related aside: I am particularly disappointed in the whole “My dad hates me because he thinks I killed my mom in childbirth, so that’s why I am such an amazing dissolute teen dandy” angle. I am hoping that that’s just what Chuck tells people so they’ll feel bad for him, like the Joker’s series of different stories about how he got his scars.

Also, of interest is Lily’s deep dark secret, and the way that Bart stood behind her with the sexy elaborate necklace.

But I love how consistent and well-drawn the Blair-Serena relationship is on the show. This was totally the inevitable conclusion of the photoshoot in “Bad News Blair,” (Season 1, Ep. 4) where Eleanor picks Serena to model for her over her own daughter. I love the just, like, fundamental injustice of the fact that things just kind of come easy for Serena and that Blair has to bust her ass for everything, just as a function of their personalities or something. Especially since the actual prize of this competition is not actually a thing, it’s just this nebulous sense of being adored or something.

I further love, and I don’t think I have noted this, that every single thing in Blair Waldorf’s life is a beloved tradition that can’t be broken or altered in any way.

Did anyone else catch the Vitamin Water in the gift bags at Eleanor Waldorf’s show? Product placement as self-reference! LOL.

One, the hurt and humiliation on Blair’s face when Vanessa gives her the bad news re: Marcus and Duchess Shelley the waitress.

I love everything about that scene, from the fact that Blair is hurt and sad, not just by being cheated on, but by having to be told so by Vanessa Abrams, to the irony of her sunny dress.

Two, Chuck just floating around being creepy and manipulating people for no apparent reason. In a lilac suit!

“Cashing out so soon Humphrey?” “You really should wear a bell.” “Oh, I thought you’d be able to hear me miles away because my suit is so loud.”

Three, the ascendancy of Queen Serena.

That whole scene was so weird, how Serena takes her signature Chanel scarf headband off and ties it around Blair’s neck like that, and it goes along with a gesture of sympathy but it actually is totally like a secret signal of girl-dominance that only the initiated would understand.

So many levels of absurd and amazing.

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.

Confession: though Dan is my least favourite character on the show, I’m unclear why “we have had this fight three times in a year” is a good reason to break-up, and I think a lot his supposed relationship problems would be solved if he would only stop making Serena apologize for her existence, I was still shockingly saddened by him and Serena’s break-up. When she leaves the elevator? And he’s all “I still” and she’s all “me too”? And the doors close?

I do have to confess that I’m excited by the previews that promise the return of Bad Girl Serena.

Moreover, I love that the show was smart enough to do Dan and Serena as celebrity breakup, complete with random fangirls coming up to them on the street to give them their opinion about their relationship. That scene was amazing. I think one of the things that Gossip Girl does, besides be pretty and funny, is to kind of stage this switch to a new normal, in which having no privacy is the way it is. Case in point: Dan’s conversation with Rufus where he was all “You’re still reading should-they-break-up threads, aren’t you?,” which contains two insights about the Gossip Girl universe that I find especially fascinating. One is that this means that Rufus is aware of the existence of Gossip Girl, a website that features breathless by-the-minute accounts of his children’s relationships and social lives, and two is that this does not utterly disturb him. OMFG indeed.

In other news, I acutally like Nate and Vanessa as a couple now, and my favourite part of Blair and Chuck’s dark-groping is when Lord Marcus asks “Did you really not know it was him?” And Blair completely realizes how preposterous the whole thing is and is all “No, I knew it was him.” The way she delivers that line is gold.

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

(via Jezebel)

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.

First thing is, although I am really more of a Blair partisan, Serena was amazing this week. Not that Blair wasn’t (”Basshole”, heh). But Serena, I loved her reaction to Blair’s “It’s like Roman Holiday and I’m Gregory Peck” translating to Blair suddenly loving Marcus the British Lord even though she’s known him for like two seconds. Her reaction being basically “Okay, you love him; I will totally go along with your new, ridiculous scheme.” And even more, I loved S’s tapdancing to make sure everyone knew who everyone was when Nate walked into Blair’s party and saw Blair and Shelly the waitress, heretofore known as the Duchess (heh!). Words can’t describe it, the whole thing, and Gossip Girl’s “What’s this?” voiceover that follows; see the one minute mark in this video. Tee! Serena to the rescue with the information. It’s always about having the information on this show.

Also, poor Nate. He just wants someone to talk to, and apparently the only person he can find, besides Vanessa, who he basically abandons when he gets a better offer (because who wouldn’t), and it’s an old lady who basically turns him into an official whore. That is so much better than taking money from Chuck, his friend who loves him. Seriously, Nate is so pretty and tragic. It’s too bad Chace Crawford isn’t much of an actor.

I still don’t really care about Vanessa or the Rufus b-plot where he was like, “maybe I should abandon my children some more; oh wait, I love them!” Meh.

Images borrowed from Jaunted.

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.

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.