Devil, Thy Name Is iTunes

So, being the obsessive fan that I am, I read on the Rufus Wainwright web site that there would be an exclusive sample from Want Two available on iTunes today. Upon the sound advice of a very wise, tech-savvy, logical, and convincing friend, I decided that, seeing as how I have no computer and no iPod of my own, the only reasonable thing to do would be to install the program on Giddy's computer while she's still out of town, buy the music, and then burn it onto a blank CD, right? That's what I thought.

After a long, grueling evening of laundry, I settle down at what passes for our kitchen table, fire up the old browser, download the program onto the laptop, spend about $25 on Franz Ferdinand, Jason Falkner's Necessity: The 4-Track Years, and The Bens EP. But where's Rufus? I was convinced I was using the search function incorrectly. It finally dawned on me to check out his web site to make sure that I'd read the date right, etc. Well, of course, there's been some technical difficulties getting the songs on to iTunes and they're not yet available for download.

**sigh**

So, here I am, $25 lighter, with three burned disks sitting at my left elbow, mocking me ever so quietly for how easily I am seduced in the face of new music. I was planning on being seduced by a tall, crooning gay man this evening, but instead I'm going to bed with an Archduke, a Jellyfish, and three guys named Ben.

Choose Yer Poison

GH: You know what I'm fantasizing about right now?

AF: Alcohol and a foot massage?

GH: Oatmeal raisin cookies.

AF: (beat) Me too. That's what I was gonna say.

Je Regrette!

This, from Nora Rocket.

MD

Can we please talk about the hotness that is Martin Donovan?

Mostly, I'm doing this just to be a little squirrely and annoy Giddy, but there is the part of me that's perfectly OK with the fact that, in spite of the considerable amount of jailbait hotness in Saved!, I was all, "mmm . . . Pastor Skip . . ."

Napoleon Dynamite

If the Pitchman were still living with me, I imagine we would have had a conversation this afternoon that would have sounded a little something like this:

Me: So, I went to see Napoleon Dynamite today.
Pitchman: Best movie ever?
Me: Best movie ever.

I'm actually surprised by how much I genuinely enjoyed it because I think, in years past, I might have taken exception to the way it treated its geeky characters. But, I felt like there really was a genuine affection in the way Napoleon, Pedro, Deb, Kip, and even Uncle Rico were portrayed. I think the scene at the dance was probably the most effective (and affecting), especially with the use of Alphaville's "Forever Young." The repetition of the line "don't you want to be forever young" played over one of the most archetypal scenes of high school horror really nailed the movie's affectionate slap on the wrists to those who romanticize their high school years. No, I don't want to be forever young, because that means there'd be no escaping situations like that. I couldn't help thinking throughout the movie of the line from Donnie Darko when Donnie grabs Cherita by the shoulders, looks her square in the face, and says, "I promise that one day everything's going to be better for you." I feel like that's what the whole movie was trying to tell the characters.

Best dialogue

Napoleon: (gingerly touching Deb's party dress) I like your sleeves. They're big.
Deb: Thanks. I made them myself.

Best scene

When Napoleon asks the big man on campus for a "Vote for Summer" button, regards it calmly for a moment, then hurls it down the hallway in defiance and runs away.

(However, the publicity shots they've got associated with the film at the IMDB are hilarious because you can tell all the actors are actively trying to look super-cool and hipstery so as to dissociate themselves from any potential geekerific typecasting in the future.)

Dans Ma Peu (In My Skin)

Grappling at the moment with the fact that I just finished watching Marina de Van's In My Skin, a film recommended by a friend who knows of my weakness for flashy/trashy contemporary French film. He described it to me as seeming like it was made "maybe if Cronenberg were French, and a woman." Which means, fun with body parts!

I'm not the most overly squeamish person on earth, well, at least when it comes to watching disturbing movies. I'm willing to put up with a lot. And I would have been willing to put up with all the lead character's self-mutilation if I felt like it added up to anything. This movie makes for an interesting companion piece to Demonlover, which I watched last week, in that they're two highly disturbing looks into what it means to be a powerful contemporary working woman. (In her dispatch from the Melbourne International Film Festival last year, Michelle Carey speaks of the two films almost in the same breath at Senses of Cinema online.) And the outlook is pretty depressing. Seems like being insanely attractive, professionally successful, sexually confident, and financially secure is a one-way ticket to self-destruction, both emotionally and physically. Of course, there's something to be said about the way these films are trying to tap into the existential despair that often comes with the modern world's perception of "having it all," the feeling that there's still something missing and that perhaps the only way to assuage the sense of guilt over feeling so empty is to embrace utter annihilation.

Watching In My Skin, I found myself wishing the movie would just end already, not because I was grossed out, but just because I was bored with the fairly one-dimensional characters and constricted storyline. But. At the same time, it was making a whole lot of emotional sense. There were a few moments (when she leaves her business dinner and escapes to a hotel across the street to be alone with herself; when she looks directly into the camera near the end of the film, covered in blood, but one tear trickles down her cheek) that were shockingly powerful in the way they resonated with me in some completely unexpected ways. "Yeah, I get what that's about. That's a really weird way of literalizing that vague emotion, but I know I've certainly felt that way before." I mean, I'm pretty notorious for changing my hair cut or color when I'm depressed or angry about something, and there are often times I wash my face or brush my teeth a little too vigorously or cut my fingernails a little too short in an effort to push back some untidy emotions that I haven't been able to process. These admissions sound almost comically innocuous in comparison with the really intense stuff going on in this film (and the really intense stuff I know people sometimes feel compelled to do to themselves in real life), but I'm just saying that I see what de Van was after in the construction of this character and the trajectory of the narrative. But--and I know this sounds weird to say of a film that's so over the top in its graphic depictions of body horror--it didn't go far enough. It didn't go beyond a kind of pat theme of "we walk around life so numb, we have to do anything to make ourselves feel; when we're not being affirmed by the co-workers, lovers, friends in our lives the way we want them to affirm us, we have to create a relationship with our own physical selves to soothe that ache." Yeah, that's true. But so what?

