Moving on in to the New Year

I've been out to see a shitload of stuff over the past week or more. Had a chance to catch up with:

Notes on a Scandal. I really wouldn't recommend seeing this alone if you occasionally feel vulnerable about ending up a crazy, embittered old maid. (**Cough, cough** I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying--I have several black spiral bound notebooks full of articulate yet deranged scribbling exactly like Judi Dench's character's.) The acting is stellar, and it needs to be in order to actually make the statements about loneliness and desperation and codependency and selfishness and vile behavior (of both the deeply motivated and animalistically unmotivated varieties) as it wants to make. There were a few points, especially toward the end as all the various intertwined subplots started coming to their inevitable climaxes, that I saw the bizarro-world version of what this movie could have been without Dench, Blanchett, Nighy, Marber's script, and Eyre's direction (though I could have done without Glass's score--OK, OK, I get it, the frenzied sense of entrapment, etc.): it could have been so strident, hysterical, and cliche that it would have made me scoff, legitimately offended, at the needlessness in perpetuating the evil old lady stereotype yet again. Yet, it's so perfectly pitched that it reveals a deep, core truth about people who kill any chance at happiness they might have because they can't stop themselves from bringing those they want so desperately to love down into their own misery, even if being miserable together is in itself a kind of love. Bonus points for a "Fit but You Know It" reference.

The Painted Veil. Unoffensive, slightly turgid, clearly Oscar bait. There's one howler of a scene plopped into the middle, though, that just begs to be read as a red state/blue state metaphor, and it made me want to shout at the screen. Gotta love any screen work Liev Schreiber is doing these days, though. We need more.

Dreamgirls. OMG, so bad. I dislike it more the more I think about it. I expect better acting out of community theater. I guess they got what they put into it, though: musicians trying to act instead of actors trying to sing. (Why didn't they just do a staged concert, release the soundtrack album, and be done with it?) The character development is appallingly thin, and even the talented actors look like they're drowning. J. Hudson, though--wow. It's like her voice was directly wired into my tear ducts. Unbelievably powerful. There were only about 20 people in the theater the day I saw it, and we all still ripped up in applause after "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going." The camera does love Beyonce, though, and, in that, she was well cast. I think the best acting she did in the whole thing was that montage of her being photographed in all those exotic outfits.

Children of Men. A real stunner of a film. (And, another Danny Huston performance I can add to my films-of-'06 tally!) It's so scary and so powerful. If I look at it as a "film," I can see Rosenbaum's point about how the back end of the movie turns into "a rather banal suspense plot about whether she and her child and therefore humanity will survive," but, as LK and I discussed, that sequence is also one of the most powerful visual metaphors for parenting that we've seen in a good long while, a fact which I'm willing to cast aside my rampant filmie snobbery for.

Miss Potter. Well, at least I didn't pay to see it. (Free sneak preview passes; thanks, MJO.) I declared afterward that I felt I'd been whimsied to a pulp. The only true moment in the whole boring slog was at the end of the dinner party when Renee as Beatrix whispers her acceptance of Ewan as Norman's marriage proposal, and his face crumples into a deep frown that, in any other circumstance, would give way to a sob of thanksgiving, yet he must tuck the passion of that emotion back into a proper stiff upper lip, which, despite his best efforts, still blooms out into a giddy but cautious smile. Get that man a light saber, people! (Erm...) The Onion A.V. Club ably and concisely sums up pretty much anything else you might need to know in order to convince yourself to skeep eet.

Casino Royale. Wow, what a pleasant surprise! How thrilling was that opening foot chase through the construction site and on into the embassy? How nice was it to get even a little bit of Jeffrey Wright? I'd also just read the novel and was impressed by how closely they stuck to the basic plot outline while improving on some of the weak spots and making it utterly contemporary. And, not to be all I told you so, but Daniel Craig is perfection.

