January 2011
89 posts
“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a...”
– Ann Druyan, talking about the late scientist Carl Sagan
[swiped from fuckyeahexistentialism and savagemike via kaelco]
Acceptable Perversions
What we have in Yorgos Lanthimos’ very unsettling and very strange Κυνόδοντας [Dogtooth, 2010], the Greek film that has just been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, is a story of a kind of Eden. A perverse one at that — but what’s to say about “perversity” when the grammar of things in this isolated world that the film depicts has been turned...
Hell is Other People Who Think of You With Such...
We know people like Mona Plash, the gossipmonger in the center of Douglas Sirk’s sly, subversive melodrama All That Heaven Allows [1955]. Her tongue is a well-oiled scarlet machine of titillating tales, and people may publicly censure her for her gossip, but she is allowed to thrive for one reason: to make everybody else feel superior about themselves as they secretly delight in the tales...
Pensive Pondering Does Not Equal Poetry
What a pretentious film Loo Zihan and Kan Lume’s Solos 单 [2007] is. The Singaporean film has its poetic aspirations as evident in its aesthetic choices — the long takes, the lack of dialogue, the pensive atmosphere, the black and white cinematography that bursts into sudden scenes of bright colors, the hallucinatory images of forests and fish and dancers — but it falls flat on...
A Pretty Postcard From Heartbreak But Not Much...
Time has been butchered, stretched, and experimented on so many times in the movies it has ceased to become an inventive narrative device we can be at awe with. Christopher Nolan’s Memento [2000] and Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible [2002], for example, notoriously began at the end and ended at the beginning, and subsequently forced us to consider first the darkness of what’s to come,...
How To Be An Artist Without Really Trying
Truth to tell, I find myself stumbling all over the place trying to write something coherent about this film I have just seen. In a way, I am struck dumb by it. It is not because the film is bad; it is because it is very good, and perhaps my flailing has every thing to do with a conscious effort to process whatever it is about this documentary that impresses me as a work of genius. It got to me....
The Future of Books and Publishing →
Ebooks and ereaders were hot items this past holiday season, but while this is seen as a good thing by many people there has also been a concomitant rise in piracy of the digital books. Going forward, publisher’s will have to find some way of dealing with a host of issues in an increasingly digital world. SF Signal asked their panelists this question: What will the publishing industry look...
Memories
I am a crying child in my earliest memory. It is evening, my parents have left for some other place, and there are people around me cooing to comfort me. “Mama will be back, don’t cry now…,” one of them says. I don’t believe any of them, but I soon fall asleep exhausted from all those tears. Years later, there’s still a part of me that cries from some...
Random
You gotta love Tumblr concidences: on one post, geeuh blogs a YouTube video compiling the many times The X Files’ Mulder and Scully say “I don’t know,” and on top of that post elainamaxine blogs a picture quote that says, “There will be an answer, let it be.” Why kaya the coincidence? Is this a sign? I don’t know.
Why I'm the Mayor of KRI →
Link to my food article on KRI Restaurant in my long-form blog. An excerpt: “And then there is the pad thai—perhaps the best one can find in the city—and the KRI burger with Swiss cheese and the turkey on ciabatta and the barbecued pulled pork. Once I had its Chocolate of the Week—a concoction so sinful I swore never to have it again, or at least have it with an intense sense of moderation....
MTV is Uncool.
There was a time when we tuned in to MTV to find the coolest music videos. And some really cool stuff, like Daria and Beavis and Butthead and Unplugged. Now you tune in to view the lives of serious losers. There was Snooki, and now there’s Paris Hilton looking for another disposable BFF.
Seriously.
MTV = Uncool.
You Should Date An Illiterate Girl →
By Charles Warnke. Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment….
WatchHow to eat a pizza, with feelings. This is totally not work-safe, but then again it’s Friday night!
