* To whomever used this site to nuke Pigs & Buttercups: bud, you need help. Anger management has helped Milton Bradley, and it can help you. Funny gag, though.
* My New Republic post of the month: not tired of talk about fanboys yet? Elbert Ventura makes a good case for why Oldboy is not just a fanboy wankjob. Speaking of Ventura, TNR appears to be grooming him as a replacement for the venerable (read: 184-year-old) Stanley Kauffmann, a formerly esteemed critic who has now sadly faded into irrelevancy. The young, adventurous Ventura's a good choice to make TNR film coverage vital again. Not sure if these links work for nonsubsribers, but if you can, check out this ode to Wong Kar-wai and this nerdy attack on the National Society of Film Critics' parochialism for a sample of his work.
* I placed 15th at a 1,600 entry freeroll Party Poker tourney the other day, which netted me a cool $18.00. Freerolls are basically a big waste of time, but it was good experience for further adventures in big multi-table tourneys. (I had finished out of the money in the two other times I tried 500+ player tourneys.) One lesson learned: Even though I dig Daniel Negreanu's style, I'm gonna stick with the easiest way to play big tourneys, which is the T.J. Cloutier-tight style. Wait for a monster and build your stack against fish, which comprise of about 50% of these players (types who will re-raise all-in a big raise pre-flop with KQs or 66). Negreanu's approach requires consistently outplaying your opponents after the flop, which I'm not skilled enough to do just yet. Right now, my overlay at my stakes level comes from being able to make big folds and use selective aggression better than some others.
* One basic poker principle I have only recently picked up on. In late position, it is better to call with 76 suited with limpers in front than if you're holding QJo. You try to bust'em or fold with hands like this, not risk your stack by going for top pair marginal kicker.
* Speaking of Negreanu, I think this article is pretty right on. Asian poker players are getting dissed, though admittedly, most Asians who are poker fiends tend to fall on the FOBby or the quiet nerd side, making them far less marketable than your Daniel Negreanus and Chris Fergusons. Still, as in the case with demographically-unrealistic hospital dramas, it's pretty lame that Tilt, the ESPN poker drama, has no Asians. (Have the producers stepped into a cardroom lately?) A character like my brash young poker fiend cousin Eric would be nice, but they'll probably cast Devon Aoki as a silent-but-deadly type to fill the quota.
* Lastly, thanks to Josh Rothkopf for alerting me to the awesomeness of Jonathan Lethem's book of collected short essays, The Disappointment Artist, which limns the nexus between cultural obsession and autobiography. It's really about the pathology of being a geek, and few books have offered such satisfying (and mortifying) jolts of self-recognition. His description of what it's like to prematurely revere a film (in his case The Searchers) before he's ever even seen it, then having to endure all those who would mock the Western's dated Hollywood conventions, is perfect. And I loved how, in arbitrarily adopting 2001: A Space Odyssey as his new favorite movie, he tried to watch the Kubrick opus 22 times to overtake the number of times he watched Star Wars, only to finally realize that logging most viewings of a particular movie doesn't really mean that much, even in one's internal heirarchy. There's also some good stuff on Jack "King" Kirby. A fine read for cultural obsessives who've read all the Nick Hornbys twice over.
Friday, April 15, 2005
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
The so-called "Man Date"
File under the Let's-Make-Up-a-Trend-to-Attract-Buzz Dept.: The notorious Jennifer 8. Lee, the Gatsby of the journistacracy, files a blog-buzzfly explaining the alleged phenomenon of the "The Man Date". Not mandate, as in "Dubya assuredly has no mandate", but the supposedly common and apparently panic-inducing situation (if this article's to be believed) of a date arranged between two heterosexual male friends, whether to catch up or just to hang out.
If I sound just a tad skeptical about this article, forgive me. But why can't I shake the feeling this is something Ms. Lucky 8 made up when she rolled out of bed one day, a musing which is supported only by that well-known thinkpiece crutch of selective interviewing? Maybe it's the toxic amount of homosexual panic that's evinced by the case studies, a level native only to the predictably corporate types (who just happen to make up the interviewees) that's setting off alarms. Or the fact that these so-called "Man Dates" are so common in my experience that an attempt at making it a specific sociological phenomenon comes off as useful as a thinkpiece on dishwashing rituals. The piece actually has a germ of an interesting idea in it -- the peculiarities of "male bonding" -- but this topic is best teased out through Howard Hawks movies, casual joking at lunch, or standup routines, not psuedo-intellectual gibberish. Still, this is hypocrisy week, so I'll offer my own gibberish:
Let's start with some very basic premises in discussing heterosexual male relationships.
