The Broad View

A New Deal

2009-11-08T18:59:00.003-05:00

Hello, loves.
From now on, check out my film writings and general tangents at New Deal Sally. And thank you so much for reading this blog. It is where I found my voice, plain and simple.

Come Visit

2008-04-23T23:21:00.003-04:00

Huzzah to any who still stops by. I'm blogging Ebertfest again this year, and would welcome your eagle eyes. And stop back. Who knows? I may just have something to say again soon. Spring thaws even the most frozen of writers.

A Message From the Managment. Oh, Indeed.

2008-03-09T23:17:00.006-04:00

Yes, yes, it's been forever and a day since I last posted and my excuses include the classic Rosmanic litany of funerals, flu, and felled hearts (true, true, and true!), but this is what I request — nay, command of thee:

Please do not mention the Wire finale to yours truly until Wednesday, March 12.

This is when Jostle, Kristal and I plan to reunite for the last, precious 90 minutes of what has been and will remain the greatest show to ever grace (my especially) small screen. The newsroom scenes were as unnecessarily expository as the rest of The Wire never was, but the season's penultimate episode pretty much saved the series, its soul, my faith. RIP Omar, RIP Snoop, RIP hoppers everywhere. Now zip them lips — for now.

The Farewell Symphony

2008-02-02T15:04:00.000-05:00

As Joshua's words come echoing across the water and down the years to me, I can't help thinking that his life was not just his finest thoughts about poetry and friendship, expressed in a style that rejected forcefulness in favor of sympathy, but it was also comprised of his long mornings in his dressing gown with his telephone, newspapers, the Hu Kwa smoked tea and the little sterling-silver strainer that sat in its drip cup when it wasn't straddled across a cup catching leaves. His life was made up of his pleasure in the morning glories as well as his hilarity .....

After [his death] I looked through all the letters I'd ever received from Joshua and I realized I'd been unworthy of him then, that he'd been sending them through time to me as I would become years later.
--Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony

Maybe it's this unyielding time of year, but lately there's been much death both in my life and in the lives of people I love. Rather than finding them shocking, I have begun to accept these losses as commonplace, albeit painfully so. Herein lies what Jane Smiley famously termed the Age of Grief. That point in our 30s when those who were the grownups begin to sicken and fade, leaving us to step into their shoes without any acceptable self-illusions or selfishness. When we lose the only ones who remembered us when were little and effortlessly dear, who forgave our sins as youthful folly, and who regarded us with the hope and fear and helpless affection with which every generation regards the one that will supplant them.

I suspect that most of what these people taught me I only roughly comprehend now. And I hope fervently that someday I will, like White, become the person that their best selves were already addressing.

Of the Gold Standard Set by The Wire and, Yes, I'm Not There (Another Rosmanic State of the Union)

2008-01-06T13:46:00.001-05:00

I’m up early today, already digging on the different quality that a mere extra twenty degrees imparts to winter air, because, really, I never fell back asleep after I screamed at the kids partying on the first floor of my building.

Rest assured I loathe the word “party” as a verb, but that’s the word for the loathsome activity that had been holding my entire apartment building hostage last night. The coked-up Alexander Dumbasses in 1R had been blasting their mediocre dance music and scrabbling around in the hallway on audibly cheap heels, repeatedly slamming our heavy front door and screaming to each other in MySpacese. I’d been lying in my bed, simmering and then seething, reminding myself that at some point that might have been me. Another voice kept hissing, though: Dude, you taught yoga in your 20s and went to Quaker college. At least you would’ve given your neighbors a heads-up that there was going be a party and I know you would’ve tapered it off before the older Italian couple on the second floor started dressing for church. Not to mention you would’ve been blasting music that actually got you laid.

At 5:45 am I finally lost my shit. Threw a robe over my hideous nightgown and thumped down two flights of stairs, hair standing on end in an uncultivated way that might’ve looked cute when I was, say, my neighbors' age. But now: just pissed-off hair on pissed-off me.

I banged on the door as hard as cops do and when a girl opened the door — her eyes glassy, her nose rabbity, her skirt Robert Plant-short — I balled my fists and barked in a voice I’d almost forgot I had: “What is it going to take to get you to shut the fuck up?”

The girl stared at me, entirely blank, and whispered, “Okay.” The music went off immediately. Five minutes later a mass trampling in the hallway was followed by one last, weakly defiant slam. Mama had ended the party.

I tromped upstairs, and lay back in bed, heart thumping in my throat, Max and Ruby’s tails swishing furiously. Nearly 37, a cat lady alone on a Saturday night, and still I thought I was better than those douchebags sowing their seemingly endless wild oats. Let them do this for two years, I thought, and then rush back to the suburbs that spewed them once NYC seemed so dang safe. Let them have two more years of bad sex and overpriced meals and dumb outfits in histrionically overdocumented spaces. Give them two more years of something to blog about and then, just as they’re rounding 30’s corner, let them scurry back to 401ks and their expensively reproduced DNA that they’d freak if they didn’t have to remind them to grow up. Let them pretend they’re city dwellers but never really learn anything from or about the very place they live. Let them live in this fabulous, dreadful quagmire for two more years without once silently nodding at someone whom they’d never run across in the cushy world from which they emerged. Let them be hipsters; I’m a bohemian who never wants to return to the mostly dark muddle that spawned her. Fuck’em if they can’t shut the fuck up.

That’s right.

I blame the whole thing on the Wire, honestly. For five months I’ve been in Wire boot camp and it doesn’t exactly teach you to suffer fools gladly. Yancey and I watched the first three seasons together, but after the split I couldn’t bear to watch Season 4 when it aired. Eventually I got over that silliness and realized I needed to start from scratch before Season 4 came out on DVD. The last five months’ free time — which has scarcely existed, save for certain trips to Massachusetts — has been spent in the following way:

1. My Wire buddy Kristal comes over or I skulk over to her East Village joint.
2. We eat a meal that one of us prepared with more care than we’ll ever admit to the other.
3. We drink a bottle of something strong while we silently watch as many Wire episodes as we can.

We barely talk about anything not Wire-related. If we do talk about anything else, it’s mostly comprised of the famous Fucks, Bunk and McNutty style. Mostly we just sort out the show and let it sort us out. To extol its virtues here would be radically redundant: you’ve either already surrendered to its brilliant articulation of power theory or you will. As well, since the show is finally reaping a modicum of what it’s due, much has been written about it elsewhere.

But I will say this: what the show most thoroughly achieves is perspective. It throws into high relief how overstated everything else is — not only onscreen but in daily life and conversations. This show possesses heart and brains and balls and yes, mofo, pussy, and it does so without once laboring to make sure you know. God knows it doesn’t cater to those baby tomatoes who can’t catchup. And it sure as hell doesn’t fall prey to the Klever with a K meshigos that I apparently will never resist. It just tells an untold story with wit and empathy, and leaves it to you to keep track of its bits and pieces. This may be the only TV show that not only teaches you something in particular but makes you generally smarter. It coaches you to really pay attention. Gives you what they call in the Baltimore Police Homicide Division “soft eyes.” Goes on to show that every cog matters — especially the ones that have been officially erased because they can achieve that much more since no one’s looking. Any self-aggrandizing just falls against the natural order this show lays out. Vanity is a luxury ill-afforded; egoism the true crime. That’s what idiot-savant McNulty’s rise and fall and rise and fall teaches us.

Which is why, going back to my neighbors, I’ve become less tolerant as of late. I moved to Brooklyn 15 years ago not because I thought it would be a lark but because I never thought there’d be another place for me. I didn’t just come here for some stories to tell later; I came here to finally live amongst people who weren’t all like me or each other, and didn't aspire to be. I came to Brooklyn, not Manhattan, and even then I was aware I was part of the very gentrification that we’d all come to bemoan. But back then we did it differently. We planned (or at least I did) on sending our kids to NYC public schools, and involving ourselves in improving them. We smoked dope; didn’t do bumps. We worked in Community Gardens, got involved in local causes. We got to know our neighbors. I always picked up litter — and yelled at kids for littering. (Still do.) I was aware of my tendency to pat myself on the back for mixing with what I still viewed as local color, but I hoped I’d grow out of that shit, and I mostly have. Hell, these days, as a late-30s woman who’s hung on to her rent-stabilized pad even during the years that crackdealers and a real-life brothel also inhabited the building, I think I’ve actually become part of the local color. I’ve been doggedly un-upwardly mobile because I just couldn’t bear the kind of job I’d been programmed to seek, but I was at least conscious that my poverty was a choice rather than the inescapable reality experienced by many in my chosen city and my family of origin. And when I finally did surrender to that stable gig — which, yes, I did this fall — I became another taxpayer, as they say on the Wire. Someone who wants her stoop nice.

So it’s going to take more than those punks on the first floor to get me to give up on my sleep. Not only because those kids don’t bode enough real danger, Bodymore style, for me to steer clear, but because, hell, I can’t respect how they just can’t shut the fuck up. And if Omar and Keema and Bunk and Lester and Daniels and Rawls and Stringer and Avon and Prop Joe and Marlow have taught me anything, it’s how to back somebody down with a silent stare followed by a few well-chosen words that pack a punch no one knew was coming.

---------------------------------

Of course that leaves me in a funny place as a film critic. During this fall that I’ve been immersed in the Wire, all cinema has seemed so damn spelled out. Yes, I’ve still been sitting in on tons of screenings — I've been writing for Flavorpill more than ever and even writing up some mainstream ditties for my mainstream mag — and am more than willing to admit that 2007 was the best year US cinema has seen in at least five years. I have even concocted my top-11 list (quel Spinal Tap, I know):

11. Romance & Cigarettes
10. Michael Clayton
9. The Host
8. Knocked-Up
7. The Bourne Supremacy
6. Broken English
5. Persepolis
4. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
3. Away From Her
2. There Will Be Blood
1. I’m Not There

But most of this list overlaps with those of my colleagues and what doesn’t I haven’t been in the mood to discuss. I’ve held every film and every conversation to The Wire's tremendous economy and long view, and what can live up to that? I suspect, for example, I might not have hated films like Eastern Promises or Gone Baby Gone quite so much if I hadn’t been watching a show that made Scorsese seem incredibly overdone.

I wasn’t surprised by this year's trend of wildly violent Westerns — both withholding and overdrawn — given that the US impulse of Manifest Destiny is currently tearing the entire Middle East an unnecessary new asshole. (There Will Be Blood is by far the best of this lot.) I took to Away From Her and Broken English but knew their grown-up, terribly feminine sadness would drop like a thousand trees in an unpopulated forest. And I loved I’m Not There in such a personal, fierce way that it hurt to argue about it as I did whenever the subject was broached.

Suffice it say that it was the first successful music biopic ever made because it wasn’t so much about Dylan as it was about the '60s that bore him — the state of mind that really sprawled from Guthrie’s '40s to the Vietnam '70s. It was about the last time Americans thought that not only they could change but that they could love their country and still seek to change it. It’s about how much artists can reasonably be expected to owe their audiences and how much influence they can reasonably expect to wield. About whether art can really impact social change, and whether it should be expected to. It is even about the mutability of identity, and the impermeability of soul. Lofty stuff, for sure, and I’ve been accused whenever I’ve attempted to discuss this of being everything from fake-populist to elitist, but I think that big ideas beget big ideas and it’s okay to expect our film and even our television to aspire to such levels and it's okay to try to talk about them. Even fake populist to not try. Certainly a loss. With all apologies to Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman, Todd Haynes created in I’m Not There easily the most original film of this decade, which renders it the most original film of the millennium. And he did it by achieving a cinematic expression as variegated and ragged and unhappily gorgeous as his subject(s).

But more than that, this movie feels like home because it nails so many moments and emotions that carve at the loneliness I carry. It channels what I love about my borough and The Wire, too. The willingness to acknowledge (as Wire creators David Simon and Ed Burns suggest over and over in interviews) that no one is solely a saint or a sinner. That human nature is so complicated that unnecessary embellishments are at best whistling in the dark and at worse a disavowal of the richness that already exists on every corner. That sometimes a new language must be manufactured in order to communicate what we don’t normally say, even to ourselves. And that learning a new language doesn’t exactly entail easy listening.

I cannot wait for The Wire Season Five premiere. But I’m going to try, just like I’m going to try in this new year to not hold every other show as well as myself to its impossibly high standards. Otherwise, I may never write more than 200 words of criticism at a time again.

Why I Embrace a Woman's Thirties/Why I Embrace Schulman at Any Age

2007-08-08T18:28:00.000-04:00

I watched her skin, primarily, and the way her wrists moved. She had the manner of inner grace and intelligent beauty that women only begin to realize in their late thirties. Everything is texture and wise emotions. It was in her voice, her gestures, in every habit. A certain familiarity with obstacles. She glanced, not fleetingly from side to side, but up and down, to herself and then back to me. Her eyes were deep and tired with wrinkles from the sides like picture frames. Beatriz’s veins stood away from her neck and those thin wrists, so beautiful — there I could see every sorrow and useful labor. I got excited for the first time in a long time, realizing that this was in my future as well. Not just knowing her, but myself, becoming that beautiful. It had been too long since I had such hopeful imaginings.

--Sarah Schulman, After Delores

Just when we women become salty and beautiful is when the real culturally agreed-upon Ophelia Syndrome kicks in, and it’s just so unnecessary. I’m tired of even talking about it, honestly, but since we female-identified persons (not just biological women) climb into true adulthood ever-apologetically, I am grateful when I stumble upon a passage or a song or a person that reminds us that our daily iridescence only becomes a matter of fact when we're old enough to know who we are. Schulman does so in every line of her work.

She has an ability to nail it, as well as a passion for lowdown New York as if it were as distinct from the rest of the globe as the Earth is from the rest of the solar system (and as if leaving it were as difficult), and a love of women that is specific and fierce and generous and still, somehow, not self-obliterating. There is something crummy and self-pitying about her characters until you grasp that the misery and sisteroutsiderness they channel are necessary to produce her steady onslaught of insights. The full-frontal honesty that has been deplored in me exists as her finest attribute so I cling to her baggy Levis as if she were a spiritual big sister. She writes in a series of snapshots that connect to each other through the pussy and the heart, and their timeliness and timelessness read at first as casual but turn out irrevocable. I challenge you to connect to all of it. To try, at least. Just the effort will sneak up on you worthily.

Lookee What Broken English Drug In

2007-07-11T22:26:00.000-04:00

Broken English is the exact sort of film that gets lost in the Sundance shuffle. About a sadsack 30something single wiling her days in a nearly there New York existence (she works a chi-chi downtown hotel job rather than the art world gig she’d desired; friends with rather than a member of a prosperous gorgeous couple), its premise falls in with the listless fare that comprises festival fare these days. Not to mention that it stars lil Miss Indie America herself — Parker Posey, who acrobatically jumped her own shark nearly half a decade ago in a drift of tiny ironies masquerading as movies.

Anyone who’s read this blog over the last few years knows of my mounting frustration with the American independent film scene. Why I reserve my ire for this world rather than Hollywood is simple: I refuse to play frog to the scorpion of the major studio system. Complaining that a major motion picture is crap is pretty much like whining that Twinkies don’t yield nutritional value. The studio system is predicated on a business model in which the value of individual films is calculated on how much money they produce, plain and simple: if the studio doesn't anticipate a film will make money, it shan’t be made. And if it anticipates that it will make money, made it shalt be — even if the script is riddled with holes, the stars radically miscast, and the editing as junky as the guys huddled on my corner. That the financial worth of these movies is predicated to some degree on people’s experienced (or anticipated) pleasure is the only place where aesthetic or social value enters this picture, ultimately, even if the individual cogs –the directors, the actors, cinematographers, editors, what have you—still care fiercely about the quality of the work they are producing for financially unrelated reasons. So a feature that boasts strong pacing and visual style — Ocean’s Thirteen, for example — is preferable for everyone. It will last longer on the shelf due to good word of mouth; it will be more fun to plunk cash down to see.

And, let’s face it, if their only job is to entertain plain and simple, often those big Hollywood blockbusters do their job better than the American indies do. Spiderman 3 may have been an inky disaster, a nasty clot of conceits and plotlines, but its predecessors provided great fun that snatched you right out of your mishegos for a solid two hours with great wit and color. The films with greater pretenses are harder to bear, obviously; those hardheaded bids for Oscar validation that glut the cineplexes as the end of each year approaches. I pretty much hate them all—the biopics, the Spielberg Serious Ventures (with the exception of Munich, which I didn’t mind for all its bumpiness), the war porns—but so does everyone, including the Academy, which is why they less and less frequently get made. All Hollywood does really well these days is Dissociation Junction: blockbuster action movie and the occasional romance (in which clothes and posh interiors usually star) and gross-out, no-schmabortion comedies. God love them all. A waste of money, but a fun waste: our country right now, in other words, for better but mostly worse.

For if Hollywood reflects America’s unchecked capitalist impulse, the state of US indies reflects our enormous identity crisis in its wake. We are a country at war but rarely acknowledge it except to make a point at someone else’s expense. We discuss how we are systematically decimating our environment while we swig from tiny disposable plastic bottles and veer SUVs down our ever-increasing highways. No one fully cops to how wide the gap between rich and poor grows daily because everyone on both sides of that great divide might judge themselves unfavorably. Not to mention: We barely educate our young. We sicken and die of the worst kind of diseases overly developed societies have to offer (diabetes, autism, cancer, lifestyle-related heart disease). And we live under the most corrupt, mendacious regime that this country has ever known. By many counts, we didn’t even elect it in — yet another sign that our democracy has grown largely theoretical. That we don’t storm the White House and completely revolt speaks not only to our addiction to comfort and to the illusion of stability but to the profound levels of dissociation that we all sign on to every morning when we get up and face ourselves in the mirror. The levels that Hollywood plays a large part in ratcheting up. God love it.

None of this is news, not in the slightest. I am either preaching to the choir or to deaf ears, and either way the question is she breaks nearly nine months of silence for this kneejerk song and dance?

And my answer is, yes, yes, yes. Because these facts are wildly relevant to the state of independent film. An institution I still care about and, more to the point, deeply need, but one that has proven as dysfunctional as most of the other deep loves of my life. For how do you make conscious film, film presumably made for other reasons besides profit and resume-building, in this environment? If it’s true that art is only as healthy as its culture, and I truly believe that it is, then independent film, the art made in some way to illuminate the human condition or to celebrate it or at least remind us that we are human, is bound to suffer. And it has.

To be fair, many filmmakers are trying. It’s just that their efforts show, and I resent being bombarded by the seams of a filmmaker' intentions — no matter how earnest they are. Truly, most indie fare these days suffers from overearnestness of one ilk or another. There are the Sayles babies, who attempt to solve or at least tackle all the world’s problems in one swell foop. Even those ventures that are banging in theory still go down like medicine that could use a spoonful of sugar. Then there are the many indie filmmakers content to merely approach their own problems via the medium of film. Admittedly, this self-searching, however initially masturbatory, has served as the chief impetus of most art since the beginning of time. (As a certain someone has been known to say: “now you’re going to start knocking my hobbies?”) But there’s a difference between, say, Noah Baumbach, who dresses his 90-minute therapy session (Squid and the Whale) in early 80s nostalgia rather than in any greater relevance, and European film, which philosophizes about human emotion rather than wallows it. So much of American indie that doesn’t labor to wake us with dirty buckets of cold water — clunky ventures such as Fast Food Nation or, oy, The Situation — languishes instead inside the grime of a writer-director’s navel, albeit one charmingly or whimsically adorned.

But.

But I still believe movies satiate very primal longings in this crazy constructed modern world we call home these days — call it the desire to be understood; the need, ideally fulfilled in meditation or prayer, to surrender to your problems from a healthy remove in order to more thoroughly comprehend them; and the need to connect those problems to someone else’s, to many else’s. Boys, and some girls, who never cry in their real life sob unabashedly at the movies. Girls, and some boys, sneak into romances or, you should pardon the expression, chickflicks when our own love lives come tumbling down round our ears. It’s why the only moderately talented Sandra Bullock radiates such great appeal. She willingly swings us and all of our problems, be they loneliness or addiction or rampant immaturity, over her shoulder in an emotional rucksack as she embarks on often surprisingly successful pilgrimages for redemption.

Ideally, films connect us back to our authentic selves rather than our mere egos via a painless honesty typically only achieved through drugs or spiritual transcendence. But that’s because film is a drug and movie theaters are our temples. Where else can you at least expect so many varied humans to sit in rapt silence for hours on end these days? Where else can you hope in this ruptured dream that we call the US that we might commune with both beauty and truth shoulder to shoulder with strangers and loved ones alike?

Admittedly, it’s a lofty way to regard film. But (and here’s the real but) why not? Why can’t the films purportedly not solely made for profit aspire to be art? Art that does not merely proscribe our wretched existences but prescribe a little insight even it’s merely insight into our what's breaking each of our hearts? And why not expect such films to entertain as well as to illuminate? As Edmund White once wrote, "What I really like in art is entertainment, if what is being entertained is the mind as well as the parts of the spirit and body that can register pleasure."

So on said admittedly lofty note I wind myself back to the example of the little-indie-that-barely-did: Broken English. In the face of all the solitude that has proven to be the ides of my 30s, the hard questions that being alone raises amongst the Noah’s Arks coasting in my New York sea, I can recognize myself in this film without hating Posey-as-protagonist or even me in absentia. Posey for once has less channeled her bratty deadpan than offered herself up as a cracked, dusty mirror that’s beautiful in all of its flaws.

Small but not small-minded, linear but not leadfooted, herein lies a film that channels an American optimism grounded out by a European ability to withstand personal misery. In fact, the film is bighearted in its acceptance of misery, important in its insistence that misery doesn’t always require company in order to be ameliorated, political in its suggestion that coupledom is so often a placebo. And that often true solutions only appear when we’ve settled into their absence.

I knew at the critics’ screening that this film largely would falter in reviewers’ eyes. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination; its pacing at time devolves from graceful ambling to downright choppy. But it faltered because it’s not about people who’ve fallen through the cracks grandly nor is it about the critic-by-proxy nor is it about the odds-beaters (though the ending is for sure a gimmee). It’s about a wildly condescended-to demographic: the single woman, and Zoe Cassavetes, who knows of what she writes/directs, attempts to articulate that existence with more low-key dignity than sturm und drang and soundtrack cues and lascivious winks. I contend that lady indie filmmaker did her job well. A fact, in this current environment, that is worth noting. Trumpeting even. Like this.

How Shortbus Shut My Shite Up

2007-07-01T15:49:00.000-04:00

Q. If a blogger falls in the woods after not posting for months on end, is anyone left to read about it?
A. You tell me.

Except: I didn’t fall in the woods. I fell into Alice’s looking glass, more like, sometime around when I saw John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus. I dug its oldschool-NYC patriotism, though the movie itself proved surprisingly forgettable — proven scientifically by the fact that now, six months later, all I can summon is an autofellatio sequence (not hot, as it turns out) and Daniela Sea brandishing a feather (ibid, naturally). But the real problem materialized afterward, when I rolled out of the critics’ screening and fell in step with a colleague whom I knew only vaguely. Enough to know that he was very nice and equally discerning, in other words.

Typically, none of us really talk about the films too much when we emerge from screenings; for me it comes down to not wanting to shoot my load prematurely and, though others’ reasons might be articulated with less of a potty mouth, I suspect they’d amount to pretty much the same thing. So the critic, who’s almost exactly my age, and I talked about Other Stuff instead. He told me about the new condo he and his wife had just moved into, and about the baby they were expecting in a few months. Then he turned to me and asked brightly how things were with me.

Crickets.

I couldn’t settle on how to respond with the same level of personal detail without, well, shooting my load. There were facts that I wasn’t ready to throw out in the hopper yet. I didn’t know what to make of them yet myself, let alone how to present them. Those facts comprised every corner of my personal life and in the face of all his age-appropriate stolidness, I felt shamefaced about how upended I still was. I’m not suggesting his life, or he, was square. He’s not. Just decided. Whereas I was decidedly not.

Crickets.

So, the critic moved on gallantly. “Well, what’d you think of the movie?” he finally asked.

A movie in which the characters turned their sexualities inside out and then on their heads. One that resonated so much with the life I had been leading in the last four months that I doubted my ability to perceive it objectively. (Apparently I’ve since gained that confidence.) “Well.” I stopped and then started again.

And that’s about when I fell into the rabbit hole.

The fabric of my life has radically changed or, rather, it’s been torn up and I’m still sorting out how to repair it. Barely any relationships in my life have been spared serious reevaluation and so much of the way that I have identified myself — and kept my wolves at bay — is either no longer applicable or no longer fit for public consumption.

Some of the questions that have me snagged: How to write when the drama of your real life eclipses that which you’re reviewing. How to keep working when just keeping afloat feels like terribly hard work. How to obey instincts rather than reflexes. How to respond to the mildest of social prompts without frothing at the mouth like a crazy person. These are the queries of a teenager rather than an adult. I have struggled with all of them the last eight months anyway.

But the other day I fell upon this quote and it hit me like a Bob Dylan hurricane:

”I didn’t understand then that it was very important for me to work, whatever happened in my life.” Marianne Faithfull

I’m still struggling with these existential navelpickers, but I think I’ve got them sufficiently back in my, uh, pants so that I may rejoin this cultural conversation — issuing these reactions that feel like my truest actions — and write here again. At the end of the day, I just miss it so much. I dearly regret having let Dreamgirls (loved), Princesas(lerved), and the timedumpers that were last winter’s missives from Tres Amigos as well as a host of other film travesties and triumphs go undocumented.

Just two more things:

1. I may have responded viscerally to Cameron Mitchell’s headspin of a genderquake of a wtf movie but I still can’t quite dub it a great film. He doesn’t relish the medium of film specifically enough; it seems irrelevant to him as it does to that other indie-renaissance poster child, natty little Miranda July. The filmmakers whom I most admire must most admire film. And on that, Marty, I still love you. I thought The Depahted your finest comedy.
2. No matter what, I am and always will be first and foremost a Broad.

Come back soon, loyal reader.

She Speaks

2007-04-26T23:22:00.000-04:00

Roughly speaking, it's been a thousand years. I know that. And I'm not really posting now. Believe it or not, though, something's due to arrive here shortly. In the meanhow, if you're interested, I'm blogging this year's Ebertfest. Do stop by!

Half (Full) Nelson

2006-09-27T16:28:00.000-04:00

Somehow I missed Half Nelson at both Sundance and in critics' screenings. It's not an easy picture, neither in terms of its subject — an otherwise over-earnest Brooklyn junior high school teacher (Ryan Gosling) buys crack from the same neighborhood element threatening his students' welfare — nor in its execution, which loops around the characters' intentions and actions like a never-swept spiral staircase. But it's worthy, in no small part because of Gosling's strong, understated performance and the incredible generosity of his pubescent costar, Shareeka Epps, who plays the student who’s onto his coke problem partly because she's already submerged in the perils of that world.

That Epps has already developed her chops enough to bestow generosity upon her fellow actors speaks volumes about her tremendous talent; she resorts to none of the tricks most young actors pass off as acting: no flat, unmitigated stare; no mugging. She watches instead, with eyebrows that punctuate a whole scene singlehandedly and a big grin that you wish her character had opportunity to flash more. But as Dre, the daughter of a single MTA worker (Karen Chilton) rueful about her daughter's isolation but too mired in scraping together her bare necessities to otherwise nurture her, Epps is more of a badass who terrorizes the biggest thug in the schoolyard yet still weeps over her brother in prison, and over her teacher's terrible folly. She is intact, in other words, which partly stems from bright lights like her smart teacher who ignores the prescribed school curriculum to teach his students critical thought — to think beyond the black-and-whites literally and figuratively prescribed by their neighborhood, their media. Their whole world, in other words.

Here's where the film falls out, for though moralizing would do no good in a film invested on every level in the greys of life, it's a bitter pill to swallow that the predicament of the student preyed upon by drug dealer is equal to that of the teacher buying from that dealer. It's hard to forgive those particular trespasses in an adult entrusted with the education of teens who receive very little other support — and though we eventually sit through an evening with his boozy, liberal (with all the true-lefties' attendant negative associations to that term) family that sheds light on his strain of inner turbulence, it ain't hardly enough.

It's an explanation, though, if not an excuse, and that's all that this small, quiet triumph seeks to offer. To its credit. I'm grateful I finally did surrender to its sleepy, sad stupor.

A Few Words For a Sponsor

2006-09-06T18:30:00.000-04:00

There are times when helpful hints about turning off the gas when not in use are foolish, because the gas has been turned off permanently, or until you can pay the bill. And you don’t care about knowing the trick of keeping bread fresh by putting a cut apple in the box because you don’t have any bread and certainly not an apple, cut or uncut. And there is no point in planning to save the juice from canned vegetables because they, and therefore their juices, do not exist.

— M.F.K. Fisher

Which is to say: this broad could use some extra gigs.

What I Did This Summer (A Retrospective of Retrospectives)

2006-08-30T15:22:00.000-04:00

Changes have been a-brewing in My Own Private Idaho this summer — breakups, births (not from this broad’s womb, nay), funerals. New people I never would have expected and people I never, ever wished to bid goodbye. That is to say: life.

And though I’ve not been in the, uh, state, to talk much, I’ve surely done what I’ve always done when the going gets tough: This semi-tough broad has lost it at the movies.

Yeth, it was an inarguably dour summer at both the cineplex and the art house; how else to explain the hoo-ha generated by the nothing-to-write-home-about Little Miss Sunshine, even given its admittedly winning cast? But just as contemporary film proved too bracing for my frazzled nerves, I finally fell, limbs akimbo, appropriately enough, for the silents. It’s hard to believe I resisted their charms as long as I did, given my oft-professed disdain for the overall volume of contemporary film—the too-Klever prattle; the soundtrack over-reliance — not to mention how much I dig the physical comedy and tic-y melodrama (o Spanish film; how I love thee). Chalk it up to my stubborn resistance to black-and-whites, which, I am pleased to report, I also have finally conquered. The trick: see’em all on the big screen. Much more so than technicolors, black-and-whities require a big screen to enliven their particular geometry of contrasts. No doubt there exist cinephiles far loftier than I who could relish Grapes of Wrath’s sour pleasures on a video IPod but, sisters and brothers, count me out.

So it’s been Retrospective summer — anything screening in NYC, from the early Hitchcocks (his style-over-substance works best nonverbally anyway) to the Frank Borzages to anything starring Our Miss Louise Brooks. The gorgeous staginess, the eyebrow waggling when I least expected it, the unmitigated emotionality that animals more than humans typically exhibit (true!): herein lie this summer’s only sweet relief.

Also of note: Film Forum’s Billy Wilder series sealed the deal for me: His Royal Filmic Puck was the greatest comedic director that ever danced down the world’s aisles. I may not officially be a listmaker, but The Apartment dwells forever in my Top Ten In The Sky.

And: After enduring the bulk of the Museum of Moving Image’s Kubrick retrospective — as well as a bona-fide StanleyK lecture (talk about earning my m-fing Hoodsie points) — I've concluded once and for all that his chilly disdain for humanity, especially for women with their messy biology and demands, limited the value of his work. I feel about him the way I suspect he felt about beautiful women: nice to look at but not so much upstairs. Especially taken in bulk, however, his films proved so much wryer than I ever would have guessed.

God love such details. The older I get, the more heartily I believe they really are what keeps us keep-on-keepin’ on.

State of the Union

2006-08-14T19:40:00.000-04:00

The body speaks unearned melodies and the heart keeps score. — Carol Shields

The Scoop on Hollow Wood

2006-08-10T20:41:00.000-04:00

It’s been a long time since I bothered to see a Woody Allen film on a big screen — longer than I’ve posted on this blog, even. And in general Woody Allen has always been a topic I’ve avoided for what I consider two exceptionally valid reasons:

1. Allen’s movies, churned out at an ever-increasingly feverish rate, have devolved into mere dissociation devices from his utterly disturbing life. And I resent playing audience to emotional resistance-as-art—which is why I also yawn at the redundantly pathological works of David Lynch, who once proclaimed that he discontinued therapy when he realized it would change his art. Yes, yes, neurosis provides the backbone of most great art, but as a starting-point rather than as a place to permanently malinger. After Husbands and Wives, the gloriously cinema verite Dear John in Special 3-D 20-20 Hindsight that he filmed presumably right before he passive-aggressively let his partner discover nude pics he’d taken of her daughter, I’ve always contended that Mr. Konisberg lost his footing. Since then, he has only clocked in shoddy rationalizations of artistic narcissism (Hollywood Ending, Deconstructing Harry, Celebrity, Everyone Says I Love You); doggedly light, me-thinks-he-protests-too-much contrivances (The Jade Dragon); and lethal cocktails mixed from both (Celebrity, Melinda and Melinda, in which he dragged his characters-are-mere-marionettes conceit down to a whole new low).
2. Physically, he is a dead ringer for my dad. I may fancy myself more Jungian than Freudian, but any discussion of Allen’s creepy sexuality (which seemed that of a dirty old codger even back in the ‘60s) sends this broad running for the psychoanalytic, psychotropic hills, blood flowing copiously from my eyes. Like, in a Woody Allen movie or something.

But there’s something burning in the air, and I do believe it is Hollow Wood. At a cineblogala the other night, I found myself launching into Allen with a renewed vigor. A few days later The Looker was kind enough to supply me with Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s brilliant Woody autopsy (not available online, alas). And then, during this last hell-hath-no-fury heatwave I actually plunked down a sawbuck to catch the, ugh, Scoop — drawn by the curiously new tone of its critical reception (even sharp-toothed Times critic Manohla Dargis described it as “oddly appealing”); by how tarot cards played a leading role along with hotter-than-the-Fourth-of-July Hugh Wolfmanjack; and by assurances that Woody had demoted himself, finally, from a leading man to a sidekick whose sexual lusts have been supplanted by heartburn.

Even at 90 minutes, Woody’s latest bogs, but I must report that I dig it anyway. Like last winter’s vastly overrated Match Point (crazy that its highest praise was how un-Woody it was), it’s based in London — though, this time he stars American actors and costars British actors who, blessedly, don’t speak Allenese. (Nothing more inadvertently funny than Jonathan Rhys Meyer whining in a posh British accent, “Mooother, you know that’s her emotional Achilles heel….”). The new backdrop liberates Allen to realistically represent class dynamics for the first time since he himself started making real cashish. He’s neutered himself enough so that I can finally stomach him, although his brand of hand-wringing still looks suspiciously like self-molestation. And Dargis is right; Allen may not be Side Effects funny here, but he's looser in his skin, not only as a writer/director (he remains too derivative to merit the term auteur) but as a performer no longer hindered by the existentialism and compensatory cheeriness of yore.

