Music 2010

Here’s what I really liked this year:
#1. Salem – King Night (Dark, insane, bedroom witch house, a soundtrack for Earth in 2010 where somehow Dario Argento is responsible for never-ending wars, religious nutbaggery and the socio-economic annihilation of the greater midwestern United States. )

Pop albums:
Best Coast – Crazy For You
The Drums – The Drums
Dum Dum Girls – I Will Be
Wavves – King Of The Beach

Songs:
Cee-Lo – “Fuck You” Song of the year by a mile.
Daft Punk – “Game Has Changed” Overall, I’m a little disappointed with the new Tron soundtrack. I wish it was all as good as this. (I will wish the movie was as good as the second trailer as well) Continue reading Music 2010

Tropes and Memes

Can someone help me out with the difference between tropes and memes, perhaps with examples of each? I’ve been having these interesting conversations with my older son about Internet-based, popular culture memes. A lot of what he describes as memes, I would have called tropes. But I don’t really know what I’m talking about and the usual dictionary definitions are not helping me much. In practice, what do “we” mean, inside the academy and out, by these terms?

omg The Maid (chile)

opening scene. raquel, a youngish-looking maid in a wealthy chilean household, is thrown an after-dinner birthday party by the family she has been serving for 20 years. turns out it’s her 40th birthday. you do the math. twenty years? 40 years old? dang. half a lifetime spent living with these folks. as if to flesh out your perplexity, shock even, at this extraordinary but all-too-common fact of human existence — people indenturing themselves to others — the director, sebastián silva, segues with a merciless look at the routine of raquel’s life, which consists of focused, meticulously practiced, down to a T, not-a-second-of-rest work. Continue reading omg The Maid (chile)

Who Gives a F@&! About the Morgans?

Did You Hear About the Morgans? (2009). What a shittily shitty piece of absolute shite. I could stop there, but I want to say a few words about the film that could have been, the film that might have been a tad better than the one I watched (until I could watch no more, I stopped with about 20 minutes left).

Quick synopsis: Paul Morgan (Hugh Grant) and Meryl Morgan (Sarah Jessica Parker) are husband and wife undergoing a painful separation. He is a lawyer, she is the head of a real estate firm. They have butt-loads of money. Paul wants Meryl back and talks her into a date. Going neither poorly nor well, the date ends uneventfully. But as they say their goodnights, the two witness the murder (holy cow!) of a would-be client of Meryl’s. Having seen the victim, knife in back (really? a knife?), plummet to the sidewalk in front of them, Paul and Meryl look up to the balcony from which the victim fell and there they catch a glimpse of the murderer (who has a scar on his face!). Fearing the murderer will in turn spot them, Paul grabs Meryl and together the two hide behind a truck that happens to be parked in the street near where the victim fell. Get this, the truck suddenly pulls away! That’s right, the driver didn’t see the body land right in front of the truck, nor did the driver hear the body hit the pavement, or Meryl’s rather audible gasp. So, as the truck has pulled away, Paul and Meryl’s cover is blown and the murderer, looking down from the balcony above, spots them. Convincing? Hell yes!
Continue reading Who Gives a F@&! About the Morgans?

ajami

quick plug for Ajami, the israeli/palestinian film that was nominated for an oscar last year. it takes place in the eponymous section of jaffa, where christians and muslims live uneasily together. the tension, though, is not so much between christians and muslims as between crime gangs whose ruthless illegality intersects with the equally ruthless israeli occupation. even though jaffa is an israeli city, the occupation permeates the movie — through the presence of the wall (which is handily penetrated by cross-border drug and weapon smuggling), through illegal border crossings of migrant workers, through legal border crossings of israelis who need to get into west bank, and through the general violence perpetrated by israeli security forces against arabs (muslim or not).

in the meantime, we also get a sense of the way in which arab justice structure and community support systems continue to operate in what would otherwise be a waste land of violence and lawlessness. elders of both christian and the muslim faiths get together and figure things out, brokering precarious truces and stopping seemingly unstoppable carnages. Continue reading ajami

Three good films

I’ve fallen behind on scribbling thoughts, so my apologies for this unwieldy lumping of three disparate films into a catch-all “worth seeing.” But they do share a central focus on character development and outstanding acting, and they all fall a few points shy of being outstanding–‘though still definitely worth your time. (Two of them are on dvd, and didn’t play far/wide in theaters; one of those didn’t, as best I can tell, play anywhere in the states.)

Continue reading Three good films

Machete

I considered just posting a quickie in the Expendables thread, since this movie is in a similar vein, but really, Machete deserves better than that. I didn’t see the Expendables – I had less than zero interest in it – but I’m sure I would have hated it. I’ve never really liked any movie those overpaid jocko-homo jerkwads made in the 80s (maybe a Bruce Willis flick here or there), and the addition of the always-annoying Jet Li and some former pro wrestlers didn’t make it any more appealing. Now if they had cast Rowdy Roddy Piper in it, and brought in John Carpenter to direct, we’d be talking.

And that’s the big difference. John Carpenter, bless his soul. Like him, Robert Rodriguez writes em, as well as directs em, and why pay someone else to do the music for your own movies when you can just knock it out yourself with your band on a weekend? Continue reading Machete

brideshead revisited, an education, and lorna’s silence

sadly, i haven’t read the evelyn waugh novel, but i gathered from the reviews of the eponymous 2008 movie that the gay theme is vastly heightened with respect to the novel, where it is only hinted at. yet, it is easily the most engaging aspect of the film, thanks to ben whishaw’s great performance. emma thompson is not to scoff at, either. i wish i could say that brideshead, or castle howard, is the true protagonist of this film (it is after all meant to be), but i’m afraid i have to give that prize to the film’s terrible representation of catholicism as stunting and stultifying and deadly. catholicism tends to get a bad rap in films (it is not popular to be catholic these days), but this is the film that has made me most successfully angry at my religion by far. anyway, i recommend it, in spite of the fact that matthew goode is fairly annoying in his blandness (you have a constant sense that he — his character i mean — should be up to something, but no, he isn’t, he is up to nothing at all) and that venice is shot in the entirely wrong light.

i didn’t enjoy, instead, an education, which seemed to me to amount to nothing. what the heck is this film about? loss of innocence? give me a break. i agree with the oscar nomination for the preternaturally talented carrey mulligan, but the other two? i don’t get it.

i saw lorna’s silence some time ago, but it’s a heck of a good movie. the dardennes can do no wrong in my book, and their sparsity of gestures, the poignancy of the brief, often tense exchanges, and the time they spend just following the characters around while they negotiate their impossibly difficult lives are positively sensual to me. still, this may be the most didactic of their films, and the end is remarkably bizarre.

now tell me what you think of these three movies. don’t be shy.