Zito on 3 days rest. Pedro in Game 5. The Big Mo. Everything points to a Sox win. So why am I dreading this game with every fibre of my being? Oh, right, it's because I'm a neurotically fatalistic Sox fan.
Predix: this game will either end in a Sox laugher (9-1) or a tight A's triumph (3-2).
Some fabulous weekend baseball. Pudge was the Man. Ortiz came through as he had done all year. But Game 3 of the Sox series is likely the ugliest game I've ever seen. And those Cubbies -- with Prior and Wood (and the potentially dominating but less consistent Zambrano and Clement) this might finally be their year. Must be tough being a Braves fan come October, eh, Scott? Kinda cool to see the underdogs come out on top in the NL, but nothing in sports beats Bonds at bat or Smoltz's GLADIATOResque glare. Too bad.
Monday, October 06, 2003
Urban Tribes
My buddy Caroline wrote this terrific feature on the supposed social phenomenon of Urban Tribes, an article I had a little hand in. The idea is that due to various factors, including: (1) postponement of marriage due to economic and educational trends; (2) new telecommunications technology which results in easier organizing of groups; (3) disposable income and more cultural distractions; (4) shifting attitudes about institutions, the "tribe" (a group of close-knit friends) has become the central social unit for increasing numbers of late twentysomething/early thirtysomething urban types. The point isn't that this is somehow a new thing, but that "tribes" have expanded in far greater numbers in recent years.
Maybe "urban tribe" is just a fashionable tag for a old hat, maybe it's a real thing. But when folks are coming up with such lame terms as "quirkyalones", it tells you that the race to coin the "post-millennial yuppie" moniker has reached absurd levels.
Maybe "urban tribe" is just a fashionable tag for a old hat, maybe it's a real thing. But when folks are coming up with such lame terms as "quirkyalones", it tells you that the race to coin the "post-millennial yuppie" moniker has reached absurd levels.
Glad other folks can say it better...
My two big political betes noire -- Bush's anti-empiricism and California's insane initiative system -- are worked over in the op-ed pages of the big dailies. Neal Gabler's (time to pick up his book) "medieval presidency" piece might be the most rhetorically effective attack on this presidency I've come across. David Kennedy traces the initiative's origins in reformist populism to its use as a device to sabotage effective government today. Interesting thesis, though the disproportionate power of property owners with their libertarian instincts is only a corollary of the central problem with plebiscite rule -- that voters are simply not equipped to make a knowledgeable decision on most of the issues on the ballot.
The nadir of the California initiative system, as far as I'm concerned, is Proposition 211 in 1996, a convoluted securities fraud/attorneys fees initiative that utterly defies the understanding of laypersons. Heck, I took a Sec Reg class in law school, and I barely had a clue what this initiative entails even now. Of course, comprehension wasn't a huge deal for me because I vote "NO" on all initiatives as a matter of principle and have since 1992, but this ended up as a battle of misleading ads between trial lawyers and business groups. Say what you will about corrupt, career politicians, but at least you can expect them to be informed about the bill they're voting on -- it's the foundation of our republican form of government. The California initiative system results in wars of mass manipulation. May the group that puts out the best propoganda win.
Misguided populists on the left and right champion the initiative as "direct democracy" at work. Unless you have a hyper-informed and politically engaged electorate (that does not describe California), direct democracy is a recipe for disaster. Half the state's problems are caused by unintended (but foreseen) consequences of ballot measures that were ratified by the people. Come to think of it, that's probably the best reason to vote against both the Recall and Arnold. Never mind his other problems. The Gropenator insisted that he'll take all of his proposals to "the people" in the form of ballot initiatives if the legislature doesn't go along. Fuck that.
The nadir of the California initiative system, as far as I'm concerned, is Proposition 211 in 1996, a convoluted securities fraud/attorneys fees initiative that utterly defies the understanding of laypersons. Heck, I took a Sec Reg class in law school, and I barely had a clue what this initiative entails even now. Of course, comprehension wasn't a huge deal for me because I vote "NO" on all initiatives as a matter of principle and have since 1992, but this ended up as a battle of misleading ads between trial lawyers and business groups. Say what you will about corrupt, career politicians, but at least you can expect them to be informed about the bill they're voting on -- it's the foundation of our republican form of government. The California initiative system results in wars of mass manipulation. May the group that puts out the best propoganda win.
Misguided populists on the left and right champion the initiative as "direct democracy" at work. Unless you have a hyper-informed and politically engaged electorate (that does not describe California), direct democracy is a recipe for disaster. Half the state's problems are caused by unintended (but foreseen) consequences of ballot measures that were ratified by the people. Come to think of it, that's probably the best reason to vote against both the Recall and Arnold. Never mind his other problems. The Gropenator insisted that he'll take all of his proposals to "the people" in the form of ballot initiatives if the legislature doesn't go along. Fuck that.