Elsewhere:

S/FJ writes the best review of Volver I've read yet. I doubt it will be topped.

Robot gives birth in South Korean hospital. Snip: "The newborn, also a robot, is equipped with lights on its hands and cheeks to indicate its health -- blue lights mean problems while pink lights signal all is ok." I love that "also a robot" parenthetical--as if there were some chance that the robot would be giving birth to an actual human. Or, perhaps, a puppy.

900 Hay Bales Dropped to Snowbound Cows. Someone please tell me there were gay cows out there! OMG, I so love the mental image. As Alex Ross wrote in the midst of all the Brokeback hysteria last year, "please rise for the singing of the gay national anthem: 'pling-pling-pling pling...pling...'" (moo moo-moo-moo).

Much like the album itself, an epic and stunning interview with Joanna Newsom about Ys (via). If this doesn't convince you, you will never be convinced.

Wait, wha--? Kele Okereke is gay? Or bi? Or whatever? (Link via.) I wonder how I never knew or figured that out before. Huh. Even though I've warmed up to the band considerably over time, it actually kind of makes me like them about 500 time more.

Happy birthday, David Bowie. I listened to "Queen Bitch" on the train this morning in observance of the day.

Lazy Friday All Link Edition

Deadwood auteur David Milch (from an old interview on Salon): "Well, I think we all are vessels of God, you know. As Saint Paul says, if the hand doesn't know, that doesn't mean it's not part of the body, that just means it doesn't know. And that's why, when I'm able to be of service to the characters, I experience God's presence more acutely than I do when I'm not working. So I try to work as much as I can."

John Roderick: "My friends and tour mates influence me a lot, so I'm writing songs in part to impress other musicians. I hope that Matthew from Nada Surf, or Charles from The Wrens, or Colin from The Decemberists, or the boys in Centro-Matic or Death Cab hear my songs and dig them, and when they congratulate me I feel gratified. Chris Walla has apparently been playing and singing the song 'Honest' during his soundchecks, which is the best kind of compliment." (via) I am sooo ready for Putting the Days to Bed to come out.

A buncha little French kids sing Laura Veirs songs. Most perfect musical match evah! (via)

From BBC News: "'Fossil' rock rat pictured alive: Images have been obtained of a live Laotian rock rat, the animal science now believes to be the sole survivor of an ancient group of rodents." I knew a fossil rock rat once; his hair was receding in front but greasy and long in the back, and he was really, really into Deep Purple.

OMG, seriously? Five amazing high-hat parts? Five thumbs up! Loves it! Esp. the Steely Dan (and Ted Leo/Rx, too).

Ah yes, I'm a sucker for the unexpected, slightly gimmicky cover song. (Awesome fodder for mix CDs.) That Boy Least Likely To cover of "Faith" sounds like a loose tooth—wiggly and gummy and delicate yet reckless. I hate it. I love it. I hate it. I love it. (She's my sister. My daughter. My daughter, my sister.) It also makes me long for Craig Robinson to pull Pete & Bob out of retirement to shimmy and flap to it.

The Proposition and Lady Vengeance

Went in for a bloody revenge/ties-that-bind double feature on Sunday: The Proposition at the Music Box, then Lady Vengeance at the Landmark. I'm glad I saw them in that order because the second served as a much needed corrective to the first.

I very much wanted to like the Nick Cave Australian Western (it's basically useless to call it anything but, on account of it probably wouldn't have received nearly as much notice without that pedigree), but it was just a bit too ramshackle to really win me over. Playing with archetypes is a tricky business; when it's done well, it can be completely thrilling, but when, as here, you just get a handful of very basic, very familiar character outlines that are supposed to be Meaningful simply by virtue of being Suggestive of something Universal (count the number of Biblicals in the reviews gathered on Metacritic!), it all starts to feel very emperor-has-no-clothes. The characters look exactly like they should look, talk exactly the way they should talk, act out exactly the plot points they should act out, but to what end? I felt like I only had about one dimension to swim around in while I was watching the movie. I could appreciate the craft on the surface, but there wasn't a whole hell of a lot of meaning left to ponder beyond that point.

