Oh yeah. Ys finally really clicked for me this morning. Crying on the train--not just for hangovers anymore!
Speaking of oh yeah: our girl LK recently won the Bellevue Literary Review 2007 Goldberg Prize for Fiction for her story "Presidents, Space, Medical Miracles." It's a wonderfully sweet and sad little gem of a story, and she deserves every bit of recognition she's received for it. (Recognition from Amy Hempel no less!) Please join me in advising her to continue rocking the fuck on.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
The Prestige
Gapers Block recently informed me that Jonathan Rosenbaum and J.R. Jones are now blogging for the Reader. Filmies rejoice! Just in time for the year-end smackdowns.
Speaking of J.R. Jones, he got it all wrong in his capsule review of The Prestige. I wouldn't ascribe any "elegant contours," other than those belonging to the distractingly young-looking Jessica Biel, to the utterly lightweight Illusionist. Sure, The Prestige's plot might be cluttered, and, as with Nolan's Memento, I'm not altogether convinced it's going to hold up over repeated viewings, especially when you know what the big reveal at the end is, but I was transfixed by every minute of the movie just the same. I've joked here previously about people who go into ecstasies about what a great actor Christian Bale is, as if they've just discovered what the rest of us have known for about half our lifetimes, but fo rizzle? The man absolutely devours everything (and everyone) around him with this performance. It's shocking how good he is. I mean, I'm about as big a fan of Hugh Jackman as one can be without being an X-Men fan-girl, but Bale is just so, so good, he makes Jackman's performance seem flat and dimensionless by comparison. Michael Caine is really the only actor who doesn't get eclipsed by Bale when they share the screen, and, fair play to him, y'know, seeing as how he's Moykle blaady Cayne and all. Dare we even mention the non-splash that Scarlett Johansson makes, outclassed as she is here? I've carped before about the "jittery informality" (to, embarrassingly, quote myself) of this generation of younger actors, but her lack of poise, especially in her scenes on stage as the magician's assistant, just made me really sad. Why do we no longer expect our movie stars to be able to move with any semblance of grace? Her shoulders were all scrunched and her neck was all giraffey when she was trying to make these grand voila! gestures. It was like she had no control at all over the way she was moving her body through space. And she's held up as a paragon of womanly excellence among screen actors? Whatever charms she possesses (and she can be a fine performer--she was truly winning in Lost in Translation) were just not well suited to even this relatively unimportant role. It was made abundantly clear that she was cast in the film as a gambit to bring a certain demographic of moviegoers into the theater. (This is a bad habit I'd like to see Nolan break before it's too late. From the fierce strength and intelligence of Carrie-Anne Moss and Hilary Swank he goes to the whiny schoolgirl prettiness of Katie Holmes and Johansson?) Anyway, the first entrance of David Bowie as Nikola Tesla alone might have been worth the price of admission, and what would a holiday-season blockbuster be without Andy Serkis? Sure, there are some tonal missteps that tend toward the cheesy and on-the-nose, but, for the most part, the movie is deliciously tense without being jump-out-and-give-you-a-heart-attack scary, and as far as plot complications and sleight-of-hand intrigue go, it more than made up for what I wished The Illusionist had been. And, if nothing else, it's worth it to see in Bale an actor really hitting his stride.
Slate does a noble job of looking into the so-called Pitchfork Effect.
Insofar as I can be said to have heroes or role models of any kind, Betty Comden would certainly have to be one, and I was greatly saddened to read that she died last week. Well, yeah, at age 89, so she clearly lived a long, full life. A long life full of wit and music and movies and the theater and Leonard Bernstein. (If memory serves, my dear MLBO'D actually got to meet both Comden and Green before they died, when she was performing in IU's production of On the Town in the spring of 2000.) Elisabeth Vincentelli has more, and some MP3s to sample, over at The Determined Dilettante.