01. Most straight men have at least a couple of male "buddies."
02. Ordinary "dates" between men revolve around an activity of some kind, a football game, a movie, going "drinking".
03. 3 or 4 men for "manly activities" are optimal, but having 2 men together is fine.
04. Straight men, however many get together, aren't too likely to get into the nitty-gritty of relationship talk, the way a group of women invariably will.
05. Male friends don't "chat" on the phone without any purpose, and "chatting" is actively discouraged.
06. Male friends typically don't have "misunderstandings" with one another that spiral into crisis.
07. Male friends typically don't sit around talking whining about what their other male friends did to them. (They might talk shit about how the friend's a loafer, complain about his hygiene, dis him as an imbecile or a wacky wingnut, speculate about his sexuality, mock his sex life, laugh at his ideas, or pity his job, but the conversation is rarely, "can you believe Matt didn't say "hi" to my girlfriend when I bumped into him at the mall? Man, what a jerk!")
Anybody with a social radar recognizes that straight males relate very differently to one another compared to relationships between straight females. I always say there are costs and benefits to both models. Nearly all women I know have a same-sex best friend with whom they have an intense, emotionally rewarding relationship -- they are the wind beneath their wings, etc. But women also fight, have fits of envy, have "misunderstandings" that boil over into full-blown falling outs or at least generate uncomfortable tension -- in short, intimate female relationships are filled with drama.
Guys -- we'll pick our buddy up from the airport, talk a little shop or sports or politics or what have you, maybe get into where we are in our relationships if we're the sensitive type, and that's that. And contra this article, guys do get together one-on-one, grab a meal, shoot the shit, catch up if they haven't talked for awhile, and go to a bar/club/concert/movie together. Okay, so it was weird when I watched Bad Education with two other dudes at the Sunset 5; but besides such obviously homoerotic-themed situations (and even then, so some strangers might view us as three gay guys enjoying our Gael Garcial Bernal peeks -- so what?), the might-be-confused-for-gay idea almost never crosses my mind when I'm out with one other dude. These relationships are simple, with no fuss or complications attached. They key is trust and mutual respect: You know these guys will get your back, and that's enough.
Anyway, some women have confused this kind of activities-based bonding for a kind of queasy emotional immaturity -- an inability of men to form mature emotional relationships with one another, due to homosexual panic or whatever. That's clearly the subtext of Lee's NY Times article. It's about male emotional immaturity. Actually, what's happening that she's filtering the opposing gender's model of friendship through the female, just as men do with female relationships.
Back in college, one of my best friends used to call me about once every two weeks, and we'd talk about fantasy baseball for an hour, talk about a few other random things for 10 more minutes and then hang up. My girlfriend at the time would listen to snippets of the conversation and mock it. "Kirby Puckett, dude!", she'd intone in a low Kolawskian mumble, parodying my stubbornly pointless buddy talk. Ten years later, I still trust my guy pal with my life, and while we actually do have intimate, "deep" conversations from time to time, the random talk about sports, movies, music, and mutual activities dominate. And that's the way I like it. In fact, I insist on it.
Personally, I simply have no desire to have a buddy relationship with a guy analogous to the female-female best friend. (Maybe that's because I have bizarrely intimate relationships with female friends, but that's a topic for another time.) I log a high volume of phone time, on average about 1,800 minutes a month. About 90% of that 1,800 minutes will be spent talking to a few close female friends, including my significant other. I won't take a guess at how much of that 90% is spent listening to gripes about a female friend, but that time is considerable. Sure, at lunch I'll listen to guys bitch and moan about co-workers, and on e-mail some movie nerd might go off on some other movie nerd, but by and large, complaints from a guy about a close guy friend are fairly rare, unless that friend truly is a dickwad. If the dude didn't steal my girlfriend or make me miss the game, it's all good. And if a consequence of not having to spend energy managing friendship crises or snuff out petty disputes is the "shallowness" of the guy buddy friendship, so be it.
