The Glutton: Jason Segel’s muppet looked like Brian Unger.

Hermano: “Jason Segel’s Muppet” would be a good name for a band.

2011 has proven to be highly nonconducive to blogging (if you are me, which, sadly, I am, in perpetuity).  But as of now, I have recently moved, I have much better closet space (both physically and mentally), I have a bathroom wherein you can choose from several places to stand instead of just the one, I have a dishwasher again for the first time in five years,

and all of this amounts to a new outlook on life, love, and blogging.  I sincerely hope. Now, as for what I’ve been up to, other than a disturbing amount of arts consumption:

SO, I done did went and lost my whole music collection.  To wit:

Yeah.  It began when I dropped my external hard drive — only from about a foot high, but the injury was apparently sufficient to alienate it from my laptop, which turned its back and refused to acknowledge the drive thenceforth.  Being the plucky, adventurous sort that I am, I grabbed a screwdriver, dug in, and poked at its innards menacingly until it momentarily bent to my will.  In that moment, I managed to rescue about 1,500 songs (a drop in the proverbial bucket); the device then began to smoke, and I maturely chose to call it quits.

Thanks to a brand-new terabyte, the benevolence of loved ones, backup copies I forgot I had, and the eruption of Spotify, I am now largely back on track.  Those were some dicey days, though.  My hair started to fall out, my jaw started to click, and the night sweats were grueling.  Saddest of all, between the rebuilding process and preparation for my move, I had little to no time to enjoy any music; I was too busy acquiring it.  (I hadn’t even finished listening to all of The King of Limbs yet!)  So, these days are characterized by a pathetic flurry of me trying to make up for lost time.

It has only made me stronger, though, I am sure.

So, let me know if there are particular things I should be listening to; there has never been a better time to influence my behavior with reckless abandon.  In the meantime, I’ll be bopping around to Crystal Castles and hanging things on my walls.

IFFB staff member: Thanks to you all for coming out, buying tickets, and putting warm bodies in seats.

[APPLAUSE]

First guy behind me [loudly]: WOOOO!  WARM BODIES!

Second guy behind me [quietly]: I love warm bodies.

Isn’t that a line from Zombieland?  ”Always have an exit plan”?  So, you couldn’t run to a lighthouse.  Unless you had, like, a hot-air balloon.

(And, I suppose, a Bible reference.)

I had this lovely New Year’s resolution — “Suck less: blog more” — that was going to solve all my problems.  And then (get that tiny violin ready) Christmas took up more time and energy than expected, and then I had to suspend things temporarily to run off to Cambodia (like you do).  And then a deeply disturbing amount of work awaited me upon my return from Cambodia (Cliff’s Notes rundown of the trip: a horse rolled over on me).  By the time I realized how far I had sunk in ze qvicksand, there were no vines within reach.

Although I am in no way Chinese, who is to say that my blog is not?  It may have known just what it was doing, waiting until February to launch its New Year’s initiative.  So, fine.  Happy Chinese New Year!

Resolution:  “Suck less: blog more.”

For now, time to play catch-up.  Here is a quick ‘n’ dirty list of the ground I’ve covered since my last post (because everybody likes lists — especially you):

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Biutiful

It’s Oscar season, so expect a lot of these types in this list.

I had very little knowledge of what this one was about before I got there.  Now, I would be remiss if I did not point out that some of the camera work was sufficiently “raw” as to obscure the subject a bit.  A note to indie directors: we can still grasp the gritty immediacy of your protagonist’s life and struggles if you give us a clear shot of him walking down the street.  I promise.  We’re open-minded like that.

But that aside, this was a lovely and profoundly depressing movie, and Javier (oh, Javier!) did a magnificent job in it.  The wretchedness of the story kind of crept up on us — first some seediness, then some awkwardness, then unfortunateness, and finally some full-on misery, lest you think you’ll be making a smooth escape.  A fine and multilayered piece of work.