As the Great Splendini, an American magician, Allen’s greatest trick may be his stage patter: vintage Wood strained through All That Jazz-era Ben Vereen cheesecloth. Early in the film, he regales his audience with the old Manhattan chesnut “You’ve been a sincere sensation” and then pulls out of his aging tuchus ye olde “You’re incredible humans. I feel great love.” He’s a little wizard, all hopeless eyes and clownish hand-flailing and head-tilting, whose eyebrows waggle into many forms of punctuation behind the trademark glasses that dwarf his now-wizened face — not unlike the robot he aped in a Sleeper many eons ago. With his limbs flapping in billowing layers of plaid sportsjackets and Hawaiian shirts, he’s a shrimp scampi who can’t resist laying card tricks on unsuspecting uppercrustaceans (forgive my lapse into Shellfish). Finally, he has reprised his original shtick — the superficial wisecracker less troubled by the fate of the world than by how he can pull one over on it.

Except now that he’s not trying to get down girls’ pants, he’s free to expose the soft underbelly of that sizeable, cantankerous wit: a fuddy-duddy sensibility that’s not subversive so much as classically conservative. Allen’s legendary narcissism is such that he takes umbrage with whatever trespasses outside of his comfort zone, be they jocks, bean sprouts, EST, cocaine, shopping malls, strong emotions, spirituality, or, mothers, or, now, Scarlett Johansson’s blowsy sexuality.

Jonathan Rosenbaum writes:

Filmmakers like Jerry Lewis and Jacques Tati differ critically from Allen in the degree to which they express their conflict between narcissism and self-hatred in relation to their comic personae….They usually maintain enough distance from their own characters to allow audiences to have a critical perspective on them.… Allen, by contrast, is too close to Woody to allow us this detachment; his task is to seduce us into sharing his character's confusions and ambivalences without being able to sort them out. ….There is a lack of ironic distance on his characters, and if [his films] genuinely attack self-interest, [they are] seriously handicapped by being unable to see beyond it. Allen's problem is both coping and scoring — and he is more concerned with scoring than coping at the end of the day.

Until recently, I believed Allen’s films only dipped into that abject shallowness when his life took on a drama that overshadowed anything his films could ever approach. God knows as a teenager I worshipped such mid-70s and 80s works as Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Crimes and Misdemeanors as wry homages to the havoc inevitably wreaked by human desire. Indeed, they are widely upheld as his richest, most emotionally resonant works. But now that I’m (roughly) the same age as these films' characters, I recognize them as the obsessed, overly cerebral, arrested development cases that they are; as such lily-livered self-rationalizers that they actually render him a relative, if relativist, martyr. Which is, of course, the point — however unintentional. If writer/director Neil Labute sacrifices the plausibility of his characters to his misanthropy, Woody has always drowned his creations in Narcissus' kiddie pool.

And Woody’s plotting, especially in already-established genres like mysteries or crimes of passion that don’t allow much wiggle room, suffers radically from that same narcissistic inability to see past his navel or outside his own ass. Any machinations requiring more than Alvy Singer-style fumblings — be they third acts, legitimate motives and true suspense — elude him as they'd also require that all-elusive big picture that would shrink his own self down to a mere cog. In fact, if any truly philosophical or truly intellectual dilemma has ever really fueled his work, it was really another just another variant of his narcissism: what Rosenbaum refers to as his “compulsive morbidity,” as evidenced in everything from Annie Hall to Hannah and Her Sisters. The ultimate sign of a selfish person may be a blinding obsession with the extinction of that self.

I’ll take it a step further: Allen’s moral and philosophical investigations amounted mostly to him struggling to sort out if God truly existed — and if he were a punishing sort. From Crimes and Misdemeanors all the way to Husbands and Wives, the question was not so much whether transgression was morally reprehensible as whether it was mortally punished by a vengeful God. Once mannerly Martin Landeau as doctor gets away with murdering his wife, he experiences nary a bad dream. Once erudite Michael Caine as businessman gets away with fucking his wife’s sister, he settles back into domestic harmony.

Woody resolved that dilemma in Husbands, when his alter-ego, a writing professor, opted out of shtupping his student in the eecummings rain only to have his wife leave him for another (taller) man anyway. Suppressing your basest impulses hardly reaps rewards unto themselves, he seemed to suggest, and soon after, he took the leap of unfaith. And when no bolt of lightening struck him down him (and even the media forgave him surprisingly quickly), he jumped his own personal shark as well. God doesn’t exist, he had determined, and so there no longer existed a reason to strive to be a good person to please him. No reason to refrain from fucking your stepdaughter. No reason to pursue self-improvement.

He quit analysis and declared instead: “The heart wants what it wants.” But having taken the leap and survived, having not been felled by a taboo of Oedipal proportions, his films lost the one artistic tension that had fueled them. He had made his bed and no longer feared lying in it eternally. The problem: How can you reinvent your work if you’re no longer courting change? How do you make intriguing art when you're travelling in the denoument of your own life's dramatic arc?

Judging from the ensuing films, he grounded himself on that one for a while. No only did his growth as an artist completely halt, but his acknowledgement of the basic passage of time, as well. He continued to cast himself against gorgeous 20- and 30something women, and though New York grew ever more culturally complex and financially stratified, his characters remained white 30something artist types who listened to Bach and, naturally, Louis Armstrong (though there ain't nothing wrong with Louis!) and lurked in cavernous, well-appointed flats. And every other picture completely mimicked without improvement an already-existing genre, whether it be music mockumentary (Sweet Lowdown), Hollywood musical (Everyone Says I Love You) and ~~Old men Take the Money and Run~~ Small Time Crooks, a new form of metamovie, in which he limply ripped himself off.

But Scoop heralds a new Woody era, in which the Woody persona finally reverts to its rightful place in his cinematic universe: a largely irrelevant, Sleeper-era borscht-belt court jester sidelining the main event, just out to make'em laugh, make'em laugh without any underlying existential angst or divorced-dad self-pity. Casting the fulsome 21-year-old Johansson has a lot to do with that. Though she frequently costars with significantly older men, something about the sensuality of her full-lipped, lingering baby fat highlights the creepiness of their desire — so much so that 70something Allen has finally capitulated to the role of a pseudo fatherly advisor, though he grouses about it bitterly all along the way and luxuriates in the joke that he’s hardly decent papa material.

As Sondra, a journalism student keen on cracking the story of the century with help from a recently deceased ghost and good old Splendini, Scarlett has shed her normally flattened demeanor. And it turns out Scarlett animated is terrifying. Braying in entire paragraphs and windmilling her limbs every which way, she is positively Ethel Mermanized, an overeager dork who fucks often but without much skill or any neurosis. Hey, as Woody himself has been known to say, 80 percent of life is just showing up. And it is actually quite fun to watch her barrel right over his protestations and nasty little digs (her fingers, they’re stubby! She can’t swim, she’s not buoyant!) rather than transmogrify into a Woodette, as even his most formidable leading ladies normally do. In fact, from a brilliantly cut set of scenes, in which she matter-of-factly shrugs off fucking a musician for an interview she doesn’t even land, Scarlett as Sondra establishes a sexuality Woody could never relate to but as a filmmaker, finally, does not judge. Splendini does, but his very assignation is that of a walking anachronism. It’s a new millennium, Woody is acknowledging, and he’s just an old man dancing on its grave.

Of course, he still treats such plot necessities as dramatic structure and tension largely as nuisances; I barely understood or even cared who Scoop’s murderer was or how he was caught. But though Allen may not have entirely transcended his narcissism, or at least his limited abilities to execute a real whodunit, he’s come to terms with all of it.

And that’s what distinguishes Scoop most. Allen as filmmkaker no longer fears or is ashamed by his own insignificance. At the end of the film, he blithely offs a Splendini rushing to save Sondra (though she hardly needs saving), and the world, or even film, scarcely ends. Rather, its characters take his demise in stride with nary a pause — exactly what would have sent Alvy Singer into paroxysms into despair.

The film ends with Splendini riding a slow boat to nowhere, literally cheating Death with his nifty deck of cards, and literally skimming the surface, just as he should. Yes, Allen seems to be saying, he doesn't change. But the world around him does — women change, technology changes, New York changes, and his own body changes — and he now accepts his increasingly limited relevance. After all, there really is no fool like an old fool. If his classic joke was, “I’ve always been two with Nature,” finally, finally good old manchild Wood has become one with his own.

On Drinking: A Love Story (Caroline Knapp, 1960-2002)

2006-06-15T15:52:00.000-04:00

I've been rereading Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story, one of my all-time favorite memoirs, for a gig, and I came across a passage that has always resonated with me so deeply:

There’s something about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of any sort of anesthesia that disabuses you of the belief in externals, shows you that strength and hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even though it’s painful and you’re afraid....Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug. If it feels warm and fuzzy, it is probably the [addictive] choice. If it feels dangerous and scary and threatening and painful, it is probably healthy.

These days, I no longer automatically distrust what feels right. I have learned that if you are honest with yourself for long enough, you start to parse out the differences between your reflexes, which often really aren't to be trusted, and your instincts, which emanate from your truest self. But I will be forever aware that the more I fear something, the more I should clamor to learn from it. And when I first read that passage, I was just beginning to undertake a journey not unlike a detox although I was sober. It was like reading a transcription of my secret thoughts — of my dawning recognition of all the different anesthesias, from love affairs to friendships to food to books to the business of being a prettygirl, that I deferred to rather than simply trust myself. I was 25 and still afraid of my own shadow, let alone my independence.

Knapp died in 2002 from lung cancer. She was a life-long smoker. I still believe, however, that it was better that she died clearheaded than with a clear set of lungs, if she had to be felled by one of her addictions. For I looked up to her as one of my literary and spiritual big sisters, although I doubt we would have even liked each other very much in person. She was shy and somewhat socially conservative: a true-blue Bostonian, the sort who sent larger-than-life me running to black-sheep NY as soon as I could. The beauty of a really skilled memoirist, though, is that through her perspective you can connect with a person whom you might not admire or even recognize in regular life. It is a testament to how gifted Knapp was at her job that I wept for most of the day I heard about her death although I never once met her while she was alive. I knew that, unlike most people, she actually stayed present for the life she did manage to live.

So it is not strange that I miss her still. Selfishly, I miss the possibility that she could live more and learn more and write more so I could continue to understand more of my life through the lens she so painstakingly provided. So that I could keep anticipating from her example more of my own challenges and progress. Sometimes I fantasize that she will posthumously pen another one of her fiercely precise memoirs (she wrote three in all), this time about what it was like to die.

There are so many ways that growing up is lonely, but perhaps the most daunting is that eventually, whether or not we like it, we become the grownups by default. Although, as Knapp herself wrote:

It seems like such an obvious insight, so simple it borders on the banal, but I'd never before really grasped the idea that growth was something you could choose, that adulthood might be less of a chronological state than an emotional one which you decide, through painful acts, to both enter and mantain. I'd spent most of my life waiting for maturity to hit me from the outside, as though I'd just wake up one morning and be done, like a roast in the oven. But growth comes from the inside out, from trying and failing and trying again. You begin to let go of the wish, age-old and profound and essentially human, that someone will swoop down and do all that hard work, growing up, for you. You start living your own life.

Fish out of Water (SJP in Family Stone and Other Actressy Pratfalls)

2006-06-11T15:08:00.000-04:00

I've been watching Family Stone while cleaning — a friend lent it to me is my only thinly veiled excuse — and what strikes me most is how bad Sarah Jessica Parker is. I never thought she was terrible on Sex and the City. As Carrie Bradshaw, even if she stumbled a bit when a strong emotion was called for, her physical comedy harkened back to old Broadway in the very best way. She threw out vaudeville one-liners with panache. She tripped well. She wagged. She mugged. She arched her eyebrows with the best of them,

But she is God-awful in this film. I mean shite and shinola. Parker is no more a terrible stage actress than she is a terrible television actress, but now that I consider the body of her filmwork, she truly fouls up celluloid every time she crosses its path, except for maybe in Footloose. Pictured on a big screen, her long face and wiry body resemble those of a 1950s drag queen, which is hardly her fault. That she overreaches and stammers is. She falls so out of step with her fellow actors that she comes off as more humanoid rather than fully human. Someone get this woman a musical. Just ban Aniston from the same fate.

For I'm stuck on the idea that not every actress is suited for every medium. Film requires a level of honesty that the small screen doesn't, but television requires a level of give and take and an insouciance that the long incubation of moviemaking often renders impossible. And stage requires a level of engagement and vibrancy that almost inevitably proves too much for any sort of screen actor. Of course there exist the likes of Glenn Close, who rarely falters, not even in The Shield, of all things. Kathy Bates, in town for a reading of Eve Ensler's Necessary Targets, is smart, honest and accessible in every medium known to man. And God knows Helen Mirren never misses. British broads basically are equipped for everything, all attendant metaphors applicable.

But can you imagine how dreadful Meryl Streep, who excels on stage even more consistently than she does on film, would be in a sitcom? She's already almost too larger-than-life for the big screen. (To be fair, she turned in the best performances of her later career in Angels in America, but HBO hardly counts as TV anymore.) Or take Catherine Keener, a star on stage and big screen whose snide demeanor would merely come off as a lack of affect on TV. Maggie Gyllenhaal is such an ideal film actress that I can scarcely imagine her in any other medium. Jennifer Aniston has flatlined in every movie she's ever appeared in except for Office Space, in which bad acting was actually the point, but she sported genuine comedic chops on Friends. Julia Roberts really is a decent movie star, if a limited film actress (a whispering Mary Reilly will forever haunt my dreams), but her sputtering guest turn on Friends flailed and Broadway ate her for breakfast with forgivable glee. Some actresses whom I've seen shine on stage over the years have never made it to screens of any sort (save the requisite Law and Order episode) not only because their looks didn't translate but because they couldn't stop pitching to the back of the house.

The list goes on and on — and I haven't' even tackled the European actresses. It's like a missing lesson from the Free To Be You and Me soundtrack: Not every actress is suited to every medium and, hey, that's okay.

Armond White, Wes Anderson and A Loaf of Bread

2006-05-17T13:29:00.000-04:00

God help me, but critic Armond White's article about why it takes so long for the "American Eccentrics" — namely, Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Alexander Payne, Paul Thomas Anderson, Sofia Coppola — to churn out their films is really great. White's metareactionary reviews normally get my dander up, but if I didn't cop to digging on this piece, I suppose I'd be guilty of the grandstanding I smell in most of his work. Or did I just evidence it now, already? Oy. Meta, meta, meta and not a drop to drink.

Here's the Amex ad by Wes Anderson he references. Much better than The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Russian Dolls (and Me) at the IFC Center

2006-05-13T21:49:00.000-04:00

A brief e-treaty: If you're around tomorrow in NYC, come to the discussion I'm leading at the IFC Center's 2:00 screening of Russian Dolls. Although critical reception has been mixy, I actually prefer Dolls to its prequel, 2003's L'Auberge Espagnole (The Spanish Apartment), which starred much of the same cast, including toothsome Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou. Afterward, I will be interviewing director Cédric Klapisch and moderating audience questions.

Particularly given that he looms as a huge rock star in his native country of France, Klapisch is a very generous interview subject. I interviewed him after a screening today, along with Romain, in his Parisian flat via ichat webcam. Between their wine consumption, the three-second delay, technology glitches, and my retardation directly proportional to Duris' wicked hottyhottyhotness (he was sporting a devastating mustache), the experience could have been misery incarnate. Twasn't, and since Sunday will just be Klapisch, with all technology glitches sorted, the event should prove quite worthy of a sawbuck and change. In a low-budget Jetson sort of way.

So come! And come with questions!

The American Office Is Funny

2006-05-13T21:09:00.000-04:00

That said:

"AIDS is not funny. Believe me, I've tried." — Michael Scott (Steve Carrell), The Office season finale.

What can I say? I told you I was sick, man.

My Parents Emphasized the Life of the Mind and All I Got Was This Lousy Tee (Vee)

2006-05-11T22:09:00.000-04:00

On Day 4 of this flu, I am beyond generating ~~pithy~~ half-baked puns and am now officially drowning in the snot that swallowed Brookland. There exists but one advantage of being this patheticus maximus, and it's revisiting the delicious boredom of childhood. And this time I get to watch TV.

Like most intellectually but not emotionally precocious kids, I had a lonely childhood. My best friends were Anne of Green Gables, Harriet the Spy, The Great Brain, Betsy and Tacey, Pippi Longstocking, and Ramona Quimby. I have no doubt that my best friends would have been Samantha, Natalie and Tootie, Jeannie, Laverne and Shirley, but my old man enforced a strict moratorium on all junkovision — that is, everything but public television. Under the circumstances, I had no choice but to mine my imagination and torture my cat for personal entertainment. I played the violin, conducted science experiments, took disco lessons, wrote dozens of plays about an alternate universe in which Miss Hannigan killed Annie and Ronald Reagan paid dearly for his predilection for jelly beans. And I read. And read and read and read.

Every librarian in town knew my name. I wielded such terms as "capricious" with aplomb in kindergarten. I spelled like a maestro, swore like a sailor (thank you Bukowski), and knew all the Shakespearean terms for sexual organs. But, really, I would have tossed it all over in a heartbeat for one episode of Love Boat. God knows I would have burned every one of those plays for an episode of Fantasy Island. I think anyone would have, frankly.

I had to laugh at that recent New York article about hipsters who try to brand their idea of cool on their children. (The acronym drummed up for the occasion was so uncatchy I can't even google it successfully.) How could the children of hippies convince themselves that any generation would willingly play choir to what their parents preach? Witness the Shiksa whore-mongering Chasid youth; the jacked-up children of the Christian right; the junked-up scions of Mormons and stage moms; the junkfoodjunkies hailing from macropsychotic families; and, me, Little Miss Junkovisionjunkie USA.

For I must confess, truly, I love television. I love film, yes, but I love TV just as unabashedly, if more crudely. Love love love, Eloise style. I squander my limited income on HBO and Showtime. I host Sunday Night Weeds and L Word parties. I rearrange my social life around Gilmore Girls. I miss appointments in order to watch the end of unfortunate Lifetime TV movies. (No, I don't have DVR. Yet.) I obsess over Lost, The Sopranos, The Wire. Even Big Love.

By laboring mightily to ensure they didn't raise a passive child, my poor parents begat an adult who ekes out her living rationalizing her daily TV and movie consumption. The road to hell really is paved with parents' good intentions.

Not What the Doctor Ordered (On Festivals)

2006-05-08T23:16:00.000-04:00

I am riddled with flu right now — no doubt filmfestivalitus, a common strain of cinennui, exacerbated by an immunizing shot of bridesmaideningtitus for good measure. Nothing more on the wedding circuit here, I do thee promise, but I must report that, although Ebertfest was a piece of peach pie, Trifecta has already gone Utarded.

I like the model that Ebertfest presents: a showcase for hand-picked films with absolutely no choices to make and very few distractions. It allows for gestation, conversation, even, at times, conversion. (I like silent films now after a screening of The Eagle.) While is Tribeca even an essential stop on the overground film railroad?

Because my whole attraction to movies will always be that luxuriant surrender to another world, the plaguing sense that Something Is Being Missed (not to mention the nonstop flicker of the Blackberry) feels contrived. Oh, I understand braving the hoopla of the Toronto Film Festival (especially as it screens so many international films that don't make it to North America otherwise), and God knows nothing's going to stop the behemoth that is Sundanceteria in its tracks (not even Redford, apparently). But Tribeca? For all its overkill, it simply doesn't slay me.

My Bumpersticker Reads: I'd Rather Be in Champaign-Urbana

2006-04-26T16:23:00.000-04:00

Hey all. For the next five days, I'll be wolfing big burgers and blogging Ebertfest 2006 here. Come one, come all. Tribeca, Schmibeca. That's what I say!

Telephone: Cindy Adams Says Jessica Lange Says She Does Not and I Say Why Do We Bother?

2006-04-09T00:05:00.000-04:00

I try not to read Cindy Adams. She is gossip's answer to Ann Coulter and an iron-clad argument against brass balls as a socially acceptable strap-on. Occasionally, though, I fall prey to her, uh, column.

This is how I know that yesterday she claimed that Jessica Lange has not undergone any plastic surgery. (The Post is stingy with its links so take my word on it.)

Fact: In Broken Flowers (so broken) and Wim Wenders' newest, Don't Come Knocking, Lange appears so sewn up that she looks like she's wearing a Jessica Lange mask from the dollar store. It's either major work or a stroke, and the eyes staring out of that immobile face are not merely sad but abject, hopeless, and horribly afraid. They are the eyes of a woman who's caught herself a mean case of the Dorian Grays.

Why do I care? Because she who is being honored by Lincoln Center for Career Achievement this month lost faith that we still would want to watch her even when she no longer wore a blank slate for a face. Because she's probably right. And because on top of all of it, she feels compelled to lie about the work just like almost all American actresses over 30 probably do.

This epidemic of plastic surgery may never abate. What sign do we have that it ever will, except that it looks so crazily ET, so Faye's Joan Crawford near the end, and, more to the point, so not young that maybe eventually people will throw in the towel and all come to worship at the altar of my frown lines and crazy-ass gap teeth?

And if it does not abate, then should the women who subject themselves to the botulism, the ass fat, the knife and the laser come out of the closet so they're not doubly shamed? Only 20 years ago a cultural taboo presided against admitting to using hair dye. Now I challenge you to find any woman who won't sing the praises of her colorist. At that, find five women in any city outside of New England sporting a full head of gray hair.

So will people grow more open about getting work eventually?

Actually, I think not. Serious plastic surgery is an attempt to erase the last 50 years of any given human life, and so it is a denial of the basic life cycle, in which girlhood is a mere drop in the pan. Even if we won't allow ourselves to go so far as to acknowledge the ideological, cultural and psychological implications of widespread cosmetic surgery, we know somehow it's taboo, the same way people instinctively understood fucking their parents was wrong long before science gave us the reason. Permanently altering your face is as unnatural as puking up your meals. And even if half of Hollywood does that — and a goodly part of all America — I don't see the vomitorium coming back any time soon. It's as creepy as that sad little Jessica Lange mask.

I Testify: Neko Case at Webster Hall, Blessed Be

2006-04-08T01:54:00.000-04:00

Just got back from seeing Neko Case at Webster Hall. Case is truly blessed and thus, for the duration of this evening, were we.

It’s amazing to witness this woman of my generation and ilk — that is, we who are now more busty than skinny, hurdling head-first into our late 30s; we with the hair dye once deployed only ironically now valiantly covering gray’s tracks; we, the forever latch-key kids with the afterschool TV forever pepper-and-salting our tongues; we 60s babies' babies whose limbs and hips and hearts are frozen by a paralyzingly self-conscious irony — it's amazing to witness one of us so generously and comfortably fill a stage. Her set was so grand, so heroic, so long that even though I arrived a full hour into it from my j-o-b job, I still caught 45 minutes of that voice, that voice, that voice soaring into the rafters where I stood uncharacteristically still so as to savor every minute and every inch.

She really does possess one of the greatest modern voices around, angelic and unchecked and big enough to channel great sadness and great hope. When coupled with her lyrics, it communes with the best parts of each of us and then those dark unseen, unsung corners too.

Take “That Teenage Feeling,” which she sang tonight and is arguably the best title from her newest album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood:

Now that we've met
We can only laugh at these regrets
Common as a winter cold
They're telephone poles
They follow each other
One, after another, after another
But now my heart is green as weeds
Grown to outlive their season

And nothing comforts me the same
As my brave friend who says,
"I don't care if forever never comes
'Cause I'm holding out for that teenage feeling
I'm holding out for that teenage feeling

All the loves we had
All we ever knew
Did they fill me with so many secrets
That keep me from loving you
'Cause it's hard, hard

Ah, but she’s the brave one. Because at our age those lyrics really mean something. So many have settled or scorned or forgotten what it was like to experience anything with an unmediated intensity that at times I feel like we’ve become ghosts of our younger dreams. To watch my girl rock those lyrics, her fists clenched, her muscles taut with an adulterated sincerity, well — I like her so much, really. It reminded me of how Yoko seduced John all those years ago, how he patiently crawled through the whole of her many-tiered, slightly silly art installation until he reached that tiny tag to which all her labyrinths were leading. And it read: yes.

So, yes, when Miss Case wasn’t making music, it must be said, she didn’t quite know how to conduct herself. I wanted her clad in something red satin and less ironic. Something Ella, something Patsy. Certainly nothing Reality Bites. I wanted her nonsinging self to match up to the unapologetic and bold chanteuse with the baby-bird mouth. I wanted her, even when talking in between songs, to behave as a woman rather than a girl with grey roots. Someone who murmured or boomed, Nina style, rather than someone who rambled through pop culture's navel. Someone who meted out her words carefully to ensure they measured up to the voice that solidiered an entire auditorium of New Yorkers’ regrets.

But what can you do? Each of us grows at the rate we can bear, shedding different vestiges of girlhood slowly until one day we truly do embody the women whom our little-girl selves assumed we’d easily become. The women whose instincts, strong and fine, run their lives as well as the show. The women whose eyes this culture can barely meet.

Yes, I forgive Miss Case for her terrible stage patter and her clever-with-a-K Dr. Pepper T shirt. Gladly, I do, yes, because tonight, for a full 45 minutes, she made me think that this whole mess was still OK. Hell, she made me know it. Yes.

And Another Clown College Graduate Bites the Dust

2006-03-27T00:57:00.000-05:00

This — how do you say in English? — blogger, right, blogger breaks her self-imposed silence to point out a debacle that validates her long-held suspicions about Morgan "Super~~cilious~~ Size Me" Spurlock’s not-so-secret hostilities fueling his last adventure in clowndom. Let the record show that his heretofore covert rancor toward the very Americans whose interests he claimed to represent is now out of the bag. Meow.

In other news: My alleged redesign is taking forever and I must disclose that I also have been moonlighting at a publication that supposedly requires qualifications of every sort for every item it dispatches. Reportedly. You may speculate that it is my job to insert said legal loopholes. A source close to the author says you’d be correct.

More soon. And of a less glib, more clear-spoken nature!

Not in My Backyard (The Tenants)

2006-01-31T23:16:00.000-05:00

Just saw a really miserably half-baked movie, The Tenants. It stars that tall drink of water, Dylan McDermott Mulroney, as a clever friend calls him, and that too-tall drink of water, Snoop Dogg, as two writers eating each other for breakfast in an otherwise-vacated Brooklyn apartment house. Via a blank-faced traffic-in-woman paradigm named Irene. I think. For a minute I thought this film's one asset was its rather beautiful set design, but even for a low-budget movie, its anachronisms were hard to overlook. (Um, who carried a doggy pooper scooper in early '70s Red Hook? Who drove a Prius, for that matter?)

Why bother to rant? A critic's job is to filter crap movies so that those with more honorable occupations don't have to waste their leisure time. But I just got back from Sundance, where pretty much every American independent dramatic feature was crap. The few ones that didn't completely shank, like Little Miss Sunshine, were bought and sold before you could utter the words NOT CRAP. Which is the only possible reason why a movie as weak-sister as The Tenants scored distribution besides its bankable stars.

Why have American indies hit such a complete wall? Why are the only good films shown right now coming from overseas? Why are the few American dramas that don't suck and aren't completely derivative, like Forty Shades of Blue or anything by Andrew Bujalksi, languishing in unheated art houses in overly rarified cities like NYC or LA while Starsky and His Boyfriend King Kong subsume two screens at every megaplex theater?

Given that so few movies that I see really rock, and given that the marriage of commerce and art is what distracts most of us who in a different era would be burning bras or the Capitol, I'm very curious about who's buying what — and whom. Look for a series of interviews about distribution here at The Broad View in the months to come. As well as an imminent redesign. And if anyone wants to help me with said redesign, give me a holler. Not, I might add, a holla. Hollas are so 2004. So speaketh this broad.

Huzzah.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ski Lodge

2006-01-30T17:31:00.000-05:00

AWOL but not, I hope, forgotten. I've lately been residing at Flavorpill Sundance, where my partner-in-crime JKG and I have been skiing down the slippery slope of mainstream indie film culture in Parka City 2006. Actually, it's been insanely fun, so go take a gander. And in the next few weeks expect a revised Broad View, significantly better than ever, but still pink. Mama loves her pink.

Oh, and wish me happy birthday, please. The 35th mark has come and now gone.

Pauline Kael, Film Criticism's Good Mommy

2005-12-15T00:20:00.000-05:00

Perhaps around the time that New Yorker critic David Denby published his “My Life as a Paulette” essay, in which he described how the late film critic first mentored him and then wrote him off as “not really a writer,” I lost my taste for Pauline Kael. Not because of her dismissal of Denby — he is a self-proclaimed American Sucker, after all — but because the piece brought home how she spawned the monotone dominating contemporary film criticism. It wasn’t her fault necessarily, though she certainly seemed to encourage la highest form of flattery from her adherents. But her plainspoken chattiness slid into a gossipy pissing contest when attempted by the many critics who’ve either taken cues from her or, perhaps, reacted against her. Once upon a time a review would be about whether or not the reviewer recommended the film — a simple, even simplistic, goal but a nonetheless honorable one. These days, a review often serves that purpose, but it's become an opportunity to be like film producers and hold the following dialogue: Q. Would you fuck it?” A. Ah, but you just did, my friend. Fair or not, I named Kael as the progentitor of all that glibness.

The other night, I watched Altman’s Three Women and fell knee-deep under its spell: the illusive, elusive dichotomies that Lynch should’ve been so lucky as to achieve; the mirrors found in pools and windows and fishtanks and dumb lugs; the spot-on performances from Sissy Spacek and Shelly Duval. At the film's end I still lacked much insight into its characters or plot or even intentions and yet was utterly hooked — deeply uncharacteristic for a girl who tends to dismiss such opaqueness as mere smoke and mirrors. It was a moment when I longed for a teacher or a good review to illuminate me or even frame the context of the conversation, and I realized that more than anyone I longed for Kael and her smart-cookie two cents.

For the first time in a dog’s age I cracked open one of her review collections: I Lost It at the Movies. And, though I never found her essay on Three Women (I did suss out that he’d improvised the film from a dream), in my search I fell knee-deep under her spell as well. In a way, Altman and Kael’s tone is of a piece: marked by a high-minded chattiness that never borders on pretension even when it misses the mark. What distinguishes Kael’s writing, even after all these years and even in this era of critical oversaturation, is that she’s writing for someone who’s already seen the movie.

She never lost what they call in yogic circles “beginner’s mind,” always demonstrating a generosity more typical of viewers who’ve paid for a sitter and consumed a heady cocktail of popcorn and smashing trailers before the feature. It’s why her now-infamous second person voice doesn't grate nearly as much as when others slather it on: she really was talking to us. Her reviews were written as if we were all cradling cups of tea around a kitchen table after having seen the movie togther, savoring the pleasure of the experience with a satisfying post-mortem. That's why, even when she didn’t like a film in question, her prose never devolved into vitriol.

Her musings on the '60s and '70s classics are best remembered; how (like Sontag, like Warhol) she relished jop and pazz and dispensed briskly with such dichotomies as high and low culture that other critics still drew upon with a straight face. But even when reviewing a mostly mediocre batch, like the films in Movie Love, her collection of 1989-1991 reviews, she drew upon her significant body of knowledge to excavate positives — a lingering shot, a director’s development, a new actor’s performance. And when she did find fault, she did so cheerily, with no loser-in-a-black-cape fury fueling her assessments.

It’s been said that Kael didn’t much cotton to female Paulettes in her life, but none of that Adrienne Rich “exceptional woman” pathology colored her prose. She admired actresses as well as actors, and pointed out without rancor where sexism sank plots by not fleshing out female characters. She was funny, but only in service of more precisely nailing her point rather than gilding her reputation. She was smart but in a matter-of-fact, unshowy way that suggested she’d be a smart observer of any human milieu. Her calm, confiding tone inspired both confidence — and confidences — in each of us, and she used her good name to cultivate filmmakers and critics and an American audience whom she recognized as worth cultivating.

Only Kael tapped into the basic psychology of film-viewing; that there, in that temperature-regulated womb of a movie theater, complete with a light flickering at the end of the tunnel, we each, alone but together, shoulder to shoulder, are silently reborn each time. She remained both open-hearted and open-eyed to the end, a too-rare combination these days in any field. She may have been the progentitor of contemporary film criticism but more than that (I smell test tubes in that word, anyway), she was, and remains, its good mommy.

Maureen Dowdy Ain't No Broady, and Other Notes From the Feminist Ghetto

2005-11-10T23:37:00.000-05:00

I've been knee-deep in malodorous manuscripts these last few weeks — for one of my few remaining money jobs, you dig. In the meanhow, speaking of malodorous, I will chime in my (last) two cents on the Dowd Question and, no doubt, surprise no one in the process. For: I never liked Miss Mo and her delusions of screwball-dame grandeur, and now her botoxed puss is giving me the heebie-jeebies as she spews her reductionist, classist, Cathy-cartoon, decidedly un-Great Kate, Catholic schoolgirl-uniform tripe all over the media's three rings. She is old-school only in negative, dichotomous ways, and I anticipate her self-implosion breathlessly, from the bowels of the back of the classroom. She gives straight-girl feminists a bad name.

On another, deeply related note: I am sick of women distancing themselves from the very term "feminism." None of us like every action or ideology that lives under its umbrella, but it's disrespectful and downright ignorant to dismiss the label out of hand after everything the movement has given every one of us.

Last and least lofty: My lesbian boyfriend Yancey was kind enough to purchase for me Season 2 of The L Word. Despite our extended, archived grievances, Jostle and I have learned that the much-maligned season lends itself quite nicely to boozy, woozy heckling. Plus, the girls themselves (Kate and Leisha, in particular) mock the weak storylines and musical choices mercilessly on the commentary track of the "Love Boat" epi. Clearly we missed another boat in momentarily taking the show seriously. Say it loud, say it proud: f-f-f-f-fucking.