The movie snapped into a bit better focus for me after I started reading some reviews and discovered that de Van is a frequent collaborator with Francois Ozon. I've only ever seen Swimming Pool (which she didn't have a hand in), but based on my memory of that film and the little I've read about the rest of his oeuvre, I better understood the aesthetic she was working with here. There's this perverse glorification of the spectrums of female weakness (the polar opposites of sexuality in Swimming Pool, being an intellectual powerhouse possessed of a literally crumbling body in In My Skin) that I find myself kind of bored with. And maybe I'm being overly simplistic in my interpretation of these films here, but eh. I respond to what I respond to.

The most enjoyable aspect of the movie for me by far was the music. Apparently much of the soundtrack came from a Swedish trio called E.S.T. (Esbjorn Svensson Trio), which felt immediately reminiscent of the stuff Brad Mehldau does with his amazing jazz piano covers of Radiohead tunes. The root menu of the DVD loops a section of the song "Serenade for the Renegade" off the album Strange Place for Snow. It's sexy and hypnotic and icy and solipsistic. And, forgive me for speaking in film reviewer-ese here, but that's the perfect sound for what In My Skin so clearly wanted to be.

Zombies Attack!

What's with all the zombie comedy all of a sudden? Not that I'm complaining, mind you . . .

Bush/Zombie Reagan '04

Zombies and Fantasy Sports Leagues

Zombie Foot

Forgive Me for Actually Calling It a Genre*

I am absolutely fascinated by the art and science of movie previews. This is an enjoyably informative glimpse into one tiny corner of the genre.

*(Or an art, or a science.)

Glockenspiel

Glockenspiel.
Noun, c 1834
Etymology: German, from "Glocke" (bell) + "Spiel" (play)
a percussion instrument consisting of a series of graduated metal bars tuned to the chromatic scale and played with two hammers

A good word to say and a good sound to hear on Radiohead albums.

A Beautiful Mind, Indeed

I'm working on a book at the moment that humorously analyzes the differences between movies based on actual events and the actuality of those actual events. The first entry is on A Beautiful Mind, and I was fact-checking the specific name of the specific theory that Nash won his Nobel for. (According to the site, he and the two other economists won for "their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games.") But, the thing that really knocked me out was Nash's autobiography.

I'm Willing to Reach Out, Get Into Your Head

Guided By Voices' "Surgical Focus" is my new favorite song right now. Thanks, Chris, for letting me burn Human Amusement at Hourly Rates! (Rather, I should say, thanks, Giddy, for stealing Human Amusement at Hourly Rates when he moved out, hiding it in your CD case, and then letting me burn it when you felt guilty about not telling him that you had a whole stockpile of disks you intended to burn but haven't yet.)

Demonlover

Finally got around to watching my Netflix rental of Olivier Assayas's Demonlover last night. Aside from the fact that I, once again, felt the need to wait until the roommates were out to indulge in a night of weird DVD viewing (this time around my ghettoized genre of choice was French cyberporn), I enjoyed the crap out of it--without exactly understanding it.

I know the concept of The Gaze in cinema is pretty overexamined and maybe even outmoded at this point, but I felt like this movie was doing some really interesting things to challenge, undermine, subvert, and pervert our conventional ways of approaching that idea, all the while implicating us more deeply in its psychological underpinnings than anything I've seen in recent memory. Although this is an incredibly contemporary film by virtue of its subject matter alone, I don't think it's too far a stretch, or too unreasonable a stretch, to read this story about interactive websites and the beautiful women exploited by and in them as a metaphor for the (by now) century-old conflict of what a director can do to and with beautiful women on camera. Are the tortures and humiliations endured by Connie Nielsen's character so much different from the tortures and humiliations endured by Connie Nielsen the actress in the process of making the film? Sure, she actively chose to be a part of this project and got paid to do it and I know nothing of Assayas's working relationship with his divas and whether it's as fraught with abusive undertones as stories you hear about Griffith, Hitch, Polanski, Kubrick, or **ahem** Gibson, but the result is, in effect, the same: we, the paying audience, derive a certain amount of pleasure from watching this woman we initially perceive as a powerful bitch goddess get sullied in innumerable nasty ways, be it professional, personal, or sexual. But, aye, there's the rub--just what is a "certain amount" of pleasure?

The Sonic Youth soundtrack is most excellent, and Chloe Sevigny (yes, speaking fairly decent French) turns in yet another enjoyable variation on the inscrutable administrative assistant role.

For those, like me, actively seeking to untangle the narrative and thematic mess here, Rosenbaum's capsule from the Reader is a good place to start, but, as always, he seems more interested in talking about the director's previous films and other movies that traffic in similar subject matter less as a way of honestly contextualizing Demonlover than as more of the same boring old intellectual masturbation. The Onion's capsule while typically packing a lot of ideas into an impossibly small space, ultimately takes the easy way out by privileging style over substance. Charles Taylor's review at Salon Dot Com is superlative, really engaging with the material with a tough-love attitude. (You may not be able to access it if you're not a subscriber to Salon, but you should be a subscriber to Salon anyway, so fuck you and whip out that credit card.)