It's thick with atmosphere and portent, and, where it succeeds, it does so largely on the strength of the visual storytelling. A filmmaker doesn't have to do much work to make the Australian outback look stunning, but John Hillcoat framed it nicely with some interesting editing that simultaneously kept the obviousness of the plot at bay while respecting its functionality, and, evidently, created a safe space for some grand, swinging-for-the-fences acting to boot. I qualify the success of the visuals with "largely" because the other place where the film really soars and comes into its own is through the too-spare use of black humor. Par example, after mentally and emotionally unstable youngest brother Mike is sentenced to 100 lashes, the brutal flogging scene weeps its way, like Passion of the Christ with cowboy hats, through shots of the townsfolk watching dispassionately, the blood being wrung out of the cat-o'-nine-tails, the slo-mo wailing horror in his face, all soundtracked to a mournful, a cappella Irish folk tune. A beat or two for the audience to catch its breath, then one of the attending officers counts, "thirty-eight." More of this (and Ray Winstone's running-into-a-closed-door pratfall and a soldier's limping that calls back, about an hour later, his accidentally shooting his toes off and the "we're not misanthropes, we're a family" one-liner), please! But the bulk of the script was unfortunately bogged down with a lot of stilted, highfalutin diction that might have been gorgeously, gothically poetic in a Bad Seeds song, but just ended up sounding like something Drusilla would have written if given enough time and creative resources. (Seriously? That scene of Emily Watson in the bathtub describing her dream about the dead baby gripping her finger? That kind of shit drives me nuts.)

I just started in on the first season of Deadwood (thanks, Lisa Ro!), and even after only a few episodes, I could feel the fresh memory of the meatiness of its dialogue and labyrinthine sociopolitical machinations spoiling my experience of The Proposition. Though, like many of the most successful Westerns (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly being foremost in my mind at the moment), The Proposition picked up some steam toward the end in its inevitable, tragic conclusion, it still left just a little too much hanging in the breeze without a satisfying context or connection.

Danny Huston is, for me, def the standout in the cast, a monster worthy of all the veneration and fear the other characters build up around him, worthy not because he does so much more scenery-chewing, but because he does so much less. He's repeatedly described as being dog-like, but I kept seeing the calm insanity of a beautiful, magnificent cat in his perpetually crouched, coiled performance. (Anthony Lane goes for ursine; fair enough.)

Unlike The Proposition's limited rewards, Lady Vengeance is positively stuffed with treasures as you keep digging deeper and deeper. Atonement for past sins! The different functions played in a person's life by individual and collective grieving! A human being's fundamental ability to choose to be a devil or an angel in any given situation! The unimaginable hurts visited upon us by an unblinking universe! The balm of religion and its occasional situational uselessness! The formative importance of both the family of our birth and the family of our circumstance! I could go on.

The pacing of the film is nothing short of remarkable. Before I realized what it was doing, I thought to myself while watching it, "gosh, this is the longest resolution to a film I've seen in some time." It just kept ending, and ending, and ending. But then I realized, of course it's the longest resolution to a film I've seen in some time--the film is all about resolution: finishing chapters, tying up loose ends, mourning what's passed/past, repairing what we can, apologizing for what we can't, selfishly chasing after that which we imagine will allow our individual selves to heal, dimly realizing we are redeemed by our friends' and family's love for us sometimes in spite of but more often because of our inability to fully achieve the closure we crave. Instead of the brief, explosive money shot we're used to getting in most revenge flicks, temporarily satisfying but not necessarily complex, inevitable but weightless, the substance of Lady Vengeance is in its ending and constitutes a good half of the running time.