As The Passenger

2005-10-20T20:27:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how powerfully the European filmmakers mastered quiescence. I was pretty sure my assertion was correct, but it'd been at least a few months since I'd watched a European classic on a big screen.

Ah, but I was right. I just saw Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975) and then walked back into midtown NYC to find it, and myself, transformed by the experience. Restored, even.

It took a moment or two to surrender to Antonioni's pacing, but once I did there was nowhere else I would have preferred to have been for two hours of a late Thursday afternoon. A thirtiesh Jack Nicholson — still coltish, and only depraved enough to film a movie with an Italian director (rather than pant after Hollywood's prepubescent daughters) — plays a TV international journalist who has had it with his job, his wife, his life, really. When a stranger dies in an African hotel room next to his, he swaps their passport pictures and takes off with the dead man's identity, leaving the corpse behind to be pronounced his own. Only, as he discovers while he spins through Europe and Africa with tiger-eyed Maria Schneider, the legacies of both men prove too powerful to entirely evade.

That's the storyline, and it's the sort that would come equipped with an action-jackson edit and soundtrack had it been shot today. Instead it drifts along with nothing to fill your ears for minutes at a time but the crunch of gravel; the hiss of dust billowing up to defy an empty sky; the lonely, swelling murmur of passersby's conversations. Views from the trunk of a car linger a few seconds after a slammed door is all that's left to look at. The camera trails after each car whooshing by a couple lunching in a roadside cafe in an indolent nod to the distractions of modernity. All to train you for the clicking heels of destiny approaching, as the film whittles down to pure silence and a room with a (fatalistic) view.

It is a movie whose dialogue is spare enough that you take heed of the few words actually exchanged. Especially Nicholson's proclamation that "There are coincidences everywhere." As he uttered it, in fact, the woman in front of me craned toward her male companion in a way that gave me a start of recognition. It was a woman, I suddenly realized, whom I'd once known quite well.

When the lights came up, they were both gone. I darted out to catch them in the screening room's hallway but only two men chattering into cells stood there, their silhouettes cast into perspective by a glittering, steely Manhattan sky. For a second, I thought I'd mistook real life for another scene in the movie but then I knew it'd been no mistake. It was all of a piece; she had dipped in and out of plain view the way Nicholson's character had on screen. The movie, made 30 years ago, had reached into my life and made someone visible again for a second who had disappeared years ago.

But not me: I was wonderfully invisible.

Downstairs on 55th street I slipped into the noisy quiet of the New York City throng, clicking east in my silver-toed boots and popping chocolate-covered apricots from a brown paper bag in my pocket. Listening close. For three blocks still I was just an extra passenger.

Didion's Year of Magical Thinking Ain't (Goodbye to) All That

2005-10-19T19:34:00.000-04:00

I’m trying to sort out what I think about Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

I’ve always admired rather than identified with or even really embraced Didion. It seemed to me that her best work was created when she was younger, when she still felt fragile and vulnerable and used her writing to steel herself against the cultural and personal abyss that roared beneath her Pappagallo flats; when she used her writing to both burrow into and explain away the most intense personal-is-political ethos of her generation. It was in that vein that “Goodbye to All That,” her essay about leaving NYC, was anthemic. Today it still speaks of a particularly fraught moment in time and of a very fraught cultural mood, as does the rest of the rightfully lauded Slouching Towards Bethlehem. But by her mid- and later career, when she was more firmly established critically, commercially, and, yes, domestically, her writing, always economical, grew sparse and sometimes even remote.

She’d always alluded to great feelings, even great passions, but in a way that never threatened to truly disrupt her prose. No menstrual blood stained her diction; no hysteria drew undue attention to individual paragraphs. She spurned the navel-gazing of her generation and purported to embrace action, movement, John Wayne types. But somehow that lack of a psychoanalytical impulse merely translated into an ever-cooler remove. Politically informed but mostly unaligned, spiritually and ideologically fluent but unconvinced, it was if she didn’t need her reader to like her so much as admire her. I appreciate any woman who doesn’t sing for her supper the way we’ve all been trained to do, but in the case of Didion, I appreciated her with a reserve that matched her own.

More and more, I suspect anatomy truly is destiny. Despite all my political and academic training, I’ve come to believe that the physical bodies we inherit and inhabit are blueprints for the kind of experiences we create or crave or fear. For even as online everything makes it increasingly possible to transcend our bodies, we are increasingly rooted in them, defined and even haunted by them. Or is it more that both are of a piece, that our written voices are in fact just another aspect of our corporeal beings, however phantom? It is a long, controversial conversation that's best pursed elsewhere, but I touch on it because any discussion about Didion always reveals these biases of mine and, I would argue, of many others, too.

Suffice it to say that I am a tall, blowsy woman with a big voice and a big mouth — there is a reason I call myself a broad rather than a chick — and I write long sentences and pieces that either send you packing or seduce you despite yourself. I’ve never resonated with Didion’s compact limbs and compact prose. I’ve studied it to understand the high-tech mechanics that enabled her texts’ unruffled surfaces. I’ve even copied out passages from her books to experience what it’s like to write with such a powerful restraint. But although a rawness always lurks in between those carefully arranged lines, and although she proclaims great passions and has famously shunned the paralyzed introspection of her generation, there is something censorious, even stunted, in her economy that displeases me.

I had intended to go on here and write that Didion’s prose always mirrored her tiny, angular physicality. I went back and checked some of her older bookjackets lining my shelves, though, and a sensuous, sly-eyed, full-lipped subvert looked back out at me. Yes, she was always slim and small, but it would be wrongheaded to assert that she had always been the tiny, hawkish woman she is today. Recent experiences, and perhaps that infamous restraint, have wizened her. Like the irritating phrase every woman is told when she hits 30: “Honey, it’s your ass or your face from here on in.”

Which leads me to all the brouhaha that has greeted her recent publication. Although I still don’t know a ton of folks who’ve finished the new book, name a major publication or lofty public radio affiliate and you’ll find pages and hours of genuflection at the magical altar of Didion with nary a negative word. It is the best-selling book at most bookstores here in New York. Her readings have been standing-room only.

Are people so agog about her new memoir because they feel protective of this fiercely slight woman? Are they drawn to her type of, as she writes with her characteristic irony, "cool customer?" As arguably our ideal lady writer, hers is a calm, collected feminity: no flab and no fuss. We can count on her, in other words, to not throw herself in her husband's grave literally and literarily. She was the right kind of girl and is the right kind of woman. And now we are looking to her to be the right kind of widow.

For central to the glamourous intrigue that cloaks Didion like a mink has always been her marriage to writer John Gregory Dunne. While the rest of America divorced and remarried and divorced again, Dunne and Didion worked and lived together, presiding over the American literary scene as the golden couple who straddled NYC hustle and Hollywood shuffle seemingly effortlessly. They wrote reviews and nonfiction and fiction and screenplays — sometimes together, sometimes separately but mostly, it was reported, in the same room. I must admit I wondered if the safety that union afforded her hampered her prose, if Dunne’s bluster allowed for Didion’s remove. Certainly their interdependence rendered her even more of an acceptable woman. For all detachment, she clearly leaned on Dunne to stand, as puts it in her book, in between her and the rest of the world. And while I am delving into un-Didion-like confessions, I must admit — I’m not proud of this — that when the news of Dunne’s death hit the wires I was not only genuinely sorry for his widow but curious to learn how she would negotiate that loss. I am guessing I am not the only one, which is another reason why her book has been so anxiously awaited. (Perhaps the breathless reviews are mere compensation gestures for that prurience.) Would her characteristically bloodless prose gain some color? Would the floodgates open, shedding some insight into not only her union but into her famous containment? Would she genuinely transform her creatively and personally?

The answer, honestly, is no.

In this slim tome and in the many interviews she’s conducted since its release, she acknowledges she writes because that is how she makes sense of her life. She has also acknowledged that she has looked forward to the flurry of distractions that the book publication has promised to provide her. All of which goes a long way toward explaining the resulting stunned prose. But not toward excusing it. I find this book genuinely alienating, even self-aggrandizing. I resent it, just like I resent everyone's piety in their treatment of it.

Didion is still the careful researcher, wading through written material about the process of grieving for — what? Insight into how she should behave? Insight into what she is feeling? Fodder to fill out her slender paragraphs? She studies psychological texts, consults poets. And she lingers longest on Emily Post’s practical advice about how to treat mourners, purportedly because Post accepts death as a matter of life. I think, however, it is because Post regards grieving from the outside, providing a handy how-to manual that not only teaches us how to treat mourners but also mourners how to behave. She is still very concerned with the surface of things, if only to approach her situation cautiously from the outside in. With, in other words, her characteristic remove.

Perhaps as a result of writing screenplays, Didion’s prose has grown increasingly cinematic, with observations neatly folded into slender paragraphs and a strange redundancy of phrases that do not subsititute for the punch her earlier prose packed. The Year of Magical Thinking is no exception. In fact, no doubt because she wrote it in the first year after her husband’s death, the same year in which her daughter slowing surrendered to a fatal illness, she repeats phrases rather than approach too closely any new essential truths. I get the same feeling when reading this book that I get when I view Woody Allen’s movies since he left Mia Farrow for her daughter (and his kids’ sister): that this is art made to dissociate from reality’s painful rigors rather than as a bold effort to accept them. I got the feeling when reading this that Didion hasn’t even begun to really grapple with the reality of what it means to have lost Dunne. That she is tasting her phrases with the same numb wonderment that a weeping child has when she tastes her tears.

Understand I do not condemn Didion for being shellshocked by losing her husband and child in the span of one year. I do, however, slightly condemn her for writing a brittle book about those events rather than genuinely experiencing them. I resent that she did not have the courage to surrender to her grief before she took up her pen to whip herself back into shape; I resent that she failed to use those losses as a way to join and connect her to a larger context that she has for a very long time merely just observed. What could have been interesting, and why I bought the book, would have been a book about the creative and emotional transformation she embarked upon as a result of these terrible events, And it doesn’t count if that journey is mostly just the writing of this book.

For let me say it out loud. Her loss, though great, it is not the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone, especially not in recent history. And even if it were, the sheer accounting of it would not merit publication. Many, many women have lost their families and have not written books about it. Why Didion's book could have been special is because she could have shed insight, with her characteristic finality, into how she got through it. Instead, she seems to have written the book about her husband's death in order to even believe that it took place — the way, ironically, an overtherapized person will tell you over and over that her parents abused her while she's trying herself that it is true. I would have liked to read the book she might have written in a few years had she not written this last year away.

I don’t know Didion’s official stance on blogs, but I’m going to take a wild guess that she views them with disdain. And yet, what she’s written here manifests blogs’ worst qualities with none of their intimacy: Information is introduced and reintroduced endlessly without ever fully being digested. To wit: Your husband is dead. By the way, your husband is dead. Your daughter is dangerously ill. Your husband had heart trouble and you didn’t want to face up to it. Now he is dead and you don’t want to face up to that, either. And, yes, your husband is dead. By the way, the end.

How about: How will you go on? How have you gone on so far? What will you do now? How will you find emotional and physical sustenance, and from whom? In recent interviews, you have confessed you didn't like being single before you married Dunne. Do you know who you are separate from his embrace? Have you the courage to put down your pen and find out rather than subject us to ever-more brittle prose, o Joan?

Her answer, at least according to this volume, is: not yet. My suggestion to the rest of us is: Wait until she is. It could still be magic.

This Month's Reverent Hush (Touch the Sound; Capote; Good Night, and Good Luck; Forty Shades of Blue)

2005-10-09T19:35:00.000-04:00

Like most underfunded documentaries, Touch the Sound hasn’t achieved much of a theatrical run and isn’t that easy on the eyes; it’s got the feel of a PBS piece you might watch idly on a slow night. But its narrative about Evelyn Glennie, the profoundly deaf musician who trained herself to hear by mobilizing other senses, shines unexpectedly when it recreates her aural experience. For long stretches, noiseless, wordless urban and pastoral landscapes are punctuated only by the occasional whistle or honk or clang. Upon that foundation of silence director Thomas Riedelsheimer builds what is essentially Glennie’s ideology about sound — namely, that we can hear with our entire beings if we tune out the static of modern life. A curious sense of liberation lingers after the film ends. It is surprisingly seductive, that stillness.

It is a quiet to which moviegoers clamor more than we realize.

The recent buzz generated by Capote speaks to that desire. Directed by Bennett Miller and featuring a tepid script by Dan Futterman (Robin William’s spineless son in The Birdcage), this filmic essay about how the late author constructed In Cold Blood (and himself in the process) isn’t really anything to write home about. It neither delves fully into the timely, fecund topic of journalistic ethics nor does it impart new insights into that puckfaced conundrum himself. Mostly, it’s a terrific vehicle for Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman, although impressions of famous people are dubious achievements that are grossly overestimated by Hollywood. (The Ray Charles-inspired Jamie Foxx vocal on Kanye’s so-good “Gold Digger” packs much more bang for your buck than the whole of Ray.) In fairness, Hoffman not only delivers what by all accounts is a spot-on simulation of Capote, but he gives the kind of subtle, discomfiting performance that has become his trademark, as does Catherine Keener as author Harper “Nelle” Lee.

But Hoffman and Keener aren’t really why the film has flipped so many wigs. Half a dozen features have been released this year that contain equally compelling performances. It is Capote’s voluptuous quiet that appeals to the many critics and audiences worn down by bombastic Hollywood soundtracks and the incessant, self-conscious chatter of indies. The first few shots of Capote say it all: a wintry, Midwestern terrain, austere and beautifully blank. A family home, neutrally colored, perched primly at the edge of the prairie. A girl who enters that house and discovers the bloodied corpses of her friend and her family — at which point the camera scurries to the cacophony of a Manhattan evening, presided over grandly by the see-and-be-seen king, Mr. Capote himself.

It’s a transition that sets the tenor of the entire feature: the famous socialite-writer as a kind of whistler in the dark, a rabblerouser who rouses good neighbors in the middle of the night from much-earned sleep; the disquieter, essentially. The success of this film does not lie in our fascination with this ‘50s/60s icon and his self-pitying amorality. It lies squarely in the tranquility disrupted not only by abject criminals but by the brigade of their documenters that was led by Capote. For the real journey of this film is Truman’s eventual, painful surrender to the silent roar of middle America, and to all the terror that it can contain. It is in conveying that wretched quiet that Miller and Futterman succeed, perhaps despite themselves.

European filmmakers have always proved quite handy with quiescence; the confidence and depth it requires distinguishes such masters as Bergman, Fellini amd Tati. Not surprisingly, Americans emulators have produced more varied results, as if we’re such a young nation that we’ve yet to stop fidgeting. Woody Allen trips all over himself when he tries on Bergman- (or even Fellini-) inspired somber, and in Gus Van Sant’s trilogy of Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days, “still” slides into “soporific.” But Jim Jarmusch has mastered the evocative silence. It’s what made his career, sometimes undeservedly.(Broken Flowers is a recent example of undeserved accolades.) And part of why George Clooney hasn’t been hung out to dry for his overtly political allegory Good Night, and Good Luck, which hones in on how Edward R. Murrow helped take down the senator from Wisconsin and the Committee of Un-American Activities, is because it’s an economic film. It sidesteps preachiness by telling its story as much through spare sets, black-and-white cinematography and oddly articulate silences as through its snapdragon dialogue.

And then there’s Forty Shades of Blue, which seems less like a European film than a Russian one, albeit one set in Memphis. It also may be the best film released this year in the US. At the least, and that this is a necessary qualification shocks me, it is the best US nondoc of the year. (Murderball and Grizzly Man are outrageously good.) About a triangle of sex and resentment (love factors very little into this geometry) between an aging, debauched R&B producer Alan James (Rip Torn), his significantly younger, Russian immigrant girlfriend and baby’s momma Laura (Dina Korzun), and Michael, his resentful grown son (Darren Burrows), it’s blessedly hushed given that it takes place in arguably the heart of American music. Sad and slow, the film’s central tension lies not its sexual infidelities and indiscretions but in the question of whether we have the right to expect joy in our daily lives.

In early scenes, Laura’s true character emerges only through the cracks of her trophy wife veneer: long and lean and pale and clad with more money than taste. She roves about makeup counters, impassively receives her husband’s gestures of affections, applies her makeup with more care than she greets her child. Alan is honored for his musical achievements, and at the ceremony delivers such a heartfelt speech about how soul breached the gap between white and black folk that there’s not a dry eye on the house. Except for Laura, whose expression remains inscrutable as she sips a glass of white wine. Just as she may be dismissed for being an ice princess (and the movie for offering up such a fatuous cliché), the event breaks up, he abandons her for a blowsy blond, and the camera holds on Laura, who, features immobile, shoulders high and tight, strides to the bar where she drowns herself in vino desperatas. Michael is introduced to his defacto stepmother through a half-ajar door as he espies her drunken struggle with a stranger who drives her home but fails to extract the blowjob he no doubt expects.

As the film unpacks, Laura’s exact dilemma grows clear. She lives with greater ease and luxury than she even dreamed of in her former life, but remains dangerously malnourished emotionally, and this is a fact she cannot acknowledge, let alone indulge. To expect more is foolish, even ungrateful in her eyes. When Michael complains about his father’s negligence, she bursts out, “Americans are so spoiled!” When asked how she is, she answers “fine” as if she were willing it so each time. Only the ragged, narcissistic desire of father and son James disrupts the precarious balance she’s achieved between her needs, her highly developed morality and the selfishness of this family of aging boys. She is profoundly sad, in other words, and the film does not shy from laying out that misery.

Scenes heat up leisurely and linger on the bare trees and impersonal, garishly appointed rooms of her surroundings while almost as a sideplot characters make sloppy, fierce love and look disappointedly, longingly, wordlessly at each other. (In this way, the film recalls the woefully undersung Junebug, released early this summer.) The resulting effect is of floating above all that wild emotionality, in the manner that Laura wishes she could. The effect, actually, is deeply Russian: a philosophical investigation of a matter of the heart.

When that deceit inevitably causes her to implode, she jumps out from the car Alan’s driving, striding noiselessly along a deserted American street into a dark nowhere. If this were my perfect movie, I thought, it’d end here.

And it did.

We Americans pretty much never shut up anymore. People blither on their cell phones and thumb their sideberries everywhere and always (even during film screenings); blast out ears with programmatic music and blather when walking or running or showering or shitting. There are virtually no moments left when we have to sit still and grapple with the pain that lurks in every modern template. Only a rarified strain of movies compel us to listen by resuscitating the stillness our daily lives so sorely lack. We are lucky that so many have been released this fall. For at their best, they burrow into that quiet and all it holds, allowing us to channel ourselves and our truest selves through them. And even if we don’t know why we love these films, sometimes we still yield to their deeper lessons and pleasures.

At Your Service

2005-09-26T11:37:00.000-04:00

Hi, I'm still alive, and I thank those who've continued to check in occasionally to ensure that was so. I've been as gappy as my teeth lately; there's been much to observe, and I've needed the off-media time to adequately digest it all. Luckily, in these few weeks, some eminently worthy films (History of Violence being the most groundbreaking) have been released, especially for this time of year, and TV isn't shirking its strangely multifacted duty. Arrested Development third season, anyone? More HBO Hollywood navel-gazing? Chris Rock's personal time capsule?

I'll step up again, finally, tomorrow. In the meanhow: hi. Thank you for stopping by.

I Take It Back (Everything Is Illuminated, Grizzly Man, March of the Penguins, Broken Flowers)

2005-09-08T17:35:00.000-04:00

It’s not the time to go to the movies right now. For one thing, with the exception of Everything Is Illuminated (coming out 9/16), the worthy releases of this month are limited to the film-festival circuit; Toronto, Venice, and Telluride all crowd into this period. As for Illuminated, surprisingly, first-time director Liev Schreiber favors cute over the historical contextualization that formed the backbone of Jonathan Safran Foer’s excellent novel about an American writer tracing his Ukranian-Jewish roots. Why I still recommend the film, however, is its final scene, the most affecting depiction of the legacy of US immigration that I have ever seen.

Just: Don’t see March of the Penguins. That this Splenda-sweet anthropomorphizing piece of nuclear-family propaganda was the highest-grossing indie film of the summer while the brilliant Grizzly Man, which examines the very dangers of anthropomorphizing, lurked mostly below the radar blows my mind. And the more I think on Broken Flowers, the crosser it makes me. When I first saw it, I surrendered some to its icy appeal, but still felt vaguely unmoved. A month or two later, I can’t believe I fell even a little bit for another aggrandizement of a man drowning in his own self-entitlement, even if he is Bill Murray and even if he does possess an excellent soundtrack. Such unresolved self-pity lurking in that nest of quiet (male) sadness. What kind of a man (a poorly complected one, at that) breaks it off with Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone, Tilda Swinton and Julie Delpy, and mostly loafs about in a gorgeously appointed home while his best friend (the estimable Jeffrey Wright) hops around doing his emotional work for him? Not one I feel very sorry for, at any rate. Not one I care to watch for two hours, certainly.

Better to save your dollars for disaster relief. And to listen to music. Music! This is the exact moment when we need a soundtrack rather than a visual. We need a medium that enables us to better access our emotions rather than a vehicle for dissociation. God knows I love hiding out at the movies, but this is a time to strike forward, not to shy from our exasperation and disbelief and grief.

Go listen to Nina Simone sing “Trouble in Mind.” Like all of Nina’s best work, it swoops down to the darkest places we ever live and then back up again, reminding us that despair's never a permanent residence:

Trouble in mind
I'm blue
But I won't be blue always
'Cause the sun's gonna shine
In my backdoor some day

Just a Reminder

2005-09-02T16:58:00.000-04:00

Here are some ways to help.

On Today of All Days (The Constant Gardener)

2005-09-01T18:14:00.000-04:00

Everything I wanted to say about film today tastes like chalk in my mouth. I can't peel my eyes away from the television news, and the last time this happened was September 11, 2001. The long-term effects of Katrina are far more devastating than those of 9/11, though, especially for the many, many poor people facing the demise of everything and everywhere that they know. I just keep thinking on my visit to New Orleans three years ago; how charmed I was by the last authentic city in the United States (and I do count my beloved, if completely commodified, NYC in that count); how deeply connected New Orleans denizens were to their city's culture, architecture, cuisine, even its foibles. We have not only lost a crucial part of our history — a living part that connected us to both our Native American and European roots in a profoundly immediate way — but we now are forced to confront the stark reality of the horrendously governed society to which we have devolved. It's ugly.

If you must stop looking at this demise today, and if you have the luxury to be able to do so, I say go see The Constant Gardener. Perhaps it is the only film that will afford an unguilty escape right now. Certainly, it is the best one. City of God director Fernando Meirelles teased out of a John Le Carré novel a tremendous epic of postcolonialism and love set amidst (rather than separate from) a contemporary Africa gone wild with corporate greed and mortal danger and disrepair. And somehow, it is uplifting. Even today I can endorse it.

Lars von Trying (Dear Wendy)

2005-08-30T16:40:00.000-04:00

With his small, worried eyes and seemingly toothless jaw, English-born Jamie Bell has become cinema's poster child for a very American strain of pathos. In the Green Day video, he’s the generic beleaguered US soldier in Iraq; in this summer’s Chumscrubber, he’s the disenfranchised suburban teen; in last fall’s Undertow he suffers as the oldest child in a Southern rural family held hostage by good ole boy masculinity. And in this fall’s upcoming Dear Wendy, he plays Dick, an orphaned teen stranded in an ultra-generic Southeast mining town, who falls in love with his gun, (dear) Wendy.

That Bell, 19, hails from England is hardly a coincidence. Very few American male actors, especially young ones, ever transcend the brash boyishness that damns performances as hopelessly glib; Bell’s long-faced stoicism, a Brit staple, suits heavy fare to a T. No doubt he’s less encumbered by the American publicity machine than most US actors his age. And that outsider status, coupled with that real-man wad of invisible tobacco lodged in his cheek, renders him an ideal spokesperson for more controversial social criticism.

Such as Lars von Trier' script Dear Wendy, which, much like von Trier' Dogville (2003), offers social criticism galore — and almost nothing else. Back when von Trier and other Danish filmmakers formed Dogme95, that stark departure from Hollywood machinations couldn’t have been more welcome, but it’s been interesting to see, as the major helmers of the movement have moved on, how they have ran out of gas. Some, as in the case of Italian for Beginners writer/director Lone Scherfig, have faltered, but gorgeously, as they incorporated more painterly elements into their storytelling. Some, like Dear Wendy director Thomas Vintenberg made use of Dogme’s rigid mandates to distill a pure emotionality, as in his wonderfully wrenching Celebration, but haven’t found a way to do so since. And then there’s von Trier himself, who, it turns out, benefited from Dogme95’s stark lack of affect because it suited his natural cold-fishiness. He's such a cold fish that everyone involved in his projects channels their inner cold fish. For some, such as Nicole Kidman, that’s not much of a stretch. But poor Jamie Bell's caught in the good cop/bad cop crossfire of a Vintenberg-von Trier production. Bell’s blank humorlessness, which can be used to such fierce, good effect, reads as maddening when compiled with von Trier’s hopeless grandstanding.

The Dear Wendy screening made me regret my recent pledge to not walk out on movies anymore. Most around me, when they finished hissing and shifting relentlessly, filed out long before the credits and I looked after their backs longingly. Yes, only von Trier can summon a knee-jerk defense of the US from a room full of NY pinkojewbroadfag critics. And, no, strong responses do not unilaterally a good movie make. Von Trier’ uninformed generalizations, blueprints (literally, as he incorporates diagrams) of his diatribes about American culture, prove that.

Honestly, Vintenburg does his best with his old compatriot’s script. The stage set that von Trier undoubtedly called for is transformed into a sepia-toned square, slick with oil puddles and crumbling small-town capitalism. Despite the classic, ludicrously monotonic von Trier voiceover overdetermining every screen moment, Vintenburg does coax out three dimensions — making good, if perhaps also-ironic use of character quirks and Tarantino-like explication. But he can’t transcend the project's wild limitations. Here’s the basic plot: Dick, a young teen, is mentally or emotionally disabled in a never-identified way. His mom is gone. His dad, a man's man miner, doesn’t dig on him. He’s mostly raised by his black maid Cristobel (what modern mining town denizen can afford any maid, let alone a painful Mammy character?). He clerks at a grocery store run by a sniveling Jew who fears town gangs no one’s ever seen. One day, the boy finds a pistol. He falls in love, and meets another who loves a gun. They form the Dandies, a cult of pacificist gunlovers who are all former losers so emboldened by what they’re packing that they don’t need the weapons' actual power. They dance together in a temple of their own creation, study forensic psychologists’ educational films and weapon history, recite odes to their firearms, drink port, (oddly) cheer each other in a patented Brideshead stutter, and wear the ruffled-shirt, big-booted uniform of the American Revolutionaries. Until a bad black boy who’s actually killed steps into the mess and onto Dick’s toes by manhandling his beloved Wendy. And the world ends in four-alarm gunfire despite the intentions of dull-witted sheriff Bill Pullman.

Ye Gods. It’s obvious but I’ll say it here: The irony of von Trier, who freely admits he’s never been to the United States, is that he traffics heavily in all the worst stereotypes he’s garnered about the US from the exact source, the media, that he includes in his critiques — and then regurgitates those stereotypes in these weirdly improvisational, highly offensive ways that don’t even make sense. The irony of von Trier is that he’s such a ignorant, remorseless bully that if he’d actually been born and bred in the US, he’d no doubt be one of the meat-and-potaters, Bible-thumping, self-righteous, small-minded, frothing-at-the-mouth motherfuckers he lobs at whom he lobs so many spitballs.

In a conversation between von Trier and Vintenberg included in the press notes, Vintenburg acknowledges his discomfort with the lack of apparent logic or intention that motivates film’s principle events. “Ya, I don’t think that matters much,” von Trier admits blithely in response. He goes on to cite one of his chief influences as Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), which makes a painful amount of sense. At least Kubrick generally didn’t bother to bury his misanthropy in political stances, but I’ve learned the hard way to see a Kubrick fetish for the red flag that it is. Here’s a guy who generally found humankind, especially womankind, repellent in its messy spill of bodily fluids like blood and cum and tears, and he made his career photographing his distaste beautifully. Von Trier, with his pared-down sets and plots and character sketches, takes that distaste one step further (much like that Mormon wanker Neil Lebute): with bare-bones dialogue, plotlines and characters, he sacrifices any plausibility, let alone humanity, in order to campaign on his neverending platform that people suck. Ain’t no one, not Vintenerg nor Bell nor even congenitally genial Pullman, can sweeten up that shit.

Being R. Kelly

2005-08-29T16:18:00.000-04:00

It's beyond me why I watch dumb shit like the VMAs, but R&B singer R.Kelly, the diamond buried in the coal of Diddy (excuse me, Seandoleeza Rice)'s stocking, earned those three hours of my life. Overtly lip-synching to his own 300,000-part soap-operetta "Trapped in the Closet," Kelly flung his body around the ramparts of a mostly bare set as he acted out the roles of a wronged wife, a wronged husband, a wronged gay boyfriend, and a wronged thug lover. Finger wagging, hands on hips, neck swiveling: the jailbait maven resembled nothing so much as a Malkovich marionette in Spike Jonze's first feature. An intentional social satire, I'm quite sure.

More Boys-Will-Be-Boys Bluster (Entourage, Wedding Crashers)

2005-08-27T15:35:00.000-04:00

A few more notes in the vein of my last post.

This week, Slate’s brilliant Dana Stevens has her way with the Entourage boys, laying out just exactly how she’d fix up that ode to young-dumb-full-of-cum. High on her list: flesh out at least one female character. Obviously the relentless appeal of Entourage is the chick-deflecting boy-on-boy bonding, and that it's not hell bent on self-monitoring with that po-mo wink that sinks so many other telegenic ships. But I admire Stevens for genuinely not digging on the show, because I can’t fall in with her. I first watched it at the home of a rather premier rock critic and thought, I must admit — it’s so rock critic to dig this arrested-development traviata. But then I ate my words, most likely the way many men surrendered grudgingly to Sex and the City while their girlfriends glued themselves to it. Both shows, at their core, do what TV does best: illustrate a real-life dynamic (male or female friendships) against an eminently desirable backdrop. It's entertaining as all get out to watch the boys wield their puny, TV-sized swords. Plus, Vince is cute. (What is it with me and Vincents this week?)

That said, Stevens is right. The patriarchy — would calling it cockacracy render this concept more, uh, palatable? — is such that no one connected to Entourage has thought to include a few women that aren’t just plot-movers. The always-capable Debi Mazar sinks her tiny, feral teeth into her tiny, feral role as Vinnie's publicist, for sure, but it’d be just as easy to give more backstory to her as it has been to give to agent Ari Gold (an ideal role for type A Jeremy Piven, heretofore relegated to the premature-baldy special: la sidekick). I ain’t going to pretend that Sex and the City features any straight male characters who don't play second fiddle in our girls’ urban orchestra, but because the girls view men with a more complicated cocktail of fear, confusion, and admiration (not just lust, in other words), the male characters benefit from greater depth. Big and Aidan are drawn with broad strokes, for sure, but generic boytoys they are not.

Also on a loosely related note: someone on David Poland’s Hot Blog pointed out that Wedding Crashers was marred by the romantic love object’s brother, Todd Cleary, a horrendous gay stereotype. Since the Hot Blog’s normally a hotblogbed for said boys-will-be-boys bluster, the comment took me aback — mostly because I couldn't believe I didn’t bother to sputter about that character myself. The sheer hatefulness of both the character and the protagonists’ reaction to him (deranged, cringing artist throws himself on Vince Vaughn, who shrinks in terror) sinks any legitimacy of the relentlessly male angle of the film. The aggrandizing of the boyish antics (stone-cold dogging of chicks, mostly) seems less excusable when the film's underlying old-school, geneneralized male anxiety translates into a protest that just because it’s about male friendship doesn't mean it's gay or anything. Nah, they're real men.

Oy.

That I didn’t bother to complain about the Todd plotline only shows how inured I’ve become to sacrificing my politics, empathy, or even self in order to gain the experience a movie intends. What passes for clever is backbackbackbacklashing more every day and sometimes I find I'm holding that whip.

Funny Is as Funny Fucks (Aristocrats, Wedding Crashers, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, The Baxter)

2005-08-25T02:07:00.000-04:00

With the exception of The Baxter, which comes out this week and has thus been appropriately relegated to the end-of-summer sloppy seconds, the comedies released this summer have been distinguished by three qualities. To wit:

1. They are unabashedly, almost histrionically male. (An unshocking fact; pedestrian even)
2. They are dirty: chock-full of eff words and plastic titties and swollen cocks. (This is less pedestrian on the heels of the born-again malaise that’s swept the nation.)
3. They are funny. (Distinctly unpedestrian; shocking even)

Wedding Crashers, particularly the first 30 minutes, is genuinely amusing. It may be fratty as all-get out, but count on marble-mouthed, swarthy (part Lebanese, according to imdb) Vince Vaughn to tromp all over the bleached-out DC status quo, with his Bluto-boy cake-stuffing, wildly effusive back-slapping subversions of age-old WASP esthetics. In the grand tradition of Hollywood comedies, Crashers falls off like a bad wig in the last 20 minutes, but I still saw it twice. I’ve always had a soft spot for lanky, funny boys, and ham-handed V.V. may be my new boyfriend. The movie is unabashedly male, of course: shot from an unremittingly masculine perspective and all about the maddeningly overdocumented struggle of American boys fighting maturation.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin takes the cake when it comes to slavishly documenting that struggle. It’s also funny as hell and highwater, its plot doesn’t merely serve as the necessary filler between gags, and it doesn’t fall out the end. It actually ends on an insanely high note; Paul Rudd wiggling his always surprisingly silly body to “The Age of Aquarius” is a high note to me, anyway.

