Coke Vs. Prada

Yes, I'm still proselytizing about Blink. A great quote from this interview with Malcolm Gladwell, via Bushman's blog. (Thanks, B!)

"Some journalists like to write about things at the extremes. I like to write about things that go right down the middle. Pepsi and Coke, right? And I'm attracted to them precisely because to me what's most interesting is taking something we're completely familiar with and subverting it in some way. I'd rather write about The Gap than Prada, for that same reason. If you can find something weird below the surface of The Gap, that's so much more interesting than something weird below the surface of Prada. Of course something is weird below the surface of Prada.

"And whatever is weird below the surface of Prada, by the way, at the end of the day is not going to be that interesting. It's Prada; it's for one percent of the population. But The Gap, which is for all of us, that's cool if you can discover something weird below the surface. That's the way I think about things, I suppose."

"You Live on a Spaceship, Dear."

I never had the time or critical acumen to say it myself, so I'm glad someone finally said it for me: Owen Wilson was the unacknowledged key to the success of the first three Wes Anderson movies.

Chicagoans, the Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre exhibit at the Art Institute is wonderful. I'd highly recommend checking it out while it's still in town.

I'm more than happy to report that The Island is summer blockbuster fun at its finest. As Mike O'D astutely pointed out, it's not as good a movie as, say, Batman Begins, but it's a hell of a fun time nonetheless. It doles out plot points way less insultingly than it could have, and once it really sinks its hooks into you, you'll be more than happy to keep your brain turned off and enjoy the ride. I was ready to be done with it maybe half an hour before the credits rolled, but even that didn't necessarily diminish my feelings of goodwill. A perfect excuse to sit in an air conditioned theater during the hottest afternoon of the summer.

Oh, I'd forgotten what a wonderful bastard Kubrick can be. I was able to catch up with Barry Lyndon at the Siskel on Saturday afternoon, on the big screen, the way it was meant to be seen. Not only does the experience of seeing it in a theater allow you to bask in the beauty of the mise-en-scene, but it also allows the subtle, dry humor to really shine through. This movie is hilarious. In all the talk about those famous zooms and natural lighting and obsessive attention to historical detail, the laugh-out-loud humor of the piece gets pretty much ignored. Of course, the comedy is also a cunning trick to lure you into the story, emotionally, so it can kick you in the kidneys that. much. harder. in the last forty-five minutes or so. The duel, yes, the duel, but also the tiny little casket in the sheep-drawn carriage. Egads. Brilliant.

Finished the Firefly DVDs this weekend. (Thanks again, GH!!) Let the countdown to Serenity begin. These are amazing characters, and I can't wait to get to spend another few hours with them.

As Ms. Ward and I have already discussed, Bust magazine cover boy Justin Theroux is en fuego, and one hell of an enlightened human being to boot. Witness:

"Everyone in life, every day, we're sort of given the choice to make a left or a right. . . . I feel like you have to be the guardian of your own curiosity. You have to be pushing yourself to make the more ballsy choice in life or in relationships or in circumstances or in your career or whatever, you know. I've made some chicken shit decisions that I regret in my career and in my relationships and I've also made some brilliant decisions. Not brilliant in any sort of outward way, but brilliant in that I felt as though I'd made great personal gains in spite of the fact that it was the more painful decision."

Swoon. Preach on, brutha.

Love Is

This comes from Bachem Macuno, who is apparently the same delightfully sick individual responsible for the nasty Ann Coulter blog from a couple months back. Thanks to David Geb. for the heads-up.

The Beat and the Summer

Caught up with two flicks this weekend I've been itching to see: The Beat That My Heart Skipped and My Summer of Love. (Let's hear it for the Landmark--always there in a pinch when I'm jonesing for some Eurotrash cinema!)