Wednesday, October 01, 2003
5 random thoughts +1
1. What Rush Limbaugh said is delusional, wingbat nonsense, but it isn't "racist." Even in their zeal to condemn the Big Fat Idiot, it's good to see that some sportswriters are able to make the correct distinctions. But it's equally gratifying to see ESPN getting burned on their moronic football/Rush synergy plan.
2. Wesley Clark correctly diagnosed the present administration's central problem -- governing entirely by ideological instead of pragmatic considerations -- in a must-read interview with Josh Marshall. This, coupled with the C-SPAN broadcast of a New Hamshire Town Hall meeting during which the General shows almost a Clintonesque smoothness and rapport with the voters, I'm about one step from hopping on the bandwagon. Not only can this guy win, more importantly, he looks like he'd make a damn good prez.
3. Radiohead @ Hollywood Bowl, September 25, 2003. Can anyone think of another "big" band that has moved in such a radically new direction in such a short period? One can argue the Beatles, of course, but I'd say the Fab Four simply "matured" between Help! and Revolver -- underneath their newfound lyrical and musical sophistication were still melodic, verse-chorus-verse "I lost that girl" rock songs. Radiohead's show, which mixes in simple acoustic numbers from their earlier albums with the densely textured, sprawling prog-rock electronica of Kid A and their new album, Hail to the Thief (more melodic and hooky than its immediate predecessors) makes for a strange mix, like a dub tape full of music culled from only two different bands.
Still, a kickass show. Thom Yorke really pours his soul into his wailing tapestries, and their set, with carefully choreographed horizontal light beams, coupled with the band's dark, disembodied, alienating soundscape, evokes the mood you might feel if you're listening to this music in a space ship headed for Pluto with no return ticket. It's a kind of indescribable melancholia that pinches at the edges of genuine emotion. (Okay, so that last part was total bullshit, but gimme credit for trying, okay?) Second encore ends the show on a crowdpleasing high, with crisp renditions of faves "Karma Police" (this song is so awesome) and "Everything in Its Right Place". Bonus: no "Creep".
4. Baseball Playoffs predictions. AL: Red Sox in 4. Yanks in 5. NL: Cubs in 4. Giants in 5.
5. Marc Chagall @ SFMOMA. With fairy tales and the naive-child aesthetic on the pop culture upsurge, it's no wonder Chagall should be making a comeback. His art, with their unfinished crayonesque texture and their fantasy milieu, look like illustrations from children's books, if his willfully unrealistic proportions and sophisticated allegories didn't make much of his art so baffling and difficult to unpack. Most modernists ran away from "meaning" and symbolism. This guy included a bunch of floating goats and roosters in his paintings. What gives?
A concurrent SFMOMA exhibit, Reagan Louie's pics of Asian sex trade workers, is interesting but unfocused. Lighting his subjects in a hyper-real manner and typically framing a prostitute frontally against a garish backdrop, Louie sought to take a detached, unjudgmental view of the Asian prostitutes. It worked in some of his photos, where the toll the sex trade has taken on the subject is without editorial comment. In others, there's an artful stylization that's poorly judged, adding emphasis when none is needed. The worst are shots that look like stills from a Wong Kar-wai film, highly stylized but entirely wrong for the subject.
Lastly, I'm devouring every last detail of this Plame-leak scandal. Track all the tawdry details and spin here and here. An outrageous scandal, and finally one that's seems to have a chance to stick. (The Post is really kicking ass on this one.) It's also the best issue I've seen that tests whether your favorite conservative is principled or just another nakedly partisan hack. This dude shows himself to be among the former. This page, not surprising, belongs in the latter group.
2. Wesley Clark correctly diagnosed the present administration's central problem -- governing entirely by ideological instead of pragmatic considerations -- in a must-read interview with Josh Marshall. This, coupled with the C-SPAN broadcast of a New Hamshire Town Hall meeting during which the General shows almost a Clintonesque smoothness and rapport with the voters, I'm about one step from hopping on the bandwagon. Not only can this guy win, more importantly, he looks like he'd make a damn good prez.
3. Radiohead @ Hollywood Bowl, September 25, 2003. Can anyone think of another "big" band that has moved in such a radically new direction in such a short period? One can argue the Beatles, of course, but I'd say the Fab Four simply "matured" between Help! and Revolver -- underneath their newfound lyrical and musical sophistication were still melodic, verse-chorus-verse "I lost that girl" rock songs. Radiohead's show, which mixes in simple acoustic numbers from their earlier albums with the densely textured, sprawling prog-rock electronica of Kid A and their new album, Hail to the Thief (more melodic and hooky than its immediate predecessors) makes for a strange mix, like a dub tape full of music culled from only two different bands.
Still, a kickass show. Thom Yorke really pours his soul into his wailing tapestries, and their set, with carefully choreographed horizontal light beams, coupled with the band's dark, disembodied, alienating soundscape, evokes the mood you might feel if you're listening to this music in a space ship headed for Pluto with no return ticket. It's a kind of indescribable melancholia that pinches at the edges of genuine emotion. (Okay, so that last part was total bullshit, but gimme credit for trying, okay?) Second encore ends the show on a crowdpleasing high, with crisp renditions of faves "Karma Police" (this song is so awesome) and "Everything in Its Right Place". Bonus: no "Creep".