Speaking of J.R. Jones, he got it all wrong in his capsule review of The Prestige. I wouldn't ascribe any "elegant contours," other than those belonging to the distractingly young-looking Jessica Biel, to the utterly lightweight Illusionist. Sure, The Prestige's plot might be cluttered, and, as with Nolan's Memento, I'm not altogether convinced it's going to hold up over repeated viewings, especially when you know what the big reveal at the end is, but I was transfixed by every minute of the movie just the same. I've joked here previously about people who go into ecstasies about what a great actor Christian Bale is, as if they've just discovered what the rest of us have known for about half our lifetimes, but fo rizzle? The man absolutely devours everything (and everyone) around him with this performance. It's shocking how good he is. I mean, I'm about as big a fan of Hugh Jackman as one can be without being an X-Men fan-girl, but Bale is just so, so good, he makes Jackman's performance seem flat and dimensionless by comparison. Michael Caine is really the only actor who doesn't get eclipsed by Bale when they share the screen, and, fair play to him, y'know, seeing as how he's Moykle blaady Cayne and all. Dare we even mention the non-splash that Scarlett Johansson makes, outclassed as she is here? I've carped before about the "jittery informality" (to, embarrassingly, quote myself) of this generation of younger actors, but her lack of poise, especially in her scenes on stage as the magician's assistant, just made me really sad. Why do we no longer expect our movie stars to be able to move with any semblance of grace? Her shoulders were all scrunched and her neck was all giraffey when she was trying to make these grand voila! gestures. It was like she had no control at all over the way she was moving her body through space. And she's held up as a paragon of womanly excellence among screen actors? Whatever charms she possesses (and she can be a fine performer--she was truly winning in Lost in Translation) were just not well suited to even this relatively unimportant role. It was made abundantly clear that she was cast in the film as a gambit to bring a certain demographic of moviegoers into the theater. (This is a bad habit I'd like to see Nolan break before it's too late. From the fierce strength and intelligence of Carrie-Anne Moss and Hilary Swank he goes to the whiny schoolgirl prettiness of Katie Holmes and Johansson?) Anyway, the first entrance of David Bowie as Nikola Tesla alone might have been worth the price of admission, and what would a holiday-season blockbuster be without Andy Serkis? Sure, there are some tonal missteps that tend toward the cheesy and on-the-nose, but, for the most part, the movie is deliciously tense without being jump-out-and-give-you-a-heart-attack scary, and as far as plot complications and sleight-of-hand intrigue go, it more than made up for what I wished The Illusionist had been. And, if nothing else, it's worth it to see in Bale an actor really hitting his stride.
Slate does a noble job of looking into the so-called Pitchfork Effect.
Insofar as I can be said to have heroes or role models of any kind, Betty Comden would certainly have to be one, and I was greatly saddened to read that she died last week. Well, yeah, at age 89, so she clearly lived a long, full life. A long life full of wit and music and movies and the theater and Leonard Bernstein. (If memory serves, my dear MLBO'D actually got to meet both Comden and Green before they died, when she was performing in IU's production of On the Town in the spring of 2000.) Elisabeth Vincentelli has more, and some MP3s to sample, over at The Determined Dilettante.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Sign of the Apocalypse
Sign of the Apocalypse
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.
I've been planning this (admittedly stupid) joke for close to a week now. I realize there's little hope that anyone will be as amused by it in its final form as I was by my imaginary version of it, but hey, a girl's gotta try, right?
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
RIP, Robert Altman
One of the masters has left the building: Robert Altman passed away on Monday night. I, somewhat irrationally, inherited some anti-Altman bias from one of my favorite film professors, but his talent and influence are of course undeniable. The elegiac qualities of A Prairie Home Companion, which I pretty much cried straight through when I saw it this summer, will only become more poignant with time and in their newly revealed context as his final farewell.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Last Week's Movies, This Week's Music
I don't think Shortbus is really all that great a movie, but I liked it a lot just the same. The fact that it was so heavily improv-based made it feel, as many of the reviews have noted, formless and repetitive, but, to its credit, John Cameron Mitchell has a way of bringing out the swoony sappiness without making you feel guilty about it. I was moved to tears right along with the random extra during that final marching-band-
orgy-by-candlelight scene. It was ridiculously over the top, yet ridiculously life-affirming, which might be another way to defend the inclusion of all that un-simulated sex. A lot of it's funny, some of it's hot, but none of it's dirty. As Stephanie Zacharek was right to point out in her Salon review, "I've felt sleazier looking at ads for Captain Morgan's rum." Plus, it just goes to show ya how much we need more gay male filmmakers (who are actually dealing with gay themes and not just trying to pass) because, egad, I can't remember the last time I saw so much wang! It was completely refreshing to see the male form joyfully eroticized on film instead of the passing glances at Ralph Fiennes's artfully soapy d or some twinked-out doe-eyed CW star trying to do "edgy" in a microbudget indie like we usually get. Bring on the autofellatio! Bring on the national anthem being sung into that cute young guy's ass!