The Beat..., directed by Jacques Audiard (whose Read My Lips I remember loving at the time I saw it but couldn't synopsize for you now if my life depended on it) and based on James Toback's Fingers (which, despite a Keitel in his '70s heyday, I have no desire to see), fits right in with my weakness for flashy French genre movies. Far from being a throwaway guilty pleasure, though, this is one of the more stunning character pieces I've seen in quite some time. In marked contrast to most American films you'd see about an aspiring concert pianist, lead character Tom, played by Romain Duris (unassailably hot, yadda yadda--you know you were waiting for me to say it), actually isn't all that talented. Nor can he simply practice himself into brilliance. He sweats and he stomps and he swears, but even after several weeks of lessons, his improvement is negligible. The lessons are, ostensibly, to help him prepare for an audition with an agent, but it's never entirely clear what his motives are for auditioning in the first place. He gives some lip service to a desire to leave his life of petty crime, but, at 28, he's getting a little long in the tooth to regain whatever skill he'd lost during a decade without serious practice. (Petty crime to one side, of course, this all hits a little close to home for me.) I won't spoil much of the plot for you, but his longing to be reconnected to his past, represented by the piano, while fighting against the entropy of his present captures with heartbreaking precision what it feels like to first start having regrets in your late twenties about the path your life is taking. There's also some interesting stuff going on here around the concept of language barrier. The characters who end up being Tom's greatest ally and greatest nemesis, respectively, speak not a lick of French, which propels his interactions with them into these heightened states of emotion fueled by music and violence. The movie's brief epilogue crystalizes these relationships with a casual confidence that feels deceptively like an afterthought on the director's part, yet sneaks in a few minutes of breathtaking acting from Duris, especially the scene where he savagely beats a man in a stairwell while weeping profusely. Bonus points for the excellent and evocative use of The Kills' "Monkey 23."

My Summer of Love will get you in the door with the voyeuristic promise of some first time schoolgirl lesbian experimentation, but it'll keep you with its assured sense of pacing and storytelling and fine acting. Though there are more than a few passing similarities to Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, I wasn't really distracted by the fact or tempted to interact with the movie on anything other than its own terms. Nathalie Press has sly and effortless comic timing, and Paddy Considine pulls off the nearly impossible feat of successfully giving a portrait of a man playing at faith, who thinks he's convinced himself that he really believes, yet is most real and most likable as a character when the mask drops in anger to reveal the violent, tangled mess of his soul.

I [heart] the CTA. Anybody have any fun tales of woe from the commute last night? I stood on the brown line platform at Chicago Avenue for about forty-five minutes last night, then Nora Rocket and I decided to race each other home: she stayed there, I opted to take the Chicago Avenue bus to the Western bus, and we promised that the first one home would call the other. I was just pulling up to the light at Western and Wilson when my cell phone rang at 7:08. Good times.

Lighting Up the Night

I just thought this was nice. (Image via Flip Flop Flying.)

I wonder if it would be possible to get a recording of DS bellowing "a reeeeeeeeeeeal weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeird-o" to use as my cell phone's ring tone. Classic. (The Neo-Futurists' summer series It Came From The Neo-Futurarium IV: Spawn of The Neo-Futurarium! runs Thursday nights until August 11.)

I hope all you kids heading out for Intonation this weekend have a great time. Stay hydrated and say hi to the Decemberists for me.

Sufjan

Ohhhhhhh my goodness, what kind of crazy musical genius do we have on our hands here? An interview with Sufjan Stevens from this week's Onion A.V. Club (and, just for snicks, one from Gapers Block too, posted last week for the official July 5 release date of Illinois). Though "Decatur" is definitely in the running for my year-end CD comp, when he plaintively sings "I've made a lot of mistakes" at the end of "Chicago" . . . man, that just hits me, as CTLA once said, somewhere between my heart and my lungs. Love it.

Clap Your Hands Dites Oui

Remember when I attempted to single-handedly ignite an ecstatic firestorm of buzz around Seattle band Dolour? I been schooled. This is how it's meant to be done, kids: behold Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, current darlings of Pitchfork and Tiny Mix Tapes, among others.