I would guess that, for females, this kind of no-harm-no-foul-no-heart-to-heart buddy relationship is emotionally unrewarding. But that's why we're from different planets. Or something. But in short, guys hang out one-on-one with no anxiety. The end.
If I sound just a tad skeptical about this article, forgive me. But why can't I shake the feeling this is something Ms. Lucky 8 made up when she rolled out of bed one day, a musing which is supported only by that well-known thinkpiece crutch of selective interviewing? Maybe it's the toxic amount of homosexual panic that's evinced by the case studies, a level native only to the predictably corporate types (who just happen to make up the interviewees) that's setting off alarms. Or the fact that these so-called "Man Dates" are so common in my experience that an attempt at making it a specific sociological phenomenon comes off as useful as a thinkpiece on dishwashing rituals. The piece actually has a germ of an interesting idea in it -- the peculiarities of "male bonding" -- but this topic is best teased out through Howard Hawks movies, casual joking at lunch, or standup routines, not psuedo-intellectual gibberish. Still, this is hypocrisy week, so I'll offer my own gibberish:
Let's start with some very basic premises in discussing heterosexual male relationships.
01. Most straight men have at least a couple of male "buddies."
02. Ordinary "dates" between men revolve around an activity of some kind, a football game, a movie, going "drinking".
03. 3 or 4 men for "manly activities" are optimal, but having 2 men together is fine.
04. Straight men, however many get together, aren't too likely to get into the nitty-gritty of relationship talk, the way a group of women invariably will.
05. Male friends don't "chat" on the phone without any purpose, and "chatting" is actively discouraged.
06. Male friends typically don't have "misunderstandings" with one another that spiral into crisis.
07. Male friends typically don't sit around talking whining about what their other male friends did to them. (They might talk shit about how the friend's a loafer, complain about his hygiene, dis him as an imbecile or a wacky wingnut, speculate about his sexuality, mock his sex life, laugh at his ideas, or pity his job, but the conversation is rarely, "can you believe Matt didn't say "hi" to my girlfriend when I bumped into him at the mall? Man, what a jerk!")
Anybody with a social radar recognizes that straight males relate very differently to one another compared to relationships between straight females. I always say there are costs and benefits to both models. Nearly all women I know have a same-sex best friend with whom they have an intense, emotionally rewarding relationship -- they are the wind beneath their wings, etc. But women also fight, have fits of envy, have "misunderstandings" that boil over into full-blown falling outs or at least generate uncomfortable tension -- in short, intimate female relationships are filled with drama.
Guys -- we'll pick our buddy up from the airport, talk a little shop or sports or politics or what have you, maybe get into where we are in our relationships if we're the sensitive type, and that's that. And contra this article, guys do get together one-on-one, grab a meal, shoot the shit, catch up if they haven't talked for awhile, and go to a bar/club/concert/movie together. Okay, so it was weird when I watched Bad Education with two other dudes at the Sunset 5; but besides such obviously homoerotic-themed situations (and even then, so some strangers might view us as three gay guys enjoying our Gael Garcial Bernal peeks -- so what?), the might-be-confused-for-gay idea almost never crosses my mind when I'm out with one other dude. These relationships are simple, with no fuss or complications attached. They key is trust and mutual respect: You know these guys will get your back, and that's enough.
Anyway, some women have confused this kind of activities-based bonding for a kind of queasy emotional immaturity -- an inability of men to form mature emotional relationships with one another, due to homosexual panic or whatever. That's clearly the subtext of Lee's NY Times article. It's about male emotional immaturity. Actually, what's happening that she's filtering the opposing gender's model of friendship through the female, just as men do with female relationships.
Back in college, one of my best friends used to call me about once every two weeks, and we'd talk about fantasy baseball for an hour, talk about a few other random things for 10 more minutes and then hang up. My girlfriend at the time would listen to snippets of the conversation and mock it. "Kirby Puckett, dude!", she'd intone in a low Kolawskian mumble, parodying my stubbornly pointless buddy talk. Ten years later, I still trust my guy pal with my life, and while we actually do have intimate, "deep" conversations from time to time, the random talk about sports, movies, music, and mutual activities dominate. And that's the way I like it. In fact, I insist on it.