*          *          *

Black Swan

Ever since seeing this movie, I have begun to see the people around me as divided into two camps: (1) people who were seriously freaked out by Black Swan, and (2) people who weren’t.  As you may surmise, I fall into Camp #2.

Maybe I’m just well versed in my Aronofsky.  Requiem for a Dream is in my top five films of all time.  I’ve been mildly obsessed with the man since 1999, when I went to see Pi alone in Sydney, Australia, and found myself in a theater mostly populated by people who had tried to see other movies that were sold out.  Movies like October Sky. These were people who clearly had no idea what sort of culture was about to be served up to them, and the sounds they made while trying to process what they were seeing were as entertaining to me as the movie itself.

But that’s what I can’t figure out.  Pi had no advertising budget, clearly, whereas Black Swan had an almost militarized publicity campaign.  How does one go see Black Swan without thoroughly expecting it to be just the sort of movie it is?  And if one expects it, how can it rattle one so?  These are questions with which I struggle.

Anyway.  I liked it.  A lot.  But given how well prepared I’d been by the trailer, I found myself wishing it had gone further, surprised me more.

Oh, and really?  Mila was “snubbed” by the Academy?  She was just what the role called for, but come on.  How much of a stretch was this?

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Burlesque

Obvi.  I mean, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association clearly believed in this hidden gem of the alternative community, this unassuming little vignette of love and yearning, so who was I to imagine otherwise?  Unquestionably, the most moving scene was the one in which Christina Aguilera admitted to Cher, her voice catching on emotion, that her mother had died before she had a chance to teach little Christina how to slather on makeup like a common strumpet.  And Cher, who had been around life’s block a time or two and was no stranger to heartache herself, sagely took a seat next to the budding starlet and thoroughly bestrumpeted her:

For all those who may have read that this film was Showgirls-bad, I am woeful to say that it is not.  There is no moment as painfully magnificent as when goddamn Elizabeth Berkley whips out that goddamn switchblade in the truck.  Had there been, I would have gotten oodles more out of Burlesque.

Stanley Tucci (or as Shazbot calls him, “TUCCI!”) — don’t ever change.  And don’t ever do a movie like this one again.

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Despicable Me

Shall forever be to me the Fluffy Unicorn Movie.

Watched on the plane back from Asia.

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Eclipse (Twilight)

Oh, for crying out loud.

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The Fighter

Pretty good for a movie in which it was almost impossible to like anyone.  As with Mila, I find myself relieved that Marky Mark was not nominated.  Yes, yes, there’s no glory in the quiet roles, etc.  What Christian said.  But while Wahlberg did everything demanded of him by the role, he barely changed his facial expression through the whole thing, let alone his intonation.  If we’re going to throw around golden statuettes, I do think it’s okay to look around for a bit more nuance.

Melissa Leo, though, was definitely a rock star of obnoxiousness in this one.  She made me miss watching Treme.

Boston movies are so hot these days.  I try to remember which one really kicked off the trend — was it The Departed?

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Gentlemen Broncos

I’ll admit, my hopes were a bit high on this one, based on the ingredients — the director of Napoleon Dynamite and Jemaine Clement, with Jennifer Coolidge and Sam Rockwell thrown in.  I likely asked too much, with my mind.  But do let me say that Jemaine’s scenes absolutely did not disappoint.  His character was genius.  Just not in it enough, sadly.  Many of the other parts tried too hard, flying in the face of Napoleon‘s effortless brilliance.  Which should not be confused with the (also enjoyable) film, My Effortless Brilliance. I’m still willing to recommend Broncos for Jemaine — he’s just a delight.  But with all sorts of caveats piled on top.

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Get Low

Caught and enjoyed this one on the plane.  The little boy from Sling Blade has grown up to be hot.  That is all.

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The Illusionist

Sweetly charming, and I loved the dreamy, animated landscapes of Edinburgh, one of my all-time favorite cities.  But it’s no Triplets of Belleville — God bless it — if you ask me.  Speaking of things I need to rewatch.