Travis Morrison is the fucking bomb, man (link via Morrison's own site). I'm so sad I completely missed the heyday of the D-Plan, but I fully intend to follow Uncle T wherever he ends up going.

The weather in Chicago today feels like the kind of days I always inadvertently ended up going to the beach as a kid: overcast, humid, neither particularly warm nor particularly cool. (Oui, I grew up in a Parisian banlieu, delicately nibbling on stale French bread that maman had stubbed out her Gauloises on. Pauvre cherie.)

Heaps and heaps of love go out to the newly expanded Pollen family, who welcomed Cora Jo into the world on Sunday, July 10.

Summer Reading

"Once we walked into the house and Rod's dad, who insisted I call him Burt, was sitting in his red chair with his black slippers on, and said, 'Boys, boys, listen to this one,' and just then the needle met the small vinyl grooves of the record and 'Time After Time' by Chet Baker began playing, the strange haunting voice of a man that to me sounded like a woman, so that I asked, 'Wow, who's this lady?' and Rod's dad nodded and laughed and said, 'That's Chet Baker, son, the trumpet player,' and I said, 'He sounds spooky,' and Rod's dad said to Rod, 'This was the first song your mother and I ever made love to,' and I thought that was a little strange for him to say, but I didn't say anything. I just listened, and the more I heard that ghostly, quiet, nighttime voice rising, the more I was thinking about Gretchen and kissing her to a song like that, and then it was over and we were all standing around silent and Rod's dad said, 'That's how you should feel after you hear a good song. Like a brand new man,' and I said, 'Burt, I know what you mean,' and we walked off into Rod's room, still kind of listening." —Joe Meno, Hairstyles of the Damned

"I understood, suddenly, why Hitchcock had given the secret away in the middle of 'Vertigo.' The surprise is revealed because Hitchcock could not see what was surprising. He didn't think that there was anything bizarre in the idea of someone constantly being remade in the image of someone else's schemes or desires or weird plot points, because he thought that this is what life and love consist of. Suspense, not surprise, was the element Hitchcock swam in—not What next? but How will we get to the inevitable place again? Hitchcock himself, after all, did not adapt to circumstances. He made circumstances adapt to him. When Grace Kelly married a prince, there was Kim Novak, and when Kim Novak rebelled there was Tippi Hedren. Every five-year-old has one fish, as every great director has a single Blonde. What Hitchcock's films of the fifties have in common with all the world's religions is the faith that death can be overcome, or at least made tolerable, by repetitive obsession. First the mind, then the pain, and then the echo: that is the order of life. James Stewart learned this and now Olivia had, too." —Adam Gopnik, "Death of a Fish" (The New Yorker: July 4, 2005)

Thanks!

Big thanks go out to the good folks at Blogger for fixing the weird spacing/leading issues I've been having around here for the past two weeks. And, thanks to my readers for politely ignoring the tight layout and soldiering on through my Tom Cruise rants and other ephemera in spite of the inevitable eye strain. Nothin' but love to the lot of you.

Something for Everyone

Whether your nightmares are haunted by aliens, Scientologists, Dakota Fanning, or cinematic hackery, there's something for everyone to fear in War of the Worlds. It's been a while since I have actively disliked a film as much as this one. It wasn't even so much that it was completely unsatisfying (intellectually, narratively, emotionally, even popcornily) . . . it's that Spielberg's authorial voice comes off as casually fascist in the most grimly repulsive pop nihilistic sense imaginable. The utter cynicism in the way he films crowd scenes makes me nearly sick to my stomach. The unwashed masses—variously whimpering and animalistic—are helpless, selfish, and in need of the superior guile, cunning, and guidance of Ubermensch Ray Ferrier. (Ugh, yes, that's Operating Thetan Cruise's actual character name: Ferrier. As in, containing the Latin root for "iron.") Sure, he's a hapless schmuck of a father, but, by God, he does what needs to be done, from figuring out how to fix a minivan that was previously thought inoperable after being fried by the aliens' electromagnetic force fields to blindfolding his sensitive, innocent daughter before killing a man in cold blood to chucking a hand grenade up into a giant alien-robot vagina (well, you tell me what that orifice was supposed to be!) in self-defense. I mean, we're supposed to go along with this as some sort of allegory for 9/11, right? (Even though, in the world of the film, there is a definite awareness of and a handful of references to terrorist attacks, which puts it all a bit on the nose, as if we wouldn't have figured out the parallels ourselves.) Well, wasn't one of the minor miracles to come out of that tragedy the widespread cooperation and general bravery of so many innocent bystanders (not to mention, of course, the NYPD and -FD) in Lower Manhattan? It's amazing how often Spielberg gets labeled as "fuzzy" or "soft" when his loathing of humanity in general is so thinly veiled.

