Miss Garland, My Darlin'

Oh kittens, we had a thrilling movie moment last night at the CIFF screening of Michael Haneke's Caché, the kind that can really only happen communally, in the dark of a theater, in the assured hands of a director who has complete control of your attention with his skilled plotting and camera work. Though I generally make no bones about giving spoilers aplenty in my blog posts, I'm not inclined to talk about this major plot point, except to say that it was one of the most genuinely shocking things I've ever seen in a movie, and this is coming from someone who actually paid to sit through the entirety of Irreversible. Now that I've read a handful of short reviews this morning, I have to laugh at all the admonitions to be sure look at the bottom left corner of the screen during the final shot, because my companions received the exact same hint last night from a ticket taker before the movie started, which made us so attuned to the potential enormity of the detail that, when we actually saw what it was, it almost felt anticlimactic. It explains nothing, but certainly adds an additional layer of complexity and mystery to an already complex and mysterious film. (Also, speaking of short reviews, I don't know what movie Jonathan Rosenbaum saw before he wrote his capsule for the Reader, but it certainly wasn't the one I saw. I'm usually the first person to be on guard against a director's punitive attitude toward the audience or characters, but that charge feels nothing short of wildly inaccurate here.) This was my first viewing of a Haneke film, but I will definitely be adding more of his stuff to my Kittenflix queue. Thanks to DS and KP for convincing me to join them for the night out.

My love for John Darnielle just continues to grow. Here's his guide to whom indie boys should be crushing on now that Scarlett Johansson has gone all mainstream.

Though it's not rocking my world quite as much as I'd hoped it would based on all the superlative blogging about it, I'm still enjoying the hell out of Devin Davis's Lonely People of the World, Unite! "When I Turn Ninety-Nine" has a corking good brass line, and I woke up in the middle of the night a few days ago to a noise it took me a little while to identify as the sound of "Iron Woman" playing on repeat inside my own head.