1. The Wolfman (was apparently directed by someone on purpose, okay his name was Joe Johnston, and it turns out he also directed Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, who knew?, 2010): I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie this deeply bad on purpose. If you like bad movies, it’s pretty fun, in that it features Anthony Hopkins wearing a tiger bathrobe, totally phoning it in, delivering shocking revelations like he’s talking about what he had for dinner last night; it also features a severed arm that is STILL ABLE TO SHOOT A GUN. And an arbitrary romance. And Benicio del Toro, English Shakespearean Actor. No seriously, that is his character.
2. A bunch of more recent John Waters movies: things really go downhill after Serial Mom, huh? Of the later ones, I liked A Dirty Shame the most, and Pecker the least. Pecker is rough, y’all. I still love J-Dub though.
3. Welcome to the Dollhouse (Todd Solondz, 1995): This kind of hurt to watch, almost. I was never really Dawn Weiner in junior high, but there was a year where it was close, and that felt really important in 8th grade. This came out when I actually was that age, and I never could have dealt with it then, never could have had the distance to find it funny as well as painful. Even now, it’s such a great combination of funny and awful: the way the kidnapping turns from this thing where everyone’s almost sincere about the kidnapping — but then it still kind of turns into a triumph for Missy and it’s back to being so cynical. I don’t know if you can really say anything else about this movie. This says it all:
4. Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama, 2009): I actually saw this first, but I put it after Welcome to the Dollhouse because it is clearly a worse movie about the perils of adolescent girldom. This one is more in the horror vein, sort of a pinker, poppier Ginger Snaps. It suffers from a bit of Diablo Cody’s patented adorableness, but I liked it better than Juno. It’s one of those things, like Twilight where I love it precisely because it speaks to such a fundamental thing of how I remember being a teenager. This is a different thing than Twilight, which is fully about the danger of one’s own desire; Jennifer’s Body is about toxic friendships. I don’t where this thing comes from, if it’s a teen girl thing, or a white girl thing, or a suburban high school thing, but I sure had a couple of those incredibly intense teen girl friendships where they’re the main person in your life. It’s the old-time “romantic friendship” thing: it’s not necessarily that you want to bone your best friend, it’s more that you just have all this energy to devote to…something that’s not your family, and you’re not ready for that to be a boyfriend yet, so it winds up being your BFF. And that’s scary, and those friendships always kind of implode. I love horror, and I love when things turn real high school fears into something fantastic and hideous. I’ve been listening to “Live Through This” constantly ever since.
5. A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2009): One word review: disappointing! The press has been so good, and the negative reviews (like at The Awl) complain that the fashion designer director aestheticizes the emotional content of the story too much, which to me, is not really a negative per se. But the problem for me was that the emotional content wasn’t even aestheticized well! You know me, I love a Minnelli, or a Fassbinder. I wrote a whole thesis on Almodóvar. Bringing all the emotion into the mise-en-scene is what melodrama’s all about; there’s a Hollywood tradition to this. But at this point it’s so done that you have to do it well to be effective. The thing where most of the movie’s shot with this yellow-ish gray filter, but then the full spectrum of colour comes in when something nice happens to Colin Firth (who was great despite the general lameness he’s working in) is so bad, and the “I’m a sad man in my meticulous modern house” sequence at the beginning is so laboured. It did get better as it went on and some life was injected (in the form of Julianne Moore and Nicholas Hoult). And the clothes were great: the suits, Nicholas Hoult’s giant awesome sweater, J. Moore’s giant hair; but ultimately it’s not fabulous enough to really transcend its coldness. Tom Ford might be able to make a great movie someday — but this wasn’t it. I keep thinking what an interesting story it is, how great it could have been if Almodóvar or Todd Haynes or someone had made it.
   There are some arresting images though. I’ve woken up with ink all over my bed.

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.

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 am basically just watching this video on repeat to comfort myself:

I tumblr’d this already with a different YouTube embed, but I am pretty much dying of awesome over here. I love almost everything Beyonce does, but this is maybe my favourite video of hers. It is basically her shooting dayglo guns at men with cameras for heads and adjusting her gold bra/breastplate, with Lady Gaga. It’s so amazing because on the one hand all this stuff makes it seem like this really straightforward commentary on Beyonce’s role as subject of the male gaze and her aggressive response to same – -again, she shoots bullets and arrows at dudes with giant video cameras for heads — but she still is not wearing pants. Lady Gaga always does self-aware, but it’s usually like “Look, I’m being self-aware, enjoy me!” (which I do). When B does self-aware, it’s this weird complex thing where she’s self-aware, and she’s badass, but she’s also still somehow presenting herself very carefully as a brand, and she still brings this incredible sense of passion and abandon to everything she does. But in a way that seems calculated. It’s like a faucet of abandon she turns on and off. Look at her and Gaga dancing side by side. Gaga does all the steps, but Beyonce does them with fervor. She hits it harder, she pushes it further, she snaps back faster. That’s what I’ll always love about Beyonce, no matter who else comes along; she lives in this weird dichotomy of, like, crazy passionate fire and total self-control and self-packaging.

