3:00 Wallpaper.
5:13 Cameron Diaz’s southern accent is kind of creepy.
6:45 Everybody talks real slow and weird-like. Creepy.
8:56 What’s up with that high school kid?
10:13 What’s up with her foot? Sartre?!!
14:54 Creepy.
18:23 I think it’s creepier to see the little digitized gaps in Langella’s profile than to see the digitized wound on his face.
20:23 Creepy music.
25:14 What the fuck?
Continue reading Live-blogging The Box
Three episodes in now. Is anyone else watching this? I’m happy to say each episode is slightly better than its predecessor. Or (and this is the point of this probably premature post) I’m getting more adjusted (to the fact that this is not The Wire). Just some quick observations: Continue reading Treme
I tossed out a throwaway sputter about “audience” in the conversation debating — or, rather, digressive chatter circling around — Gio’s pointed, repeatedly noted complaint that we seem stuck in a manly-man rut. Gio notes that we boys watch an awful lot of boys’ films, and she wishes there were a little more engagement with women’s films. This usually cues my self-deprecation, a bit of nervous collar-pulling, a fair amount of defensive listing-of-women’s-films-we-love, a lot of “deconstructing” of the premise of genre (and avoiding the issue), etc. I tend to take it the way John did, smartly noting how his tastes do tend with film to veer toward a range of films (and techniques, filmmakers, genres) shaped with male audiences in mind… when his iPod might be far more diverse.
I could say that my iPod and my netflix queue are chockablock full of shoot-’em-ups and cock-rock, and sure tons of great stuff that shouldn’t be simply reduced to gender debates, but very few works coming out of or aimed toward viewers other than people like me. My bookshelf is another story (ahem), and I think John raised a very interesting question — let’s stipulate that our tastes aren’t wholly reducible to our subject positions in cultural categories, but those categories sure as hell inform our tastes. Why in some forms do we find a more catholic or eclectic openness. . . and in other forms less resist than fail to be at all attracted to such alternatives?
Which is not to say we should beat ourselves up about this, nor is that Gio’s point. She’s lamenting, not criticizing, I think. I’m not keen to expand my engagement with crap films to include not just the action shite I already enjoy but also the rom-com crapola that bores me silly. But . . . I wouldn’t on the other hand sidestep the fact that my cinematic tastes are thoroughly enmeshed with/embodied in visions of masculinity. Gio wishes this blog weren’t so man-centric in its reviews and discussions; I’m not sure we get around that completely, nor do I feel we need to–but it would sure be nice to try consciously to do more than have the occasional “women’s-film month” discussions. It’d probably work best if we just simply had more members (not a pun), so that the weight of our collective interests was more widely distributed. Continue reading Meet the new man . . . (same as the old man?)
I don’t have Starz, as my cable provider only carries plurals using the letter “s”–those repressive motherfuckerz–so I had no clue that this even existed. And when I did hear some rumor that it existed, the it sounded crap: a series about down-on-their-luck Hollywood-wannabes who work for a catering company. Hijinks ensue! Every week new guest stars (“hosting” the parties where the catering goes down)! Love Boat meets Entourage–that’s one unseductive mashup, there.
But–with some wit and style from a creative team which included the Veronica Mars head honcho and Paul Rudd–season one is pretty damn funny. The cast is generally very strong, with a standout trademark loop-de-loop turn by Jane Lynch. But my favorite is Ken Marino, the schlub team-spirit work-ethic-chanting supervisor with a huge schlong (episode 4, I think). All of these are available on Netflix’s play-now, so… give it a go.
The star of this delirious, chaotic, hilarious movie is Hit Girl (the utterly wonderful Chloe Grace Moretz), daughter of Big Daddy (Nicholas Cage, in a return to crazy-eyed form), and one of a new breed of superhero stalking the streets of New York. The trailers, and even the first 15 minutes of the movie might suggest that Kick-Ass himself (Aaron Johnson) is our hero, but he just provides the narration and the brief moments of self-reflection. The movie belongs to Hit Girl, from the slew of profanity that comes out of her eleven-year old mouth, to her proficiency with gun and knife, to her glorious impersonation of Chow Yun-Fat (Big Daddy raised her on John Woo movies). I could recount the plot, but that would be silly. Just go see it and have some fun.
just kidding. the embalmer, a 2002 italian movie by gomorrah‘s director matteo garrone, is a longing, brave, heartbreaking dirge to doomed desire. peppino, a dwarfish and very ungainly middle-aged neapolitan taxidermist played by a fabulous ernesto mahieux, falls in love with a spectacularly handsome young man who, too, has a passion for taxidermy. peppino convinces young valerio to come to work for him. but, then, who knows: maybe valerio doesn’t have a passion for taxidermy but simply a sense of the dead-endedness of what he’s currently doing. or maybe he’s just flattered that peppino should like him so much. this is only one of the multiple uncertainties on which this film so brilliantly pivots. Continue reading women’s films
The fussy particulars of every stray image, every slightly off-center accent or line reading, make Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer a gloriously fun visually-enthralling puzzlebox, even if the storyline seems a bit thinner, a bit more dependent upon a too-easy associative political anxiety. (And a bit too invested in a shrill misogyny that seems both allusively and reductively Hitchcockian.)
I lack any good rationale for linking these three films under a loose “point” about genre, but I’m lazy and haven’t posted in forever.
Prachya Pinkaew’s Tom yum goong (renamed in the US The Protector by some dolt) is in many ways simply a showcase for Tony Jaa jumping really high and kicking people in the face, or flying through the air to land with his knees on someone’s nose, or jumping from a standstill to smash a lightpost over a guy’s head, or doing a backflip and landing on a narrow scaffold over a long fall to escape a crazy BMX guy trying to run him over. And so on. It’s got a prototypical faux-classical schmaltzy set-up: the ancient protectors of elephants lose an elephant–and her baby!–to mafiosi in Sydney. Revenge/rescue ensues. Cue Tony Jaa’s thighs and steel toes. Continue reading Zhaownrrhhh
Adieu, John. Even when I was 12 years old I wanted hair like his.