4. Baseball Playoffs predictions. AL: Red Sox in 4. Yanks in 5. NL: Cubs in 4. Giants in 5.
5. Marc Chagall @ SFMOMA. With fairy tales and the naive-child aesthetic on the pop culture upsurge, it's no wonder Chagall should be making a comeback. His art, with their unfinished crayonesque texture and their fantasy milieu, look like illustrations from children's books, if his willfully unrealistic proportions and sophisticated allegories didn't make much of his art so baffling and difficult to unpack. Most modernists ran away from "meaning" and symbolism. This guy included a bunch of floating goats and roosters in his paintings. What gives?
A concurrent SFMOMA exhibit, Reagan Louie's pics of Asian sex trade workers, is interesting but unfocused. Lighting his subjects in a hyper-real manner and typically framing a prostitute frontally against a garish backdrop, Louie sought to take a detached, unjudgmental view of the Asian prostitutes. It worked in some of his photos, where the toll the sex trade has taken on the subject is without editorial comment. In others, there's an artful stylization that's poorly judged, adding emphasis when none is needed. The worst are shots that look like stills from a Wong Kar-wai film, highly stylized but entirely wrong for the subject.
Lastly, I'm devouring every last detail of this Plame-leak scandal. Track all the tawdry details and spin here and here. An outrageous scandal, and finally one that's seems to have a chance to stick. (The Post is really kicking ass on this one.) It's also the best issue I've seen that tests whether your favorite conservative is principled or just another nakedly partisan hack. This dude shows himself to be among the former. This page, not surprising, belongs in the latter group.
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Bush Hating Addendum
Esteemed neocon pundit David Brooks, the NY Times op-ed's newest hire, today blasts Bush Hating, even quoting Jonanthan Chait's column at length to support his idea of virulent Anti-Bushism as the most pernicious kind of liberal self-delusion. Nice try, except Brooks completely missed the point of Chait's column. (See Chait's rebuttal here.) Chait's piece, more than anything, is an honest attempt at self-analysis. The starting point is: "why do I harbor these emotions, and are they justified?" You may disagree with Chait's conclusions, but it's hard to argue that honest self-analysis isn't a good thing -- at least intellectually (politically, liberals' tendency toward self-analysis and self-criticism is one reason why they tend to cannibalize one another). Isn't self-analysis -- or at least reflection -- what Brooks is demanding from liberals? Too bad self-analysis has become a foreign activity for right-wingers, where intellectual honesty has been in very short supply. But a whole cottage industry has sprung up to identify and mock right-wing hypocrisy -- an easy exercise, that -- so let's leave that one alone.
Friday, September 19, 2003
Bush Hating 101
Maybe a year ago, I finally confronted my demons. I admitted to myself that, yes, I *hate* President Bush and his cronies and all that they stand for. Mind you, it wasn't an easy emotion to acknowledge. As something of a secular humanist, I fervently want to believe that "everyone has his reasons." And as something of an intellectual elitist, the notion of politics being driven primarily by emotion is, well, frankly embarrassing. (That's, y'know, for those unwashed masses whom the Svengalis manipulate like puppets.) Lastly, as a political moderate who reads the Economist and mused about voting for McCain over Gore, it's not just extreme partisanship that's boiling my blood. I don't reflexively hate Republicans. Heck, I even kinda liked 41.
But just hearing 43 speak would raise my temperature 10 degrees. His clipped cadence, pausing after each line on the teleprompter, his Manichaean rhetoric, his budgetary sleight-of-hands -- it got to the point where as soon he appears on TV, I'd immediately change the channel, a reflex I normally reserve for such monsters as Ja Rule, Al Bundy, Fran Drescher, and Rush Limbaugh. At some point, I concluded what's most noxious about this administration -- why these guys enrage me so -- isn't that they're evil. Except for Dick Cheney, they're probably (mostly) well-intentioned and sincere (that's the liberal humanist talking). What's most offensive is these guys have no grounding in reality. Like the Soviets, or any number of insanely deluded regimes, these guys ignore facts -- science, economic data, history -- in favor of some fantasy world that they've bought into with a religious fervor. They don't give a shit about the real world that I'm living in, and that's just fucked up.