*         *          *

The King’s Speech

‘Twould be no small feat to knock this one off Oscar’s pedestal, and really, it has everything one typically wants from a Best Picture.  Personal challenges, global challenges, nifty camera angles, Nazis . . .  the standard smorgasbord of Matters of Weight.

Go forth, Firth.

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Mega Python vs. Gatoroid

SyFy’s inevitable culminating moment in genetic-disaster/’80s-pop-star fusion films.  Why have a mutation movie starring Debbie — sorry, Deborah — Gibson and a mutation movie starring Tiffany when you can just have a mutation movie starring both of them? AND Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration?  And then you can have them get into a violent cat fight and roll around in skimpy cocktail dresses and claw at each other?  And then you can have them make adorable little references to their own hit singles?  And then you can have them get eaten by giant, toothy carnivores?  Their CGI-ed blood spurting decisively across the screens of attentive home audiences everywhere?

Have I said too much?  Was anyone out there really worried about preserving the tension of the narrative?  All right, fine, I apologize; better late than never:

SPOILER ALERT

They both DIE!

SyFy decided to air this film’s debut with both ’80s — cough — legends hosting and drawing our attention ever more aggressively to the ludicrousness of the entire affair. As any connoisseur of bad cinema knows, if you highlight the awfulness in real time, it loses its awesome power.  So, misstep there, SyFy.  But whatevs.  My favorite part was not the shrieking hissy fit, nor the fact that even static objects like gator eggs were painfully CGI-ed within an inch of their lives.  No, instead it was THIS utterly stupendous musical montage of Deb’s and Tiff’s problem spiraling mightily out of control:

I don’t know whether to run and hide or just dance, dance, dance!

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127 Hours

Dare I admit: this movie called my bluff a bit.  I have long prided myself on my bring-it-on attitude with respect to visual ickiness in film.  Save for some involuntary facial twitching, I will watch whatever the good people of cinema want to serve up.  And that includes

SPOILER ALERT

James Franco hacking off his own arm with a tiny, blunted Swiss army knife.  And I did — I watched this scene, with my characteristically stoic resolution.  And just as it was wrapping up (so to speak), I noticed that, hey, I was having a vagal episode.  (Thanks to an unfortunate hand-mangling incident a couple years ago, I know that I — like many members of my often irritatingly hapless gender — have an overactive vagus nerve.)  My heart rate slowed way down and I broke out into a cold sweat.  The only thing I could think in this moment was, Mother of God, I’m going to be one of those people who passed out in 127 Hours. I couldn’t let it happen, doggone it.  Through deep breaths, sheer force of will, and a quick round of leg exercises, I was able to right the ship and hang tough amongst the conscious.  But I was thoroughly grumpy to have proven thusly manipulatable.  My movie-going counterpart cheered me up by telling me of the time he passed out in the audience of the Lollapalooza side show; this helped immensely.

That all aside, good movie, great story.  Leave it to Danny Boyle to produce an incredibly kinetic rendering of an incredibly static event.  And leave it to A.R. Rahman to beat your head in with the score.

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The Science of Sleep

I’ll happily watch Gael García Bernal twiddle his thumbs for two hours, but this reminded me a bit too uncomfortably much of some unstable guys I’d fallen for in the past. Whimsical claymation sequences notwithstanding.

Actually, no, maybe they are withstanding.

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The Social Network

Also caught this one on the plane.  (We make use of the tools available to us.)  I liked it more than I thought I would.  I was tickled by the fact that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross did the music for a story about this most mainstream and preppyish of subjects — music that I liked, there’s no denying it.  Still, a far cry from the skin-peeling, vein-splitting, god-taunting, face-shooting fare they have oft favored.