Say what you will about Sophia Coppola's cinematic pedigree, she does have some really good taste. After all the hullabaloo about the non-period specific music in Marie Antoinette, I was expecting the tone of the thing to be very Moulin Rouge-ish and zingy (not that that would have been a bad thing, of course, ardent Moulin Rouge defender as I am). But, I was shocked by how quiet so much of the movie was (which may have been an inadvertent side effect of the theater I saw it in; I don't think the sound system was cranked very high anyway). The minimal dialogue, the long stretches of unblinking behavioral observation, the deliberate, heart-on-sleeve bites from Barry Lyndon--this does not a "giddily postmodern" take on the Marie Antoinette mythology make. It's one of the better things I've seen Kirsten Dunst do, Schwartzman continues to impress with his on-screen warmth and comic timing (his delivery of the word "obviously" in the first half hour or so is motherfucking plated in gold), and I don't think you can really ever go wrong getting Shirley Henderson to run around the place, making catty remarks under her breath. Enjoyable, if not exactly life-changing.
This essay/interview with Zach Condon of Beirut is a leeetle wanky, but mostly right on the money. I'm glad to see someone taking him down a few notches, as I, personally, got tired of Gulag Orkestar real fast and think a lot of it was fatigue with the disingenuousness of Condon's cultural appropriation. Not to keep hammering away at the tired (and, let's be honest, slightly unfair) Gogol Bordello comparisons, but Eugene Hutz just has so much more integrity in the way he's bringing gypsy music to the forefront of indie kids' consciousness. He knows what it means, politically, to harness the raw power of that playing style ("IF WE ARE HERE NOT TO DO WHAT YOU AND I WANNA DO, AND GO FOREVER CRAZY WITH IT, WHY THE HELL ARE WE EVEN HERE?") and uses that power for good, not just for good feelings (even though, obvy, the good feelings flow like the finest vodka when Hutz is rocking the mic or the decks). Sure, Condon's got a nice knack for pleasant melodies and the album has some good songs on it, but how much more apparent can his tourism be when he's already anticipating copping from Portuguese folk and Fado on his next album?
We're all enjoying Ys, yes? I'm still thinking about what I think about it, but it's wondrous, heady stuff. And, oddly, it puts me in the mood to listen to Rufus Wainwright. I think a lot of it is due to the Van Dyke Parks connection (he did some arrangements for Rufus's debut), but there's also their similar vocal quality shift from reedy-shrieky on the first album to stronger and mellower on the second.
Ooh, speaking of Rufus, Pitchfork gifted us with a whole passel of news today, including the fact that he's working on an opera commissioned by the New York Met. I've had a hunch that his career would eventually wend that way since around the time I first heard that duet with Antony on Want Two, but I just didn't think that time would come so soon. Kudos to him, and I can't wait to hear the Judy Garland concert CD.
Wang, twinks, autofellatio, Rufus, Antony, and Judy Garland--this is officially the gayest blog post I have ever written.
And, a big happy birthday shout-out (one day early) to my best girl Mary.
orgy-by-candlelight scene. It was ridiculously over the top, yet ridiculously life-affirming, which might be another way to defend the inclusion of all that un-simulated sex. A lot of it's funny, some of it's hot, but none of it's dirty. As Stephanie Zacharek was right to point out in her Salon review, "I've felt sleazier looking at ads for Captain Morgan's rum." Plus, it just goes to show ya how much we need more gay male filmmakers (who are actually dealing with gay themes and not just trying to pass) because, egad, I can't remember the last time I saw so much wang! It was completely refreshing to see the male form joyfully eroticized on film instead of the passing glances at Ralph Fiennes's artfully soapy d or some twinked-out doe-eyed CW star trying to do "edgy" in a microbudget indie like we usually get. Bring on the autofellatio! Bring on the national anthem being sung into that cute young guy's ass!
Say what you will about Sophia Coppola's cinematic pedigree, she does have some really good taste. After all the hullabaloo about the non-period specific music in Marie Antoinette, I was expecting the tone of the thing to be very Moulin Rouge-ish and zingy (not that that would have been a bad thing, of course, ardent Moulin Rouge defender as I am). But, I was shocked by how quiet so much of the movie was (which may have been an inadvertent side effect of the theater I saw it in; I don't think the sound system was cranked very high anyway). The minimal dialogue, the long stretches of unblinking behavioral observation, the deliberate, heart-on-sleeve bites from Barry Lyndon--this does not a "giddily postmodern" take on the Marie Antoinette mythology make. It's one of the better things I've seen Kirsten Dunst do, Schwartzman continues to impress with his on-screen warmth and comic timing (his delivery of the word "obviously" in the first half hour or so is motherfucking plated in gold), and I don't think you can really ever go wrong getting Shirley Henderson to run around the place, making catty remarks under her breath. Enjoyable, if not exactly life-changing.