That angle wasn't touched on by Jonathan Chait in his otherwise invaluable and extremely timely ode to Bush hatred. Chait does an enviable job of articulating why it's legitimate, even logical, to be contemptuous of a man who had the audacity and arrogance to govern as a far-right ideologue after losing the popular vote and campaigning as a "uniter". He also discusses what I've alway thought was the central divide in American politics: culture. Bush is like a liberal elitist nightmare straight out of central casting, an ignoramus chickenhawk fratboy posing as a cowboy, just as ambitious, smarter-than-thou, pot-smoking, womanizing "moral relativist" Clinton is almost a cliched right-wing bogeyman. To the other side, each demonized president represents the apogee of toolitude, what we despise about others (and what that says about what we love about ourselves). It's John Wayne v. Monty Clift. Whichever side you identify with says something about who you are and who you aren't. Too much ink has already been spilled over the culture war, but Chait also tries, without much success, to distinguish Bush hating as far more legitimate than Clinton-hating. To be fair, it's a hard intellectual dance, one I've never truly worked out to any degree of satisfaction.
One key distinction is the aforementioned phobia of facts by the present Administration. I've detected that many Bush haters -- many of my political-engaged friends and all the raging lib columnists and pundits among them -- are driven batty most often when Dubya or his spokeman ignores a widely known or widely supported fact and continues to insist, for example, that no more troops are needed in Iraq, that taxes were cut for "everyone", or that global warming is some wacko fantasy. My favorite line on Bush, that he's not so-much an imperialist as an anti-empiricist, encapsulates his administration's wholesale contempt for knowledge, fact-gathering, data, and any expert advice that dissents from the party line. Clinton was nothing if not a pragmatist and empiricist. His penchant for reciting an exhausting litany of stats in his rambling State of the Union addresses speaks to this. By contrast, Dubya and his cronies intone about vague principles and, when confronted, do little more than to pass off fantasy scenarios ("the tax cuts will grow the economy and shrink the deficit"; "the Iraqi people will welcome Americans as liberators"). Bush's rhetoric reveals the pseudo-religious, black-and-white moral stance that this adminstration and most right-wingers take, a stance that's increasingly proving to be a menace to our country and the world. What's been a tonic to us Bush haters is his rapidly declining poll numbers. We keep telling ourselves (as Clinton has been telling to Democrats as well) that the middle-of-the-road voters will turn on Bush if and when they finally learn what Bush is doing. Of course, if Dubya continues on this course and gets reelected anyway, you'll do well to pick up some stock in Pfizer and Eli Lilly. I know I'll need some.
But just hearing 43 speak would raise my temperature 10 degrees. His clipped cadence, pausing after each line on the teleprompter, his Manichaean rhetoric, his budgetary sleight-of-hands -- it got to the point where as soon he appears on TV, I'd immediately change the channel, a reflex I normally reserve for such monsters as Ja Rule, Al Bundy, Fran Drescher, and Rush Limbaugh. At some point, I concluded what's most noxious about this administration -- why these guys enrage me so -- isn't that they're evil. Except for Dick Cheney, they're probably (mostly) well-intentioned and sincere (that's the liberal humanist talking). What's most offensive is these guys have no grounding in reality. Like the Soviets, or any number of insanely deluded regimes, these guys ignore facts -- science, economic data, history -- in favor of some fantasy world that they've bought into with a religious fervor. They don't give a shit about the real world that I'm living in, and that's just fucked up.
That angle wasn't touched on by Jonathan Chait in his otherwise invaluable and extremely timely ode to Bush hatred. Chait does an enviable job of articulating why it's legitimate, even logical, to be contemptuous of a man who had the audacity and arrogance to govern as a far-right ideologue after losing the popular vote and campaigning as a "uniter". He also discusses what I've alway thought was the central divide in American politics: culture. Bush is like a liberal elitist nightmare straight out of central casting, an ignoramus chickenhawk fratboy posing as a cowboy, just as ambitious, smarter-than-thou, pot-smoking, womanizing "moral relativist" Clinton is almost a cliched right-wing bogeyman. To the other side, each demonized president represents the apogee of toolitude, what we despise about others (and what that says about what we love about ourselves). It's John Wayne v. Monty Clift. Whichever side you identify with says something about who you are and who you aren't. Too much ink has already been spilled over the culture war, but Chait also tries, without much success, to distinguish Bush hating as far more legitimate than Clinton-hating. To be fair, it's a hard intellectual dance, one I've never truly worked out to any degree of satisfaction.
One key distinction is the aforementioned phobia of facts by the present Administration. I've detected that many Bush haters -- many of my political-engaged friends and all the raging lib columnists and pundits among them -- are driven batty most often when Dubya or his spokeman ignores a widely known or widely supported fact and continues to insist, for example, that no more troops are needed in Iraq, that taxes were cut for "everyone", or that global warming is some wacko fantasy. My favorite line on Bush, that he's not so-much an imperialist as an anti-empiricist, encapsulates his administration's wholesale contempt for knowledge, fact-gathering, data, and any expert advice that dissents from the party line. Clinton was nothing if not a pragmatist and empiricist. His penchant for reciting an exhausting litany of stats in his rambling State of the Union addresses speaks to this. By contrast, Dubya and his cronies intone about vague principles and, when confronted, do little more than to pass off fantasy scenarios ("the tax cuts will grow the economy and shrink the deficit"; "the Iraqi people will welcome Americans as liberators"). Bush's rhetoric reveals the pseudo-religious, black-and-white moral stance that this adminstration and most right-wingers take, a stance that's increasingly proving to be a menace to our country and the world. What's been a tonic to us Bush haters is his rapidly declining poll numbers. We keep telling ourselves (as Clinton has been telling to Democrats as well) that the middle-of-the-road voters will turn on Bush if and when they finally learn what Bush is doing. Of course, if Dubya continues on this course and gets reelected anyway, you'll do well to pick up some stock in Pfizer and Eli Lilly. I know I'll need some.