Personally, I simply have no desire to have a buddy relationship with a guy analogous to the female-female best friend. (Maybe that's because I have bizarrely intimate relationships with female friends, but that's a topic for another time.) I log a high volume of phone time, on average about 1,800 minutes a month. About 90% of that 1,800 minutes will be spent talking to a few close female friends, including my significant other. I won't take a guess at how much of that 90% is spent listening to gripes about a female friend, but that time is considerable. Sure, at lunch I'll listen to guys bitch and moan about co-workers, and on e-mail some movie nerd might go off on some other movie nerd, but by and large, complaints from a guy about a close guy friend are fairly rare, unless that friend truly is a dickwad. If the dude didn't steal my girlfriend or make me miss the game, it's all good. And if a consequence of not having to spend energy managing friendship crises or snuff out petty disputes is the "shallowness" of the guy buddy friendship, so be it.
I would guess that, for females, this kind of no-harm-no-foul-no-heart-to-heart buddy relationship is emotionally unrewarding. But that's why we're from different planets. Or something. But in short, guys hang out one-on-one with no anxiety. The end.
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Reviewing the Audience
Is there anything in criticism more obnoxious than a critic reviewing the audience? Well, yes... there's Rex Reed's racist screed masquerading as an Oldboy review (since deleted by the Observer). But reviewing the audience is a very close second.
Before we go further any further, let me be clear on what reviewing an audience means. For preliminary examples, I direct you to any review by Armond White. Another place where this practice abounds is this universally derided Slate movie club, where the participants find "hipsters" who like Dogville and Before Sunset as dangerous as al Qaida. Or better yet, this Matthew Wilder dis on Rohmer fans, perhaps the nadir of this tactic. Used exclusively in negative reviews, the elements of a "review the audience" ploy are (1) defining the intended audience for any given film in the most ungenerous light; (2) implicitly congratulating the reader as someone superior to this intended audience; and (3) once you've lathered up your readers sufficiently, leaping to the conclusion: "you should not watch this movie because this is made for those losers, not for you, champ." Typically, the targets are aging bobos, the Landmark Theaters/NPR crowd, to whom lefty hipsters can condescend guilt-free, but homely geeks, Red Staters, and other unfashionable types are also common objects of scorn. Of course, for it all to work every word must be decreed in a haughty, dismissive voice, like the pronouncements from the prom queen in high school. "You are not cool/sophisticated/edgy/mature if you like this movie," these reviews tell you, without actually saying anything useful about the movies themselves.
We've all come across these reviews before, and most of us have probably felt the impulse to validate our dislike by judging the intended audience of the art that we scorn. You find this impulse most commonly attached to music, but movies are not immune from snobbery. Indeed, I'd say snob psychology is at the heart of connoisseurship -- folks are just too polite to actually blurt out the nasty thoughts lurking in our inner Jack Black about lame "I Just Called to Say I Love You" fans. It's human to not want to join a club comprised of people you despise. These reviews simply pander to that impulse.
Two recent films have provoked a gaggle of "review the audience" type reviews. Manohla Dargis's pan of Oldboy isn't so much an evisceration of the Korean shocker as it is a snarky putdown of genre cultists and the cult aesthetic. It's a strange diatribe coming from a critic who has the anime Ghost in the Shell 2 on her top 10 list, but I'm not her therapist. In any case, it's a provocative if irritating polemic that has stirred much debate in geek circles. But hot on Oldboy's heels comes Sin City, which has prompted all kinds of putdowns of that comic book adaptation's intended audience. I plead guilty to do doing the same.