It’s both a relief and terribly frustrating that all good-boy pretenses have been dropped in this summer's batch of comedies. The chief example of this is that comedians' valentine to themselves, The Aristrocrats, a deft exploration of the ultimate meta joke. I’m glad Hollywood has returned to its Caddyshack and Meatballs era of gross, rated-R, naked titty comedy. Concept comedies like Zoolander and Dodgeball go but so far (although Stiller's scent, Eau de Hack, lingers forever). That's why the loser-takes-all clunker Baxter stinks so badly. It's refreshing for films to shed their Disney-approved handcuffs to take their innuendos to their natural, uh, extensions. Furthermore, the chief conceit of all of these films is to stand those white-boy antics on their heads. Crashers' chief message can be translated to mean, "Even if you're white and male and straight, it's impossible to pass if you have an iota of taste or humor." Virgin's major selling-point is its overt assumption that men are babies, least of all the 40-year-old virgin. But self-installed criticism or not, it's still all about the boys. That's part of why Whoopie Goldberg and Sarah Silverman shone so bright in their renditions of the Aristocrats gag; fresh perspectives make old hats new. The other reason was because they both, especially Silverman (every smart guy's sloe-eyed fantasy), are high-larious. Hi. Vagina jokes are high-larious. They are!

I’m waiting for a good old mainstream comedy written by the likes of SNL molls Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Mean Girls was not only snarky in the best of ways but so very smart. While watching it, I didn’t feel the least bit like I was clamoring to be something I wasn’t — didn't feel, in other words, like I was pretending to be a forever-adolescent male who, um, runs a studio or something.

Hear Ye, Hear Ye. Ya Hear?

2005-08-11T18:30:00.000-04:00

Jessica Hopper sounds an anti-capitalist cry, reminding us that modern feminism isn't all DIY crafts and Le Tigre.

Green Day's Wake-Up Call

2005-08-11T17:09:00.000-04:00

I’ve never thought much of Green Day since I saw them open for Liz Phair at Roseland back in 1993 (or was it 1994?). Billie Joe Armstrong was jumping around the stage like his postpunk-monkey self when, almost as an afterthought, he unzipped his Dickies and whipped out a surprisingly thick, fake-looking schlong — really unwelcome in a room full of mid-’90s identity-politics queens. But their controversial ”Wake Me Up When September Ends” video has redeemed them hundredfold. At least.

Starring Jamie Bell and Evan Rachel Woods, the actual song doesn’t even kick in until the second minute of the 11:29 minute movie. Instead, the video begins as two young lovers murmur “I’m never going to leave you” into each other’s sandy, wind-swept hair, brows knit with sweet sincerity; limbs wrapped about each other as they romp in rolling, verdant fields: Americana at its earnest, cheesy finest. Then September ends, the song kicks in, and reality rears Armstrong’s ugly head. Woods first crashes out of their modest house, hysterically sobbing, “Tell me you didn’t do it,” and despite myself my heart sinks. Ah, when first love betrays. Bell jumps up to pacify her. But he turns out he didn’t cheat (nor is a September 11 homage on the horizon). Worse: He’s joined the armed forces. “I did this for us! I thought you’d be proud of me. I thought of all people you’d understand why I did this.”

The song starts up again then and a sepia-toned Iraqi battle scene replaces the small-town Technicolor. At first, a group of armed, anonymous soldiers, any one of whom can be Bell, storm the streets, veiled women looking on anxiously. Then we see Bell himself, peering bleakly from beneath his helmut. Shot in the leg, he goes down and the video ends with the image of a tear-streaked Woods back on high school bleachers in those rolling, green hills.

The response has been very telling. Some think it’s both heavyhanded and too apolitical. Granted, no one lights a picture of George Bush on fire. But what could be dismissed as simplistic is instead simple. Accessible rather than sentimental. Pedestrian, corny, overt, whatever. I had a lump in my throat at the end of this video.

So few stories are being told about the war that the US is actually waging right now and who ends up waging it. The video is about the armed forces' treacherous seduction of working-class America’s youth. More and more of our boys and girls are dying over there every week along with the Iraqis whose lives we continue to ruin, and most of us blogger and mainstream- and alternamedia kids alike just don’t really talk about it. Why not? Why aren’t we more upset?

Because the media is mostly still peopled by the kind of folks who can afford to go to swell schools, function in expensive urban areas on shitty salaries — and this war isn’t real to them. These are the kind of people who don’t really know too many people who have enrolled in the reserves or flat-out enlisted because they aren’t the type of people who would need to. As the middle-class becomes a thing of the past in the US, places like LA and NYC are increasingly mere press playgrounds for people who enjoy the luxury to forget about the war this country is waging. So this video is generating this kind of whiny-ass mishegos from these folks because, more than most videos, this one isn’t directed at them. It’s directed at the kind of folks with so few options that they considered the armed forces. Or, as in the case of a lot of the preteens and teens who worship Green Day, still do.

At my uncle’s funeral back in June, I found out two of my cousins’ kids are over in Iraq right now. Back in December I basically got disinvited from Christmas for going off on my cousin Sue and her husband Frank for when they let their oldest daughter enlist in the reserves. Frank actually called me “Jane Fonda” when I told them Lindsay enlisting was dangerous morally and mortally. Now Lindsay is actually over there. She’s 18 and until now, she’d never really even been out of New England. As for dead-eyed Kyle, my cousin Kim’s oldest, I already knew he was in Iraq.

The funeral was bad for Kim. Not only had Uncle Al died, but so had Kyle’s grandmother. “So he’s back, then?” I asked her. “Just for the funeral,” she replied. “He’s on his second tour of duty. They got him doing chemical cleanup. I’m sick about it.”

In the funeral procession, I drove behind her shitty Gremlin, festooned with two bumperstickers. One was a yellow ribbon. The other said “Mothers for peace.” I know that, no matter what, everyone in my family now wishes none of us were over there. Our lives aren’t worth it.

Understand I’m not flashing my working-class credentials. I don’t have them. I went to one of the nice colleges of which I speak and no matter how broke I’ve been lately, I have resources I can fall back on. It’s just that the rest of my family didn’t get those chances and the US military dangles quite a carrot, especially if there’s nothing to eat. Those of us writing stories and talking the talk have overlooked this fact. Green Day has not.

Madison Movie Talk

2005-08-10T13:54:00.000-04:00

Once in a while, my friend Jan and I host a call-in radio program about film on a Madison, Wisc., public radio station. I dig it, and not just because I love the opportunity to sound off like a would-be expert. These lefty listeners for the most part still fight the good fight, effortlessly achieving heights of indignance that I haven’t been able to scale since I was an undergraduate. It’s good to be reminded of what I’ve become inured to — namely that plastic surgery and at least a mild eating disorder are practically casting requirements for both men and women; that women get the short end of the cinematic stick; that most people still view films as a little desert at the end of a legitimate workday rather than ye olde bread and butter. But one film that I found myself vehemently disagreeeing with the old-school progressives about was the overdetermined, overwritten, overwhelmingly underwhelming Crash, which I still contend is a pat ensemble film about LA racial dynamics that could have been written for Lifetime TV in 1991.

When Jan and I trashed it on the show, the lines lit up with a score of indignant callers chomping at the bit to set us straight. One guy said: “You just don’t understand race relations in America.” A comment that raised not only my hackles but a set of genuinely unfacetious questions: Does he? Do you? Just who does understand race relations in America right now? (Besides Cornel West, anyway?) And does the film really understand race, or even purport to?

Although I find Haggis’ movie so clichéd as to be possibly harmful, does the fact that these folks found it useful mean, as Jan tactfully suggested while I jumped all over the poor caller, that it can’t be quite so easily dismissed? It’s my final question here, I guess. None of these callers could specify what they found so helpful or useful about Crash. Rather, they just averred it was a “worthy topic.” And just because a film takes on an admittedly worthy topic, does it thus become a worthy film?

You know my answer is no. Otherwise, I’d be singing poor John Sayles’ recent movies’ praises.

On another note, callers liked that damned penguins movie, too. And more than one listener confessed s/he wouldn’t be seeing Murderball because of its title. Too bad, because that really is a worthy film — albeit one with an admittedly futile title. I’ll say this for the Maddy listeners: They do value their foreign film. Let’s hear it for the Midwestern independent theaters, no matter how poorly air-conditioned they apparently are.

Anne Heche Is a Convincing Alien (or: What I Learned My Summer Vacation)

2005-08-08T16:11:00.000-04:00

I apologize for my inexcusably long break. All I can say is that I am one of those irresponsible New Yorkers who not only has a car, but loves her car. It’s a pain in the ass to park, to pay for, and to protect, but — aaaaah. Come summer and its clammy, dirty hot-towel slap, ain’t nothing better than climbing into my Hyundai Sadie’s four walls and speeding right up the BQE ramp and out, out, out of NYC environs.

I’ve been to: the Catskills; Onset Bay, Massachusetts; the tony Hamptoni; Long Beach, LI; and, of course, la Coney Island. And I am here to report that even better auto-entertainment (if you catch my meaning) than mypod is la book on tape. The cheesier the better, it seems. I tried listening to Middlemarch and Crime and Punishment and, though I admired those books much when I read them a decade ago, lordy, were they lousy in traffic. Nay, it’s been less lofty fare: domestic fiction from Alice McDermott; you-go-girl faction from Terry McMillan (NYTimes phrasing, not my own); Frank Abagnale’s swinging-con memoir Catch Me If You Can, Aretha Franklin’s autoautoautobiography (compelling on oh-so-many levels!); and, by far the best, Call Me Crazy by Anne Heche, read by the authoress herself in her patented Stonewall-era-gay-male-meets-Ethel Merman voice. I will say this for Heche: She obviously wrote it herself. She grounds out her church-ladylikeness with down-and-dirty swearing. "I'd rather be crazy than fucking God!" she exclaims after describing waking up with, oh, stigmata in her palms. And then there's the poetry she occasionally uses to jazz up her prose. Couplets rhyming “herpes-scaby” with “My sister Abby.” Or, "I was mad/a loon/a crazy cartoon." Plus the exact pronunciation of her alien-identity Celestia’s special language.

Crazy!

All right, I’ve broken my August-posting cherry, so more later today or tomorrow.

What Made Me Grin This Temperate Morning

2005-07-23T16:29:00.000-04:00

The heavily tattooed guy with the powerful, and I mean POWERFUL, body odor waiting for the drugstore to open at 9 am. The doors swung open, I grabbed my gallons of water (they were having a sale, when can I say?) and brotherman jostled ahead of me to buy three tubes of KY jelly and an economy-sized bottle of Astroglide. The clerk and I could barely look at each other without smirking. Sexy sex sex.

My next-door neighbor, an Italian woman in her sixties, planting five pots of gorgeous purple morning glories in her tiny front yard. She was wearing a dress festooned with purple morning glories and, when she was done planting, swept her share of the sidewalk with a gorgeous purple broom. I think I love her.

You Got Served playing HBO on a seemingly nonstop reel. It's the perfect cable movie — a dull teen drama punctuated by awesome awesome awesome dance sequences. Click on, click off. Imitate the moves in the sanctity of your living room.

My apartment boasting not one but two air conditioners. Read it and weep. Or just read my electricity bill and weep.

Ah, summer soothes this savage beast.

Singleton Talks (and Money Walks)

2005-07-21T08:19:00.000-04:00

John Singleton lays it down in today’s Times. The director of the groundbreaking Boys in the Hood and a long line of what-was-he-thinking ventures (Poetic Justice, 2 Fast 2 Furious are but a few) has produced — and largely bankrolled himself — first-time director’s Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow, that which has set all kinds of tongues a-flapping. Basically, I like Hustle; it is formulaic but also large-hearted. But what’s most compelling about the story is that Singleton bothered to get behind it with such force — and a financial force at that.

In the interview today, he responds to interviewer Lola Gogunnaik’s implication that “he’s back” with a bit of bristle:

"My last film made $240 million," he quickly pointed out in a recent interview. He was referring to ‘2 Fast 2 Furious,’ the critically lambasted blockbuster he directed in 2003. "Hello, I've been here."

On one level, you’ve got to laugh. An imdb search reveals just the kind of no-goodnick Nick he’s been. But, then again, according to Hollywood standards, Singleton's been up to a lot. Just: financially. And why the "just," anyway?

With all respect to my Marxist friends, you could almost argue that financial success should matter more for a filmmaker of color (or a woman) right now than artistic merit. What most people of color don’t do is run things. (Oprah is a powerful exception.) They still rarely own sports teams though those teams are mostly comprised of brown-skinned men. They still, more to the point, don’t run studios. They still don’t have a say as to how things run and what gets made. Singleton having money means Singleton can bankroll the movie he thinks deserves bankrolling, practically Singletonhandedly (sorry). It's the same reason that Jay-Z jumped ship on his recording career to be president and CEO of Def Jam Recordings.

As Singleton himself goes on to say in the interview:

"Very few studios have people of color deciding what films get made," Mr. Lee said. "There's not one African-American at a studio in a position to greenlight a film. When that happens that will be landmark. That will have far more impact than two black people winning Academy Awards in one year."

It’s a complicated issue. The trick, of course, is not to make movies so problematic that your means don't justify the ends. But I think Singleton is right. Even just spending the little time in LA that I have over the last year, I believe that all the nefarious agendas that we leftists and conservativos alike assign to the Hollywood powers-that-be are off-base. The only color or party that matters to them is green. So Singleton is hitting where it counts when he makes a high-grossing (if crap) movie and then turns around and uses the cash he earned to bankroll a film that couldn't get a green light if green were the only color in the world. Obviously it would be preferable if all successful movies also boasted great integrity. And that's where we come in as audiences. We should remember that it is our dollar which speaks the loudest when it comes to expressing our political outrage in a daily way. And not only in terms of which movies we see.

*Also check out Can't Stop Won't Stop author Jeff Chang's two cents on the verysame topic over at the estimable alternet.

When One Odyssey Begets Another (She's Not There)

2005-07-16T22:21:00.000-04:00

I’d been meaning to read Jennifer Boylan’s She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders for a dog’s age, but having detoured from memoir, I couldn’t find my way back for a while. As fate would have it, a copy’s been floating around at Oslo, Williamsburg’s best new coffee shop, and this morning I finally surrendered my day to reading it. I am so glad.

Boylan, who used to publish under the moniker James Boylan, was already a Colby University professor and established writer of some repute when she started to transition from being a man to a woman. (People who are in or have completed this process are often referred to as MTF transsexuals.) She had two children; a real partner in her wife Grace; a strong, kind family of origin; and terrific friendships, most notably with the writer Richard Russo, who writes an afterword to this book. And she had a fairly killer sense of humor. Yet, as she conveys in her dry, spare style, she’d felt fairly sure that she was meant to be a woman since she was a young boy, and that feeling loomed as an enormous elephant right in the center of her life.

I majored in feminist/gender studies at Bryn Mawr College in the early ‘90s and, like the good postmodernist groupie I was, promptly dismissed transsexuals as the sorry victims of a world that conflated gender with sex. Long after I’d dismissed much of my academic studies as too facile, I’d always slightly turn off from FTM or MTF people I’d meet. "This is Gary," a friend would introduce a 5"1 obvious girl, albeit one with a crewcut and the beginnings of a beard, and I'd immediately channel my inner Andy Rooney. Lesbian, gay, bi: quatever. I'd decided I was a queer straight girl as soon as I realized I wasn’t going to fall into any normal heterosexual life trajectory. I could even get transgendered persons like drag queens or kings who switched back and forth; all that flipping the constructs on their head made sense to me. But transsexuals seemed so implausible. I thought people already wasted too much time being defined by their gender. Why make so much more of a fuss over whether you were going to going to wear pink or blue, be the mommy or the daddy, be (let’s face it) the financial or sexual object? Why try so hard to fit more neatly into a paradigm that limited us all?

Reading Leslie Feinberg’s affecting (if slightly wooden) book about her own gender odyssey only validated my biases. Born on what she calls “the anatomical sweep between male and female,” she spent the bulk of her young adulthood transitioning with the aid of hormones from a woman to a man. At a certain point, though, she opted out of the whole gender program entirely and has since lived her life as what she calls a she-he — someone who does not identify with the either/or gender assignment that most people adopt. Although Feinberg herself publically supports pretty much every path that transsexuals and trangendered persons take, I embraced her own path as the “right one.”

And ideology proved thicker than blood in this case.

During a Brooklyn visit a few years ago, my old man grew uncharacteristically absorbed in a book he pulled from my shelves. It was Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors.

Suddenly he jammed the book in my face.

“That’s my cousin Mahty!” he said. I looked at the page. It was a story I’d read many times about Martin, a Johns Hopkins doctor, husband and father who’d transitioned into a woman named Martine. Or Mahty, as we Massholes will always have it. She and her wife remained legally married, though Feinberg wrote they now referred to each other as “spice” rather than “spouse,” a bad wordplay that red-flagged this person as within my bloodline. (It's family legend that, when put on oxygen at the very end of his life, my grandfather began to sing, “Tanks for the memories…") A call to my dad’s sister confirmed it as so. Somehow, though, I avoided any further exploration, even avoided getting in touch with Marty when in Baltimore.

But reading Boylan’s book has given me pause about my attitudes. As a person who otherwise had found her way, Jenny had no reason to want to shake up her life to the degree she nonetheless felt she had to. She passed easily as a man, for example, unlike many of the he-shes whose testimony I’d read over the years. She just didn’t feel like a man. She didn’t even feel like a he-she. She felt like a woman, so much so that she always felt that an important part of her was held at bay while she lived her life as Jim. And being a highly developed writer and human being with many tools (pun intended) at her disposal, she managed to convey both her transition and its fallout with a wry, bittersweet evenhandedness that got through to me.

That is not to say that it took middle-class respectability to finally legitimize the entire spectrum of transgendered persons, although I suppose it didn't hurt Jenny's testimony that she possesses all the benchmarks that other artists can either relate or aspire to: the fucked-up NYC years, the travel abroad, the Johns Hopkins MFA, the plum teaching position, the movie-optioned books. Nor is this to say that reading this book magically erases my no-doubt still-ignorant assumptions. Just that I finally felt rather than intellectualized the reality some describe of being trapped in a body of the wrong sex.

She’s Not There isn’t perfect; it’s a little long, a little too careful on the topic of Boylan’s clearly now-fragile marriage, a little too removed from a larger context of transsexualism. But that detachment also serves her story well. She doesn’t come off as a particularly politically activated person before her transition, so it makes sense that she doesn’t become one afterward. Instead, she shows how her transition took place in her continued life as the wacky college professor, father and, er, spouse.

Jenny moves me to confront my bullshit assumptions by deploying all them writerly tricks that actually work: through showing-not-telling, through specifics that render her story more universal, by writing herself as a person rather than a symbol. When Russo tells Boylan, for example, that he finds her newly constructed identity as Jenny to be “implausible,” the very word that I so often apply to transgendered persons, I started with recognition. And finally felt ashamed at how emotionally shut-down I'd been on this subject for years.

I should note that, though she doesn’t really get into an extended discussion of the cultural implications of gender-sex assignment, Boylan hardly refracts an uncomplicated notion of gender. She writes that, like many newly transitioned MTF transsexuals, when she first completed her gender transition she behaved like a 40something girl. At an age when her wife had largely dispensed already with all the obvious earmarkers of gender that younger females sometimes glom onto when they’re still sorting themselves out — the nail polish, the coquetries — Jenny was ecstatic to try it all on. Only now is she transitioning from a girl to a woman, someone who has successfully integrated traditionally male and female attributes in a way that works for her adult persona. (It's a transition too few American females undergo for, oh, a bevy of reasons.)

So often memoirs about a personal odyssey rely on the import of the story itself to carry all the dramatic heat. Here we’ve got Boylan, a person who obviously has never sought to ruffle a feather except through laughter her whole life. But ruffle she does, merely by being specifically herself not only in her life but in her writing, too (perhaps for the first time). This is how memoir and social change most effectively entwine.

Lady Be Goode

2005-07-14T22:44:00.000-04:00

Last night, I saw Lady Sovereign at the Knitting Factory. Like MIA, Lady Sovereign is a fierce lil Britgirl rapper. There are so few American female MCs living in any kind of limelight these days (fewer than there used to be, even) that I am tres curious about these girls. Also I have not been able to stop singing "Ch Ching," her Little Engine That Could single.

Jostle and I drove over the Williamsburg Bridge at an hour already past our bedtime and parked right around the corner from the club like true suburban haufraus. Then girlfriend didn’t come on until after what may have been the longest DJ set ever to precede a live act. So long that I nearly drowned in the showkid culture that doesn't even proliferate Williamsburg in such volume: The girls growing out their bangs by combing them into poofy pompadours; still rolling up their jeans too many times. The boys in their goofy railroad conductor hats. The dancing, ever more white. I nearly decked a guy who poked me hard "as an experiment to see if I would fall." Why not dip my braid in the inkwell, you Tom Sawyer douchebag?

But it turned out Lady Sov was worth it and then some. Tiny with a braided side ponytail and big-boy basketball sneakers and jeans, she came off like the improbable love child of a ménage a troi between the Little Rascals, Tintin and Punky Brewster. All small useless limbs and cockeyed grin and accent. Ch ching. Reeling from bad McDonald’s, she had to fit her set in between vomiting sessions, and her deejay's equipment kept malfunctioning so badly that she stamped her tiny foot. But stylishly. If she could pull her set out from under those bad stars, she's already a star herself. And she did. She charmed the shite out of all of us with her oddly easy chatter. Like Dean Martin she was. Even standing in the queasy upper section, far from the madding crowd, her charasma bit me pleasurably in the assma. So that I got asthma. Oy. After a while, I barely even noticed how everyone around me was dancing like they were knee-deep in aerobics class.

I mean, really. Really.

On Walking Out: Not So Keane

2005-07-12T09:27:00.000-04:00

Last night I walked out of a screening of Keane, due for release in late September. It wasn’t the worst movie, at least what I saw of it. Represented by one of my favorite publicists, one known for her choosiness, and executive-produced by Steven Soderbergh (which doesn’t automatically recommend a film; see Criminal or, rather, don’t), I’d been anticipating Keane with some low-level excitement. But 30 minutes in, I knew I had to leave. The story of an obviously mentally ill man seeking a daughter abducted from NY Port Authority made me wobbly: crampy, headachey, feverish, dizzy. Made me like him, in other words; him, as he spun in circles and hissed at himself and pulled anxiously at all his layers of clothes.

I used to believe that anything that evoked such a strong physical reaction shouldn't be dismissed — the first 10 minutes of Leaving Las Vegas were at least as harrowing as this film, for example — but the last two films that I’d found as nauseating (Demonlover and Irréversible) didn’t exactly inspire me to stay yesterday. Both ambushed my senses merely as a crash course in their stunted nihilism. Keane's payoff for all this physical misery wasn’t clear enough; I could see stretching ahead another whole hour of a wild-eyed, tight-mouthed man inadvertently bungling all the lives all around him. So I grabbed my purse and hustled out in search of some Advil.

Back before I mostly attended press screenings, I walked out on films all the time. It was a lavish, dramatic gesture, almost like paying for a bad date’s meal with your last 50 bucks. It was my way of claiming my time as important, of also (I must confess) peeving my then-boyfriend, who insisted on catching not only every trailer but every final credit. Looking back, skipping out really was a luxury. As a paying audience member, I had a right to walk if the movie wasn’t holding me in its grasp. These days, I’m a cog in the film industry machine — albeit a small cog. (Right now I’m mostly doing listings for the estimable flavorpill. ) I still feel lucky to be invited to screenings, and, especially in the case of indie movies, I feel a responsibility to the filmmakers who’ve likely invested a few years of their lives and their resources to at least watch the whole damn thing. What if the film is great and just hasn’t inspired the right critics so far, hasn't been accepted by the right festivals? (The terrific Funny Ha Ha is a prime example.)

Honestly, I’m not proud of what I did yesterday. I'm thinking of seeing the film again in penance. And of pleading heat exhaustion.

Color Me Curmudgeon (Miranda July, Paul Haggis, Morgan Freeman, Ben Stiller and His Lost Boys)

2005-07-11T13:56:00.000-04:00

I seem to be slightly immune to the charms of Miranda July and her much-vaunted first feature Me and You and Everyone We Know. Something about its careful creepiness sticks in my craw — and not in a good way. July and her characters’ quiet peculiarities — the dowry-obsessed preteen; a pair of sexed-up neighborhood vixens seducing the blank-faced new kid; July herself as an art naïf busy mucking about with slide projectors and stalking the shoe salesman who lights his hand on fire in response to his divorce — just aren’t my cup of tea no matter how original they may be. Yes, July strips her film of the misanthropy that often sinks Solonz’ films (to which Me and You has been rightfully compared), but a teeth-decaying preciousness takes its place. Her movie may touch on the many mottled ways that humans strive for true communion with each other, but not with as shattering an impact as it’s been credited. It’s hard to distinguish exactly what sets her film apart from a bevy of other small movies slated for release this summer: The estimable Happy Endings and Junebug poke into some of the territory with a greater fierceness if perhaps less vulnerability.

I am willing to admit that some of my beefs simply aren’t fair, that I always read July's sort of morose whimsy as passive-aggressive. But if July's film were as overwhelming an achievement as it’s been touted, wouldn’t it render sympathetic even characters to whom I’d be disinclined in real life? Isn’t that one of the points of character-driven film in the first place? Or am I just (back)lashing out? I can’t quite decide.

Here’s the kit to go with that caboodle:

1. I was restless as all get out during March of the Penguins. It’s typically true that humans only focus on aspects of nature that suit their own agendas (the upcoming Grizzly Man does a fine job of proving that), but an usual amount of anthropomorphizing goes into projecting that those penguins were laboring hard for love. Since when is good-old species survival conflated with romantic pursuit?

My resistance may stem from a resistance to Morgan Freeman's hypnotic narration. His sonorous voiceovers actually work sometimes — most recently in Million Dollar Baby — but there are other times when his magnanimous smile is just too audible. Which reminds me that:

2. Paul Haggis really is overrated. Million Dollar Baby is great, but that is because Haggis adapted that script from F.X. Toole’s terrific book, and because Clint Eastwood is a great director and actor who surrounded himself with an able cast and crew. The over-the-top portrayal of Hilary Swank’s female boxer’s lazy, poor family smacks of the kind of demographic shortcuts that comprise the whole of Haggis’ too-pat LA ensemble film Crash. The (limited) success of that movie (and of Me and You) shows just how how hungry American viewers are for bigger topics and bigger emotions. Which brings me to my last point:

3. Reading, of all things, a copy of GQ on the can, I came across an article calling to task Ben Stiller and his gaggle of boys-will-be-boys (no link available, sorry). Much has already been written about Stiller’s vainglory, about how he struts his strangely overdeveloped little Cro-Mag bod around even when it's plot-inappropriate, about the fundamental mediocrity of his mainstream comedies. But this piece nails what it dubs his “fratpack,” the group of male comedians who claim vaguely hipster status without remotely ruffling the status quo.

Stiller started out his career working with gays and feminists (the aborted Ben Stiller Show contains his funniest work by far) but, along with the likes of the Brothers Owen, Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell (whom I do love), he has found his footing making the kind of movies that challenge nothing but patience. I’m as much a fan of simply retahded as the next girl, but therein lies the problem. There ain’t no girls to speak of in these stickly-dickly vehicles except as objects of humor or lust. Given that Chappelle is now on a seemingly permanent hiatus, that Kudrow's show is an enormous disappointment, and that the Stella boys may be nerdier but are certainly no more progressive, what does it say that the only true social satire taking place right now is in more straight-on media knock-offs like The Onion or The Daily Show?

The Word Is Oy

2005-07-08T03:30:00.000-04:00

So much for our bodies, ourselves.

Mimi Cues Us All

2005-07-08T02:51:00.000-04:00

Last weekend, Yancey and I were talking about the oh-so-BK phenomenon of the summer anthem. It’s not like certain songs don’t drop big all over the place, but it sure is something to watch a Hot 97 hit spread Brooklyn-style: thumping out of cars, earphones, boomboxes propped precariously on garbage cans, stoops, shoulders, even; everyone stopping in their tracks to nod heads, shuffle a few steps, shimmy hips and shoulders, mouth lyrics at each other laughing, whisper lyrics alone. There’s nothing like that song we all know will get us out on the dance floor and through washing dishes, will inspire us to schlump a little faster (wiggle even) in the mad, sultry heat to the deli. Sssssummer summer indeed.

This year it’s “We Belong Together.”

Just as we were walking down the street saying, “Can a ballad really be the summer song?” a moving violation (glossy black BMW, massive tires) rolled out those first few measures of tinkling piano, and we cracked up. Mariah dangled her apologies over that simple bass, three knock-kneed six-year-olds in too-big shorts danced by us singing,“Turn the dial/Try to catch a break/Then I hear Babyface,” and we knew we had a winner. ‘Tis Little Miss Comeback — Emancipated Mimi, of all people.

Ruth, it’s the truth.

A few other Rosmanias (all substantially older) during this fucked-up, funky-ass season:

Sweet Thing—Mary J. Blige
Ain’t No Way—Aretha Franklin
Here I Am—Dolly Parton
These Days—Nico
I Want A Little Sugar in My Bowl—Nina Simone
A Mistake—Fiona Apple
Coffee and Cigarettes—Otis Redding
Heard It Through the Grapevine–The Slits
All in Love Is Fair—Stevie Wonder
Que Sera Sera—Sly and the Family Stone
Got to Give It Up—Marvin Gaye (for that patented Felix Hernandez experience)
Under Control—The Strokes
Human Nature—Michael Jackson
Tezeta—Mahmoud Ahmed

P.S. Let the record show I still need a new gig. As if this list doesn't make that patently clear.
P.P.S. I'm afraid to write about movies right now lest my antipathy for Miranda July and marching penguins leak out. Done done and done, I spose.

O Me of Little Faith

2005-07-05T12:45:00.000-04:00

I would never describe myself as a fan of the clunky clunker Next Stop Wonderland, but I do really love the quiet, wistful moments in which Hope Davis screws her eyes shut and selects a quote at random from a book she pulls. Sometimes I do it too, and not only to assert my theory that anything can serve as a divining rod if we assign it the power.

Today, so aptly, my finger landed on this:

The specious, the unjust, the cruel, and what is called the unnatural, though not only permitted but in a certain sense, (like shade to light,) inevitable in the divine scheme, are by the whole constitution of that scheme, partial, inconsistent, temporary, and though having ever so great an ostensible majority, are definitely destin’d to failure, after causing great suffering.
--Walt Whitman

Sandra's Swan Song

2005-07-02T07:07:00.000-04:00

I interrupt my thummery thilence to throw out two more cents about Sandra Day O'Connor retiring whilst George II still perches on his too-big throne. Ah, but if you think it might not impact Roe v Wade, you're as wrong as me in a thong. Which is to say: really, really wrong and really, really unnecessary. Get up stand up, already. If the current administration hasn't already hit you where it hurts (and who amongst thee can say that, really?), it certainly threatens to now. We've been taking a lot for granted.

For My Uncle Al

2005-06-17T20:16:00.000-04:00

So I fly home to New York City today, drawn back to the grayer, tamer ocean for bleak reasons. My uncle Al succumbed to digestive cancer this week after a long, protracted battle and I’ve got to climb into my heartbroken little car (it was burglarized during my absence) and drive to Massachusetts. I figured I still had time to say goodbye, but, afraid to face his kind, hopeless regard, I really was ignoring the signs that he was getting ready to go. I fucked up.

My mother's youngest brother, Big Al Edney (back in the day, there’d been also been Grand-uncle Little Al), had a tough life. Fifty-six when he died, he struggled with dyslexia before teachers even knew what the word meant. Drank too much, smashed a couple of cars, lost his license, sobered up, fell in with the Scientologists, fell back out, lived a long time with Grandma Alice, she who I miss every day since her death when I was 17. I’m not sure how he avoided Vietnam, but I’m guessing somewhere between the drinking and the dyslexia, even the US Army knew they’d get a handful. He met up with Pauline (aviator glasses, enormous belly, whiskered chin), she who’d been married to a gay guy, and married her and adopted her brown-eyed pipsqueak of a son Michael, the kind of kid just waiting to grow a mullet and wear a Metallica t-shirt unsarcastically. (Which he did.) Al Drove big rigs. Schoolbuses later.

He was really, really tall and, when he was younger, really, really skinny, adam’s apple and eyes protruding something fierce. When he married Pauline, he got enormous for a while. The two ate steadily and joylessly at family get-togethers: Pepsis chilled in the bathtub, burgers, chips, ambrosia, pies. He looked like my mom, a male, unbeautiful version of her: same big teeth, long features. But where my mom had been given those Sioux cheekbones and blue-yellow eyes that shone with both elation and empathy, Al looked, well, sad. Which he was.

He was always sad, shy and largely silent and terribly gentle, folded into himself in a way that downplayed his great size, as if he were reaching, always, for a level of invisibility impossible for anyone but a superhero. Once when I was a kid, he burned down the Allston apartment building he lived in by passing out with his cig still burning. He came to live at our house for a while after that. Whirled me through the air and gave me wedgies by pulling me up by my tights. I liked him but, all of three years old, felt responsible for him and his loneliness. When he left we had fleas for months. Crazily, years later, Max and Allegra, friends of my friends, moved into the same building, long rehabbed, and it burnt down again. Allegra managed to rescue all the cats in the building.

Something about Big Al made me forget to tell him that story every time I saw him. We didn’t have that kind of fluency. I rarely saw him and, when I did, we only talked if I made a point of it since he’d usually be sitting alone at our get-togethers. Everyone on my mom's side either stares into space or screeches at the top of their lungs when we get together so it wasn't as weird as it sounds.

It’s not like our family has ever really connected much, even though we see each fairly regularly. Or they do and I rarely go. I’m the furthest, all the way in New York. The rest (my mom’s three siblings and their kids and their kids; her cousins and their many offspring) in various depressed New England towns. And Jennie, my younger sister, and I have always been fairly different from the rest (and different from each other). My mom Mary went to art school, after all, changed her name to Sari Musan, married Bernie, my tiny exotic Jew of an old man, bought the cheapest house in Newton for the good public schools her two little babybirds would attend, and promptly fell into a 20-year pool of her own sadness just when she wasn’t expecting it.

When I show up at family get-togethers, which, admittedly hasn’t been too often since I left Massachusetts for college back in 1989, no one really says much to me. There are too many kids — all my cousins started having a bunch before they’d even graduated high school — and there is nowhere to sit. I hate going back. Not because I’m a snob, even though for sure the food beyond-the-pale depresses and for sure the houses they all inhabit are crazy-messy and smell and for sure everyone’s lives bum me out (welfare, medicare, shitty healthcare, unemployment). But actually it isn’t really that. Everyone takes their crap for granted and usually tells their crazy sad stories strangely cheerily. The ones who don’t work at fast food restaurants have mostly done the unsung social service jobs like working as attendants for the mentally and physically disabled. My cousin Sue, so psychic her whole life that she’s scared the rest of us as well as herself, is a corrections officer.