Thursday, September 11, 2003
TIFF Wrap-up (Revised)
Sat Sep 13
Undead (Evil Aussie Twins) C
Good: Flying zombie fish. Bad: "Quirky" refugees from The Price of Milk who end up not having their brains eaten by zombies like I fervently hoped they would. Awful: Stupid aliens and assorted cinematic incompetence. Colin Geddes really should have just revived the awesome Wild Zero if he was looking for a proper sendoff to the venerable Uptown theater.
PTU (To) B-/C+
As the first Milky Way film (and in all likelihood only the second HK action pic) to screen at the prestigious NYFF, expectations were high going in. Best to lower them considerably. One of those "task that must be completed in a short duration" movies, much-hyped action auteur Johnnie To inexplicably abandons the urgency necessary to this genre and focuses, ever so deliberately, on the police procedural and cool lighting (To made the Handsome Boy Modeling School "gangster" pic The Mission). Except it's nothing that we haven't seen in a hundred corrupt police dramas. A kickass opening and closing plus terrific use of props, especially cellphones, but not enough, especially when his outfit has put out much better shit.
Zatoichi (Kitano) B+/B
[More to come.]
Small Town (Ceylan) w/o
10 minute long shot of a guy walking up a hill cued to an inarticulate diatribe against rural living. An endless scene with alternating close-ups of actors reciting the minutes of a 1983 Santa Monica City Council meeting. There comes a point when shoe-shopping along Yonge Street sounded much more appealing than slogging through this tiresome first feature.
Dallas 362 (Caan) B+
One thing's certain: this modest, familiar tale -- basically it's Good Will Hunting meets Mean Streets -- is in for a second wave of movie nerd backlash after the big boys fell hard for it. (The backlash is already on, in fact.) It's not hard to see why. There's nothing profound or revolutionary or "challenging" here, nothing that stretches boundaries or goes off in bizarre directions. Caan is not the second coming of the Andersons (Wes or PT).
All there is here are smartly directed scenes that invariably undercuts the cliches inherent in the set-up, dialogue sharp enough to be laugh-out-loud funny, but naturalistic enough to be believable, fat-free cutting, and terrific ensemble performances -- the kind of thing that used to be called "good, smart filmmaking." Occasionally stumbles (if we start a letter campaign now, perhaps never again shall The Smashing Pumpkins' "Today" be used as source music for a montage sequence), but it's as accomplished an AmerIndie I've seen since You Can Count On Me. Yeah, you read that right: Sonny Corleone's son made one of the best movies of the festival. Stop scoffing, Stults.
Fri Sep 12
Nine Souls (Toyoda) C+
All over the place, but mostly watchable when it isn't trying to be a zany New Zealand comedy. Or when it isn't trying to be All About Lily Chou-Chou. You get the idea. Why didn't I get a ticket for Purple Butterfly instead, which sounded so fucking awesome?
The Merry Widow (von Stroheim, 1925) A-
Ignore that crack-ho V-Mort: The guy who played the villain was totally awesome.
Distant (Ceylan) B+/B
Beautifully observed, smartly judged film, of the sort you almost take for granted until you realize how rarely they turn up. Caveat: checked out for fifteen minutes (due to sheer exhaustion and poor viewing conditions) so take it for what it's worth.
Thu Sep 11
Gozu (Miike) B-
Remember the climax of Dead or Alive? The whopper of a finale here almost tops Miike's finest moment and really bumped up this wildly uneven Alice in Wonderland-cum-Yakuza flick. And yeah, it's way more fucked up than that description makes it sound.
The Five Obstructions (von Trier & Leth) A-/B+
Liked this cordial deathmatch between men of opposite temperaments quite a bit better after a good night's sleep. What I loathed about von Trier's Dancer in the Dark -- essentially, I resented his meta-gambit of manically trying to jerk your heartstrings while forcing you to see him doing it -- works well here, as von Trier's sadistic, control freak meta-pranksterism is laid out bare, and without the cover and artifice of the overwrought melodrama. As a smarter man than I suggested, Dancer feels like it's about a sadist (von Trier) and his victim (Selma). Here's a movie about a sadist and his sparring partner. The dignified, sympathetic Jorgen Leth makes a terrific foil: Lars wants to forcilbly shape every molecule of his material; Jorgen seeks to just observe and record the right moments. Lars imposes absurd rules; Jorgen dances his way around them. Punch/counter-punch. Moviemaking is simply the instrument of battle between the two wills, the act of filmmaking itself energizing and (possibly) cathartic for one, the impish rulemaking and power trips delighting the other.