Am I a hypocrite for fuming against the "reviewing the audience" tactic yet turning around and employing the same? Perhaps. But I find no way of explaining my disdain for Sin City honestly without coming to the heart of the matter: that this movie embodies a certain kind of sensibility best described by way of reference to fifteen-year-old Punisher fans. Watching Sin City, I had the inescapable feeling that the movie is made specifically and only for the edification of "fanboys" (as exuberant teen geeks (and their likeminded adult manifestations) are contemptuously or affectionately called, depending on whether you consider yourself part of the fanboy bretheren). Every "cool" moment by a "cool" character -- tortured tough guy, ninja chick, or whore with a machine gun -- feels calculated to elicit sighs of joy from boys just beginning to sprout pubes, whose idea of "cool" involves a very mean dude in a trench coat with a big gun, preferably with a cigarette dangling from the lips and a quick quip for every occasion. If you don't think trenchcoat chic is actually cool -- Robert Rodriguez's very similar exercise in studied coolness, the Desperado/Once Upon in a Time in Mexico series of macho posturing, struck me as laughably uncool -- all your left with are some arresting visuals in service of peurile crap. I found Sin City uncomfortable to watch, not because of the violence or nihilism, but because I was embarrassed by the shameless fanboy ethos at work. The perfume commercial dialogue and the cliched tough guys, the ninja chicks and whores with machine guns, the trite corruption storyline -- I thought the Spider-Man movies put an end to this kind of nonsense.
It's possible that much of this disdain stems from my own addled psychopathology, something to do with being a self-loathing geek, as someone has suggested. I'll admit that I'm instinctively suspicious of nearly anything I liked when I was fifteen. I'm more embarrassed than excited by references to Debbie Gibson, The X-Men, or Get Smart. But fanboys are characterized by their unalloyed enthusiasm for the object of their devotion -- they are, after all, partisans -- while my approach to art can be described as cautiously optimistic. Nor am I particularly attached to the tropes of "extreme" cult cinema.
So I don't think it's hating my inner fanboy that makes me review the audience. Rather, certain films, like Sin City or Finding Neverland on the other end, function so well within its niche that, in the end, what's offensive about them is that they close themselves off to anyone who doesn't get giddy when they get a whiff of their scent. These movies are "well-made" and arrive exactly as the creators intended, I'm sure. But by wallowing in "cool chic" fanboyism or middlebrow Miramaxism and rubbing the audience's nose in it, these movies face a backlash from those who find that underlying sensibility repugnant. Of course, my own blowback will come when the similarly hermetically-sealed, sensibility-sensitive movies by Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas are flamed. Yeah, it's true: misguided creatures who hate talky French Dandy Cinema are out there, if you can believe it. And they will pay me back.
Kings and Queen, April 20, 2005 @ Aero. I will be there. As will Arnaud. You will have your chance for dandy scalp thereafter.
Before we go further any further, let me be clear on what reviewing an audience means. For preliminary examples, I direct you to any review by Armond White. Another place where this practice abounds is this universally derided Slate movie club, where the participants find "hipsters" who like Dogville and Before Sunset as dangerous as al Qaida. Or better yet, this Matthew Wilder dis on Rohmer fans, perhaps the nadir of this tactic. Used exclusively in negative reviews, the elements of a "review the audience" ploy are (1) defining the intended audience for any given film in the most ungenerous light; (2) implicitly congratulating the reader as someone superior to this intended audience; and (3) once you've lathered up your readers sufficiently, leaping to the conclusion: "you should not watch this movie because this is made for those losers, not for you, champ." Typically, the targets are aging bobos, the Landmark Theaters/NPR crowd, to whom lefty hipsters can condescend guilt-free, but homely geeks, Red Staters, and other unfashionable types are also common objects of scorn. Of course, for it all to work every word must be decreed in a haughty, dismissive voice, like the pronouncements from the prom queen in high school. "You are not cool/sophisticated/edgy/mature if you like this movie," these reviews tell you, without actually saying anything useful about the movies themselves.
We've all come across these reviews before, and most of us have probably felt the impulse to validate our dislike by judging the intended audience of the art that we scorn. You find this impulse most commonly attached to music, but movies are not immune from snobbery. Indeed, I'd say snob psychology is at the heart of connoisseurship -- folks are just too polite to actually blurt out the nasty thoughts lurking in our inner Jack Black about lame "I Just Called to Say I Love You" fans. It's human to not want to join a club comprised of people you despise. These reviews simply pander to that impulse.