My mom's family's dogged blitheness freaks me out; I read it as shutdown, though I think it’s also a form of bravery. But what really has kept me away is that no one except for some of the kids ever says a thing to me when I show and it hurts to not feel like I belong to my own fucking family. I live in New York, I went to college, I worked as a television actress, I’ve mostly made my living working at magazines and on Internet publications. No matter how broke I feel, I live in a different world, where things can change every time I turn a corner. I’ve been so, so lucky both in terms of the choices my milltown-born parents made and in terms of the connections I’ve fused in my life since I left their house. And even if I don’t always feel that the rest of the Edney side and I occupy different universes, everyone else does. It’s not like they resent me; it’s that I'm a different species, plain and simple.

But it’s not as if I’ve been able to escape entirely the bottom that Al made his home. I live in it differently: lose whole days when I can’t face my computer, can’t face New York’s crackle right outside my door. A few times I even considered trying to talk to Al about it. He’d been my grandma’s favorite in a way, since he’d lived at home for so long and had come to love reading as much as she did once he mastered the process. (She bought him two extra years of special dyslexia training after high school on her meager secretary salary.) Usually, I’d just volunteer jokes instead and he’d laugh generously, a big man giggling with great gums showing. And, ah, those sad eyes. Only when we talked about science fiction did the conversation grow remotely natural. He reminded me so much of Grandma, whom I missed more than I even realized until recently.

My grandmother. Self-taught, she went to school only till her early teens herself but read everything under the sun and did crosswords every day of her life. She and Al got into science fiction, and that was the only real connection I ever formed with the both of them. I’d read their old paperbacks when I’d go over to Grammie’s, and eventually they got me my own subscription to Isaac Asimov Magazine. I loved its various conjectures about the future, so many of which have since come true. Did I thank them properly? I worry and know that I didn’t. I was a kid, and an ungrateful one at that. If I’d thanked them enough, I could have talked with them about the mags, maybe gotten past that crazy silence that both of them always generated like mournful monks. Instead I chattered on about myself: gymnastics, school plays, my many A's. I must have been something else for them, barging into their sanctuary whenever my mom drove up to Lowell, to the house where they lived and where Mom had grown up. Some rooms in the house were so filled with books you couldn’t even open a door into them. Mystery novels. Socialism. The classics. Buddhism. Transcendentalism. The rest of the rooms were on their way.

Grandma got poor-people sick in her early 70s — factory air, bad diet, cartons of Camels macked her system — and she started reading about macrobiotics. Ate mostly beans and vegetables from then on and lived a while longer. I think it was loneliness that did her in finally, when Uncle Al married Pauline and she began to live alone. The year I was 17, I interviewed her and Al and Mom and George and Jo, my mom’s other siblings, about working in the mills. A teacher submitted the report to a historical society and I was offered a grant to conduct oral histories in Lowell while living there with my Grandma. She actually called a few times to see if I accepted it, which was big. She never called. But I didn’t go; wanted to be near my acid-dealing boyfriend so I could fuck him on the regular to make sure he didn’t fuck anyone else. (He did anyway.)

She got sick that fall again and died in the winter. At the funeral when I did the eulogy, I talked about her clear denim eyes that never missed a beat and looked up to see Big Al’s own blues, brimming with tears, gazing straight into my own for the only time of our lives. Later Jennie, always on the little-sister lookout for my hypocrisy, said, “At first, I thought you were just being an actress. But then I could tell you were for real.” It was seeing Al cry that day that made me real. He felt it all, I think, and it was too much for him. Always.

None of the rest of us ever did let ourselves feel much usually. The crying might’ve never stopped once we started. The horrors just kept coming and coming. The many disastrous fathers of the cousins' kids. Sexual abuse. Mental illness. Homelessness. Prison. Alcoholism. In fact, if I had to say for real why I left home so completely that year (I’ve not lived in Massachusetts since I graduated from high school, never spent another night in my parents’ house), it was so I could learn to feel again, this time in a way that didn’t just hurt.

The last time I ever saw my uncle was at a family cookout. After a year of reporting unsolicited weight loss to his shitty poor-people doctor (“That’s good, Al. You needed to lose some weight.”), he’d been finally diagnosed with stomach cancer. Stage four. Al was easily 6’4 and the time before I’d seen him he’d been toting such an enormous gut that it’d given him a hernia. Now he weighed in at 120 and was grey and yellow, eyes not sad so much as scared. He managed half a shake my cousin Kimmie matter-of-factly made him and then threw it back up. I tried my hardest to go over to him — I am not a kid, I reminded myself, no matter how long NYC lets us extend our adolescence. All I could manage to tell him was that I was sorry he was so sick and to kiss his dry cheek.

I yell at my mom for being such a checked-out caretaker of Jen and me when we were coming up; it’s our worst fight these days, and a ridiculous one to have now that I'm in my 30s and she is in her 60s. But I’ve got to give it to Sari: She did her best by her brother as he died over this last year. He’d been given only a few weeks to live back in February and she went over to his house every day to help him out rather than hide her head in the sand. She and Jo did what they could while Pauline sat by, shellshocked. Made him food he could eat to gain back some of the weight. (They couldn’t do chemo with him so weak; not that chemo’s often much help at that stage.) Got him cable. Bought him a better Barca Lounger and hospital bed. Helped with the small things since they couldn’t do anything bigger, basically. Jennie, who’s become a hospital-trained dietician, figured out to how to make his shunt more comfortable.

And I stayed away. “Don’t come,” said Jennie over and over. “The house and the situation will just make you mad.” I figured she was right, that they didn’t need my self-righteous indignation on his behalf. That I wouldn’t do anyone any favors if I came over and raged against the cold house falling apart to which he was relegated for his final days, against the shitty system that landed my uncle in this rut even younger than his dad in turn. (Grandpa George, a textile cutter, died at 59 not long after the mills closed and moved South.)

But Jen said it was terrible. That Al rocked in his chair and just stared, frightened as could be. That the hospital had sent a counselor over to talk to him but that she fell on their ripped-up sidewalk and ended up in the emergency room. Woe to all who enter the Edney family vortex, I thought, and stayed away. I prayed for him from NYC with Yancey, though. I asked my grandmother to send him guidance and clarity from where ever she was and I asked God to protect my grandmother’s baby son and my mom’s baby brother, to send him peace and release him from his fear. I wrote Al. But I never did see him again.

I kept thinking I’d still have a chance. He hung on for so much longer than anyone expected that I went ahead and bought tickets to the West Coast to tend to my own mess at the beginning of this month. Right before I left, my mom said:

“I think Alfred has hung on so long because he’s getting love from all of us and he needs it, and so he can get used to the idea of dying.”

He got used to it, I guess. The other night, high on morphine (his first mind-altering substance in more than 20 years) and antidepressants, he hugged Pauline. Told Michael and Michael’s new baby girl that he loved them. Said, “I am leaving now.” And then my uncle Al, who had such a hard time living well on this Earth, had himself a good death.

I pray that Grandma was waiting right there for him. I’m sure she was. When I talked to Jen from California, she said that he’d been getting more talkative right at the end. Talked about Grandma, and about how much he’d been missing her. Jen said it was the first time he’d really opened up to her. I felt jealous that they’d talked and that she’d been able to help at all at the end of his life. I wished I’d spoken with him frankly about his depression years back, when antidepressants may have actually made a difference in his life, not just in his death. I’ve never been much good for my mother’s family and I’ve never gotten much back.

But I can write this, for better or for worse.

So here’s to you, Big Al. Gentle, so gentle that you never could get much you needed from this world, and gentle, so gentle that, lordy, you never hurt a fly. I love you much.

SIFFting (Seattle International Film Festival)

2005-06-15T16:43:00.000-04:00

SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival) was oh-so-Seattle-y. I’d be more afraid to explain what that means if I thought my dear friend Mary, who is a staunch Seattle convert, would actually read this.

Seattle is a very clean, amiable city that, like most places, matches its civic personality to its climate. In this case that translates into slightly uncommited, indeterminate, ultimately mild if rarely sunshiney. The locals are disarmingly nice. During my stay there, (I arrived for the last week), barristas drew me maps; strangers sorted out which buses I should take; herds of traffic slowed to a complete stop the minute I stepped foot off curb. By Day 2 I longed for a remark as strong as the local expresso: a sneer; a diatribe; hell, a sidelong look at my boobs. Anything to cut through the veneer of overcast skies and polar fleece.

Perhaps that’s why so many Seattlites who consider themselves alternative still dye their hair bracing colors ‘90s-style; at least you can glimpse hot pinks and greens through the clouds. What goes for alternative in Seattle moved into the mainstream of the rest of the country 10 years ago, though, and then sank without a trace except on annoying retro-grunge nights of certain New York City clubs. Short bangs (not long ones swept sideways), Mary Janes, ripped jeans, rock tee shirts, plaid flannel. And the rest are scrubbed clean with pressed jeans, fugly shoes, and guileless expressions unsullied by wrinkles. (Dewy climates beget dewy skin, apparently.)

You could argue that a town’s film festival in turn takes its cues from the town’s personality. (The sexual misadventures that distinguish the Bermuda film festival for sure gives new meaning to the word "triangle.") That said, Seattle’s film festival is actually fairly impressive. A full 28 days (most festivals are significantly shorter), it includes a wide range of new features from foreign language and domestic directors, many of which promise to be the biggest indie hits of the summer: The Last Mogul, Layer Cake, Junebug, Ellie Parker, Mad Hot Ballroom, Shake Hands with the Devil, (which came and, I believe, went already at Film Forum), Murderball, Heights, Her Minor Thing, Deepwater (oy), Americano, Last Days, March of the Penguins, Lipstick and Dynamite, and (of course) Miranda July’s You and Me and Everyone We Know, which took Caméra d'Or at Cannes, thereby stripping its best asset: sleeper status. (Welcome to the making of an indie hit 101, j’guess.) A tribute to Argentine film. A secret festival (a Crackerjack idear, if there ever were one). Special honorariums for Joan Allen and Peter Sarsgaard, both terrifically worthy actors.

So it's probably merely coincidental that I cobbled together a rather monotonic program for myself, but I can’t help but wonder. All the films I screened — admittedly, a bit of a sloppy seconds conglomeration as I was trying to only screen movies that I hadn’t seen before — fell under the umbrella of fine though I was never knocked out of the water unexpectedly. At the Hamptons film festival 2003, I randomly sat in on Assisted Living, still two years away from finding distribution, and really dug it. At SIFF (is everyone too well behaved to call it SIFFilis but me?), I never did quite experience that out-of-pocket surprise, which arguably is the best part of small festivals.

Of the 11 movies I screened, then, here are a few particularly worth mentioning: Mars, a surrealist number about the tiny aspirations of a tiny Russian town stumbled upon haplessly by a visiting prizefighter. It shone brightest when its youngest cast member, a tiny blonde female Mussolini, barreled across the screen, maternal amusement tugging at her small features. "This world is not ours. The freedom of choice is one illusion or another,” drones one character. Overall, a kind of abject Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie. A Wonderful Night in Split, a black-and-white Croatian film, genuflected far too much at the altar of Quentin Tarantino by way of Sin City (drugs, teen prostitutes, a-chronological sequencing). Its best scene was, like a true pussytease, its first: messy, comic love made amongst a rubble of cabbage soup and dumpy kitchen chairs. In Heights, Glenn Close and many pretty, almost others play a host of artists connected by a social web that they don’t entirely glimpse; twas fine but perhaps best suited for viewing in default mode on the Sundance Channel. Frozen, a Northern English film about a fish worker seeking to make sense of the disappearance of her sister, transcended its many filmic repetitions through brilliant casting. Namely, fierce, economical Shirley Henderson, one of my favorite actresses working today and the exact sort of a 40-year-old the US lacks in spades. (Her faint American shadow is Jennifer Jason Leigh, I suppose; another intense, compact woman, albeit one who simply cannot act).

Perhaps it wasn’t merely my own program. Members of the five juries reported a genuine difficulty in picking out the best of their litters. One jury that shall remain unnamed wanted to avoid awarding a film altogether. (Even the laidback SIFF powers-that-be couldn’t brook with such nonsense.) For me, the best moments of the festival took place when the visiting filmmakers tromped right over all the Seattle niceties. "Enough with the copperhead salmon already," was a typical comment after a few days. Filmmaker Álex de la Iglesia in particular cut quite a figure when he arrived late for interviews brandishing comic book bags. "I am not a serious filmmaker," he said, wiping mustard off his face when introducing his own movie (the sitcomartist El Crimen Perfecto). "I don’t like serious movies. Here I am cool, indie modern Euro moviemaker. But in Spain I am a fat fucking big-budget bastard," he said with much glee.

And just in case the Seattle audience was inclined to give him one more benefit of doubt, he crowed, "It is not my English that is bad. It is me that is bad. I am bad!" and pounded his enormous chest, emblazoned with a beheaded woman.

Does it really rain in Spain?

Generically Speaking: The Snoozefest That Is Mr. and Mrs. Smith

2005-06-10T03:01:00.000-04:00

Just so you know: Mr. and Mrs. Smith really is stone-cold shite. I can understand the compulsion to see it if only to gauge firsthand whether or not Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were truly making it. (Answer: Does a scientologist proselytize on a subway?) But be forewarned: When the film ended, I wanted my two hours back. I could have used them to, like, clean my cupboards or something.

The film, about two married assassins unaware of each other's identity, buckles under the weight of:

A. Angelina Jolie’s acting. It's not like Pitt didn't stink up the joint — he barely dipped into his bag of tics to shuffle through this little conceit — but he comes off as Olivier next to her mannequantics. She really did deserve the Oscar for her performance in Girl, Interrupted, but it may be that she was merely mining her true personality structure. Since then, she’s admittedly chosen shoddy vehicles, but she has been shoddy in them; it’s hard to tell where her Lara Croft ends and the Craft action figure begins. (They're both very waxy.) With her pneumatic features and impossibly long, tapered limbs, Jolie is always easy on the eyes in a way that invites the projection of all kinds of wisdom and wryness upon her. But since I don’t actively want to fuck her (critics who do vascillate between punishing her for it and grossly overlooking her limitations), I can’t help but observe how woodenly she preens for the camera. I challenge Jolie to hold a weapon without lowering her lids and pimping out her lips. And she is supposed to be Hollywood’s stock temptress these days — possibly because her breasts seem real. What dire, Dairy Queen days these are.

B. An interfering soundtrack. To the point where the movie would suddenly stop in its tracks and convert for the duration of a song into a music video. I am more stringent on this point than some, but I don’t think a film should ever take its cues from its music; it’s an awful cheat for conveying information or an emotional development. In Smith, I could close my eyes and known exactly when the fighting stopped and the lovin’ began. It was easier, actually; when I can see it, the flexing of Jolie's lips educes a dying fish rather than a woman in love.

C. A too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen script, which, as usual, robbed the film of any coherence. For example, why does it matter so much that two assassins live under one roof? And does it really matter so much that an entire army of assassins would be sent out to kill them? And where do the two place on the assassin food chain? Why don't they experience any fallout from being assassins? Who contracts them? And why if they are so smart do they never figure out each other's identity, especially since they're in the same field? Did the script-writing sessions take place in the kind of sweaty sensory deprivation tanks that Michael Jackson’s jurors must currently be beating their heads against? The script would have benefited from either better developed gags or higher stakes. (With The Bourne Identity and Swingers under his belt, director Douglas Liman certainly has both a better action movie and comedy in him.) It would have benefited, in other words, from a committment rather than a story-by-consensus. As it was, what should have been the climatic ending just about dribbled to a stop.

The best thing about this film is the Smiths’ kitchen, all steel and marble and (naturally) very good knives. Maybe the Iron Chef would have spiced things up. We would have needed Vincent Vaughn moonlighting as a homicidal momma’s boy to make it worse. Doh.

A Critic's Manifesto (West Coast Notes)

2005-06-09T16:05:00.000-04:00

I must confess I’ve fallen into a bit of a funk lately, which is pure and simple why I’ve not been posting. (Nay, it wasn’t just because The L Word dashed our every hope.) It’s the “what’s it all about, Alfie?” cinennui that keeps hitting me below the belt, coupled with the precariousness of an underemployment.

I’ve been seriously taking stock of all and sundry in my life. Of the relevance of chiming my own voice in the cacophony of the cultural conversation already chattering. Obviously this sounds like the roaring of depression’s ugly head, but if it is, it ain’t just that. There really does exist an oversaturation right now of critical voices, partly thanks to the Internet — even it is a technology that has democratized the dispensation of information.

In some ways.

I’m out on the West Coast right now again, shedding some Pacifica light on my dusty and dull Easterly woes. As usual, I’m charmed beyond reason by the many missing pieces of the movie industry jigsaw that LA offers up with a big ole glass of watermelon juice. I’ve met Álex de la Iglesia, a Spanish filmmaker who pretty much comes second only to Pedro Almodóvar (pronounced AlmoDOvar here) in his own country but has received US scanty distribution even on DVD. I nervously coffee-klatsched with a group of older, bombastically funny old Hollywood types, including Paul Mazursky. I’ve drunk good wine in a studio bigwig’s backyard while the very future of the movie business was shoptalked. And one point that's repeatedly been made is that new computer and television-viewing (Pay Per View, TIVO) technology threatens to derail the movie business as we know it.

Which has set me thinking about who really does benefit from all this new technology. When I ride the subway in Brooklyn, it’s mostly the American Apparel set and the lost-youth professionals who wield IPods, for example. The rest still carry CD walkmen, which now appear as bulky as the laptop I bought only three years ago. I try to imagine what steps it would take to bring the CD stragglers up to speed, and I feel overwhelmed for them. It doesn’t just entail IPods and computers and Internet access. It also entails a comfort level with the technology, which in turn entails education in addition to the necessary equipment.

I mention this because those of us who write about culture are in danger of only preaching to the choir — comprised, in this case, of each other.

The summer’s downslide in movie revenue has sparked a lot of conjecture about the habits and proclivities of the American viewing public, and those conversations have revealed critics' assumptions. In his recent two cents on the subject, for example, Times critic AO Scott dismisses the worth of most recent movies by saying, “They will each show up eventually…on the transcontinental flight when your iPod battery is dead and you've forgotten to pick up the latest issue of Vanity Fair.” That’s a pretty specific population that Mr. Tony is identifying there, one that, I’m willing to guess, doesn’t comprise the bulk of American moviegoers, even those who daily read the Times.

Being downright poor right now — the brokest I’ve been since I worked in the labor movement — I’m reminded of how paralyzing serious financial concerns really can be. I’m cognizant that given my education and community, I’m in a good place compared to many people in the US. (At that, most everybody in the US is in a fantastic place compared to many other parts of the world.) But not matter what, being this broke makes you doubt not only your self-worth but also your future. It’s hard to make plans in good faith when money is required to implement every step toward those goals, no matter how modest. Gas money, interview clothes money, daycare money: For lower-income people avoiding credit card debt or who aren’t even eligible for a credit card, the basic expenses of life loom painfully large.

Under those auspices, art is a necessary luxury. We need something to help us feel better, to both inspire us and to provide us a sense of community. And the role of critics in that equation is less esoteric than you’d think: We’re filters. We help connect a creation with an audience, help separate the cream from the crap. We can point people toward work that wakes them up rather than numbs them further.

In a conversation I had this week with Benoît Jutras, the Cirque de Soleil scorer, he mentioned something interesting. As a composer who began in the wildly esoteric community of contemporary classical music and now scores music for a truly mass audience, Jutras says the transition taught him that creations require perceivers. "Audiences complete the circle of creation," he intones. So no matter what, he tries to be respectful of his audiences. Ideally, he wants his music to not only really reach listeners but to also take them a few steps past their comfort zone. (Along these lines, he is, admittedly, moving on from Cirque, at least for the time being.)

It's a goal for critics, too.

Since I’ve been scurrying up and down this funny coast (this week I’m at the Seattle International Film Festival), I’ve had a chance to revisit how many different ways film (and television) fit into people’s lives. When traveling I realize just how dangerous it is to suppose anything about audiences because it’s clear how varied Americans still are, even with the mallification of the US. In fact, we are moving from that infernal melting pot toward a (tuna) niche salad these days, one in which critics take on an even greater importance because it falls on us to serve as guides.

That shift makes it particularly dangerous to write from any perspective other than my own. “I,” rather than “they” or “you” (sorry, Pauline Kael), is more useful and infinitely less condescending. Only by being clear on what I like and don’t like — reacting from my gut rather than to demographic suppositions or to the community of other critics — can I speak honestly and extemporaneously enough to be worth heeding. But on the other hand, I can’t assume that the persons I’m writing to are exactly like me. It’s just that the more specific I am, the more universal I can be; that way people can know who they are working with and what they are heeding. A translation is required, and I would argue that it is that translation which completes the circle between critic and audience.

So what does that translation entail, concretely? It requires less of the old boy’s club chasing their own tails and comparing the size of their, uh, pens, for one. We need new blood and new voices that specify where they're coming from but never misconstrue those contexts as universal. We have to stop approaching films as mere fodder for potential catchy leads or trends to identify before our peers do (though humorectomists need not apply). It means that we should only include NY-LA industry buzz when it speaks to something larger than itself. And although this in some way contradicts what I am saying about being honest about your own perspective, we also do owe both films and audiences what they call in yoga circles "beginner’s mind," no matter how many screenings we have sat through. When we’re so stifled by cinennui that we can only perceive a film through the lens of other films, maybe it’s time to take a sabbatical.

That said, my own cinnennui is lifting. I do want to get my voice out there right now, if for no other reason that I still really love films and really do think they articulate and ameliorate the modern human condition in all kinds of ways. I’m going to start posting more again. To highlight on this blog more of the films that I see, especially the amazing features that rarely achieve nationwide distribution (especially foreign language features). To include more interviews with filmmakers to raise the Wizard’s curtain. And I’m going to try, for a change, to get out of my own way. It’s time to see the forest and the trees.

And Then Sunday Night Fell Silent (The L Word Season 2 IM Postmortem)

2005-05-23T12:33:00.000-04:00

Starring: jostle, aka Jocelyn, flavorpill queen and a true Lesbian Science Theater 3000 partner-in-crime; liser, aka me.

I leave our exchange fairly unadulterated (and promise to post something more substantive soon) so if you aren't familiar with the show, we doth duly apologize.

jostle: guten morgen
jostle: i just ate a sprouted bagel with.. yeast!!!
jostle: which segs nicely into a lezbo discussion
liser: or concussion
liser: Ok, basically, we're having an IM convo that wraps up Season 2 of The L Word, which we had, I think it’s safe to say, hotly anticipated
jostle: right up until we heard the new theme song
liser: exactly. someone let the fact they were getting some get in the way of taste when it came to using BETTY for the theme song
jostle: in what started to seem like every scene of every episode
liser: Betty was Where's Waldo
jostle: i think Waldo's cuter
liser: Better fashion, for sure
liser: Anyway, cheesy theme song....
liser: cheesy Season 2
jostle: yes, i think it took a little while to sink in, say about halfway through, but then we started to recognize that the show was in a serious sophomore slump.
liser: it got progressively worse the whole season
liser: we should disclose that we spent weeks before the new season began watching Season 1 on DVD. It got us through the February snow ambush and I do mean bush...
jostle: indeed
liser: so we were not inclined to acknowledge at first how crap the show got in Season 2
jostle: when the season commenced, we were all taken in by the wondrous transformation of Jenny Schechter, the sexed-up, annoying tree sprite to Jenny, the actually really hot, nearly lovable character, but that was about the only real exciting development
liser: yeah, Jenny didn't suck for about three episodes
jostle: and then she headed into a self-reflexive women's issue martyr role
jostle: i can't remember. did she adopt some Christ-like poses during those final strip scenes? it seems highly possible
liser: you know, she's a Jew so it was more like Survivor Syndrome chic than Christ at the Cross
liser: it's like being jewish is the most exotic character trait ever seen
jostle: as you said, the fetishization of judaism
liser: But you're right. it's hard to remember now, but we had higher hopes in the beginning of the season
liser: Jenny had a spine
liser: Tina was pregnant and really mad at Bette so she had a spine while Bette was eating the crow
liser: which meant that Tina wasn't just speaking in her weird, wheedling voice and Tina was!
jostle: Carmen was still almost hot
jostle: Alice wasn't pathetic
liser: and Dana was still pathetic, just like we like her!
liser: Shane was still a lothario
liser: all was as it should be
jostle: one thing that occurred to me recently is that the primary problem was that they actually wrote themselves into a corner
jostle: almost all of the characters became one-dimensional
jostle: once out of the closet, what did Dana have to offer as a character?
jostle: judging by Season 2, nothing really. just someone who was uncomfortable with sex toys
jostle: once in a relationship with Dana, Alice lost all her humor and her spine, plus any confidante to reveal another side of her personality other than the co-dependent girlfriend
liser: they'd spend the whole of two episodes on Shane's career and then drop it
jostle: yeah, what happened to the producer bitch?!
liser: and none of the characters related to each other anymore. It says a lot that neither of the two new characters had any dimensions
jostle: Carmen was never a character, more like a cardboard cut-out used to play other characters off each other. or a dj'ing vehicle
jostle: Helena began and remained a rich brat with a fetish for pregnant women
jostle: which didn't change at all when she was confronted by her mother in what should have been a somewhat climactic scene
liser: the fetish for pregnant woman is so Remedial Freud
liser: Mommy wasn't around. so...
jostle: I think they had the least well-hung cliffhanger i've ever seen
liser: i know. such dimension!
jostle: i mean, when Shane finally says i love you to Carmen--which was supposed to be huge--you have no idea why she'd even be attracted to her, nor do we ever get any kind of reaction shot from Carmen or hear anything from her!
jostle: weighty, dying father plot and all, Bette was the only one who really remained an interesting character throughout Season 2, and went somewhere
jostle: we'll have to await Season 3 to see if they just blew their wad, so to speak, in Season 1
liser: their oh-so proverbial wad
liser: what makes it so much worse now? the show was still kind of bad, but it was enormously fun to watch and to talk back to
jostle: a) less sex!
jostle: i would say Season 2 had about 75% less sex
liser: b) too many plotlines randomly abandoned
jostle: ding!
jostle: how about? no real plotlines that stuck throughout the whole season?
liser: and the star cameos were nighmarish. they were just abrupt interruptions
liser: right
jostle: c) heavyhanded treatment of ISSUES
jostle: d) introduction of another lame and/or evil straight guy
jostle: guess what ladies? they're not all bad, and it's kind of boring to imply that
liser: ruth, you speak the truth
liser: it'd be a Better use of the straight guy if he was just a hapless but supportive sidekick
liser: like the gay man in romantic comedies
jostle: eggzachary
jostle: having ruminated upon it more, i think that the loss of Marina was a big blow to Season 2
jostle: she was sort of the Yani to Shane's yang
jostle: and someone who wasn't really in the inner circle, so to speak
liser: if you're going to have more than a certain amount of main characters, it results in a superficial, soaplike treatment of all them. Better to have a limited amount and then some blatantly minor ones
liser: Marina was a perfect minor character
liser: interesting to look at and visit with but not as important so she wasn’t a competing plotline. They knew which cog she was!
jostle: the whole Season 2 played like they just hadn't really mapped it out in advance, as if there were too many cooks in the Kitchen, all being really supportive of one another's ideas in a really unhelpful, destructive way
liser: typical lezobots!
jostle: can i take this metaphor further?
liser: take it further, sister
jostle: the season two climax was all lesbian bed-death
liser: Shane:
jostle: it's interesting. once she started to downshift out of Lothario mode early Season 2...
liser: she became almost as bad as Jenny
liser: she had this big freakout when her big studio boss tried to get with her
jostle: "everybody needs something from me!"
liser: and then she went to confession
liser: and then she was doing all the drugs
jostle: oh that was the WORST
jostle: the oxycontin freakout music?!
liser: SO FUCKING BAD
jostle: her character became so unmoored they had to start playing music that whispered SHANE SHANE SHANE in the background when she was fucking just to remind us where we were
liser: (the music in general:)
liser: (wet wet wet wet)
jostle: omigoodness i almost forgot about when she brought the twins home! twins! Twins!
jostle: (twins twins twins)
liser: i forgot about dem twins
jostle: (bed-death bed-death bed-death)
liser: that's so hot!
jostle: it was like a porn soundtrack to heat things up when they really weren't building them up properly
liser: we liked Shane before because she was a little tragic but had an understated wit about it
jostle: too true.
liser: maybe moving in with Jenny was a bad influence on her
jostle: Or Season 2 just ran her through the issue wringer
jostle: “have i ever really loved anyone?”
jostle: “where am i going with my life?”
liser: “has anyone ever really loved me....for me?”
liser: and
jostle: “what's my fashion like?”
liser: “I LIKE TIES!”
jostle: “why don't i wear glasses anymore?”
liser: the thing is, i don't expect L Word to cover every issue and person in the lesbian community
liser: but i think that the L Word tries to
jostle: they do have a show to run and it ain't ELLEN
jostle: if only it were.. then it'd be funnier
jostle: (worse dancing tho)
liser: it's like a 14 year old who wants to tackle all the issues but you know like still be cool wrote this season
jostle: i think that 14 year old lives in Jenny's pink room
liser: it had an unpleasant makeshift qualiity where if it was a liittle worse we could laugh at it and it if was a little Better we could relax into just viewing as lesbian Dynasty
jostle: well put
jostle: you knew it was bad when i looked up at the clock during the cliffhanger and was sad to see only 20 min. had passed
liser: it was like being held hostage at the bad play of a friend who is going to quit acting next year and go to law school in a few years so what’s the point of sitting through it in that drafty theater that smells like old cheese?
jostle: maybe shane should just get her own spinoff, like the hair salon she never had: SHANE
liser: i'd get my hair cut there any day
liser: if you catch my drift…
jostle: oh dear
liser: will we even watch season 3?
jostle: i think we have to see if it was just a sophomore slump, to see if they can pull it back together
jostle: really the end of Season 2 left me cold, but you never know
jostle: we know they've got new writers...
liser: yeah, but that's what is weird. they always have good people connected to the show
liser: the directors list alone is nutso
liser: ernest dickerson, lisa cholodenko, etc
jostle: true
liser: yes, but the writing has a little too much Go Fish influence
jostle: INDEED
jostle: let's put our heads together and lay on the floor and talk issues
jostle: i dug Guinevere Turner’s cameos on the show tho
liser: she's a Bette-r actress than writer
liser: but i guess because she is a big old out lesbian and not uber gorgeous she ends up writing more than she acts
liser: but when she writes, lordy, the hand it is heavy
jostle: well, if Season 3 doesn't pan out Dynasty is available on DVD now
liser: we could just turn off the sound and rename the characters with L Word character names
jostle: shane= blake carrington
liser: ok, final list
liser: different ways to spice up L word sex
liser: tantric sex
jostle: i think we're in need of a friend three-way mayhaps?
jostle: Kit getting it on with a lady? mmmaybe Ivan is coming back
liser: Jenny should stay celibate from now on, though
jostle: she should at least let someone else remove her clothes once in awhile
jostle: i'm tired of the tit flash
liser: no more urine sex
jostle: HA! what WAS that???
jostle: no more shower sex
liser: ladies, in general golden showers are not so golden
liser: and on that note, my friend. i think we have put this baby out with the bathwater
jostle: baby angelica's out of here!

Gordon Willis Speaks (Purple Rose of Cairo)

2005-05-19T18:58:00.000-04:00

Cinematographer Gordon Willis, the man behind such films as All the President’s Men, Klute, the Godfather triptych and many of Woody Allen’s finest, has become a conscientious objector.

When I mentioned Willis to the only notorious Hollywood insider whom I call my friend, he said, “A bunch of us were wondering the other night if he were still alive.” A quick IMDB search would easily have settled that score, but it also would have revealed that Willis, 74 next week, hasn’t made a film since 1997’s The Devil’s Own. Following a Cinematographers Guild breakfast screening of the The Purple Rose of Cairo last weekend, the DP shed some insight into that disappearance when he submitted to a rather lengthy question-and-answer period for his brothers and sisters.

The Guild had been kind enough to include me in their monthly Saturday morning shindig, their version of the more traditional beery union local picnic. I’ve a soft spot for unions of all sorts, and the cinematographer’s union boys are as good a lot as any. They sit on the arms of each other’s chairs, huddle close when they tell a story, regard each other with unmitigated affection, and somehow all seem alike, regardless of age and gender and race: avuncular with regional accents and bright eyes gleaming behind thick-framed glasses. They seem like family, in other words.

It’s a good scene overall, one certainly worth a temporary exodus from the briny bogs of Cape Cod, where Willis dwells these days. And you can bet the Guild nabs the finest prints possible of whatever film they screen.

Willis looked on from the back of the Tribeca Screening Room while Rose, which has aged into a lovely timelessness, ran. One of my favorite Allen flicks, it features Jeff Daniels as screen actor Gil Shepard who in turns plays Tom Baxter, the pith helmet-clad anthropologist who steps off the screen of a black-and-white Nick and Nora-style romance into the Technicolor Depression-era New Jersey movie theater to woo hapless fan Mia Farrow (who keeps her stammering to a tolerable level here). Less of a metamovie than a lovesick valentine to the transcendent power of ‘30s-era Hollywood glamour, Rose actually carries some of the same wistful contrasts as Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. But even Allen’s worst films spring more out of magic realism than the drab nihilism that Trier seems to regard as due punishment for those frivolous enough to attend movies, so Rose is infinitely lighter in its loafers — thanks in no small part to Willis’ mastery of the visual understatement.

Afterward, the cinematographer ambled to the front of the room. He has a shock of white hair and watery blue eyes, his confidence and acumen better telegraphed by the tough NYC kid posture and voice that New England hasn’t successfully erased. He speaks easily with colorful metaphors, the way almost all union guys do, whether they be ironworkers or cinematographers. Because of that, and because he’s such a compelling character, I’m including most of his comments verbatim.

About Purple Rose, he said, “We shot the black-and-white movie first, including the characters’ interactions with the people in the theater, and then photographed it again in color stock as it was running in the theater.