My TIFFing pals largely concentrated on other aspects of the film, many of which were fascinating but undercooked (the intervention angle too clever by half to be intelligible and the thesis that "rules can be liberating" is seriously undercut by film's positive assessment of the Figgisian Obstruction 3). Don't listen to those guys. My take on this is way better.
Guest Room, etc. (Halim, etc.)
My pal Skander Halim shows that that he can put his incomparable wit and unassailable good taste in comedies to teriffic use by crafting an incredibly appealing short called THE GUEST ROOM. He takes a sitcom scenario -- a grad student takes up a guest room in a family residence and catches the attention of both the mother and the daughter -- and creates a funny and poignant portrait of a family yearning for connection. Halim displays a deft touch with actors, who undoubtedly relish the opportunity to spit out Halim's biting lines. More stunning is Halim's incisive depiction of teenage emotional confusion. I've yet to see a better film that captures that confusion teenage girls undergo in dealing with their budding sexuality. Halim must've tolled some heavy research hours since he has never expressed much interest (at least to me) in this topic previously. Perhaps it takes a detached observer like Halim to really nail the confusion and temptation of teen sexuality.
Les Sentiments (Lvovsky) B/B-
Romantic comedy with a Greek chorus (think Mighty Aphrodite) makes great use of Jean-Pierre Bacri's classically Gallic pout. Much of it frothy and enjoyable, but takes a tonal lurch into botchy-wotchy land in the third act (turning into The Woman Next Door). (The poor bullpen of this fest lineup (movies floundering from the 7th inning on) is proving to be a worrisome trend.)
Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai) B-
A minor nostalgia piece that pretty much happens in real time; takes Tsai's ardent minimalism to the limit, or perhaps past it, veering into self-parody at times. It's full of ten hour takes of a gimping woman silently shuffling through an empty corridor. But Tsai's always rainy Taipei, with its forbidding greens and blues and its attendant malaise, is, in a strange way, an inviting world to lose yourself in. Helps that Tsai's really pretty funny, the physical jokes now depend almost entirely on the preceeding stillness for their effect. And it ends beautifully. But please, let's try something new next time, eh, Tsai-fly?
Wed Sep 10
Des Plumes dans la tete (Some Frog) C+
Starts off like The Seventh Continent, presenting a series of cryptic yet evocative imagery. Then it becomes a very poor man's Under the Sand.
Histoire de Julien et Marie (Rivette) B+/B
Good then okay then boring then good then totally awesome then what the fuck Rivette.
In the Cut (Campion) B
Remember how awesome it was when Jane Campion took Henry James and imbued his novel with her own concerns (especially how a woman can find a good man) and a strong female subjective viewpoint? No Nicole Kidman here, unfortunately, and Meg's "brave" performance is both laudable and uneven, but Ruffalo once again channels Brando to terrific effect (this time looking just like the man in Viva Zapata!)) and Campion does her thing in the context of a sub-Seven type crappy erotic thriller. In other words, the genre stuff sucks eggs (and Campion's touch is, as is often the case, two touches too heavy), but as a supple, erotically-charged fairy tale about a woman's fear of male malevolence (in its many forms) and male abandonment, it's pretty compelling. (The bad genre stuff often has a thematic purpose. For example: Red herrings = the avarice of men in their many manifestations.)
Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (Roeg, 1980) B+
Roeg's sometimes too arty for his own good, but I always enjoy cautionary tales about some obsessive guy trying to fully possess an elusive woman (perhaps because that theme confirms my smug satisfaction about my own very adamant non-possessiveness in relationships). Art Garfunkel: the most unlikely SkineMax leading man ever.
Twentynine Palms (Dumont) B-/C+
Formally accomplished and pretty engrossing road movie, and with actual characters for a change (though early on I'd pegged them for either sexual archetypes or national allegories, or perhaps both). Then it blindsides you with an aluminum bat and turns into another Bruno zoology exhibit. It's clear Dumont's not interested in human beings as such; he's much more curious about the genus (or perhaps the phylum) to which we belong. Pretty fucked up shit, but still doesn't deserve all the hate thrown at it by the seething, stirred-up audience.
Tue Sep 9
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and...Spring (Kim) B+/B
Premised on the concept of samsara, this simple, surpassingly lovely Korean parable really captures the vital spirit and elegant simplicity of Buddhism like no other film I've ever seen. So what if it happens to be "cute" as well?
Brown Bunny (Gallo) B+
So it's narcissistic and self-indulgent vanity project...but we're talking about Vincent Gallo here. Didn't anyone see Buffalo '66? And besides all that, there's also a Hellmanesque a beautifully monochromatic look and magnificent framing (especially of faces). Felt just like a mournful drive to visit the grave of a deceased loved one. Post screening Q & A a riot. The skinny: Vincent Gallo does not like Buffalo. Or Roger Ebert. Or reporters. Or his crew.