Two recent films have provoked a gaggle of "review the audience" type reviews. Manohla Dargis's pan of Oldboy isn't so much an evisceration of the Korean shocker as it is a snarky putdown of genre cultists and the cult aesthetic. It's a strange diatribe coming from a critic who has the anime Ghost in the Shell 2 on her top 10 list, but I'm not her therapist. In any case, it's a provocative if irritating polemic that has stirred much debate in geek circles. But hot on Oldboy's heels comes Sin City, which has prompted all kinds of putdowns of that comic book adaptation's intended audience. I plead guilty to do doing the same.
Am I a hypocrite for fuming against the "reviewing the audience" tactic yet turning around and employing the same? Perhaps. But I find no way of explaining my disdain for Sin City honestly without coming to the heart of the matter: that this movie embodies a certain kind of sensibility best described by way of reference to fifteen-year-old Punisher fans. Watching Sin City, I had the inescapable feeling that the movie is made specifically and only for the edification of "fanboys" (as exuberant teen geeks (and their likeminded adult manifestations) are contemptuously or affectionately called, depending on whether you consider yourself part of the fanboy bretheren). Every "cool" moment by a "cool" character -- tortured tough guy, ninja chick, or whore with a machine gun -- feels calculated to elicit sighs of joy from boys just beginning to sprout pubes, whose idea of "cool" involves a very mean dude in a trench coat with a big gun, preferably with a cigarette dangling from the lips and a quick quip for every occasion. If you don't think trenchcoat chic is actually cool -- Robert Rodriguez's very similar exercise in studied coolness, the Desperado/Once Upon in a Time in Mexico series of macho posturing, struck me as laughably uncool -- all your left with are some arresting visuals in service of peurile crap. I found Sin City uncomfortable to watch, not because of the violence or nihilism, but because I was embarrassed by the shameless fanboy ethos at work. The perfume commercial dialogue and the cliched tough guys, the ninja chicks and whores with machine guns, the trite corruption storyline -- I thought the Spider-Man movies put an end to this kind of nonsense.
It's possible that much of this disdain stems from my own addled psychopathology, something to do with being a self-loathing geek, as someone has suggested. I'll admit that I'm instinctively suspicious of nearly anything I liked when I was fifteen. I'm more embarrassed than excited by references to Debbie Gibson, The X-Men, or Get Smart. But fanboys are characterized by their unalloyed enthusiasm for the object of their devotion -- they are, after all, partisans -- while my approach to art can be described as cautiously optimistic. Nor am I particularly attached to the tropes of "extreme" cult cinema.
So I don't think it's hating my inner fanboy that makes me review the audience. Rather, certain films, like Sin City or Finding Neverland on the other end, function so well within its niche that, in the end, what's offensive about them is that they close themselves off to anyone who doesn't get giddy when they get a whiff of their scent. These movies are "well-made" and arrive exactly as the creators intended, I'm sure. But by wallowing in "cool chic" fanboyism or middlebrow Miramaxism and rubbing the audience's nose in it, these movies face a backlash from those who find that underlying sensibility repugnant. Of course, my own blowback will come when the similarly hermetically-sealed, sensibility-sensitive movies by Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas are flamed. Yeah, it's true: misguided creatures who hate talky French Dandy Cinema are out there, if you can believe it. And they will pay me back.
Kings and Queen, April 20, 2005 @ Aero. I will be there. As will Arnaud. You will have your chance for dandy scalp thereafter.
Monday, April 11, 2005
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Quiznos
The first album I ever purchased was Van Halen's 1984. My favorite song on that album was "Panama" but now I like "Hot for Teacher" best.
I could only name three of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The rest I had to look up on Wikipedia. I wish they would reconstruct the Colossus of Rhodes. Then I would visit it.
The Decemberists are very good in concert. During the concert, it occurred to me that the lead singer looked like high-profile blogger Matthew Yglesias. Funny that Yglesias turned out to be a Decemberists fanboy.
I could only name three of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The rest I had to look up on Wikipedia. I wish they would reconstruct the Colossus of Rhodes. Then I would visit it.
The Decemberists are very good in concert. During the concert, it occurred to me that the lead singer looked like high-profile blogger Matthew Yglesias. Funny that Yglesias turned out to be a Decemberists fanboy.