The thing that bugged me, though, is a thing that generally bugs me whenever Hollywood plays in the Harvard (or similar) sandbox.  Movie makers always seem either convinced or desperate to convince us that Harvard types wander around bars and parties having rapid-fire, boardroom-style exchanges like they are barking “buy” and “sell” orders at each other in even the most casual, social settings.  I never met Mr. Zuckerberg and I attended one of The Other Ivy League Schools, so of course I am barely in a position to comment, but I’d still like to say that no one was holding court in a bar like a little Wall Street CEO-to-be when I was in college.   At the risk of dampening the Ivy mystique, I promise you that they were shotgunning PBR and singing the wrong words along with Van Morrison and yelling angrily about which Real World cast members they would nail and vomiting into shrubbery.  Those were some high times.

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Toy Story 3

News flash of the century: Toy Story 3 was light-hearted and cute!

I’ve loved these dudes for ages, so it’s always nice to check in and see how they’re doing.

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True Grit

Awesome.

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Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen

Had to get this one read quickly, because the latter portion of the first paragraph of this is absolutely true.

Another of those “Why this book, of all books?” questions.  I enjoyed it well enough.  I like elephants and reading about the neat stuff they do.  I’ll enjoy watching one do neat stuff in the movie.  And the setting — a Depression-era circus coupled with life on the rails — is a great, meaty one for literature.  All of the little factoids and contextual details were good stuff.

It was the story that did little for me.  The side details were nice, but the main trajectory seemed so pedestrian and underdeveloped.  And here, let me ask the millions upon millions of other people who’ve read it: am I the only person who thought that the whole old-man-looking-back angle added a lot of big, fat nothing?  Okay, he made a couple of passing comments about how circuses had changed over the years.  But the rest was just banal contemplation of getting old and becoming defunct and forgotten — and did that really have anything to do with the rest of the book?  Like, at all?

I didn’t think the book was bad.  But as is so often the case, its rampant popularity made me cranky.

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When Broken Glass Floats, by Chanrithy Him

I rewatched The Killing Fields ahead of my Cambodia trip, wanting to freshen up my grasp of the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge.  Largely as grim as I had recalled.  This book contained more on the atrocity front.   I read it throughout my trip, but completed the lion’s share on my final day, the relaxation day that I spent by the pool.  The sickly contrast of reading about communist, genocidal despair while lying on a chaise longue under a palm tree and and having cocktails brought to me was not lost on me, for what it’s worth.  The book did what I hoped it would, though, which was to make me appreciate the happy-seeming locals around me more, and to make me marvel at how much of the country was ultimately salvaged.

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Winter’s Bone (book), by Daniel Woodrell

A much better book than Water for Elephants.  Measured.  Deliberate.  Brutal.  An equally meaty setting for literature: the meth-cooking Ozark underbelly.  The storytelling had a deep, muddy rhythm to it, the loping gait of low-key desperation. Yeah.  Take that, son.  And I’d take Ree Dolly over Lisbeth Salander any day, FYI.

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Winter’s Bone (movie)

On the whole, a faithfully measured, deliberate, and brutal companion to the book. Except that it never looked as cold as the book made me assume it should be.  And for reasons unclear, they excised my favorite part of the book.  (For those who have read it, it involves a very awkward hug.)

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Oscars this weekend.  Wish me luck in the betting pool.

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* For purposes of this statement, “mankind” shall be understood to mean “me.”

]]> http://artsglutton.com/home/archives/1957/feed 0 http://artsglutton.com/home/archives/1850 http://artsglutton.com/home/archives/1850#comments Sat, 04 Dec 2010 20:22:09 +0000 The Glutton http://artsglutton.com/home/?p=1850 Knocked Off the List:  Nowhere Boy, The Hunger Games trilogy, Nine, Last Chance Harvey, All Good Things, Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Surviver’s Story of Life and Death in the Peoples Temple, Dark and Stormy Night, Cemetery Junction, Tiny Furniture

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Look, I’ve been adrift at a crossroads before.  And I went through the obligatory phase of thinking, “Hey, maybe my problem is really a solution!”  I thought my true purpose must be to explore and chronicle the anatomy of my adriftness, to give a voice to the millions who surely felt Just Like Me, to become the Lorax of people adrift at crossroads.  I began writing a book about a girl who was on the brink of graduating college and lacked a Plan B.