Les Triplettes de Bellville (Some French Animator) B/B-
Imaginative, cute and well-designed French cartoon but lacks the foundation and thus the emotional resonance that makes Miyazaki's flights of fancy so rich. Would've worked better as a 40 minute piece.
Undead (Evil Aussie Twins) C
Good: Flying zombie fish. Bad: "Quirky" refugees from The Price of Milk who end up not having their brains eaten by zombies like I fervently hoped they would. Awful: Stupid aliens and assorted cinematic incompetence. Colin Geddes really should have just revived the awesome Wild Zero if he was looking for a proper sendoff to the venerable Uptown theater.
PTU (To) B-/C+
As the first Milky Way film (and in all likelihood only the second HK action pic) to screen at the prestigious NYFF, expectations were high going in. Best to lower them considerably. One of those "task that must be completed in a short duration" movies, much-hyped action auteur Johnnie To inexplicably abandons the urgency necessary to this genre and focuses, ever so deliberately, on the police procedural and cool lighting (To made the Handsome Boy Modeling School "gangster" pic The Mission). Except it's nothing that we haven't seen in a hundred corrupt police dramas. A kickass opening and closing plus terrific use of props, especially cellphones, but not enough, especially when his outfit has put out much better shit.
Zatoichi (Kitano) B+/B
[More to come.]
Small Town (Ceylan) w/o
10 minute long shot of a guy walking up a hill cued to an inarticulate diatribe against rural living. An endless scene with alternating close-ups of actors reciting the minutes of a 1983 Santa Monica City Council meeting. There comes a point when shoe-shopping along Yonge Street sounded much more appealing than slogging through this tiresome first feature.
Dallas 362 (Caan) B+
One thing's certain: this modest, familiar tale -- basically it's Good Will Hunting meets Mean Streets -- is in for a second wave of movie nerd backlash after the big boys fell hard for it. (The backlash is already on, in fact.) It's not hard to see why. There's nothing profound or revolutionary or "challenging" here, nothing that stretches boundaries or goes off in bizarre directions. Caan is not the second coming of the Andersons (Wes or PT).
All there is here are smartly directed scenes that invariably undercuts the cliches inherent in the set-up, dialogue sharp enough to be laugh-out-loud funny, but naturalistic enough to be believable, fat-free cutting, and terrific ensemble performances -- the kind of thing that used to be called "good, smart filmmaking." Occasionally stumbles (if we start a letter campaign now, perhaps never again shall The Smashing Pumpkins' "Today" be used as source music for a montage sequence), but it's as accomplished an AmerIndie I've seen since You Can Count On Me. Yeah, you read that right: Sonny Corleone's son made one of the best movies of the festival. Stop scoffing, Stults.
Fri Sep 12
Nine Souls (Toyoda) C+
All over the place, but mostly watchable when it isn't trying to be a zany New Zealand comedy. Or when it isn't trying to be All About Lily Chou-Chou. You get the idea. Why didn't I get a ticket for Purple Butterfly instead, which sounded so fucking awesome?
The Merry Widow (von Stroheim, 1925) A-
Ignore that crack-ho V-Mort: The guy who played the villain was totally awesome.
Distant (Ceylan) B+/B
Beautifully observed, smartly judged film, of the sort you almost take for granted until you realize how rarely they turn up. Caveat: checked out for fifteen minutes (due to sheer exhaustion and poor viewing conditions) so take it for what it's worth.
Thu Sep 11
Gozu (Miike) B-
Remember the climax of Dead or Alive? The whopper of a finale here almost tops Miike's finest moment and really bumped up this wildly uneven Alice in Wonderland-cum-Yakuza flick. And yeah, it's way more fucked up than that description makes it sound.
The Five Obstructions (von Trier & Leth) A-/B+
Liked this cordial deathmatch between men of opposite temperaments quite a bit better after a good night's sleep. What I loathed about von Trier's Dancer in the Dark -- essentially, I resented his meta-gambit of manically trying to jerk your heartstrings while forcing you to see him doing it -- works well here, as von Trier's sadistic, control freak meta-pranksterism is laid out bare, and without the cover and artifice of the overwrought melodrama. As a smarter man than I suggested, Dancer feels like it's about a sadist (von Trier) and his victim (Selma). Here's a movie about a sadist and his sparring partner. The dignified, sympathetic Jorgen Leth makes a terrific foil: Lars wants to forcilbly shape every molecule of his material; Jorgen seeks to just observe and record the right moments. Lars imposes absurd rules; Jorgen dances his way around them. Punch/counter-punch. Moviemaking is simply the instrument of battle between the two wills, the act of filmmaking itself energizing and (possibly) cathartic for one, the impish rulemaking and power trips delighting the other.
My TIFFing pals largely concentrated on other aspects of the film, many of which were fascinating but undercooked (the intervention angle too clever by half to be intelligible and the thesis that "rules can be liberating" is seriously undercut by film's positive assessment of the Figgisian Obstruction 3). Don't listen to those guys. My take on this is way better.