"Working with Woody is like working with your hands in your pockets. I would say how I thought something should work and then he would say how something should work and then together we would pound the dough. He shot it with Michael Keaton first and didn’t like the effect so they had to reshoot the first two weeks again. Not as many reshots as you’d think; just embarrassing for Keaton, I’d imagine. Allen has a writer’s mentality but I tried to make it difficult for him to redo things — and it was a film in which it was very hard to redo things.

"To make the black-and-white movie [within the movie], I just picked up the light pattern of '30s movies and reconstructed it. For the rest of the film, choices were made to minimize color. Everything in the movie was sets except for the theater exterior, which was in Piermont, NJ. The interior of the theater was a real porn house in Brooklyn." [Because this fact was not greeted with loud guffaws and whistles, at this point it became obvious this wasn't a typical union.]

Willis moved into the health of movies, past and present. He’s not a big fan of technology for the sake of technology, for example. “Zooms are lazy closeups. And too many people hang their hats on video assist; it’s a way to avoid too much. Video assist helps people dissociate from the scene that they are directing. Pretty soon the director will be directing all the way from his apartment.

“Coppola and Beatty got very into it. Frances used VA from his trailer and then a speaker to communicate with the actors,” he noted with a dry grin. “But I wouldn’t suck on that tube all day long. The truth is that video assist will always show you something different than what you throw on the screen. I used it for tech check and stunts only.”

Or: “Anamorphic [widescreen technology, in uber laymen terms] is in vogue right now. The smaller the indie movie, the more anamorphic. Back when I did The Paper Chase, I told Fox to do it anamorphic. Their response — and keep in mind Fox invented anamorphic — was ‘It’s not a Western.’

“Like everything else, it’s how you use the format. Any idea in this business is like poison gas in a room. I liked the use of it better in the ’70s than now.

Another cinematographer said, “Labs are laundromats now, so how you do get repeatability these days?”

Willis’ response was succinct: “I wouldn’t know; I haven’t done a movie for six years. Last time, the lab tried to help me but there was blood over all the walls. Working on The Devil’s Own I knew you get sick if you try to fix everything for everyone. [Note: According to IMDB, eight years have elapsed since The Devil’s Own was released.]

“When doing the Godfather movies, I had trouble with continuity, of course. Decades passed between making II and III, for example. I used brassy, burnt yellow a lot. The only problem with III besides it not being a very good movie is that it used a different technique. Super 185 to blow into 70 mm. I didn’t care for that, but Francis did...”

GW is very nuts and bolts. When asked how he developed as a cinematographer, he responded: "My wife was pregnant and I needed some money." You both believe him and you don’t — he’s utilitarian but clearly also believes there’s a pride in doing your job well, no matter the job.

"Who mentored me? I guess not too many people. I did what I liked. I learned from watching at first, sure. You have to learn how to cut if you’re going to learn how to shoot well. Then I pushed through what everyone else was doing and thought I should be doing, and I did what I wanted. I was very specific about what I should do. In concert, it's luck but it’s also always your attitude.

"A director would walk around for two days trying to sort out how a shot should look and I would just say in two minutes,'I think it should be this way.’ ”

Not shockingly, Willis is an enormous proponent of less is more. “I spent a lot of time on films taking things out. Art directors would get very cross with me. If something’s not going well, my impulse is to minimalize. The impulse of most people when something’s not going well is to add — too many colors, too many items on a screen, too many lights. If you’re not careful, you’re lighting the lighting. American films are overlit compared to European ones. I like closeups shadowy, in profile — which they never do these days.

"People by nature like complexity and rarely recognize the elegance of simplicity. I like simplicity. So I just do it. I figure out what you have to say in this scene and how it connects to the last and to the next and then shoot. Today it’s what I call dumpster directing. They shoot too many angles in scenes. Two problems result: 1. It tires out the actors. 2. The editor ends up making the movie, since there’s no true point of view if you shoot it every which way.

“What’s needed is simple symmetry, but everyone wants massive coverage these days because they don’t have enough confidence in their work and there are way too many cooks in the kitchen.

"My philosophy has always been that it should look easy even if it’s hard to make.“

Someone asked him about a piece of Local 644 folklore and with a mix of chagrin and some residual pride, he said:

"Yes, it’s true. I threw a camera out on the street once during the shoot. It had broke three times, and each time they fixed it just well enough to get it running again but not enough for it to not break again. It’s a common mindset. And I’m not the type to fetishize a camera. I always say that ideally, something would have French design and German make. Because then it would work.

"Finally, I just got fed up. Each time it held up production. I threw it out, yes. You can believe the next camera they sent over was perfect. Well. I like stuff that works.”

Since not enough seems to work these days, Willis is for all practical purposes retired. He seems to think the industry and the world are in such straits that he’d prefer not to be actively involved. I talked with him alone for a second afterward and he said he worries a lot about the world that his children, and all younger people, are inheriting.

Then, he seemed less gruff than sad. Sad and unfailingly kind.

Funny Ha Ha in All Its Unglamorous Glory

2005-05-13T16:36:00.000-04:00

Funny Ha Ha’s charm sneaks up on you in the same flatfooted, backhanded way as its characters do. Grainy, not even prettily unpretty, and superficially inarticulate, it draws less directly on Cassavetes’ cinema verité than on early John Sayles films like Return of the Secaucus 7 (the 1980 inspiration for better-known, worse-for-wear The Big Chill).

Like Sayles’ early movies, which no doubt draw in turn on Cassavetes (at that, the entire genres of reality TV and Dogme 95 should be laying wreaths at his grave), Funny Ha Ha ambles along with less of an explicit agenda than with a set of circumstances, ones that 24-year-old unemployed Marnie (Waking Life animator Kate Dollenmayer) idly nudges with her long, unmanicured toe. In Secaucus 7 especially, Sayles succeeded admirably at making plausible sexual desire between characters who, though not repulsive, wouldn’t necessarily be considered attractive by audiences watching them. That’s a lost art, for sure; a lost ambition, even, in this era when “would you fuck her/him?” prevails as the most urgent casting question (Shrek aside). And it’s an art resurrected by director Andrew Bujalski, who has captured in Funny the bloodless exchanges of a certain breed of Greater Boston-based recent grads. But that’s where the comparison between Bujalski’s and Sayles’ characters, also New England-based, stops. For whereas the Secaucus guys wring their hands over ideological questions and the wisdom of their choices, Marnie and her loose network of friends are just starting to arrive at the idea that commitment of any kind is required in life — if only in terms of committing to a clear sentence.

In his review, A.O. Scott shows his old-school colors when he describes the film as "a generational statement." The movie’s “statement,” a term that may be too strident for this mumbling venture, is at once much more universal and much more specific than that. Specifically, it’s about the type of middle-class, recent grads who proliferate Neutered England. Basically nice kids (in Boston, you’re called kid until you die) who’ve got no play.

The film looks as if it were shot back in a Slacker ‘90s, when boys and girls alike donned the androgyne uniform of unflattering jeans and ripped, unironic tee shirts, but that'd be Bostonian twentysomethings in their natural habitat in any era, alas. It’s hard to imagine how these kids will get around to procreation (or doing the things required for procreation) until you realize that they’re infinitely patient with each other as they’re all, at least, similarly socially retahded. They slouch; they’re post-ironic enough that they apologize endlessly if even a little presumptuousness creeps into their tone; they barely meet each other’s eyes; and though you suspect their alma maters weren’t community colleges, they’re hard-pressed to formulate a direct thought or request, especially if it trespasses into the world of emotions or, God forbid, carnality. (In an NPR interview, Bujalski acknowledges that all the ums, likes and you knows that his nonprofessional cast utter all like you know pretty much derive verbatim from the script).

In any other film, for example, Alex, Marnie’s unrequited love, would be the hopeless sadsack rather than the glib Lothario who dances (awkwardly) in the face of Marnie’s wistful affections. He’s got small, shifty eyes, wears white sneakers with his jeans, and mumbles rather than fumbles once he gets a girl out on her porch in the middle of the night. If you know what I mean. Watching all these characters stumble around their desires is as excruciating as watching your seventh grade math teacher (the one in a short-sleeved button-down and a pen protector) putting the mack on a girl.

But that’s the charm of the film. There isn’t a soundtrack. There are no clever pop culture references. There are no montages. There are no big showdowns. There’s nothing, in fact, to mitigate the excruciating self-consciousness of one’s 20s, which is typically aggrandized without measure in both American and European cinema alike. In Marnie’s features and body, for example, you can glimpse an inkling of a woman who may one day be beautiful, but right now is inchoate and hopelessly floppy, a female equivalent to Linklater’s Wiley Wiggins. When she applies for a position as a research assistant, the professor who interviews her seems less stodgy than self-assured, insouciant compared to Marnie and her crew's fidgety self-consciousness. Rather than wrinkled, his features seem, well, defined. And they remind us how, for most of us in the real world (the cinema verité kind as opposed to the reality TV world), one’s 20s are actually years to fast-forward through as rapidly as possible. The weight of the world-as-oyster is actually fairly intolerable.

When watching this film at Cinema Village, I was sure it'd just look like shitty public access if seen on a TV (not that CV's screens are much better). But when I got home, it was playing on the Sundance Channel, and I settled in with a surprising degree of pleasure to watch Marnie float through a sea of bad parties and awkward encounters one more time. It makes sense, though: A lot of Funny's appeal stems from its rejection of typical filmic devices; dramatic moments that would typically escalate into either slapstick or confrontation merely devolve. At one moment, for example, while Marnie is waiting for Alex in his bedroom, she happens upon some other girl’s birth control pills. She puts them away, then fiddles with his tiny wrench to an effect that is sadly, slowly funny.

Made back in 2003 and only now hitting theaters in cities like NYC, Funny Ha Ha has taken its sweet time to gain any momentum — also like its characters — but it has finally accrued the kind of critical accolades typically only awarded European film these days. And it has a sort of European feel, in its closeups and blurred edges. Even the film’s ending, obstensibly the resolution of the film’s only dramatic conflict, is swallowed rather than spat. A welcome restraint.

House of Whack(s)

2005-05-09T15:23:00.000-04:00

House of Wax has got to be the loopiest Doublemint commercial ever made. Starring not one but three sets of errant twins — fraternal teens, fraternal serial killers, and Paris Hilton’s (fraternal) tweens — it takes more cues from '70s slash-and-gash than the J horror inspiring the recent spate of psychological terrors (the Ring franchise, vanilla bean Boogeyman). And, lo, it’s got little in common with the 1953 Vincent Price vehicle of the same name. Except for, well, wax.

This House poises a gaggle of road-tripping teens at the wrong campsite. Enter a bone-squelching, squirting set of murders, dumber-than-dirt dialogue (like, my cell reception totally sucks, you guys!) and a lot of innuendo between future has-been Chad Michael Murray as Goofus to his scrappy-sexy twin Elisha Cuthbert’s Gallant. A tortured artist who wears an ominous mask and is ace with a blade. A goofball sidekick with the now-standard video camera. A black stud making it with a flaxen nymphette, as interpreted by Paris-Barbie Hilton. Box-office gold, in other words, for who’d resist watching that corporation-unto-herself put into, uh, bankruptcy once and for all? With no less than a pole rammed through her least vital organ, as my colleague delicately pointed out.

Which brings me to my three cents:

1. Never has a movie invited more Mystery Science 3000 narration. Best for DVD, albeit with the parental warning: To be watched in the comfort of your own snark.
2. Any Moral Majority that would have me as a member (or is that any member that would have me as its Moral Majority?) would be protesting the movie's violence-as-porn already.
3. I am convinced that the under-25 airess has submitted to botox already. Insert Paris Hilton wax joke here, dollbabies. I'm just too underwhelmed.

Dickless Jane (Klute with Just a Dash of Leaving Las Vegas)

2005-05-07T10:21:00.000-04:00

The sudden reemergence of The Many Faces of Lady Leotard Hanoi Jane Vadim Hayden Turner Fonda (a possibly ill-advised return from retirement, the new book) has inspired me to revisit Klute (1971). In it, she portrays Bree, a stalked prostitute who balls detective Donald Sutherland and conveys her feelings clinically to her therapist as if they were co-workers rather than doctor and client. Like everything else connected to Fonda, her depiction of Bree shouldn’t be nearly as effective as it is.

Fonda never, no matter what the role, loses her clipped, boarding-school diction — which has a condescending effect though she likely intends the opposite. Somehow depicting working-class women (as in Stanley and Iris) or merely working women (as in Klute) who speak so precisely and stridently rings hollow — as if she holds these women at such bay that she is speaking of them rather than climbing inside them.

But in Klute she manages to evoke that terrible hush that creeps into a life unpopulated by real human connection in every moment. Even Sutherland seems uncharacteristically muted in her presence. In her poorly lit rooms, as she smokes dope, leafs through books, stares down her ugly walls with all the weight of one who knows that silence is threatening to extend forever, she really does relay the grimness of a woman who has accepted she’s fallen through the cracks. Who accepts that she is doing nothing to steer from the path she’s charted by default, that she’s surrendered so fully to her isolation that she luxuriates in it as if it were bathwater still warm though dirty. You believe she can tolerate no intruder save her cat entirely, and that kindness unwires her, angers her, however irrational she recognizes that fact to be.

Klute is not a terrific movie by any stretch of the imagination; it falls prey to many ‘70s movies pitfalls, including poorly built suspense (a high, female voice singing to a single piano note does not in itself conjure fear) and self-important pauses. The first time I saw that movie I’d been alone for a long, long time, though, and it felt so familar that it was as if I were kissing my own arm.

*Also, why hasn't anyone pointed out that Shue’s prostitute character in Leaving Las Vegas draws so much on Fonda’s Bree? Both women stride about with the same very middle-class, can-do assertiveness rather than brassiness, and both films deploy that oy-vey storytelling technique of the women confiding in their shrinks while jazz trumpets blare bleakly.

Ebertfest Remainders: Boys II Men (Mario Van Peebles, Jason Patric, Guy Maddin, Darrell Roodt)

2005-05-04T01:12:00.000-04:00

Classic me to still dwell on Ebertfest eight days later, especially since I saw a bunch of Tribeca screenings last week that merit discussion. But I’ve a bit more to say before I lay it to rest, and Tribeca, well, everyone chatters about Tribeca. Much more delicious to linger in the land of Steak N Shake. I swear after this I will lay yesterday’s lunch aside.

It’s just I was struck by the presiding theme of boys transitioning to men. Mario Van Peebles, the scion of madcap Melvin (he of Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song), won me over but good when he spoke at length about childrearing at a women and film panel on which we both spoke. I like, not love, Mario’s Baadasssss!, which for sure deserved more press and population than it garnered. Its strength stemmed from dry humor and big convictions, but what struck me most about the film, focusing on how his dad (played by Mario clad in black and a sober expression) wrung out Sweet Sweet despite wildly extenuating circumstances, is where it didn’t go. As a dad, Melvin was clearly a bust in the way that many groundbreaking artists tend to be. His rampant narcissism prevented him from placing first the needs of his own children, especially Mario, whom he forced to enact a sex scene that no professional child actor would today be allowed to enact. Obviously, how Mario feels about his dad is his own business, but I couldn’t help but suspect that his unwillingness to fully strip down that cultural linchpin called his dad resulted in a certain surfaceness in his own movie. He scratches at it, but a deeper, untreated wound still lurks as the elephant in every scene.

The result of that hit-or-miss childhood, however, is that he’s a clear thinker and a really kick-ass dad. He said many things on the panel and in the question-and-answer discussion that I’m still mulling a full week later, but my favorite (besides the eminently quotable “There’s a Baldwin for every budget”) was “We have an obligation to continue the conversation that our culture begins.” It was in reaction to a parent’s expressed concern about the impact of the media on her kids. He’s right. These days, we can’t entirely monitor or censor what children, or anyone, watches. But we can make it a dialogue. A 24-7 Mystery Science Theater 3000. Mario lit up most when speaking about his kids, whom he featured in a little short he made called Baadasssss Grandkids. I wish he were my dad.

Along the same lines, Jason Patric (grandson of Jackie Gleason) surprised the hell out of me when he spoke with Ebert when After Dark, My Sweet (1990) screened. Patric’s career could be most charitably described as bumpy, and he directly addressed that fact with a frankness that seemed to take even him by surprise. Basically, he acknowledged that after Lost Boys, (which my friends and I loved loved loved at the time, and which still tickles my fancy even now), he was loathe to cash in on his teen-king status by starring in the usual spate of action movies. Likewise after the misbegotten Speed 2 (which Ebert hastened to acknowledge he liked; ah, the cheese stands alone), he didn’t jump at the offers that appeared, at least until box-office returns were counted. The result was that the clamorers became naysayers, Patric explained slowly with a low level of amusement. Or at least bemusement. His refusals were perceived as holier than thou rather than as simple no’s by La-la bigwigs, and he's been kind of blacklisted since. He still works a lot, cutting his chops in theater and the odd but well-received project. Narc, for example, was terribly underrated; everytime it plays on Showtime, it stops me in my tracks. But where he’s to go now as a Hollywood player mystifies him as much as anyone.

What occurred to me while he was talking, with a marked lack of surliness, I might add, is that Patric has a chance to accomplish something very few American male actors really achieve: transition from a boy to a man. Seriously, very few American men, whether it be in Hollywood or elsewhere, really ever step into grownup shoes. Even their features remain painfully boyish, albeit with a few smile lines and stray grey hairs, as they age. And it’s not to their advantage as artists. Youth remains impervious to all but black and white, and it’s the colors that lend art any lasting weight or intrigue. By suffering a bit, by being forced by either the powers-that-be or his own prescient unconscious to marinate on the sidelines, Patric has been granted the chance to develop into a fine actor with all the gravity and stillness of a man. It’ll be interesting to see whether the landscape of American film makes room for him. When I said as much to him at ye olde S n S, he responded that he hoped it’d work that way — while his lip inadvertently curled. But politely, I swear.

Also of note: A true Canadian, Guy Maddin, he of the movies Lynch only wishes he’d remained pure enough to make, is as mild-mannered and sweet-tempered as his films are spiky and flamboyant. That said, he did reveal in a discussion that he has a very rare neurological disorder in which, unless medicated, he experiences phantom fingers randomly prodding various parts of his body. Hear ye, hear ye: The phantom limbs of all his films doth be officially explained.

And, finally, Yesterday, one of 2004’s foreign film Oscar nominations, made me cry like a teenaged girl three weeks late. Somber, still and terrifically brave, it’s the story, relayed in a Swahili dialect, of a young, small-village mother who discovers her mostly MIA husband has infected her with HIV. When the lights came up, I was still crying, and my only consolation was that so was pretty much everyone else. Including Ebert himself, who surely had seen the film a few times if he’d decided to include it in his festival. Talk about Boys II Men, for when South African director Darrell Roodt bounded on stage and started jabbering to Ebert, “Wow, you’re crying!” I stopped in my tracks. That he was white and clownish was surprise enough. I kept waiting for his hypoglycemic-child-going-at-the-birthday-cake affect to wear away, but it didn’t. Let the record show that you cannot judge a film by its director’s cover. Because the film is, er, not to be overlooked.

Ebertfest 2005: Murderball

2005-04-29T09:24:00.000-04:00

Murderball, about Olympic-level quadriplegic rugby players both on- and off-court, screens to much ballyhoo on Ebertfest’s second day, and deservedly so. As Ebert says in the post-movie discussion, it’s a complete film that’s at once a backstage story, a reconciliation story, a rehab story, and a competition story about the US team's rivalry with the Canadian team coach, former teammate and notorious hardass Joe Soares.

The first scene, in which American player Mark Zupan silently changes into his rugby gear in a small bedroom, sets the tenor: suspenseful, modest, unflinching. It is the most physically exposed any of the players will appear, but no details are ever spared, from the varying levels of disability of members on the team — one guy lost all his limbs to a childhood disease — to whether and how they can schtup. (Answer: mostly yes, and with some rather hot tamales). And though it’s a real sports movie, complete with ESPN-style action photography often shot from the height of the chairs, the stakes are much higher and very different. It’s not as if just playing is winning, Special Olympics style. In their armored chairs, these guys are cyborg gladiators, part men, part machines, and 100 percent out for blood. But each of them has already conquered so much internal mishegos in order to come to terms with their physical limitations that they radiate a Buddha-like equanimity right below the surface of their boys-will-be-boys bluster.

The exception is Joe, the 50something Team Canada coach who may be the most decorated quad rugby player to ever grace the court. Hailing from Portugal by way of Providence, Rhode Island, he’s anger incarnate, snarling at his violin-playing son who worships the ground he rolls on and who lovingly dusts the wall of trophies he has collected. Jargon-spouting, only unintentionally humorous, Joe is grimly set on besting the US team since he sued them for retiring him when he got older. Directors Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro pull no punches when it comes to depicting Joe’s real disability: a one-minded Massholia that (as always) trumps all other cultural and life experiences and that he is forced professionally and physically to confront. We see how, on his anniversary dinner, he responds to his long-suffering wife’s toast to him with a toast to Team Canada. We’re even privy to the operating room when his heart is literally surgically opened.

Joe’s emotional self-reckoning — check out the violin awards section he eventually adds to his trophy wall — dovetails with a rapprochement between Zupan and his lifelong best friend who, when they’re both 18, unintentionally, drunkenly pitches him out of the back of his truck and permanently paralyzes him. Neither storyline take a backseat to the actual face-off between the Canadian and American teams in Athens. Here’s where Murderball most sharply veers from more typical sports documentaries. The big match is captured with significantly less fanfare than is its emotional impact on the defeated players, who crumple into girlfriends’ and family members’ arms in painfully long shots. If winning isn’t everything, transcending failure is. And if there’s one thing these boys know, it’s how to get back up again and defeat emotional and physical obstacles just when most think they’d roll over and play dead.

At the question-and-answer period following the screening, Zupan and Joe join the filmmakers and Ebert. It’s refreshing to see that the feel-good post-coital of the documentary hasn’t altered either player. Zupan (who wheeled impatiently out of Playtime halfway through the screening night before) projects the same barely suppressed bemusement that he shows off-court during the film. He also still clearly loathes Joe, who, as onscreen, is loathsome in a totally likeable way. While the coach grandstands in bumper-sticker speak, Zupan can’t help but grimace.

Team Canada has axed Joe to his considerable confusion: “I don’t know what those guys wanted!” he tells the crowd with a smile that doesn't reach his eyes. When asked whether he'd hire Benedict Arnold Joe back on as US coach, Zupan says, “My first reaction is no." Joe’s smile temporarily tightens, how much his olive-branching to Zup is a job appeal suddenly revealed.

But both guys are united in their frankness, especially when it comes to negotiating their disabilities. In an especially good question, Ebert asks the players how the qualification system plays out. In the film, it’s established that each player is awarded a number of points based on how able-bodied he is: only eight points are allowed per team on court at a time. The bizarre result, Joe and Zupan acknowledge at the discussion, is that these players who spend so much of their life transcending their disabilities have to temporarily play up their weaknesses. Not to mention that, as the film also explores, committing to quad rugby typically only can occur once someone has psychologically eliminated the possibility that he's going to walk again. A strange dance between acceptance and rejection of limitations.

As for how to approach the disabled, “It’s always better to ask questions,” Joe establishes. Zup takes it a step further. “If someone asks me how I'm different, I say, 'I’m shorter than you. That’s the big difference. But you hit me, man, I’ll hit you back.'”

Every Murderball review is bound to deploy the word "balls" in one way or another, but it ain’t about balls. It’s about heart.

Ebertfest 2005: Playtime

2005-04-28T13:34:00.000-04:00

Leaving New York City’s two-week window of unhateful weather was tough cookies already, but almost as soon as we set foot in Champaign-Urbana, thunder clapped and great bolts of lightening danced. It was worth it to watch festival heavies tread gingerly on the fine rugs at the university president’s house rather than in his garden, where the opening ceremonies were set to take place. Between the wall-to-wall carpeting and the abundance of white folks, I could've sworn I was back in my high school boyfriend’s rec room; a powerful craving for grape soda and French kissing seized me. Instead, we gnawed on prosciutto-wrapped asparagus and chatted with feminist professors before we crashed through the rain to catch the opening screening.

Not shockingly, Tati's Playtime is an entirely different experience when screened in 70mm on the jam-packed theater’s enormous screen, introduced by a real-life organ. Truly a silent movie with dialogue, the few lines spoken — and the myriad languages in which they are uttered — are irrelevant as the story is conveyed so clearly nonverbally. Following a host of mid-‘60s characters from the airport through one day in a sound-stage Paris, the film’s protagonist is the human race itself as seen through a kind of National Geographic lens. As highly stylized as a Buster Keaton jig cut out of modernist sharp corners and floppy flowered hats, every moment recalls the very droll mis-en-scenes buried in more acclaimed, more narrative-driven narrative films of the same era. Imagine, for example, if the whole tone of Breakfast at Tiffany’s took its cue from the rhapsodic party scene with the heiresses, the vamps, the barking agents, the woman laughing, the woman crying, the treacherously long cigarette holder, and Cat prowling matter-of-factly amidst people’s fur stoles. At that, imagine if life did.

In the discussion that followed, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum revealed to Ebert that he briefly worked for Tati. Since typically working for your heroes sours you on them forever, just the fact that Rosenbaum still trips over himself in praise for the filmmaker is momentous. “You had to be aware that everything that crossed his path made its way into his movies,” he said.

Rosenbaum also spoke of a sadness about the isolation and sterility of modernity that he felt permeated the film, particularly through the use of architectural details like doors and windows: The sharp lines of the airport and city streets give way to the wild curves of a later nightclub scene, where social boundaries are metaphorically and physically scotched. I’m not so sure. An existentialist joy imbues each frame, a love of humans in all their vanities and ungainliness. Tati embraces his characters the way a parent unconditionally loves his errant child.

Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival 2005 Overview

2005-04-28T11:30:00.000-04:00

Never mind that it took trekking to the big-shouldered, big-burgered land of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, for Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival April 20-24. And never mind the perversity of jumping NYC ship just as Tribeca reared its overhyped head. A chronic case of cinennui has been kicked, and all it took was four days of Ebert-selected movies screened in a dilapidated, grand theater for 1,000 cinenthusiasts, mulled over slowly and surely in long question-and-answer periods, aided and abetted by Long-Tall Sally shakes and steak(burgers). Ebertfest 2005 was the cinema studies grad school experience we all wish we’d actually had.

The premise of the festival is brilliant in its simplicity: films that Roger Ebert really digs. Initially, the festival solely focused on unjustly overlooked films, but as this was its seventh year, the category of unjustly overlooked was bound to slide into semi-deservedly overlooked. Better instead to uphold movies that deserve a closer look, a decision this year’s programming reflected, and which Ebert himself acknowledged before each screening. (A festival name change looms if only so he can sidestep the definition song and dance in years to come.) So the bill of fare: Playtime; Murderball; Saddest Music in the World; Heart in the World; After Dark, My Sweet; Yesterday; The Phantom of the Opera (1925); Baadasssss; The Secret of Roan Inish; Primer; Map of the Human Heart; Me and You and Everyone We Know; Taal. Crazy good.

Dave Poland, Lord of the Hot Button and Movie City News hooked me up but swell in the University Union where all the Swells were residing, complete with a green VIP pass to the green room, where junior mints and wacky taffy flowed like wine. After a Coney Island ride of a flight, he met me at the airport and immediately greeted Jason Patric, Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum and numerous (significant) others whom I should’ve already recognized on my tiny plane. A powerschmoozer I am not.

In the mornings, a kitchen klatch convened in — no joke — the student union to talk shop. Bad coffee and sugary scones breeds more cinemaspeak. Kubrick became the Elijah at the table and DP offered his Eyes Wide Shut ~~rationalization~~ thesis. My alternathesis — that Kubrick’s films were unremittingly remote due to being unremittingly male — landed about as well as Ishtar; those who agreed expressed their sentiments out of earshot from the rest. The first day I also picked a fight about the new pope with Toronto Film Festival pope Dusty Cohl, who graciously pardoned me after a beat. Someday soon I will learn to keep mum till my blood sugar properly spikes.

Steak n Shake, a local franchise founded, no kidding, in Normal, Illinois, turned out to be the Peach Pit of the festival. The festival was small enough so that every night after screenings, a crew collected under the fluorescent lights to talk movies past, present and future. It was enormous whipped-cream-topped strawberry shakes (Ebert’s wife Chaz bought me one of my own the first night, and I got hooked) and two-tiered Swiss burgers with the likes of Guy Maddin, Jason Patric, Mario Van Peebles, Rosenbaum, DP, and the Murderball crew. No late-night drinking here; the drugs of choice were sugar, dairy, and good old red meat here in the Midwest. Boozy confessions replaced by giddy, sugar-bred free associations. The hangovers, however, were just as bad.

Neither of us were able to stay for the whole festival as seders called from the really big-shouldered land of Chitown, but a breakdown of highlights that we encountered — cinematic and otherwise — follows. Should we have been able to stay longer, no doubt director John Sayles and performance artist Miranda July would have been real boons. I’ve heard only amazing buzz on July’s new feature, which I'm disgruntled to have missed again, and, well, Sayles is Sayles, Silver City or not.

Freelancers: Unite Your Freewheeling Asses!

2005-04-22T19:48:00.000-04:00

I'm Little Blogger on the Prairie this week, looking at Roger Ebert's Overlooked Festival and suffering from wonky old-school Internet connex. Having a fine old time otherwise — which I'll launch into shortly — but wanted to point all and sundry to Yancey Strickler's call to freelancers. It's time we freelancing writers and editors really organized ourselves. Working Today and other freelancers' unions provide us health insurance but not much else, and recent experiences have brought home the fact that we all need to step up our support for each other. Check out Yancer's proposal, and email either of us with idears please.

Also, while I'm in the bidness of touting Mr. Strickler's bloggy, please note his homage to R&B divadom. Best line: "R&B was once the milky cleavage of a heaving bosom wailing love notes to the wind; now it's a navel flatter than the Platygæan Hypothesis getting bossed around by some scrub in a tank-top who's at a loss on how to love anything other than a girl." Yes, yes, y'all.

Sloppy Seconds DVDs (The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Spanglish, I Heart Huckabees, Sideways)

2005-04-17T19:59:00.000-04:00

Yancey’s had flu for a week and I’m Barely Employed Bertha (rolls right off the tongue, don’t it?) so time together has become a bed-in of the asexual variety. Since we’re a. products of our (respective) generations and b. not John and Yoko, no revolutions have been planned nor questions of a deep philosophical nature deliberated. Instead, we’ve been on the sacrificial lamb, drowning our snot and sorrows in new DVD releases to spare others the horror of deservedly deleted scenes. Oh, such lofty superheroes we in pajamas be.

The theme: Love and Life in the Disappointing Face of Mortality. Or: When We Realize Even Superheroes Aren’t Superheroes. All movies I saw last year, and with the exception of Sideways, all movies I loved when first I saw them. The test, then: Did they make us feel sicker and sadder in our time of woe? Or (marginally less pathetic): Were they better the second time round?

The Results

Turns out Sideways is an ideal renter, though I balked at joining its fan club when it came out last fall. Former TV star Thomas Haden Church’s gummy schtick fares better when returned to its rightful size screen. You can linger in the sun-dappled Tuscany-by-Cali wine country with the time you’ll save after skipping the split-screen montages, and you can piece together Paul Giamatti’s best performance by editing out the too-long sadsack sequences. (Everything after they return from wine country is overkill.)

As for the extras, they confirm what before I’d only suspected: Alexander Payne is a smug prick. Most DVDs include deleted scenes without much fanfare from directors, possibly because they’re embarrassed by what typically amounts to dirty underwear, but Payne precludes the whole of them with an enormous typed essay that fills three different screens. Not to mention that he introduces each individual deleted scene (each duller than its predecessor) with a loving homage in the same shitty font. It’s a testament to his fairly exceptional wit that his films are as good as they are, given that he’s clearly never learned that art flourishes when you kill your babies. Hey, Payne, KILL ALL YOUR BABIES. Consider him told.

Ready for umpteenth bad lead regarding this flick? I heart I Heart Huckabees even more the second time around.

Everything lives inside that movie that I could ever want.: french farce; ‘60s psychedelia; big, hard spiritual questions about meaning and responsibility tossed into the air like a pizza pie that never flops. J’heart heart heart Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman as the good-parent existentialist detectives (a sort of reprise of Tomlin’s eye-twinkling acid mommy in director Russell’s Flirting with Disaster); Jude Law as the smarmy fuck we all know he prolly really is (LA gossip was he fired his agent and manager after Chris Rocked him at la Oscars); Marky Mark earnest as you want him to be, rasping out critiques of capitalism and petroleum use and existentialism with all the indignation of a nine-year-old boy straddling a dirt bike, which, incidentally, he does; Jason Schwartzman, so hangdog highlarious as the floundering environmentalist that his Rushmore performance will never be dismissed as a fluke ever again; and, may it please the court, Naomi Watts putting her normal stridency to good use as the former model slouching toward enlightenment in overalls and a lil bonnet and a mud-smeared face. If only all movies could hit you on as many levels as this one. It manages to hit all the stages any spiritually thirsty Westerner undergoes on a quest for enough peace of mind to tolerate the mundanity of the mall — from the initial revelation that everything is connected, to the dawning that pain’s inherent to being alive, to a reconciliation of that whole process. Only, the journey is rendered shorter and smarter, which is what movies are supposed to do for us.

As for the extras, note in particular the extra Huckabees commercials. I never liked her before, but I kind of have a hard-on for Watts now. Girlfriend is (a) good sport.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was better first time round. The ‘50s-style science fiction still melds well with the philosophy MA jokes; Winslet’s performance is still only bested by Imelda Staunton’s Vera Drake in the annals of 2004; and it’s still the best Charlie Kaufman movie yet, which is saying rather a lot. Sunshine is a fantastically original movie that has a heart rather than a navel. But on another viewing, clever occasionally slides into cloying, complacent, and other c words. Second time in, it’s harder to ignore Jim Carrey’s selfish performance, in which he sucks up all the air in his scenes. And once you know the story’s outcome, the plotline devolves into Jack and Chrissy land occasionally. Truth told, so stir-crazy was I by the time the film itself finally ended, I didn’t even watch the extras.

