we like to watch

Is anyone watching this? I felt duty-bound to watch it since Lena Dunham went to Oberlin, and there still exists video footage of some of her performance art around campus. I found Tiny Furniture to be too precious and privileged for my taste, but I’m very impressed with Girls. I don’t pretend to really understand the current generation of college students (and recent graduates) but something rings true about Dunham’s portrayal of them. The combination of hyper-awareness, deep insecurity, simultaneous comfort and disgust at their own bodies, ability to critique consumer culture while being embedded in it, all seem to capture something real, and quite distinct to this generation. The show is constantly compared to Sex and the City, though it has a far harder edge, shorn of the romanticism of the earlier show. The awkwardness of sex is also front and center in Girls, something very different from Sex and the City. It is too early, three episodes in, for the other friends to have really developed beyond caricatures, but Dunham’s Hannah is a remarkable, and remarkably fully formed, character.

Mel – (screaming the whole time)

Why don’t I have a first draft of “The “Maccabees”?

What the fuck have you been doing?

I’ll type it!

— mumbling inaudible —

It’s her!

— mumbling inaudible —

I go to work, you’re getting paid, I’m not! Shit!

I am earning money for a filthy little cocksucker who takes advantage of me!

Just like every motherfucker!

So hurry the fuck up!

(Throwing things, knocking down the totem pole)

Fuck! God!

(Coming up from the billiard room and approaching the table and screaming at the top of his lungs in the face of his guests)

Who wants to eat?! Who the fuck wants to eat?! Go have something to eat! Hurrrrraaaaayyyyyy!

(Screaming)

Fuck!

Fuck!

Fuck!

Fuckin’ hate!

Fucking cunt cocksucker whore!

(Very hoarse)

Fuck!

(Screaming as he runs toward the driveway, gets into his car and drives away)

(Sung to the tune of “Over There”)

The fact that it’s been years since I’ve last posted (maybe before I had Adam even) says a lot.  I am not sure I like this film as much as I’m affected by it.  Not sure if it’s a good way, but I can say that I think this is a work of an exciting film maker.  The film is by Lee Sang-Woo, part of a trilogy (?); there’s at least one other in the series called “My Father is a Dog” that I’m trying to find a way to watch but can’t find it.  I can say that the film is hard core in its content but not in the usual way.  For instance, you’d expect sex and even violence from just the title; but none of it is straightforward–everything is twisted.  Lee has been compared to Kim Ki Duk; in fact he got his start by working for Kim.  But his stuff is so harsh that “Mother is a Whore” was banned for years (made in 2009) in Korea and just recently came out.

Watch it here: http://www.dramovie.com/movie/Mother-Is-a-Whore,-2009/

(click on #4 below the screen and onwards)

Let me know what you think.  I almost can’t write critically about it yet, for some reason.  Maybe because there are aspects of the film that do not seem to fit.  It’s about poverty, religion, family, love, sex (its many faces: violence, desire, need, love, hetero-, homo-)–but everything somehow fits.

he talked me into watching sucker punch, and a more enervating, nasty piece of claptrap i haven’t seen in a long time (and i watch films produced by luc besson). do not watch this. not for any reason. the cgi stuff is dull too. pretty but dull.

Martha Marcy May Marlene explores the fractured identity of a young woman who spends two years in a cult of sorts before escaping to stay with her sister. The young woman (Elizabeth Olsen) was named Martha by her family, but given the name Marcy May by the cult leader, Patrick (an astonishingly good John Hawkes). Marlene is the name each of the women at the cult use to answer the phone with when someone calls, usually to track down a missing girl. The names reflect blood family, adopted family, and then the collective of women who service the men in the cult, and both compete with and betray each other for the attention of Patrick. Continue reading Martha Marcy May Marlene

No surprise, but an actively-ugly and uninteresting film. But then, amidst the other British actors buying their vacation homes, BOOM! Edgar Ramirez pops up. Carlos the Jackal plays Ares, God of War! Alas, aside from me thinking that was so weirdly cool …. he just snarls and gets sucked into the vortex of shittitude.

Saw 2 films I thought I’d shout about here. Continue reading Debbie Downer

Pick of the bunch is Haywire, easily the best action thriller since the third Bourne movie, and more evidence of Steven Soderbergh’s astonishing range. The story of a betrayed covert operative, Mallory (played by MMA champion Gina Carano) wreaking revenge is hardly original, but Soderbergh has made an wonderfully economical little movie (coming in at 93 minutes), littered with trademark interiors and some breathtaking exteriors (a fight on a beach as the sun goes down with only seagulls and waves for sound, the wide open wilderness of New Mexico), in which the moments of frenetic action alternate with long periods of stillness, and the attention to detail shows how a craftsman makes movies. The point of using Carano, one assumes, was to make the action sequences more realistic, and it works; there is nothing in the movie that looks computer-generated or as if performed by superhumans. A long chase sequence across the roofs of Dublin looks exactly as though a very fit twenty-something woman is doing the running and jumping. Finally, Soderbergh gets wonderful small performances from the ensemble cast of Michael Douglas, Bill Paxton, Antonio Banderas and Ewan McGregor. Highly recommended. Continue reading Some Recent Action Movies (now with Vampires)