This essay/interview with Zach Condon of Beirut is a leeetle wanky, but mostly right on the money. I'm glad to see someone taking him down a few notches, as I, personally, got tired of Gulag Orkestar real fast and think a lot of it was fatigue with the disingenuousness of Condon's cultural appropriation. Not to keep hammering away at the tired (and, let's be honest, slightly unfair) Gogol Bordello comparisons, but Eugene Hutz just has so much more integrity in the way he's bringing gypsy music to the forefront of indie kids' consciousness. He knows what it means, politically, to harness the raw power of that playing style ("IF WE ARE HERE NOT TO DO WHAT YOU AND I WANNA DO, AND GO FOREVER CRAZY WITH IT, WHY THE HELL ARE WE EVEN HERE?") and uses that power for good, not just for good feelings (even though, obvy, the good feelings flow like the finest vodka when Hutz is rocking the mic or the decks). Sure, Condon's got a nice knack for pleasant melodies and the album has some good songs on it, but how much more apparent can his tourism be when he's already anticipating copping from Portuguese folk and Fado on his next album?
We're all enjoying Ys, yes? I'm still thinking about what I think about it, but it's wondrous, heady stuff. And, oddly, it puts me in the mood to listen to Rufus Wainwright. I think a lot of it is due to the Van Dyke Parks connection (he did some arrangements for Rufus's debut), but there's also their similar vocal quality shift from reedy-shrieky on the first album to stronger and mellower on the second.
Ooh, speaking of Rufus, Pitchfork gifted us with a whole passel of news today, including the fact that he's working on an opera commissioned by the New York Met. I've had a hunch that his career would eventually wend that way since around the time I first heard that duet with Antony on Want Two, but I just didn't think that time would come so soon. Kudos to him, and I can't wait to hear the Judy Garland concert CD.
Wang, twinks, autofellatio, Rufus, Antony, and Judy Garland--this is officially the gayest blog post I have ever written.
And, a big happy birthday shout-out (one day early) to my best girl Mary.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
RIP Spymaster Wolf
When the time comes, I can only hope my own obit will feature the word "spymaster" as prominently and frequently as it is used here. Somewhere, Colin Meloy is writing a song about this guy right now.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Handlebar, Handlebar, You Are My Handlebar!
I just got the most recent issue of Rolling Stone in the mail the other day and haven't really had a chance to read anything yet (except the piece on Matt Dillon, which seems oddly spiteful, though perhaps it's just not as gushingly reverent as most glossy magazine profiles I'm used to these days), but this exchange from the Q&A with Andre Benjamin that Stereogum excerpted yesterday cracked me the hell up:
RS: Are you with me on this: "Hey Ya!" is the best song of the twenty-first century? ANDRE BENJAMIN: Jesus. I don't know, man. That could be argued by a lot of people. RS: Can you think of anything better? ANDRE BENJAMIN: No.
Love it. Bitches, seriously, if you are not reading Green Pea-ness on some kind of regular basis, you are missing out on the best kind of celebratory exasperation the MP3 blogs have to offer. He talks a lot of shit about a lot of stuff, but always in service of wildly flipping out about something he loves. He reminds me of the Doc from Deadwood in that way; sphincter perpetually clenched and just barely resisting the everpresent urge to grab some motherfuckers by the throat who don't SEE! DON'T YOU SEE! the beauty and decency that's so readily apparent to his own eyes and ears. James celebrated the blog's first birthday last week with a five-day reappraisal of ten songs that have continued to stand the test of time for him, and, this week, gave us an inspired vision of how our musically inclined grandparents might have reacted to the shit-hot new singles of their era. Go visit now. "Kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, coast...!" is all that's been in my head for the past three or four days. Sing it with me! "Kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, kick-push, coast...!" I can watch segments of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central's website or YouTube, I can rent TV on DVD from Netflix, and I can read wonderfully funny blow-by-blow wrap-ups of the VMAs from S/FJ and Fluxblog. Why would I ever pay good money for cable? It is revealed that Chicagoist loves Great Expectations every bit as much as I do. Yay! We've all seen Sufjan's facial hair by now, yes? I love how something as completely insignificant as a newly grown handlebar mustache has become this major issue being discussed all around the series of tubes. On quite the other hand, here's something actually worthy of being discussed all around the series of tubes: Robert Christgau got fired from the Village Voice. And now for our weekly requirement of cute-but-also-funny animal related items: bunnies yawning (via the Birdchick Blog) and Chicago's own cat circus (thanks, LK).
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