Spanglish was the most underrated movie of 2004 and the extras go a long way toward suggesting why. The movie as an event proved an interesting case study of how critics can sink a movie. (Sideways reviews showed how critics could make a movie, as Times critic AO Scott pointed out.) Its reviews tanked, mostly focusing on what was perceived as Téa Leoni’s gross caricature of an insecure wife, and director James L. Brooks' cultural imperialism despite his obvious good intentions. The fact that a very sharp, very decent movie had been made was overlooked.

There’s not a bad performance in the lot, including those from Leoni, a real 40s-screwball movie dame, and Cloris Leachman, boozily teaching torch songs to her young grandson. Even man-of-the-house Sandler lays aside his idiot savant mugging for this film, though the good cop-bad cop dynamics between him and Leoni grated, as did the zero sexual chemistry between man-of-the-house Sandler and Paz Vega as his Latina maid. Watching it at home meant I could hide in the kitchen during their love scenes; it's embarrassing how Sandler’s not enough of a grownup to summon a response in or for a woman as formidable as Vega.

Brooks’ roots lie in some of the best sitcoms ever made, and the weaknesses and strengths of Spanglish betray those beginnings: an immediate emotionality, snapdragon dialogue, strong but strangely two-dimensional characters, and a tendency to be pat — as if conflicts needed to be wrapped up before the commercial break. When we watched the deleted scenes, Yancey drawled out: “I can see why he’d want to delete scenes that showed other sides to the characters.” Fair enough. Rare are the deleted scenes that suggest a far better movie ended up on the cutting floor. But then again, I’ve not watched the Gangs in New York DVD.

Also of note: a special featurette on how to make chef Sandler’s egg sandwich. Practical!

I saw The Incredibles at Thanksgiving with my sister and her boyfriend, and we girls who’ve only studied Spanish kept whispering “incroyable!” in a French accent over and over. It was too good to compliment in only one language.

It was nice to take in the movie itself again, not surprisingly as director Brad Bird made Iron Giant, the only other animated movie worth watching over and over. But we were much more obsessed with the extras, which took more than an hour to watch in full. Included is a ‘50s style cartoon of the Mr. Incredible and Frozone, which you can watch with Mr. Incredible and Frozone’s commentary (Craig T. Nelson and Samuel Jackson, respectively; sweet Georgia Brown). Also included are “cast” bloopers such as when Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) gets too elastic — she's just so wacky — and a vignette narrated by author Sarah Vowell who, bizarrely, provides the voice for Violet, about the similarities between her character and Abraham Lincoln. This DVD's comedy is as layered as, well, Arrested Development. Incroyable.

All Hail the Queens (Beauty Shop, Miss Congeniality 2, Destiny's Child, The Ashlee Simpson Show)

2005-04-14T17:41:00.000-04:00

I’ve got female camaraderie on the brain and so, it seems, does everyone else. In researching the the Mitford sisters (amazing in their own right), I've also stumbled upon The Furious Lesbian, the badly titled (and rendered) biography of Mercedes de Acosta, a humorectomized if bold-as-love playwright and dyke at a time when most people didn’t even know the word lesbian, let alone utter it. A pining sadsack overall, de Acosta did know to hold real salons for the ladies, a tradition that should be immediately resuscitated — and not just on L Word nights.

On a more prosaic level, girls are doing something besides preening for the shall-we-say proverbial male gaze over at MTV. In the constant loop running of The Ashlee Simpson Show, Jessica Simpson freaks out not on behalf of her shoes nor her circus dog Daisy but her little miss sis botching up the Orange Bowl. "Oh, gawwwd. Take care of my sister! Please take care of her." The most selfless and certainly the most authentic moment captured on video of this decade's worst Daddy's Little Girl, it renders Barbie nearly human. (Nearly, mind you; there's a lot of plastic on that carcass).

Then there's the Destiny's Child song, "Girl." The video is sure-fire. Open-eyed and earnest, Beyonce's a human embodiment of lipgloss: jailbait-style sexy despite that too-slick veneer. She's one of the few singers working the Hot97 circuit right now who actually sings from her belly rather than through her nose: Her "Work It Out" holds up against the finest her R&B mothers ever let loose. Plus she still sings with Destiny’s Child even though she’s clearly making enough bucks on her own. The video itself, a Sex and the City homage to their enduring friendship, breaks me up even when I'm rushing in the morning. Decked out to the nines, the three prowl the city and counsel each other on their lousy relationships in that always-affecting minor key they sing in so gustily. Some lyrics:

Take a minute girl, come sit down
And tell us what's been happening
In your face I can see the pain
Don't you try to convince us that you're happy

Girl, you don't have to be hiding
Don't you be ashamed to say he hurt you
I'm Your Girl, You're My Girl, We're Your Girls
Want You To Know That We Love You.

This time round, it's the boys who are but mere eye candy, secondary to the primary relationship that's being serenaded: the girls' friendship. Um, is this MTV?

Actually, these moments speak to a little women's-women trend found on mainstream movie screens right now, too. Take the largely unanticipated success of the Queen Latifah vehicle Beauty Shop, all about a you-know-what and starring and produced by Dana Owens herself. Or the anticipated but largely undeserving success of that piece of you-know-what Miss Congeniality 2, starring and produced by the Sandra Bullock, the reigning queen of the normally endearingly bad movie.

Congeniality is by all rights too lousy to waste much time discussing. Suffice it to say FBI Agent Bullock finds herself with a bad-ass partner (Regina King, who almost emerges unscathed from this clunker), and hijinks and shenanigans ensue. Also William Shatner is involved and the climactic scene takes place in a pirate theme park. Ye gods. Note please that pirates and William Shatner rank lower (or is that higher?) than stand-up in the comedy hierarchy of crap.

Beauty Shop is a much more entertaining way to fritter away two hours. Alicia Silverstone sports a wicked bad hillbilly accent and drops it like it's hot; Alfre Neward drops Maya Angelou lyrics and African fabrics while she fries hair; Kevin Bacon drops an Austrian accent as a stylist adding a whole new family tree to his six degrees of separation (soooo much easier to connect him to Snoop Dog now). Latifah herself is easy-peezy as an Atlanta-based stylist who opens her own shop with a loan teased out of a follicly challenged bank officer's split ends. She brings along her high-end white clients to her black neighborhood and supports a musically talented daughter's high-priced education while she rescues her shiftless sister-in-law from a slide into street-walking. Oh, and she conducts as an afterthought a highly unconvincing love affair with jazz pianist Djimon Hounsou. (It's always highly unconvincing when Latifah kisses boys.)

Weirdly, both movies buckle under a burden rarely found in Hollywood vehicles: overearnestness. True, the writing stinks to the high heavens of the unmistakable fragrance of Scripts By Committee 101. (Motto: Let no plot device remain unturned.) But the real problem stems from how every scene doggedly imparts some kind of lesson a la Davey and Goliath,though they're hardly lessons little Davey might deliver. More like Gals! Women friendships deserve loyalty! and Hey, sister, men aren't the be-all-end-all! or, best of all, Mentoring younger girls is fun!

I complain not about the lessons, only that they are so unsubtly delivered. Nor do I complain that the men in these features are mostly auxiliary; it's absolutely refreshing for women's friendships, autonomy and (dare I say it) solidarity to live at the center of not one but two films gracing the malls across the US right now. Five minutes of the rarified drek of Sin City, in which testosterone overload (and Tarantino and Rodriguez' self-indulgence) distorts every character, even the females, reminds us how a few too many good intentions aren't that bad a thing these days. (Why exactly are cats like Tarantino and Rodriguez counted as edgy when they so gleefully reinforce the status quo?)

In sooth, very few movies or TV shows like Beauty Shop exist. As pat as its storyline is, that this film roates around a widowed black mom supporting her family by launching her own business successfully and treating her employees, neighbors, and (most shockingly) her mother-in-law with love and respect is fairly revolutionary. Yes, it's the black movie equivalent of vanilla — the film's biggest dramatic conflict comes in the handy package of a beautician shop inspector — but the point driven home over and over is more piquant: that the true gauge of female success is the degree of integrity she preserves daily. Maybe, if we get adjusted to that idea, it will eventually transcend being such a gimmick that it subsitutes for actual plot. (The few other mainstream movies that convey similar messages — Legally Blonde, the Where's-Waldo lesbian drama Fried Green Tomatoes — smack of the same saccarine.)

But as long as social (and familial) conditioning still dicates that when the going gets tough, the tough collapse into the nearest sperm donator’s arms like a 19th century maiden with the vapors, and so long as the merging of a financial object and a sexual one still masquerades as valid grounds for marriage, such doggedly earnest movies prove useful anyway. No matter how kind and patient your sweetheart is, boy or girl, there’s no beating the strings-free support of your long-time girlfriends, the ones who’ve witnessed you pick yourself up from a fall enough times to be able to remind you that you can do it again — and to dispense that all-elusive uncomplicated hug. Short of that, if all your girls' time is now claimed by the likes of little people and husband people, apparently right now there are them screens, silver and small alike.

I clamor to them.

Andrea Dworkin 1946-2005

2005-04-11T22:03:00.000-04:00

Talk about ass and kick ass, one of feminism's fiercest moms has died. A serious, unwavering polemicist, Dworkin was a hard ass with a hard line — sometimes too hard for this '70s baby — but one that's always been sorely needed and will be sorely missed.

Here's to you, crazy lady.

My Inner Norma Rae

2005-04-06T06:10:00.000-04:00

For the bulk of my working life, I've been a freelancer. Early on, I realized I didn't dig having the parameters of my life dictated by fluorescent lights, cubicle walls, petty middlemen, and rush-hour traffic, and figured there had to be a better way to make a buck. I'd paid my way through college by working as an artist's model and as a waitress, and swore that I'd only work jobs that in some way made use of my degree once I received it. I've always kept to that, and as a result have been a freelance editor to pay my bread and butter ever since I quit working at the garment workers' union — which, as it turned out, treated its employees roughly as badly as the errant shops that we were always laboring to organize.

But ain't that always the way?

Truth be told, I don't really dig editorial work that much anymore, at least the kind I'm doing still. For in order to remain free-lance, I've persistently avoided any upward mobility. Eventually, if you're good enough at your job, you get offered a higher, steadier position. I've never taken one simply because the claustrophobia of someone else dictating the tenor of five days of every week far outweighs the allure of a regular paycheck. Not to mention that managing editor gigs and the like always entail a level of bureaucracy to which I'm hardly suited.

The result, of course, is that I still do a hell of a lot of copy editing to pay my bills. And the more I work as an actual writer, the more this editing feels like a distraction that I resent, one too close to my actual work to not drain it in some way. I slog on, because after a decade, it's the only way I know to make a quick buck. Back in the day, I mostly separated church and state by editing architectural publications, and I still don't ever edit at publications for which I wish to write seriously. I'm convinced no one trusts the creativity of someone who's carefully excised their extra commas. Now I tend to work on publications in the entertainment industry that keep me informed about the shite that I write about and occasionally provide useful contacts.

For the last few years, I've edited in various capacities a television magazine owned by a well-endowed if nefarious company that can certainly foot my bills. The work is mostly easy and typically relevant to my own field, and if the prose is too slick and the office politics totally dysfunctional, I can keep mum since I know I'm only there a few weeks at a time. More importantly, it's financed my life as it's paid a very handsome rate.

So what do you do when it suddenly doesn’t?

For the last few months, I've not been paid by those guys. I know what happened: My overworked boss forgot to submit the invoices for my compensation. And once he realized it, he was loath to shuttle my paperwork through because he was loath to highlight how irresponsible his actions were, either to me or to his supervisor in turn. The result of that small act of selfishness has been that I've been unable to pay my rent let alone go out for dinner. Not getting paid for two months of work has meant that I've had to clear through my scanty savings, borrow money, impair business relationships based on the good faith that I pay my own bills on time, worry my parents who are old enough so they deserve to not worry about their oldest daughter. My life has been on hold.

As a freelancer, you always do have to be on your best behavior. If you prove too much trouble, you can simply not be rehired come next month. It's certainly not in your best interest to roll heads if you want to keep a gig, and until I wasn't get paid for my work, I had no intention of letting go of this cushy situation. I've been practically the only freelance writer I know who carries absolutely no debt. So in my repeated inquiries, I tried my best to be super polite, all while my savings account has steadily dwindled.

Being a woman who already can be perceived (and lo! I hate this expression) as a ball breaker simply by the virtue of taking up a fair amount of space is also a factor. The only way to compensate for being clear and outspoken when you're working under a male boss is to be not only funny but deferential. In other words, I sweeten my shit up at work.

But when, by Friday, an empty mailbox yawned at me once again, it was clear to me that I'd essentially been working my money job for no money like a stone-cold sucker. By then, I couldn't breathe for lack of finances. If it endures long enough, the shitty feeling of being super broke when you owe and are owed nags at the back of your head even during sex. It was time to step up the tone and do whatever it took to get paid.

During the process of then going over his head, sweet-talking the secretaries at corporate and leaving frank messages on his superior's voicemail, I realized how little my boss had actually done to take care of the problem. Eventually he faxed in my invoice, but he only acknowledged to me that he hadn't done so before when he knew I already knew. God forbid he of his own volition request that accounting expedite the month period it typically takes to process paperwork. Why? Because it didn’t really matter to him that his small carelessness had derailed my whole life unless I made it inconvenient for him.

It came down to me saying I wouldn't turn in any of the stories that I'd assigned on the magazine's behalf, that I wouldn't let any freelancer who I'd trained for them work there again, to writing a shaming letter that would have made George Bush admit he was wrong before they they agreed to fedex my check (and you know corporations can always expedite a check when need be). It came down to me having to reach far back in my bag of tricks and access the shite I learned from the garment workers to get my dollars. It came down to me standing on a table, essentially, with a big sign that read "UNION."

Oy.

As freelancers, we writers and editors work our asses off for jobs that never grant us insurance, let alone bonuses or vacations. The least these people can do is pay us without making us jump through hurdles. Yet how many of us get paid as regularly or as well as we should? And how carefully do we always broach that subject, fearful as we are of biting (read: irritating) the hand that ostensibly feeds us? Even now, after being treated like a subhuman for months, I'm wary of posting these comments.

I keep thinking on it. I do these stupid small-time jobs so I can finance the rest of my endeavors. If they end up instead depleting me to the point that I can't get anything else done — and note how infrequently I've updated this blog in the last few weeks — what's the point?

The point is that freelancing as both an editor and a writer has still meant that I could take off on an ill-advised trip when I wanted to, that I could still work out in the middle of the day or have a long lunch with a dear old friend, that I could sometimes stay up till 4 am or get up at 4 am to write. It meant that I didn't have to answer ultimately to anyone but myself. It meant that I could write about what I wish. But what if, as right now, I can't sleep let alone write because I'm so worried about how I'm going to pay my electric bill in the next few months? What if I now feel like I'm dancing awkwardly between self-respect and solvency?

We seem to think these days that unions are deeply outdated. We white-collar kids don’t even know our labor rights, let alone insist they be enforced. Most everybody gets screwed in some way by the new companies that look impressive as hell on our resumes. I've written and edited for I don't know how many hipper-than-thou pubs over the last few years that employ college grads for diddly, make us work weekends and nights without any benefits, let alone overtime, pay us when it suits them, drop deadlines like bombs, and remind us how disposable we are when we utter the slightest peep. Email only worsens things, as there's no excuse in employers' eyes to not constantly be on call. Most companies, truth be told, should be called LaborViolations.com rather than whatever oblique wordplay they use as their monikers. And all we do is complain over overpriced cocktails without much recourse.

There's not much room for, you should forgive the term, true bohemia in our current climate even though it's necessary to create truly original art. I never want to make a ton of cash; I don't give a fuck about working for all the glossy publications that treat copy like mere captions for celebrity pics. I simply want to lead a life of financial integrity, in which I finance myself, the occasional trip, the occasional emergency, and the occasional loved one who needs my support through work I believe in.

I know how to live on not so much cash; have been practicing that skill forever so that I could pursue a life on my own terms rather than on someone else's. For I truly believe that only when you lead a life that entails acceptable rather than unacceptable compromise can you excavate your authentic self well enough to write from it.

Sure enough everything happens for a reason, and this experience has helped me affirm that organizer within myself again. Helped me experience anger as a motivating force rather than merely as a sick drain. But I'm devastated that things are still so rough, are only getting rougher in our political climate in which fascism is so glibly confused for patriotism, in which the rights of middle and lower class Americans grow increasingly less germane to the leaders who purport to represent us. It's time to kick more ass. For all of us to try to use our art and commerce to wake each other up rather than inure us further.

What's scary, of course, is I don't know if I can do any more work in good faith for an employer who has shown such disregard for the work I do. I also, simply put, don't know how else I will live. How I will feed the cats. What's exciting is now I get to find out. It's time for me personally to shed my old-school lefty feelings of being repulsed by money, as a friend recently observed, and become truly self-employed. Money can finance wonderful endeavors in addition to problematic ones.

As they say in my country, what the fuck?

Nay to Deadwood

2005-03-26T09:49:00.000-05:00

Last night, for what seems like the billionth time but just may be fourth, Yancey tried to get me into Deadwood, HBO’s very own Manifest Destiny drama. Typically, if he tells me I’m going to dig a show, I do, if grudgingly. The Wire is the classic example — and thank our lucky stars that it’s been renewed for the fourth season, praise be.

But although I admire the painstaking research that goes into Deadwood, as well as its seamless integration of real-life historical figures with fabricated characters, I just haven’t cottoned to this one. Its sepia tones, dirty red faces, potty-potty mouths, (and this coming from a girl who's had her mouth metaphorically washed out with soap many a time); the claustrophobia of such a tiny town squirming, teeming with avarice and swaggering men in big boots and big hats with big guns and big capitalistic aspirations. It just ain’t my thing.

I’ve never liked Westerns. Ever. Even the ones I know officially are admirable, like McCabe & Mrs. Miller or Eastwood’s revisionist Unforgiven. I used to think it was just because the dusty, browbeaten aesthetic, all squinted eyes and thin lips squirting tobacco juice, didn’t appeal to me, and because the world of Westerns is very much a world stripped of femininity even when it isn’t stripped of physical women.

It’s more than that, though. Visiting the world of the Western not only entails visiting the lair of the lion, but visiting what is no matter what a rationalization, even an aggrandizement of the individualistic, acquisitive strain of American culture that now dominates our landscape. The behavior of white pioneers in the West not only embodies the strain of American history that most shames me, but on a dramatic level, it just doesn’t make for compelling drama.

The Man in action is dull. It's dull to identify with what is ostensibly the oppressor rather than the Native Americans or even land that he conquered. What interests me in every story is subversion. Underdogs. Underworlds. Greys. Out there, in the too-bright sunlight, squirming for gold, squeezing holsters, fucking broads, guzzling whiskey — there’s no subconscious. Hell, it’s all superconscious. Or, worse: id.

Deadwood may provides ample insight into the current mindframe dominating American culture, but I don’t need to squander my leisure time on the revelation that we're all just a bunch of grasping cowboys. Pardner, I've got CNN for that.

So Spring Already (More Notes from the Underground)

2005-03-24T13:18:00.000-05:00

Movies is quiet and so is I. I'm knee-deep in a batch of mostly onerous editing to help me pay off the Dreaded Taxes (really, why don't we all stop paying; it'd be a fuck of a lot faster way to derail all and sundry than those faltering protests preaching solely to the choir); reviews to write; books I've committed to read. Mostly, though, I've surrendered once again to the whims of the weather, and am here to report that the best cultural barometer of the moment is not film nor television but subway.

What public transportation relies upon, slavishly, is a complete and utter adherence to the social contract — to the unspoken agreement that the only way to get through the day with so many strangers' elbows lodged squarely and unintentionally up your ass is to practice the golden rule. In the words of Miss Tina Turner back when she was Mrs. Ike: "Nice and easy."

Alas, what with the MTA's wildly outdated signal system, the miserable slush and hail and rain and ice and yellow yellow snow and flip-your-wig winds, an entire city who needs a vacation from the Winter That Wouldn't End, well, the social contract is breaking down a wee bit. Men sitting with legs sprawled out, taking up two seats while old people on canes and pregnant women loom above them. At 8 am a woman smacking loudly on greasy fried chicken drops wrappers at her feet, while every Hungover Harriet gags around her. The angry whir of so many headphones not turned down low enough. The unfathomable body odor of a parka-wrapped people stalled in overheated sardine cans. The homeless person clad in urine-soaked paperbags. The drug addicts drooling their methadone fix on their neighbors' shoulders. The save-it-for-the-couch self-analyses between Williamsburg silverspoons who haven't quite caught on to how the rest of us working joes ain't just background plants. Nasal fusillades that masquerade as girltalk between assistants zipping between the gym and their lipstick gigs. Everyone pushing their way to get on and off first, stepping on toes, bags, egos; pushing past politesse to land that empty seat. No please, no thank you, just an occasional exasperated sigh.

A "Metropolitan Diary" Entry You'll Never Read: The other day on a superpacked 6 pm 4 train speeding down from Grand Central, a 16-year-old slackjaw fiddled with a cell phone game that beeped wildly every five seconds or so. In the grin-and-bear-it category, for sure, until the train screeched to a halt that extended into 10 minutes. The rest of us stood silent, unwilling to honor our despair by commiserating about it. But the beeping, in contrast to that looming quiet, was intolerable.

I have an impolite habit of naming other people's impoliteness. LadyRosman, etiquette avenger at your service, whether you requested it or not. I'll yell at you for littering, for talking during a movie, for wearing your jeans slung too far below your panties. So I said something.

"Do you mind turning down the volume on your phone?"

The girl looked up, cowlike, mouth ajar. But the big woman on her left looked immediately alert, jaw jutting forward to compensate for her charge's slack.

"Why should she?"

"Because the beeping is so loud that it's irritating."

"Maybe you're the one who's irritating."

"I asked her politely and you've answered for her. Rudely."

"She aint' doin' nuthin. You the one who's irritating. You rude."

"Listen to yourself. You're setting a fine example."

Everyone else remained still. Even stiller.

By now the girl was staring into space blankly, the phone abandoned, either embarrassed or markedly attention-deficient. The big woman nudged her, hard, in the ribs, over and over until she started playing again. I started to laugh, more (admittedly) to irk them both than anything else.

"You're all irritating," someone else mumbled.

They had a point.

This just in: No social contract in New York City, not until spring makes her fine self known.
Possibly, no social contract in the United States until our finer selves have a place to shine.

I worry.

Geography Is (Manifest) Destiny: This New Yorker's Final Thoughts on Why LA Works

2005-03-15T08:57:00.000-05:00

It’s so easy to find personal drive in New York City. The lousy weather, the difficulties of everything from the acquisition of groceries to laundering your clothes to finding and financing shelter, mandates its presence. To get here, you must have some fire in your gut. To stay here, you must have some kind of play — a tight ass and the right way to shake it, a clever turn of phrase, a crazy ability to transform one dollar into 100, a Buddha-like equanimity that’s the exact antipode of the zombie glaze you’ll find shuffling through America’s malls. Unlike the bulk of this county’s denizens, we New Yorkers consistently choose stimulation over comfort. Unsequestered by cars and yards and social conformity, we opt to expose ourselves like a raw nerve to the wild elements of everyone else every morning just to fetch our coffee and morning paper.

A New Yorker’s bullshit, no doubt, and I’ll tell you why. Those of us here are hiding, albeit in a different way. We’re hiding from what we’d find should we be stripped of the crazy distractions of our daily lives. Living in a world so utterly fabricated, so utterly devoid of nature untamed, we can convince ourselves we are nature’s wildest, most powerful scions. We can be the peacocks unchallenged by the regular, humbling realities of big, unmitigated sky. It’s why New Yorkers are the most intricately festooned of all Americans. In the US, the more beautiful the natural environs, the drabber the garb of the local denizens: No one in New Mexico or Northern California or Colorado is particularly inclined to compete with the purple mountains and sunsets and jeweled layers of thick-limbed forest. Here in NYC we do not have the purple mountains — so we dress like them.

This is all my way of getting to how Los Angeles utterly confuses me. When I was graduating from college and was deciding where to move, somebody said to me, “If you’re smart but not ambitious, go to San Francisco. If you’re ambitious but not very smart, go to LA. And if you’re smart and ambitious, go to New York City.” Although I actually ended up coming here because I loved stoops and West Indian patties, it was a quote that resonated during my entire visit to LA this time. Not because it was necessarily true, but because I was trying to gauge its accuracy.

For if I and my friends spend most of our time and make the bulk of our money chewing on the culture of this country, then understanding the lair of the MGM lion is pretty much required. But what I find every time I’ve come here is that this city both hides from itself and exposes itself in an utterly different way than any of us Easterners, we who after all live a full continent away, can immediately or even slowly assimilate thoroughly. After all, as my friend Hopie always says confidently when we discuss the inescapable energy of New York, “It’s the rock.” And it’s true: NYC is perched on an unbelievably solid core of rock, so strong it can sustain all the skyscrapers and egos the city’s denizens continue to heap upon it. It’s enough to make you believe New Agers may have something when they tout the power of crystals, for you can feel it as soon as you enter the city limits. The crazy buzz roaring right below your overpriced trainers.

In LA, I’m convinced, it’s all about the desert, an element you don’t even find until you scurry west of the Mississippi. The desert humbles you, but it also casts you in a golden light that’s not a far cry from a halo. It is, after all, where Jesus threw himself with nary a crumb to eat when he had to access his more direct pipeline to God. I first saw the true desert only a few years ago, and what struck me was how absolutely alive it was, shimmering with a kind of extraterrestrial botany and beauty that would otherwise never survive on a continent like ours.

And hence what is called the City of Angels, perched on that extraterrestrial terrain. A long urban sprawl in which people frolic all day long in their playclothes (Juicy Sweats and Uggs), seemingly prepared at any moment to jump onto their geographic playgrounds, the canyons and forests and beaches woven into the city’s fabric like they were just another Fred Segal. Of course these people think they can build mountains; they scale them every day in between their manicuring appointments and their boardroom meetings in which they make and break a dozen careers before breakfast.

While in LA, I stayed in Venice, a flip-flop bungalow community tucked right next to the beach. Running on the boardwalk every day, I galloped next to the beach volleyballers; the homeless people with yoga mats tied neatly onto their carts; the expensively clad executives barking into a cell phone beneath their white baseball caps; and the red, heat-struck features of all the dwellers, be it from gall or merely too much sun. I grinned wildly at every face I passed, with that very Eastern elation at the good luck of a nice batch of weather. Mostly they stared blankly back at me, the sweaty girl wearing glasses and a gap-toothed smile. These bright, salt-kissed mornings were just another morning on the IRT to them. The only thing out of the ordinary was my overeager zeal.

Finally, one morning a homeless guy said to me very gently, “If you’re going to run outside all the time, honey, you should start wearing sunblock.”

He was right. I’m too tan now.

And then I kind of got it. If you want to measure up to all that wild living right outside your door, you’ve got to pace yourself. What we back East perceive as a blandness is more likely the Western take on steeliness, the equivalent of a deep breath before leaping into that big, unmitigated sky. Westerners face every day what we back East shrink from like little squinting moles: we hide from nature, but they believe they’ve conquered it, rainstorms and earthquakes and all. And with that kind of confidence, what’s to stop them from swaggering into all kinds of huge projects, ill-advised or not. What’s to stop them from Wizard of Oz, from Singin’ in the Rain, from Star Wars and (let’s face it) from the more-than-occasional Ishtar when they’ve already conquered the desert?

Perversely, the whole time I was in LA, I read books about the Hollywood Ten, the screenwriters blacklisted because of their Communist politics, and about the queasy marriage between politics and Hollywood during the ‘50s and ‘60s — namely Norma Barzman’s The Red and the Blacklist (chatty and glamorous, one of my new favorite Hollywood memoirs) and J. Hoberman’s tweedy, incredibly comprehensive The Dream Life. I’d thought when I slipped those books into my suitcase that I’d have a hard time locating where such subversion had thrived on those palm tree-lined boulevards, but I was wrong. And I was wrong to perceive it as subversion (though communists always have to keep it on the DL; the constitution goes but so far, apparently). People in LA talk about politics and ideas a surprising amount, albeit with a disregard for facts curiously reminiscent of our country's leader. Every time I opened up my books at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf or Peet’s Coffee and Tea, young and old wanted to talk about the city’s history and our country’s future. In New York, particularly post 9/11 and the recent election, most of us don’t even want to broach that subject, so the conversations refreshed me nearly as much as the sun did, even when I thought I was talking with people's asses rather than their heads. It's not that people were bland or dumb so much as they were unfettered, perhaps too much so.

Flying back to the billionth blizzard of the season, I thought about the two worlds. Laid bare to nature’s elements, I felt bigger emotions, felt more susceptible to the winds sweeping past me on every level. I knew I’d been a more open channel, momentarily undivided by the New York City grid. And I knew that, for better or worse, I was ready to step back amongst the peacocks. Let them create it all out there with their manifest destiny. We’ll wait back here, sharpening our teeth on cement so we're ready and able to chew on their big-as-dreams scenery.

Of Lemon Pies, Navy Mermaids and Bearded Eighth Grade Boys: Oscars 2005

2005-02-28T20:41:00.002-05:00

Ah, the Oscars. As boring as ever, and I love them anyway.

I’ve never been in LA for las festivities before, and around these here parts a somberness more aptly befitting an inauguration takes hold starting the Friday before. By early Sunday morning, the city vibrates with a queasy anticipation; by midday, the traffic, shite already, crawls to a stop and everyone dutifully straps on their skinny jeans and late-90s clunky shoes to settle into wherever they are going to howl for the rest of the gloriously sunny day. I watched it all with a bunch of LA-NYC girls who, like me, occupy the frayed edges of the fellavision bidness — most spectacularly my girl CC, who’s out here shooting a pilot with Our Celluloid Lady of the Cellophane Tetas Grandes (who shalt remain unnamed).

Here’s my breakdown, shallow as it ever was.

Red Carpet

Navy, a neutral color that’s both less weighty and more conservative than black, rules the roost as chief metaphor.

Girls and boys alike have slathered themselves in the stuff — the ladies mostly in long mermaid-shaped dresses that shape them not one but two sets of hips (one of which sits squarely around their calves). And why why why why all the dyed black hair? If the attendees ain’t sporting that bracing buttery blond, it’s an equally bracing dyed black. I wish some NYC (hell, BK) stylists had been flown into shake out the TV hostess-stiff from these tarred and feathered, some of whom looked so much nicer when I caught them in other contexts over the looooong-ass holiday er Oscar weekend. Overall fashion trends include bad bell-shaped earrings, chandelier necklaces draping too-fussy necklines, siblings.

Small-minded specifics:
-Mike Meyer either a. has received a bad chemical peel b. has fallen asleep while the sun lamp technician gave him the rub and tug c. discovered bulimia, Heathers style d. is going for Scientologist-style puffiness to resuscitate his Korea.
-Cate Blanchett miraculously pulls off dressing up like Million Dollar Baby’s lemon pie with real filling.
-Scarlett Johannsson transcends the lousy fizz of her bangs and Halle Berry the debacle of Catwoman and Benet to channel otherwise apparently blacklisted glamour. Scarlett especially looks like a little cloud of red-lipped confectionary sugar.
- Say it ain’t so, Joe, but la hermosa mexicana Salma Hayek looks dumpy dora in Elvira bangs and a Tracey Turnblad dress.
-In her draped jersey dress, Hilary Swank has literally manifested herself as an Oscar. All rise for the power of suggestion.
-The new Hollywood vampires, all tiny, pointy teeth and waxy white: Renée Zellweger, tight and wincy; Johnny Depp and his French mew of a bride; Kirsten Dunst, that jagged little pill.
-Estimable Laura Linney brandishing a L Word mullet that makes her curiously reminiscent of Frank Purdue.
-Drew Barrymore as a soap actress in her 40s trying to dress like the kids.
-Al Pacino as a soap actress in her 50s trying to dress like the kids.
-Penelope Cruz channeling Audrey .-It’s official: Melanie Griffith now wears a labia on her face.

Aw, shit; you get the picture.

Rock Rolls It Up

Maybe it’s all the advance buzz, but I swear I’ve been privy to the whole of Christ Rocket’s Oscar schiticky already on the new borscht belt. Ears sticking out, slim jim in his fine, nonpleather suit, he keeps laughing at his own jokes, Billy Crystal style. Our eyes are fluttering even before he gleefully shouts “All period pieces should star Russell Crowe.” That said, I cannot believe people are up in arms that he questions the star quality of those present. Principesas, all of them, because save for Rock’s man on the streets later on, this is one of the most unabashedly undemocratic ceremonies in recent memory. All the working stiffs who actually toil for their money — makeup artists, art department, etc. — are relegated to the carpet to fetch their awards. And bewigged, bejeweled Beyonce rocks lesser known artists’ nominated songs as she sways inanely side to side in three different oufits, each more improbable than the next.

Scrapes and bows to Rock for busting out the “Next they’ll be getting their awards in the parking lot” halfway through. Even more for contriving to land Martin Lawrence in this ceremony by any means possible and for the series of man-on-the-streets at the mostly black multiplex; nice to be reminded most of us don’t even ever see the shite and shinola that gets nominated.

It’s nice too that Georgieboy gets lowered a peg, (and for meek Hollycould to applaud the Angry Black Man’s sentiments) but I’d be even more into it if Rock would bellow, “My bush would make a better president.” Where’s The L Word when you need it? And why the vanilla invocation of the f word at the end? It seems even the mighty Chris Rock gets stymied when hosting the Oscars. The cheesy earnestness of it all subsumes even the most sardonic of comedians.

Dubious Awards

With no exception, everyone wins who everyone anticipates will win. The upside is that a. no one is tossed a compensation Oscar (as Annette Bening would’ve had she won) b. all the awards are deserved. I have to shake off the Oscar mania to remember that, except for Million Dollar Baby, none of the pictures nominated even land in my personal top ten.

Highlights of awards and presenters:

-Best Supporting Actor: Morgan Freeman is back to his Electric Company roots as the original '70s proud black man in his thick white brush cut, carved Indian cheekbones, gold hoops, African scarf. Nods judiciously after his clip and then bounds, unsurprised and o so pleased, when his best supporting actor award is announced. Short and sweet, his is a gracious speech, a harbinger of the night's speeches to come. At one point in the evening, when the camera flashes on him, he strokes his new boy suggestively and winks at the camera.