I am going to go out on a limb and hypothesize that many books, song lyrics, and independent films spring from just such a span of time.

And who knows — maybe the first time I saw a movie with a wayward screenplay about a wayward 20-something who was just trying to meander through his or her quirky professional/familial/relationship landscape and Figure It All Out, I felt connected and legitimized in a profoundly meaningful way.

But by the time I get around to seeing Tiny Furniture, I have seen Garden State. And The Puffy Chair.  And Beeswax.  And Natural Causes. And Hannah Takes the Stairs. And Four Eyed Monsters.  And Quiet City.  And Frownland (don’t get me started).  And, hell, Reality Bites. I’ve been mercilessly acquainted with the quirky little pockets of meaning ensconced in everyday life and the pitfalls of interpersonal relationships for which no rulebook has been written, all unfolding practically in real time and with no emotionally definitive conclusion to be reached.  I’ve been mercilessly validated to the point of wanting desperately to extract myself from this warm community of wayward people who are adrift at crossroads.

The thing that bugs me about Tiny Furniture is that, while it is certainly more visually polished than several of the examples above, it fails to commit to its quirks with the vigor it would require to stand out from a sea of slow and largely storyless cinematic contemplations.  Protagonist Aura’s mother is somewhat oblivious . . . but not really oblivious.  Her best friend is somewhat over the top . . . but not really over the top. Her day job is kind of silly . . . but not really silly.  And her romantic pursuits are kind of pointless . . . but not really pointless.  The moments when things don’t go as planned are sorta funny . . . but not really funny.

Some will undoubtedly say that this reflects a conscious act of tapering the quirk, as opposed to failing to realize the quirk, and that its net effect is to make the film more realistic and relatable.  I might have said that too, once.  Today, I find myself saying, “Oh, come on, how true-to-life do you really want your movies to be, before you start to wonder why you paid ten bucks to have the same experience of ‘somewhat’ that you could have had wandering through your own typical day?”

The movie truly begins to lose its meager focus for me in a scene in which Aura’s goody-goody — but not really goody-goody — younger sister Nadine throws a larger-than-expected party at which high school students drink alcohol.  For whatever reason, Aura responds to this challenge by wandering around the apartment with no pants on — to get back at Nadine? because it doesn’t occur to her not to? at this point, I seriously have no idea — and this sparks a wildly unfocused argument between her and her sister that, it goes without saying, resolves nothing and in no way advances their relationship.  (It doesn’t end the party, either, which goes on to bear no consequences whatsoever.)

The truest little pocket of truth in Tiny Furniture, I feel, is when somewhat-over-the-top best friend Charlotte proclaims her and Aura’s artsy TriBeCa families and circles of friends to be “assholes.”  Yes, this I can see.  But surely it is an act of some cruelty to serve up 95 minutes with no greater point than this — or, at the very least, an act of defeatism.  Hence why one’s quirks ought to be better realized. Hold a mirror up to us if you must, but give us something here that only you can give.

I must remind myself that Furniture will be many adrift 20-somethings’ first experience with a film that speaks to them in such a way, and that they will feel properly connected and legitimized when it is over.  And so it will have served a worthwhile purpose in that regard.  But I fantasize that we might all simply agree, en masse, that yes: defining oneself and finding a groove is hard.  Adulthood doesn’t come with instructions. Parents just don’t understand.  And perhaps creative people who don’t quite have a story to tell, in the classic sense of the word, should — instead of deciding that storylessness is their story’s greatest strength — pick less narrative forms of expression.

Blogging, for example.  I have no story to tell whatsoever.  And I’m the first to admit it.