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Maggie: Beautiful Enigma (Updated)
So says Olivier Assayas in the first account I've read of the Maggie Cheung/Olivier Assayas break-up. Gossip for nerds. (Via GreenCine Daily.)
It's hard not to read Clean as some kind of valentine to Maggie, but I tend to value it for not only Assayas' incomparable mise-en-scene (the veritiginous shot following Maggie's scuttling down the airport escalator is pure awesomeness) but for another sharp take on the globalized experience. Last time out, Olivier explored the socio-economic dystopia of globalized info-business. In Demonlover, Assayas taps into globalization anxiety by exploring the dark world of corporate mercenaries and cybersex. It's both a mess (dude can't plot his way out of a zen rock garden) and absolutely essential. In the small-scale Clean, Olivier narrows his scope to Maggie's multi-national, multi-lingual junkie Emily, who traverses across continents with the ease of the real-life Maggie Cheung, though Olivier's kind enough to throw in a little Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore vibe to de-glam it some. Can't disagree with those who've belittle the TV-movie-like scenario, Maggie's not entirely convincing performance, and/or especially her sucky songs (my biggest gripe is about her hair), but Clean does persuasively portray an increasingly common species, the multi-national for whom moving from Hong Kong to Paris is like moving from New York to Miami. And anyway even a TV-movie directed by Olivier Assayas, the most thrilling cinematic stylist in the world today, Wong Kar-wai, Scorsese, Tarantino, et al. included, is not to be missed.
Update: I just happened upon this Kent Jones review of Clean in Cinemascope, which may be the best piece I've read on an Assayas film and Assayas' cinema, going into great detail Assayas' strategies of "catching up to life" and narrative elisions that give Assayas' cinema the sense of captured life in fleeting, truthful moments. Par for the course for Kent Jones, who pens the most persuasive raves in comtemporary criticism.
It's hard not to read Clean as some kind of valentine to Maggie, but I tend to value it for not only Assayas' incomparable mise-en-scene (the veritiginous shot following Maggie's scuttling down the airport escalator is pure awesomeness) but for another sharp take on the globalized experience. Last time out, Olivier explored the socio-economic dystopia of globalized info-business. In Demonlover, Assayas taps into globalization anxiety by exploring the dark world of corporate mercenaries and cybersex. It's both a mess (dude can't plot his way out of a zen rock garden) and absolutely essential. In the small-scale Clean, Olivier narrows his scope to Maggie's multi-national, multi-lingual junkie Emily, who traverses across continents with the ease of the real-life Maggie Cheung, though Olivier's kind enough to throw in a little Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore vibe to de-glam it some. Can't disagree with those who've belittle the TV-movie-like scenario, Maggie's not entirely convincing performance, and/or especially her sucky songs (my biggest gripe is about her hair), but Clean does persuasively portray an increasingly common species, the multi-national for whom moving from Hong Kong to Paris is like moving from New York to Miami. And anyway even a TV-movie directed by Olivier Assayas, the most thrilling cinematic stylist in the world today, Wong Kar-wai, Scorsese, Tarantino, et al. included, is not to be missed.
Update: I just happened upon this Kent Jones review of Clean in Cinemascope, which may be the best piece I've read on an Assayas film and Assayas' cinema, going into great detail Assayas' strategies of "catching up to life" and narrative elisions that give Assayas' cinema the sense of captured life in fleeting, truthful moments. Par for the course for Kent Jones, who pens the most persuasive raves in comtemporary criticism.
Monday, April 04, 2005
Sin City (Miller & Rodriguez w/ Tarantino) C+
She was no good. She was no good and I knew it. But I let her buy me a few. Shoulda sat at the next table, but skull's been dented too many times, it's hard to remember things. Oh yeah. I knew this dame. Some years back I took her out for a test drive. Had a nice paint job, but the engine convulsed like a cancer patient. Bumpy wheels. I like my rides smooth. Even a lug like me wants a little more from a ride than just shiny spoilers. Shiny spoilers was all she had. She disappeared for a while but now she's back. Some body shop did a nice job with her. Yeah, nice job. Real nice. Like cheap $10 perfume wrapped in a $20 package with a pink bow and and ribbons, the kind you find during the holidays in those gift boxes sold at expensive soap stores in a part of town where the broads wear stockings and the joes shave. Never got a gift box before, but even I knew cheap perfume in a pretty package is still cheap perfume.