I'm willing to give him credit for the sheer visceral kicks of the first 30 or 45 minutes—primarily the scene where Tommy Tom-Tom runs into town and witnesses the first alien tripod bust up through the street and start vaporizing people. The sense of dread and uncertainty and confusion and pure fight-or-flight instinct was palpable and definitely put you, as a viewer, in the scene in the first person. But all this "making pop poetry out of our fears" bullshit is strictly wishful thinking, a feeble attempt to unite our collective memories of Spielberg's past glories with his own inflated sense of importance as a cultural critic of the highest order. Give me Stephanie Zacharek's searing critical indictment or Signs on DVD over this crap any day of the week.

Let's see. Things for me not to be pissed off and bitter about? Long weekends, Coronas on the beach with friends at dusk, Malkmus's Face the Truth, Sufjan's Illinois, Hairstyles of the Damned, Firefly on DVD, and Mac's description of Carrie Brownstein (after attending a Sleater-Kinney concert in the ATL) as a sex popsicle.

Album A®t

I assume many of you music lovers and Pitchfork readers have been keeping up with the story of how Nike ripped off Minor Threat's iconic album art without permission for a Nike Skateboarding tour poster and then subsequently apologized and pulled the ad. Today brings this link (via Stereogum), with a collection of similarly manipulated classic album covers ranging from the completely unartful to the sublimely hilarious. Stereogum's selection of highlighted favorites is probably the best of the bunch, but I was also tickled by the treatment given The Velvet Underground and Nico, Britney's best-of compilation My Prerogative, Gang of Four's Entertainment!, and OK Computer. Prepare your wrist for a lot of scrolling, and enjoy.

I haven't yet mentioned that I saw Me and You and Everyone We Know earlier this week because I'm still trying to figure out how to talk about it without sounding like a douchebag. My emotional response to the film (heightened by some personal shit that's been weighing on my mind more heavily than usual recently) so far eclipsed my critical faculties during the hour and a half I was in the theater that I'm not sure my experience of the movie is really all that interesting to write (or read) about. All I know is that I went through, emotionally, some of the highest highs and the lowest lows I've felt during a movie in a long time: laughed myself near to hyperventilation during an early scene that revolves around the explanation of the phrase "I want to poop back and forth," then dissolved into body-wracking sobs near the end when a character's private grief is cathartically turned into public art. In my estimation, it is earning its comparisions to David Gordon Green's George Washington (esp. in its gentle, generous use of young, nonprofessional actors), but I'd certainly like to see Chuck and Buck given its due as well (for what it's worth, in the credits of the film, director Miranda July does thank C&B director Miguel Arteta, with whom she's apparently collaborating on a project called Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody?).

The Siskel does Kubrick in July. Sign me the fuck up!

The Big Fish: a fascinating article on the genesis, life, history, and enduring legacy of Suck.com (via Heather Havrilesky's Rabbit Blog).

For those of you who live in or will be visiting Chicago this weekend, please feel free to join me, Benji, and the O'Ds in Grant Park for the annual July 3rd fireworks display. If you just can't get it up for the idea of celebrating America's freedom from British rule with an obscene display of pyrotechnics, you can look at it as a convenient opportunity for self-immolation in the wake of Justice O'Connor's resignation. Hope to see you there regardless.