-I’m inclined to cut Robin Williams some slack because I’ve seen him the day before in a green pinstriped fedora and silver Adidas, graciously accomodating avid autograph hounds, but on stage he’s as much of a cokehead-without-the-coke as ever, zinging out the impressions that carefully tread the line. To wit: he does Scorsese in Shark Tale while Marty waggles his caterpillar brows helplessly beneath the big black glasses (that have apparently been passed the Philip Johnson torch). And always with the fake gay, Robin W. — Spongebob being his excuse this time. It occurs to me, when he dashes like a little Oscars leprechaun across the stage halfway through the ceremony, that he and Rock are experiencing a standup standoff of some kind. Eighth grade boys with their magic tricks, for sure.

-I forget that The Incredibles lives in my top five films of 2004 until it takes best animation. A feat, especially as Shrek 2 whupped its ass at the box office. The director looks like his animated characters, and his wife looks like the mom superhero. They say the imagination takes us but so far.

-With Scarlett hoisted into a balcony to announce the science/technology awards, it’s clear her girdle has been pulled so tight that she’s losing her circulation, causing one of her pudgy little arms to flop involunatarily like a dazzling beached jelly fish. With Natalie Portman parading as Padmé the whole night, the starlets formerly known as precocious seem to think “grownup” means “monotonic.” They’re so sophisticated!

-A quick rundown of what makes me happy about the “lesser” awards: that Born into Brothels beats the hubristic, character-driven Super Size Me; that Scorcese’s long-time editrex takes best editing (he weeps with the reality show hand flutter, so dear!); that pie-eyed Charlie Kaufman finally lands an award and backs away from the scene of the crime faster than you can say “my agent”;the cinematographer who devotes his award to his ailing mom and the hospital staff who've been attending to her.

-Best phrase of the night: “tabernacle of talent.”

-I have no idea that Counting Crows Adam wants to be Billy Joel until tonight. A bedreadlocked rube dressed like a Miami retiree is a thing to behold.

-I like, not love, Sidney Lumet, but I lovelovelove when he thanks the movies. I dare not question whether that is his mother, his daughter, or his nanny with the Hawaiian tittyfuckboobs. These are breasts that automatically reduce anyone foolish enough to attempt to describe them into an eighth grade boy.

-Other eighth grade boys: Alexander Payne (in a bad way), Charlie Kaufman, Jay Z (when he smiles). Add to this list, please.

-There is so much chemistry between copresenters Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayeck that I swear they are about to start making out. Speaking of which, I am now itching to switch over to episode 2 of The L Word.

-So pleasant for hamhock Pierce Brosnan to be helplessly overshadowed by a brassy-balled woman — and an animated one at that.

-Having seen Jamie Foxx deliver the exact same speech at the Golden Globes, his waterworks seem like they should land another Oscar of their own. Especially when, maybe not really realizing how close he's being shot, he stops mid-Grandma weep and glances up through his lashes to gauge how his show is landing. BURNT!

-Yo-Yo Ma’s accompaniment to the dearly departed is affecting without being affected. It’s ridiculous how many people chose this last year to go: Ossie Davis, Marlon Brando, Tony Randall, Christopher Reeve, to name just a few. I wonder if the changes this country is wreaking proved too much for them.

-Prince is a midget with long, lean legs and wondrous-wide Egyptian eyes. He is as hot as ever, smirking prettily and rolling his eyes in his patented Clara Bow homage when he messes up. He announces the nominations in a low-pitched, well-modulated tone that really says, “Lisa Rosman, I’ve been waiting to lick your pussy since you were 12 years old.” I knew it!!

-Check out puffy Sean Penn in his We’re No Angels haircut, clarifying who he-wuz-robbed (by Rock) Jude Law is. Ye Gods, who is writing this apologist drek?

-For the record, I’m so pleased that Hilary Swank takes best actress again. She accepts her award deliberately and clearly, with the same jaw-popping intensity with which she physically wrestles with the roles she (surprisingly selectively) chooses. I love Chad Lowe for so fully loving his wife as she shines more brightly in the sun. I truly hope their relationship is not a beard, because it ain’t a bad model for the strong straight girls.

The Morning After

A few liters of water and an Advil later, I’m still smarting over the undemocratic nature of the ceremony. It would’ve been lovely if Imelda Staunton, nominated for her performance as Vera Drake, could’ve taken best actress, because she certainly logged the finest moments in 2004 film. It would’ve been lovely if Julie Delpy, Richard Linklater, and Ethan Hawke’s valentine to growing up had scored a best adapted screenplay. But Hilary Swank was eminently deserving, and I suppose Sideways did shimmer with well-rendered dialogue, even if it lived but a step away from a buddy movie drinking Pinot rather than Bud.

And it was certainly the blackest Oscars I’ve ever seen, what with two black actors scoring Oscars, crazybird Chris Rock strutting about, and Jay-Z grinning maniacally at that lovely bird of his own, Miss I Dream of Jeannie and the billion-dollar deal, Beyonce. For sure it’s been amazing to hear everyone, and I mean everyone, discuss last night’s awards with the same rabidness that we discussed the 2000 elections back East.

Om shanthi indeed.

Dispatch from the Gold and Blacklisted

2005-02-28T10:58:00.000-05:00

Here I lounge, here I soar, here I write in what’s dubiously known as the city of angels. I snuck westerly in retreat from the NYC weather last Wednesday, landing just as the California skies sealed themselves once again against their own private maelstroms. Which is to say: I missed both states’ inclimate weather — LA's uncharacteristically crazy rain and the blizzards savaging people’s suede boots back East. Which is to say: I scored. It’s been watermelon juice and fish tacos for this girl (no euphemism intended) for going on five days, and I’m sorry, o broads of both the girl and boy persuasion, but it’s hard to skulk indoors typing when the ocean is whispering in your ear from right outside your door. That said, much has been observed and much will be scribed but firstly firstly firstly there is business at hand to discuss.

That is, Oscar folly to post here shortly.

Reality Gladiators in the Atrium of the USA (The Contender, Newlyweds)

2005-02-19T00:36:00.000-05:00

Here's a handy axiom: Reality shows are to television what stand-up comedy is to humor. Which is to say, the lowest of the low.

Until recently, I’d pretty much managed to steer clear of the entire genre. But Yancey is an enormous American Idol and America’s Next Top Model fan, and for my unnamed TV mag gig, I find myself writing about the genre all the time.

Officially I still hate all reality shows, and, truly, I do hate most of them. I never dug the Real Worlds or the myriad Bachelor mutations or any of big kahuna burger Mark Burnett’s pieces of nastiness. But my reasons are hardly lofty: I watch TV for escape, and ordinary people scrambling all over themselves hardly proffers much of a respite from mundanity. Plus, since the advent of reality programming, at least four pages of every issue of Us Weekly have been squandered on people who aren’t even nice to look at. Deeply ideological, profoundly well-developed objections, clearly.

So let me lay out my Bingo cards. Once, ostensibly for an article, I watched in one sitting the entire first season of Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica. I got a little hooked. Another axiom: reality show viewing is to human folly what rubbernecking is to car accidents. And another benchmark in my spiritual growth: self-esteem elevation through an observed superiority to youngsters so much more moneyed and famous and primped than myself.

I pitied Nick, subject to Jessica’s whining and wining while he determinedly went about everday tasks like moving his furniture himself, doing laundry, taming renegade bees. I snickered at Jessica, shuffling with the gait of a far fatter woman in those shitty Juicy sweats and platform flipflops that they never stop wearing in LA. I relished the couple’s palpable if unacknowledged discontent in the face of all received culture had told them they’d need and want (a DIY Ken doll boasting an earring and a paternalistic air; an apparently dim, blond big-breasted Barbie doll; photos of both of them sucking up to the Bushes). For days I hissed her patented “Gawwwwd” into my sister’s ear to both of our great amusement.

Strictly for clinical reasons, I then moved on to the entire first season of Ashlee Simpson in an MTV marathon — in order to synthesize the pathology of the whole family, naturally. Oh, the joyous ~~torching of the muse~~ recording of her first album, the great dyeing of the witchy witch tresses, the stamping of the foot at Big Daddy — he who's bragged about his daughter’s (now plastic) D cup and long-maintained virginity to all across the land. And the revelation that Ashlee's throat resembles to a remarkable degree a misogynist’s worse nightmare of a pussy. Bingo!

But there exists yet another axiom: reality shows are to the US what gladiators were to Rome. It’s an obvious one, but painfully, abundantly apt. This week, Najai Turpin, an eliminated participant on the soon-to-premiere boxing reality show The Contender, committed suicide. Producers Sly Stallone and Mark Burnett have denied hotly any links between Turpin’s suicide and his participation and elimination from the show, but commemorations to Turpin have already appeared on The Contender’s site and the producers have established that Turpin’s, er, story arc will be included in the limited series. Translation: No culpability accepted, but we’ll gladly incorporate this wasted human life into our show. Now that’s good television.

I genuinely feel both sick and ashamed about Turpin’s death and how it has been seized upon. His demise is such a logical extension of the reality show format — personal humiliation on a grand scale, high drama screeching at (literally) life-and-death levels, rubbernecking at its most unforgivable — that we are all to blame. Boxing is a self-negating, bloodthirsty debacle that eclipses even how football caters to the human animal’s most sadistic and masochistic impulses. Exposing the personal protracted humiliations intrinsic to the sport in a reality format practically ensures a fatality or nearly fatal accident of some sort. So matter-of-factly airing Turpin's suicide as part of the show's storyline smacks of the same opportunistic “objectivity” mainstream journalists increasingly cower behind.

A man has died, perhaps not directly as a result of the TV show he was eliminated from, but certainly in a way that will be offered for public consumption. Most will reexperience it idly from the comfort of the same couches where we pass judgement on thousands of others' lives, too. Can you imagine how his friends and family will feel when Turpin's death airs as a footnote to a crap televised competition? The humane response would be to donate the show’s profits to them, but that’s a bit much to expect from a country as aggressively capitalistic as our own. Short of that, perhaps we should all reevaluate what it is that we’ve really been watching. The truest sign of an empire’s decline may be its members’ inurement to the humanity of others. So here we are. Gladiators and their listless, glassy-eyed public, reporting for death.

In Other L Words (This Lady Says It Better)

2005-02-18T13:46:00.000-05:00

This Sunday heralds the dawning of The L Word's Season 2, and we lesbots and admirers are ready with astroglide, arcane adjectives beginning with "L," organic brown Mexican rice, and beer. A Slate piece by Ariel Levy spells out nice and easy just why the show is worth its sea salt. It also takes (another) peek at what cues it takes from Sex and the City.

Of course Levy touches on that postfeminist old saw: that it's OK that The L Word cast is comprised of mostly slick-rick lesbianicas with nary a mullet amongst them, because the girls singlehandedly dispense with lesbian bed-death through dental-dam sexual positivity. (Haven't dykes been compensating for the grim same-sex-by-default politico since at least the early '90s? And, at that, has anyone actually used a dental dam since the early '90s? Please advise.) But she's dead on when she writes that this may be the first TV show to make straight broads feel we merely lack the ingenuity to be gay; to make dyke life seem downright more glamorous. On L Word, the best slumber party of your girlhood never ends. It just ambles, sure-footed, to its natural conclusion — and lingers there. Hotness.

Cottonpicking American Apparel

2005-02-14T18:00:00.000-05:00

Back in the '90s, I worked at what was then called the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union. (These days, having gone the way of all unions, it's collapsed with Amalgamated Textile Workers' Union to become UNITE.) It was a smash-up first job, overall. Not only did I meet friend-for-life Amy and shake Bill Clinton's pretty hand, but I was able to say at the end of most days that I'd done something, however indirectly, to improve rather than further complicate the lives of a great deal of immigrant women.

One funny result of working there, however, was that I really did feel compelled to look for the union label. Even back then it was proving increasingly elusive. Truth told, it was impossible to spend all day scribing angry propaganda against Nike or the Gap, and then slap on a pair of swooshy trainers produced by sweatshop workers earning 2 cents a day. Shopping was a nightmare: For years, I could only either buy clothing at stores like Benetton, as I knew the Italians to be too prickly to use anything but organized labor, or fool helplessly with the sewing machine my grandmother left me. Over the years, as I befriended more and more Brooklyn and downtown girly designers, I started to look the other way when it came to pinpointing who exactly manufactured their too-cute-for-school gear. Only when the D train crossing the Manhattan bridge afforded me a fullscreen glimpse of the Chinatown sweatshops did I confront the women toiling at least in part on the little shifts my friends and I were sporting.

Which is why I've been clinging to American Apparel like an ideological life preserver. Sure, Dov Charney, the mustached man behind the screen, has proved himself (in the slick pages of feminist-lite mag Jane, no less) to be a chronic public masturmabator and all-round abject objectifier (in a bad way). But the ropa is clever, accessible, simple cotton, eminently affordable, and sweatshop-free. Facts impressive enough so that a church-state separation has seemed warranted in the case of Feminism Vs. Labor Politics.

A Behind the Label release, however, suggests that as usual the separation ain't possible. Dirty sexual politics and dirty labor practices is in fact the real name of the game. O ye wearing the sweet hoodies, polo shirts, and sexy camp counselor shorts, I must announce that Charney is as ugly an owner as he is a sexual prospect. Ugly, of course, in the most of spiritual of senses. What to do? Maybe we should start growing cotton ourselves.

THE FUCK FEBRUARY (DIRTY) LAUNDRY LIST/ HAPPY M-F VALENTINE'S DAY

2005-02-11T08:14:00.000-05:00

To cheer myself up, to wrest myself from February's insidious grasp, herein lies a list. It is doggedly linkless, so consider yourself forewarned.

Word I Cannot Stop Using: Douchebag.

Favorite Misapplied Acronym: FTM.

Actresses I Wish to See More: Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Helen Mirren, Juliet Stevenson, Alfre Woodard, Regina King, Holly Hunter, Valerie Harper, Judy Davis.

Actors I Wish to See More: Donald Sutherland, Alan Arkin, Alan Alda, Tom Wilkinson; John Goodman, John Turturro, Charles Dutton, Pablo Schreiber (dang, the whole bleeping cast of The Wire).

DVDs I Cannot Stop Watching: All That Jazz; Singin’ in the Rain, the greatest metamovie ever made; Love Jones; The L Word Season 1.

TV Crying Shames: That Arrested Development has for all practical purposes been cancelled; that network TRIO is on life support since parting ways with DirecTV; that The Wire may get cancelled; that Desperate Housewives won't; that there aren't enough Prime Suspects.

Favorite Bad TV: Gilmore Girls.

Season 2 I Am Desperately Awaiting: The L Word. February 20!

Best 2004 Movie that Got Shanked by the Critics: Spanglish.

Worst 2004 Movie That Got Stroked by the Critics: Sideways — and who cares if A.O. Scott said it first? ‘Tis true, ain’t it?

2004 Movie I Will Not Forgive You for Disliking: I Heart Huckabees. Runners-up: Eternal Sunshine of the Mind, Before Sunset, Vera Drake.

Maybe They Should Stop Already: Wes Anderson, Jane Campion.

What Made Me Excited about Film Again: Last Life in the Universe.

Show That Made Me Stop Hating Going to Shows: M.I.A. at Knitting Factory last Saturday night. Even though Knitting Factory sucks, even though I could barely move to dance, even though for all practical purposes I could not take a piss, even though I currently dislike all boys who wear Seven jeans, even though I currently dislike all girls wearing bangs and a frown who only dance to look sexy to men, even though I felt old as the hills, it was still exciting to be that close to someone who is going to be a huge star in 20 minutes and actually bloody deserves it. I’d forgotten.

What Made Me See The Point of New(ish) White Music Again: Blonde Redhead, The Strokes, Karen O, Matthew Dear, The Blood Brothers (I've come around), DFA remixes.

Favorite Radio Station in a NYC Heartbeat: Hot 97.

Music That Will Always Make Me Dance Unless You Cut Off Me Legs and Then I Will Dance on My Arms Delightfully: All James Brown, cliches be damned (from here on in); Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me"; Etta James' "In the Basement"; DFA remix of Le Tigre's "Deceptatacon"; Hammer's "Can't Touch This"; Rolling Stones' "Little T and A"; Britney Spears' "Toxic"; almost the entirety of Michael Jackson's Thriller and Off the Wall; Little Richard's "Jennie, Jennie"; Madonna's "Get Into the Groove" — and every fast song on the Immaculate Collection; "Rapper's Delight"; pretty much anything by Booker T and the MGs; Beyonce's "Work It Out"; all things Fannypack; black marching bands; Andre Williams's "Jailbait"; LL Cool J's "Around the Way Girl"; Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back"; and for sure Marvin Gaye's "Got To Give It Up". For stahtahs.

Singer Who Needs to Stop Smoking So Much Reefer and Record Already: Kate Bush, to remind everyone who was the original dreamy dream girl.

Singer Who Most Needs to Quit Smoking Period: Aretha Franklin. Runner-ups: Joni Mitchell, Yancey Strickler.

Singer Who Needs To Be At the Foot of the Bed While I Have Sex: Al Green, Blossom Dearie, Stevie Wonder.

Singer Who Needs To Be in My Bed While I Have Sex: Prince. I've been inviting him since I was 12, for heaven's sake.

Singer Who Needs To Stay Far Away From My Bed If I'm Ever Going to Orgasm Even Though I Like Her: Bjork.

Singers Who Need to Be Alive: Nina Simone, Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke (so he could record something in the studio more closely approximating his live performances).

I Just Love Her: Etta James, Nico, Mary J. Blige, Bonnie Raitt (but her early stuff is mucho better), Aretha Franklin, Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams, Carla Thomas, Dolly Parton.

Favorite Author who Needs to Come Back to Life to Make Me Dinner (her first order of business, naturally): MFK Fisher.

Favorite Living Author Who Needs to Publish More Already (and get back into print): Eve Babitz.

Most Surpisingly Wonderful Book I Read Recently: What I Loved by Siri Hustevdt.

Authors as Spiritual Mommies: The snappish, dual-continent ladies whose careers and lives spanned the 20th century and who discreetly wrote, lived, ate, and fucked exactly as they wished. May Sarton, MFK Fisher, The Mitford Sisters, Madeline L'Engle — to name just a few.

Short Story Authors who Make Me Remember Why I Used to Like Short Stories: Ellen Gilchrist, Amy Bloom, Alice Motherfucking Munroe.

Best Book I Keep Putting Off Reading: Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

Books I Now Accept I Will Never Finish: Middlemarch by George Eliot, 60 Stories by Donald Barthelme, Finnegan’s Wake. Obviously.

Book I Won’t Finish Until I’m 40: Anything by Proust.

Author I Will Never Like So Stop Asking Already: Don DeLillo, except for the first chapter of Underworld, which really may be perfect. Runner-up: Lorrie Moore.

The Only Remaining Author I Wish Were My Friend: Mostly I've learned it's best to admire your favorite authors from afar, but Edmund White is very endearing in person.

Favorite Literary Form: Collections of letters.

What I Miss Most About ‘90s NYC: Brooklyn. Union Square. Cheap yoga classes. Drag queens. Cheap designers on Ludlow Street. Independent bookstores. The (crappy) movie theater on Greenwich Avenue. The two-dollar theater. Clit Club (highlarious).

What I Love Most About NYC Right Now: Atlantic Avenue grocery stores. Astoria restaurants. Wireless everywhere. Diner brunches. That we can call Jon Stewart our own. Cheap designers in Williamsburg. The Landmark Theater on Houston. Brooklyn Writers' Space. The new Battery Park. Museum of the City of New York. The new dykes. Segregated dog runs. Al Sharpton.

Favorite Era of NYC: Early '50s.

Favorite Era of the '60s: Early '50s.

What Will Always Rule My School: Walking through an early NYC morning.

American City I Still Harbor Fantasies about Moving to: New Orleans (outskirts), Los Angeles (yes).

Living Friends I Miss Most: Umbe "The Creature" Consiglio, Michael Anderson.

Passed-on Friends I Miss Most: Nat Rosman, Alice May Edney.

Two Friends I Cannot Go a Week Without: Jocelyn K. Glei and Mary E. Murray.

Found Family: Yancey George, Max-a-million, Ruby Lynn — and my family of origin.

What I Cannot Lose: The 10 pounds I gained when I fell in love.

What I Cannot Find: The desire to be 25 again.

Gag Me with a Silver Spoon (Inside Deep Throat)

2005-02-09T16:36:00.000-05:00

I've been trying to resist adding my two cents to the general hoopla about Inside Deep Throat. Like the blue movie that is its subject, the doc simply is not compelling in the slightest, and even its prurience doesn't excuse half the attention that it has quickly generated. (Disclosure: I fell asleep — twice — during the seemingly endless screening).

But I can keep mum no longer. Apparently it's been too long since feminists fell into the rabbit hole that is the Porn Debate. This film has created an excuse to once again ignite that classically polarizing, highly distracting fire and brimstone, catapulting humorectomized if well-intentioned feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon and enough-already First Amendment-upholding attorney Alan Dershoshits (sic, sic) into the spotlight, along with other increasingly irrelevantes (Erica Jong and her zipless fuck, anyone?). In a New York Times piece, the two pencil-pushers (pun intended, and can you blame me?) are reported to have held forth in a panel following the premiere, though they also acknowledged they'd not seen the dirtypic itself. Now that's funny.

Bottom line: People will always look at dirty pictures, and both men and women will always make them because they generate income. Supply-and-demand, baby. As a feminist, it's embarrassing to even have to field the porn question. My great-grandmother ran a brothel, for Christ's sake, so I know that people will always pay for sex in all shapes and forms. Why waste time whining about that shite when second-wave feminism's tenets (equal wages, abortion rights, to name just two) actually have a shot in hell of getting accomplished? (I know I am being very optimistic in stating this, given our neo-con 's "advances," detailed so thoroughly by the feministing goils.)

Yes, in the decades following Deep Throat's release, Linda Lovelace came forward, her grubby hands held tight by key members of the Official Feminist Movement (Gloria Seinem et al.) as she recounted the horrors inflicted upon her off- and on-set during the making of the movie. And, yes, I don't doubt her. Not exactly, anyway. But some questions always have surfaced for me, ones that I have to say out loud even though I fear sounding reactionary: Was there absolutely no moment when Lovelace couldn't have evaded her "captors" had she set her sights on doing so? And if the experience was as scarring as she has claimed it was, why did she return to the industry in the last years of her life?

The obvious answer is that she was broke, and that it was hard for her to land work in any straight industry after making her name swallowing so many inches of cock on celluloid. Lovelace's story speaks to the many shades of gray that comprise this seemingly black-and-white issue. Women may mostly go into the industry, more often than not, for cash, but what happens to them once they do is often probably more than they anticipated. Mary, my great-grandmother, was by all accounts enormously sour by the time she died. She also was a Polish immigrant who arrived in this country penniless and died a wealthy woman. There are few other industries in which a midcentury, indigent immigrant single mother could've achieved the same. Solving women's economic problems would probably be a more productive issue for all the porn-obsessed to focus upon.

What's complicated about Lovelace's story in particular is that she has always emerged as a woman born to be a victim: as fairly dim; as easily led, whether it be by porn filmmakers or the feminists (Gloria Steinem spoke for her as blatantly as did the boys in the doc's footage); as a tabula rasa upon which various pundits and social movements of the 70s scribbled their name. Finally, she seems to have become a victim of this bad movie, which isn't about any of the myriad cultural hotbuttons wired to Deep Throat, although it purports to be. Really, Inside Deep Throat is just another movie glorifying and rationalizing the '60s-'70s as a lost utopia. The arc of all these documentaries is always the same: Details the humble beginnings of a particular movement, its heyday, and then its inevitable fall from Eden.

As a younger girl, I bought into these tastemakers' propoganda, but these days I can't help but perceive those times as a natural harbinger of the detritus that we're living today. Yes, many people then lived with ideals that have faded from our country's blueprints. But many more were hedonists, opportunists, mere dullards. That said, let's face it: To suggest that Deep Throat harkens back to an era of true art, a golden era in which porn was more about social radicalism and art than the pneumatic plastic titty and dick factory that it is today, takes the mommyfucking cake. Rich, darling, it is so very, very rich.

Notes from a Broken Broad

2005-02-07T01:26:00.000-05:00

I slipped a disc in my neck a week and a half ago and have been at best half mast since then. Slowly, slowly I am creeping back to a vaguely human state but in the interim wanted to peep that I am still alive. Peep. To soothe this savage beast there has been a great deal of L Word viewing (con Jostle and co.) and an almost complete inhalation of The Wire, Season 2 (con Yancey, naturally). Two episodes remain, and then I will be willing to more thoroughly chime in my praises on what is surely the finest show on fellavision (boy-friendly TV). Hell, TV in general. The show is seemingly impenetrable, distinctly unglamorous and typically visually unimpressive. It is also the single greatest explication of power theory ever to make it to the small screen. Michael Moore: If only.

Also I will write a real review of it later this week, but if you live in a city where The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is screening, go see it immediately. (I believe it’s just LA, SF and NY right now, in keeping with the ever-narrowing nation-wide release). The film is small-scale; is, improbably enough, about birds; and caused me to cry for a full hour after I saw it. To contextualize said tears, I only cried for about two minutes after Million Dollar Baby. Which, for the record, I hope sweeps la Oscars. It was, well, the way Eastwood looks these days — steely, taut, full of heart.

More gator, later.

Tomato, Tomawto (Oscars and Razzies)

2005-01-25T13:10:00.000-05:00

I’ve still been basking in a lack of Utah snow, merely ogling Sundanceteria from afar while supercats Max and Ruby ravage their new scatching post (it's all about the catnip). So I got to catch the nominations for the Oscars and the Razzies, both announced today in a crafty conjunction. There was less overlap than I’d hoped.

Yes, I am completely over the pretense that I don’t follow award shows, as I have been for years. I shouldn’t even be shocked anymore that a host of films I genuinely liked landed on the Academy’s radar: Before Sunset for best adapted screenplay (what could Delpy, Hawke and Linklater have adapted that from, besides their own pretty navels?); Eternal Sunshine for best original screenplay; Born into Brothels for best doc; even the growing-up-is-hard-to-do The Incredibles got a nod. The lack of nods for both The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 was a stone-cold relief; I don’t want to think about either nastily rendered polemic for a while yet. And I was more startled than distraught that lil sadsack Paul Giamatti got passed over in lieu of Clint Eastwood's chiseled jaw. Here's to more madness for the baseball commissioner's son's method (acting). The only oversight that bummed me out was the compleat Huckabees shutout.

In fact, except for Finding Neverland, none of the nominations made me bristle. Another sign of the Rosman Middle Ages, no doubt. Or maybe it’s just another sign that, although our world couldn’t be more wildly botched at this moment, cinema trots along, just getting better and better. Plus: I’m still trying to sort out if there’s ever been another year when two black actors were nominated for best actor. I don't think so. I do wish that the Oscars followed the Globes' lead, though, and had separate categories for comedy and drama. I think The Incredibles might've been the wryest, most intact endeavor of the year.

As for the Razzies, mama likes as usual. J'agree with New Yorker critic David Denby that Ben Stiller heralds a new era of nonthreatening mediocrity, and that only seeing cosmic nightmare White Girls with my parents BernieSari could've made it worse. (I know that for a fact.) Oh, and George Bush II should most definitely get a Razzie. Or at least an Oscar. Like Oscar winner Nicolas Cage, he’s made a career out of making bad acting seem good.

Manohla Testifies, and So Do I (Apparently)

2005-01-23T11:54:00.000-05:00

Not to post another link in lieu of a review, but in today's Times, critic Manohla Dargis pens an eminently worthy article about plastic surgery and its deleterious effect on, get this, the quality of acting in Hollywood. She even mentions Julie Salamon's book, whose praises Yancey and I could not stop singing. Best: She goes after Melanie Griffith's mid-movie boob job, calling it a "passive-aggressive" response to Bonfire-set complaints about how her decrepit ole age of 33(!) was showing.

Clearly I'm particularly obsessed with this topic because it's no longer theoretical to me. At 34, even if you're good looking, those good looks either start sliding into the cultural category of impressive rather than pretty, or you get a lot of the classic "you don't look your age!" What about looking your age, and looking damn good?

We women are so hoodwinked already. Even smart-as-a-whip either-coast women start coloring the minute the gray shows up — lordy knows I be no exception, even though it cracks my shit up that apparently there are no grey-haired women in all of Manhattan and Brooklyn under 75. Over the last decade, most women have started waxing their pubes to previously unimaginable degrees. And we just keep willing ourselves thinner and thinner. Even when we get knocked up, everyone's cock-eyed scared of gaining an extra pound. Fine, fine. Although for myself on that one, I'm not so convinced. I was rail-thin in my 20s, but I also was afraid of food, not to mention my own shadow; mean and hungry; and weak as Southern coffee. These days, I have more meat on my bones, but I also have the breasts (finally) and can do 30 push-ups in one fell swoop and run five miles. Anyone who tosses me shit these days should know I can toss it back funnier and fiercer, kick his ass and then outrun him should he ever recover his wind.

At a bridal shower last spring, a dermotologist acquaintance who was a couple sheets to the wind grabbed my arm, and told me she'd inject botox in the furrow between my eyes at cost as a gift. She's a sweet, lively girl, no joke, and I know that she intended no ill-will whatsoever. But I was completely floored nonetheless. Before she'd said that, I'd just assumed her own baby-ass complexion was a result of clean living and republican politics (ie no soul searching). After that, I read her good looks as a cheat. I was humiliated that she thought I needed to iron my face, but then got all steely about it, and here's what I came up with: My face will stay my face. If I want to keep looking good, it's going to have to be because I am living a clear, good life that I can wear proudly on my sleeve, and, yes, my features. I want to be the kind of woman who looks better at 80 than 20 because I'm both acute and kind. I want to be a moving picture, not a painting. I want to step out of this capitalism-borne mishegos and stop fearing each encroaching year as the enemy that must be toppled with modern science, a trainer and a board-certified Dr. Feelgood (costly tools that only sharpen the divide between well-off women and the rest; that only further conflate money with an ideal).

If it seems nuts that I am having to avow I will avoid plastic surgery, maybe you're young, or maybe you're just bullshitting yourself. Ladies and the men who attend to us, I have seen the future, and it's all about deleting every storyline and character development out of that novel called your face if you can afford it. I say we learn for real how to look more carefully at ourselves and each other, at each and every light that comprise our whole being — as Free to Be as it sounds. Because we Western gals left foot-binding in the dust a long, long time ago — when we started injecting ass fat in our faces, to be precise — and the buck, as handsome and compelling as he may be, must stop somewhere. Right? Oh, dear, I certainly hope right.

Amends

2005-01-20T17:15:00.001-05:00

Perhaps to atone for my bad Sundance attitude, herein lies a why-come for said festival.

Barney as Dirge

2005-01-20T11:55:00.000-05:00

Scene for a horror film I'll never write:

Today in my office building, the magazine American Baby is holding yet another one of their misbegotten open calls for las cute chitlins. There's nothing more depressing than happening upon an Upper East Side mother, collagen lips trembling (if botoxed forehead standing firm), bellowing at a weeping two-year-old when you duck into the ladies'. And on the elevator coming up from fetching the Egg Sandwich (capitalization mandatory), I got stuck with a very solemn woman, her tiny wide mom, and her tiny, wide baby girl, barely old enough to waddle. The mom was pushing a baby carriage that held not another baby but a boom box blasting Barney songs, to which the child swayed with a blank expression. Terrifying.

Now I'm a Curmudgeon (Sundance, Medium)

2005-01-19T16:56:00.000-05:00

Some notes.

I am not going to Sundance. Although I was extended a fairly vague invitation via flavorpill, I couldn't imagine traveling this time of year to a place colder and snowier than where I currently hang my ski mask. This kind of attitude, for sure, is what hinders me professionally. But here's my admittedly lame-ass rationalization: If the movie's good enough, it'll land distribution and I'll see a screener of it in New York. Sure, I'll miss being one of the advance-buzzing bees, but the crazy commodification of the festival, the jockeying for everything from hotels to parties to screenings? This, this I will not miss. Yes, I am Yiddish now. (Not Jewish. Yiddish.)

To be filed under the heading Network TV Still Sucks: Medium. Being fascinated by all things supernatural, not to mention Patricia Arquette's sweet little self (body), I actually sat down and watched said show. It's rare these days that a network TV series bears watching, and this one is no exception. (Current exceptions off the top of my head: Arrested Development, Law and Order, The Simpsons, though I never watch it anymore). Tuning in this week, I was encouraged by the first scene: a Beverly Hills shrink-style ghost encouraging two young lovers to kill themselves. Awesome. But the rest of the scenes suffered from the same malaise that plagues most offerings: It spells everything out to a mad degree. As Allison, Patricia Arquette's character, sparred with a skeptical detective, the dialogue wasn't merely cliched; it was overbooked with cliches. Synonymous cliches. As for the running subplot, in which Allison's husband (Jake Weber, so endearing in Dawn of the Dead), labored to surprise his psychic wife for her birthday, well, you didn't need to be psychic to see the twists and turns of that one. Hell, you could see it just from what I wrote. David Mamet this is not. And typically that would be a selling point!

I bother to take this show down because it speaks to a larger problem. Network TV doesn't trust its viewers. Even when really wonderful actors join a cast, it typically fails. Why? Because these shows are not cleverly written. Because the plot contrivances are painfully clunky. Because jokes don't flow naturally from storylines, and yet they're told over and over. Because the dramas strain rather than naturally spool out. Because the characters fail to acquire three dimensions, let alone the nuances that we've come to expect from cable series, especially HBO's. Typically, even when a network show features a big film star, it flails. People may spend two hours at a multiplex to watch someone they like looking at, but they're not going to weekly arrange their schedule around a program that insults their intelligence without even providing amusement. Very few network TV shows even benefit from DVD release, because without the commercials ensuring the handy seven-minute contrasts, the shows' choppiness makes for nearly intolerable viewing. So what? Apparently unless you're wealthy enough to pay for television, you're not smart enough to enjoy a show that doesn't spell its own name wrong. Or at least the sponsors must think so. Sponsors, networks: potato, potawto.

Also I am a curmudgeon because today I officially turned 34. That is to say: old.