She was no good, but I let her sweet talk me anyway. I downed four or five shots of moonshine the house shipped in from Mississippi. Good brew. Takes the sting off her yakking. This dame wouldn't shut up, even after I grabbed her and smashed my lips into her kisser. She just kept running those painted lips of hers. The dame memorized all the wrong pages of dime store paperbacks, and now she's feeding me some whopper about a hooker gang and a cannibal boy with glasses and corrupt senators and smelly child molestors. Tell you the truth I wasn't paying much attention. My eyes were glued on that hot red slip-on of hers, and imagined how fine she'd look in that dress as the rain came pouring down on her. She looked fine, alright. Fine enough for me. I didn't care if it was all body shop work. She looked fine. Fine enough for me.
I was ready. Ready to take her back. Ready for that ten dollar perfume to waft through the air of my cheap motel room. But she wouldn't stop spinning her yarn. Something about a lug with a heart of gold who saves a stripper. Something else about a corrupt priest and a cop with a gun barrel stuck to his head. Maybe it's a stripper with a barrel stuck to her head. Maybe I'm mixed up. But I didn't care. I just wanted the dame to shut her trap. After throwing back five, eight shots, I lost count, I told the dame I had business to take of. I told her I like the old fashion kind of dame, the kind who talked straight and didn't need to look at her phone to tell the time. I told her I like the dames from the cheap paperbacks, not the dames who playacted the dames in the cheap paperbacks. I told her about all the two-time losers in this joint, about that crunchy sound a human skull makes as it smacks into the pavement. About how her story wouldn't take here. I told her maybe she'd have better luck with the pimply boys at the gaming joint next door. Those kids was no older than twelve and maybe they'd take to this garbage about hot ninja broads and katanas and what not. I told her after twelve shots, or fifteen, I lost count, I'd be no use to her tonight. I was dazed. And not really interested. So I helped myself up and stumbled out of the joint and dragged myself home. Alone. No use getting mixed up with a dame like her. She was no good and I knew it.
She was no good, but I let her sweet talk me anyway. I downed four or five shots of moonshine the house shipped in from Mississippi. Good brew. Takes the sting off her yakking. This dame wouldn't shut up, even after I grabbed her and smashed my lips into her kisser. She just kept running those painted lips of hers. The dame memorized all the wrong pages of dime store paperbacks, and now she's feeding me some whopper about a hooker gang and a cannibal boy with glasses and corrupt senators and smelly child molestors. Tell you the truth I wasn't paying much attention. My eyes were glued on that hot red slip-on of hers, and imagined how fine she'd look in that dress as the rain came pouring down on her. She looked fine, alright. Fine enough for me. I didn't care if it was all body shop work. She looked fine. Fine enough for me.
I was ready. Ready to take her back. Ready for that ten dollar perfume to waft through the air of my cheap motel room. But she wouldn't stop spinning her yarn. Something about a lug with a heart of gold who saves a stripper. Something else about a corrupt priest and a cop with a gun barrel stuck to his head. Maybe it's a stripper with a barrel stuck to her head. Maybe I'm mixed up. But I didn't care. I just wanted the dame to shut her trap. After throwing back five, eight shots, I lost count, I told the dame I had business to take of. I told her I like the old fashion kind of dame, the kind who talked straight and didn't need to look at her phone to tell the time. I told her I like the dames from the cheap paperbacks, not the dames who playacted the dames in the cheap paperbacks. I told her about all the two-time losers in this joint, about that crunchy sound a human skull makes as it smacks into the pavement. About how her story wouldn't take here. I told her maybe she'd have better luck with the pimply boys at the gaming joint next door. Those kids was no older than twelve and maybe they'd take to this garbage about hot ninja broads and katanas and what not. I told her after twelve shots, or fifteen, I lost count, I'd be no use to her tonight. I was dazed. And not really interested. So I helped myself up and stumbled out of the joint and dragged myself home. Alone. No use getting mixed up with a dame like her. She was no good and I knew it.
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