[swiped from geeuh]
Such Simple Dreams
I didn’t realize until so much later that something fundamental was bothering me about Disney’s Tangled [2010]. Mulling a little over it, I knew I was not as moved by the film as I should have been, given the shallow joy I usually have for most of the company’s animated fare: I bawled at The Little Mermaid, I sighed with Cinderella, I reached for the mighty roar with The Lion...
It's Federico Fellini's Birthday! →
One of Italy’s great modern directors, Federico Fellini was a larger-than-life maestro who created an inimitable cinematic style combining surreal carnival with incisive social critique. While his most popular—and accessible—film, the darkly nostalgic childhood memoir Amarcord, is a great entryway into his oeuvre, 8½, a collage of memories, dreams, and fantasies about a director’s artistic...
Art and the Taming of Pain
We wring our best work, sometimes, from the brinks of pain. Long ago, I did not believe in the myth of the tortured artist—surely, I said, one can create art and beauty from a state of bliss. But I was young, I was foolish. I know now that what makes art is province only to those who are most discerning of little horrors and small upheavals, and to those who understand this: something is art...
The Warrior of the Microphone
There is a reason why the first thing we see in Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech [2010] is an almost menacing close-up of a microphone. That sets the tone for the film: it will be about speech and the hurdles one had to triumph over in order to find the voice that will inform and connect people. At the time the film is set, which is that decade of troubled peacetime before World War II...
Devour That Burger
The munchies. Everybody knows what the munchies feel like. They come around always unanticipated in the late evening, this grand craving of the carnivorous sort that starts at some bottomless pit deep inside you. The target of its unfilled rage being two ginormous orders of finger-licking cheeseburger—never mind the fries—which demand to be devoured. The munchies and cheeseburgers, they go hand in...
This Film is All Right
Of all the films from last year that I’ve watched, only two has stayed with me. One is David Fincher’s The Social Network, and I admire it for the zing of its screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and the way it demonstrated the possibilities of cinema as an artform well-suited for groundbreaking collaboration — the acting, the music, the cinematography, the production design, the direction...
A Girl and Cowboy Story
There are three types of film stories I always hesitate to screen: torture porn, westerns, and boxing films. It’s just a matter of my preferences/biases, although I know I sometimes surprise myself for liking a few titles from these genres. (Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven would be perfect examples just from one director.) Well, for the past two days, I’ve...
Two Fragments From Under the Tuscan Sun
Since I wrote a little bit of something from Audrey Welles’ Under the Tuscan Sun [2003] in this post in my long-form blog, I’ve since found myself musing over how this film has stayed emotionally intact for me over the years. Welles’ film, loosely based on the memoir of travel writer Frances Mayes, is a beautiful meditation, really, on pain, loss, and letting go, taking second...
“Unthinkably good things can happen even late in the game. It’s such a...”
– Diane Lane as Frances Mayes in Audrey Welles’ Under the Tuscan Sun [2003]
The Monsters We Love
It’s rare to find a film where the heart is in the cast of supporting characters and not the lead. But that’s exactly what you will find in David O. Russell’s boxing drama The Fighter [2010]. This is not to begrudge the talent of Mark Wahlberg who has shown us before that he has the acting chops to carry a picture. He was gloriously cocky in Paul Thomas Anderson’s porn epic...
The Wuss and the Rock
It took me several days to finish Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours [2010], his screen adaptation of the real-life dilemma of Aron Ralston who in 2003 had to cut off his arm in order to free himself from a rock that was pinning him in the belly of a Utah canyon. I was wuss. I went into the film knowing I could not possibly stand the sight (or even the suggestion) of physical torture James Franco had...
Defy the Elite! Wait, Which Elite? →
I love the froth that’s coming from the mind of the New York Times’ A.O. Scott, his condemnation of misinformed pundits who decry the existence of the “cultural elite,” and trumpet their so-called demise: “None of the ‘commissars’ and ‘imperialists’ in [Neal Gabler’s] tableau of cultural dictatorship are named, and that is for the simple...