So 2012 has a metacritic score of 5.1 and a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 39%, but I would not let that dissuade you if you like things that blow up and incredible cinematic distillations of the postmodern world. This is not a movie for critics. This is a movie that takes the apocalypse movie to its logical, incredible, landmass-shifting conclusion. It is almost avant-garde in its total disregard for explaining how neutrinos destablize the earth’s crust, and its full-on repetition of the same dazzling sequence (and it is really dazzling, every time!) of racing to get a plane to take off before the runway crumbles away beneath it. This happens not twice, but three times. Every time, our embattled family that has been broken up by modernity and technology (Dad’s always at his laptop) is left to hold each other as they fly over another destroyed city. It would be cleverly meta if this movie were in any way capable of irony.

The grand political stuff rings sort of depressingly true if you get past all the silliness and bluster and the fact that Oliver Platt is the only evil politician in the entire world and the fact that they save humanity by building arks and that they manage to keep the end of the world a secret for years. (Also, why would they assassinate the director of the Louvre in the same tunnel where Princess Di was killed? And why would the newscast in the movie mention this?) They sell seats on the arks to the richest people in the world, and then they outsource the building to China, where they can just load cheap labour into trucks. So some small proportion of the first world weathers the earthquakes and tsunamis long enough to set a course for the land of the future, the new world — now the highest elevation on earth (because the tectonic plates all shifted?), and probably the only continent to avoid flooding: Africa. We’ll get it right this time!

I’m not arguing that all this genius was in any way intentional — not that the movie is made without skill, the effects are incredible and the action sequences are well-paced and easy to follow, all the actors don’t get in the way of all this (except Danny Glover, who is trying a little hard for gravitas), and it is in general adrenaline-tastic — but oh man, it is, in so many ways, the ultimate.

Real Vancouver Sun story:

VICTORIA — With the second instalment of the Twilight vampire movies about to open, a University of Victoria professor is warning parents and young Twilight fans that the series doesn’t depict healthy relationships between the sexes.

UVic political scientist [italics mine] Janni Aragon says she understands the difference between fact and escapist fiction, but the distinction might be lost on some of the young audience for the book and movie series. “I get that, but does my 11-year-old daughter?”

The article goes on to quote a 12 year-old reader who thinks the way the relationship is portrayed is unrealistic and that Edward is condescending to Bella, and then ends this way:

Aragon said she loved reading the stories: “I could not put these books down. I think it will be interesting to see how Hollywood presents the next book. Ultimately, Bella’s character does become stronger, especially in the last book.”

But she said the danger is that the series will normalize the couple’s relationship for young, impressionable people.

“They need to realize that this is just a movie [about sparkly, baseball-playing vampires], just a book [about sparkly, baseball-playing vampires], and that it’s not the norm.”

Thanks, professor.

I tried to write a post about Glee, but I wasn’t really in the right mood. I think I will just sit next to my amp and smudge my mascara for awhile.

If I was going to have a threesome with a movie star, I would probably want to do it to this white girl cover of this hip hop song.

Whatever You Like – Anya Marina

Jane Russell, winning at life. The boys? All in the naked shorts? Their bodies turned into nothing but props like the ladies in a Busby Berkley? Awesome.

I spent my afternoon watching musicals; I always forget how much I love Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

People always remember Marilyn in the pink dress, but “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” is such a weird, creepy number. It starts with the girls in the chandelier. Then there are all the ballerinas in pink, which totally clashes with the orange-red background. Then you realize the ballerinas all have these weird black netting veils on their faces. I don’t really think this bit necessarily has a “meaning” in a sort of obvious metaphorical sense (though the veils look like cages and they also look a little like the veils that Marilyn and Jane wear to get married in their double wedding at the end of the movie if you want to get all feminist about it), but the whole thing is so dystopian and clashing and amazing.

So Lady Gaga is my favourite, I don’t care what anybody says. I love how she tries to sum up her whole persona in every video: this one’s weird and creepy and kind of sexy and also pretty funny all at once. She even wears my favourite outfit from the last Alexander McQueen show, with the crazy gold studs everywhere.