I should clarify:  I am not really attracted to Nick Cave.  I don’t think.  

<thinks> 

Probably not.  But I am attracted to the grit of him, the idea of him, rotating smugly on the needle of his own manly brand of beautiful ugly (referring to his artistry, not his face). I am attracted to his magnificently media-spanning talent. The Proposition* was half grimy bloodbath — heavy on the grime — and half visual poem.  (Join me in pretending that I didn’t just say that.)  Its soundtrack (co-composed by Warren Ellis, to be discussed later) was murderously sweet, delicately sick.  And The Death of Bunny Munro achieved the heretofore mercifully unattempted: it made me feel a sense of attachment to a child.  The queasy seesawing between the detached, nympho- and egomaniacal Bunny, Sr., and the bright, earnest, and heartbreakingly genuine Bunny, Jr., was torturously effective, and it caused me retroactively to fear growing up.  (This introduced some conflicts to my day-to-day routine.)

So, of course I’m onboard with Grinderman, which I enjoyed live this past weekend, along with a cool and refreshing $10 gin & tonic.  (I felt I was still owed about three more dollars’ worth of refreshment afterward.) 

Opening for the group was lone thereminist Armin Ra, who warmed up — well, cooled down, I mean, let’s be honest — the audience with such hard-raging crunk classics as “Ave Maria” and “Nature Boy.”  Don’t misunderstand; I liked him.  I’m just saying the relationship between the two acts may not have been . . . immediately apparent.

But back to the Cave.  This tall drink of whiskey remains quite spry, twisting about on the stage, zigging from keyboard to guitar, testifying about demons and wolfmen and executioners — none of which one can help but imagine as Cave himself.  (Same with Bunny Munro.  Is anyone really likely to have some other mental image of the character?)  Meanwhile, off to his side is the transfixing, cyclonic insanity of Warren Ellis, who is doing everything in his power to resemble a quasi-savage cave person** — no small feat when one is playing a violin!  He spent most of “Evil!” writhing around on the floor.  At one point he began smashing a hi-hat cymbal between a set of maracas, applying all the gusto of . . . well, of a quasi-savage cave person.

I’ve not heard any of Ellis’s group, Dirty Three, so I suppose I’ll make that the something-billionth entry on my to-do list. . . .

No wacky background images or stage gimmicks, just a rich rock cacophony with a hot testosterone injection.  (Yeah, that’s right.)  At one point, the highly mobile Cave knocked over his own mic stand as he was making his way over to interact with/intimidate some front-row fans, and the hapless roadie who rushed out to right it somehow failed and had to remove it from the stage completely; I suppose it had to be quarantined.  All well and good until Cave crossed to the keyboard and found himself with a mic in his hand.  For the first electronic interlude, he just plopped the thing down on the keys he wasn’t playing.  (The indigenous musicians use every part of the instrument.)  For the second, he chucked it over his shoulder.   This gave me joy.

The low point of the show came when Cave lashed out at an audience member; he corrected him about something the gentleman had apparently yelled, then followed it with, “. . . you dumb fuck.  I thought this was supposed to be a university town.”  I should perhaps explain: it was only a low point because I didn’t catch the correction.  What if it was something hilarious?  And I missed it?  Pooh.  Moments later, Cave snidely dedicated “When My Love Comes Down” to the aforementioned dumb fuck, and there was much rejoicing.

Although they did not play my favorite Grinderman song (“Go Tell the Women,” for no readily apparent reason), I am quite in favor of the new album and found the performance delightful.  Cave is fond of letting go of his guitar from time to time and crooning a choice lyrical line while holding his arms above his head, limp-wristed, in a sort of Jesus-meets-Dorothy’s-scarecrow stance.

It suits him perfectly.

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* Danny Huston was present when I saw The Proposition, and I asked him a question at the end, and he made a joke to the audience at my expense, and it did nothing to dampen my love of the film.  Nothing!

** No pun intended.