Guest Room, etc. (Halim, etc.)
My pal Skander Halim shows that that he can put his incomparable wit and unassailable good taste in comedies to teriffic use by crafting an incredibly appealing short called THE GUEST ROOM. He takes a sitcom scenario -- a grad student takes up a guest room in a family residence and catches the attention of both the mother and the daughter -- and creates a funny and poignant portrait of a family yearning for connection. Halim displays a deft touch with actors, who undoubtedly relish the opportunity to spit out Halim's biting lines. More stunning is Halim's incisive depiction of teenage emotional confusion. I've yet to see a better film that captures that confusion teenage girls undergo in dealing with their budding sexuality. Halim must've tolled some heavy research hours since he has never expressed much interest (at least to me) in this topic previously. Perhaps it takes a detached observer like Halim to really nail the confusion and temptation of teen sexuality.
Les Sentiments (Lvovsky) B/B-
Romantic comedy with a Greek chorus (think Mighty Aphrodite) makes great use of Jean-Pierre Bacri's classically Gallic pout. Much of it frothy and enjoyable, but takes a tonal lurch into botchy-wotchy land in the third act (turning into The Woman Next Door). (The poor bullpen of this fest lineup (movies floundering from the 7th inning on) is proving to be a worrisome trend.)
Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai) B-
A minor nostalgia piece that pretty much happens in real time; takes Tsai's ardent minimalism to the limit, or perhaps past it, veering into self-parody at times. It's full of ten hour takes of a gimping woman silently shuffling through an empty corridor. But Tsai's always rainy Taipei, with its forbidding greens and blues and its attendant malaise, is, in a strange way, an inviting world to lose yourself in. Helps that Tsai's really pretty funny, the physical jokes now depend almost entirely on the preceeding stillness for their effect. And it ends beautifully. But please, let's try something new next time, eh, Tsai-fly?
Wed Sep 10
Des Plumes dans la tete (Some Frog) C+
Starts off like The Seventh Continent, presenting a series of cryptic yet evocative imagery. Then it becomes a very poor man's Under the Sand.
Histoire de Julien et Marie (Rivette) B+/B
Good then okay then boring then good then totally awesome then what the fuck Rivette.
In the Cut (Campion) B
Remember how awesome it was when Jane Campion took Henry James and imbued his novel with her own concerns (especially how a woman can find a good man) and a strong female subjective viewpoint? No Nicole Kidman here, unfortunately, and Meg's "brave" performance is both laudable and uneven, but Ruffalo once again channels Brando to terrific effect (this time looking just like the man in Viva Zapata!)) and Campion does her thing in the context of a sub-Seven type crappy erotic thriller. In other words, the genre stuff sucks eggs (and Campion's touch is, as is often the case, two touches too heavy), but as a supple, erotically-charged fairy tale about a woman's fear of male malevolence (in its many forms) and male abandonment, it's pretty compelling. (The bad genre stuff often has a thematic purpose. For example: Red herrings = the avarice of men in their many manifestations.)
Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (Roeg, 1980) B+
Roeg's sometimes too arty for his own good, but I always enjoy cautionary tales about some obsessive guy trying to fully possess an elusive woman (perhaps because that theme confirms my smug satisfaction about my own very adamant non-possessiveness in relationships). Art Garfunkel: the most unlikely SkineMax leading man ever.
Twentynine Palms (Dumont) B-/C+
Formally accomplished and pretty engrossing road movie, and with actual characters for a change (though early on I'd pegged them for either sexual archetypes or national allegories, or perhaps both). Then it blindsides you with an aluminum bat and turns into another Bruno zoology exhibit. It's clear Dumont's not interested in human beings as such; he's much more curious about the genus (or perhaps the phylum) to which we belong. Pretty fucked up shit, but still doesn't deserve all the hate thrown at it by the seething, stirred-up audience.
Tue Sep 9
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and...Spring (Kim) B+/B
Premised on the concept of samsara, this simple, surpassingly lovely Korean parable really captures the vital spirit and elegant simplicity of Buddhism like no other film I've ever seen. So what if it happens to be "cute" as well?
Brown Bunny (Gallo) B+
So it's narcissistic and self-indulgent vanity project...but we're talking about Vincent Gallo here. Didn't anyone see Buffalo '66? And besides all that, there's also a Hellmanesque a beautifully monochromatic look and magnificent framing (especially of faces). Felt just like a mournful drive to visit the grave of a deceased loved one. Post screening Q & A a riot. The skinny: Vincent Gallo does not like Buffalo. Or Roger Ebert. Or reporters. Or his crew.
Les Triplettes de Bellville (Some French Animator) B/B-
Imaginative, cute and well-designed French cartoon but lacks the foundation and thus the emotional resonance that makes Miyazaki's flights of fancy so rich. Would've worked better as a 40 minute piece.
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