Having not seen the preceding two films (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy) in director Chan-wook Park's so-called vengeance trilogy, I can't pretend to speak to what he's doing in relation to his own oeuvre and that of what J.R. Jones calls the "extreme Asian" genre, but, based on what I saw here, I am in nothing but awe of his skills. He liberally uses all the elements that I loved most about The Proposition--and some that I didn't love there but was completely swept up in here--with profligate abandon. More music, more black comedy, more single-minded-hero-on-a-mission plot points, more innocents in gut-wrenchingly disturbing peril, more ridiculous coincidences that bring long-separated family members back together, more hyper-stylized framing that looks cool for the sake of looking cool, more operatic emotions snuck in under the radar of genre conventions, more keen understanding of the conflicting impulses in human nature that lead us to make difficult decisions--not to mention a far less enigmatic and far less charming villain and a protagonist with far more mixed motives, far more at stake, emotionally, and far more (interesting) complicity in the villain's actions and eventual downfall.

It's also bloody as hell, gorgeous to look at (the opening credit sequence is especially noteworthy, doing more for the colors red and white than Jack and Meg have in recent memory), and doesn't take itself seriously at all, except when it does and, even then, it takes great pains to earn it. Sure, there's a touch of sappiness here and there that you're going to be hard pressed not to find in all but the most unrepentantly gruesome Asian exploitation flicks, but they're generally easily glossed over if that's the kind of thing that's likely to stick in your craw. Lee Yeong-ae carries the thing on her back effortlessly. She caroms from murderous rage that manages to remain profoundly human to adorable cheekiness (the scene where she simply holds up a bar of soap by way of explanation for a minor villain's well-deserved comeuppance is particularly delightful) to a mother's heartbroken willingness to accept the consequences of the way she's failed her child to angelic self-sacrifice, all without smudging her most excellent, and oft-remarked upon, red eyeshadow. The movie itself is outstanding, and, as I say above, pairs wonderfully with The Proposition, for the ways they speak to and inform each other.

On the movie tip, I finally saw an actual preview for Olivier Assayas's Clean before Lady Vengeance this weekend. The good handful of reviews I read when it was released on the coasts here in the U.S. about a month ago definitely got me excited about it, but the trailer pretty much had me salivating in anticipation. Do any of you filmies know if it's going to open in Chicago at any point in the near future? The "release dates" page on the IMDB is no help; it only goes as far as the April 28 limited release date. Boo! The Windy City needs some Maggie Cheung too!

"[T]here are those who sympathise with my predicament--as if becoming 30 were a terrible accident that could have been avoided if only I had not been quite so silly": Various British celebrities and Alice Cooper share their two pence on what they're proud to have done and what they wish they would have done before they turned 30 (via).

"At a certain point, you have to wonder which is the outside culture. I mean, I think it's a lot more normal to grow up Evangelical than to grow up in New York!": Matthew Perpetua in conversation with the author of Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock on Fluxblog.

"[T]he human brain has a specific centre that does nothing more, and nothing less, than recognize faces. This centre is what enables us to recognize each other with such certainty. Prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, is what you get when that centre is damaged or otherwise unable to perform its functions": a lucid, good-humored description of what it's like to live as a social being with face-blindness (via).

And, for fans of both Cute Overload and my own "Wild Animal Edition" post below, I bring you: Vicious Dog Pack Kills Gator in Florida.

Better Than Weasels on a Train or Musk Oxen on a Cruise

This week in Snakes on a Plane-watch: viddy the trailer (via; thanks, JP). Also, why do I not own this t-shirt yet?

Dr. Robert Sapolsky's hour-long lectures on the physiology of stress linked here are definitely worth seeking out.

Though the ginormous Fosters oilcans LK and I snuck in to the theater as part of our drunken St. Patrick's Day rampage might have ever so slightly affected my critical faculties (ya think?), I still will not hesitate to say that Mrs. Henderson Presents is really not all that great. It's fun for about the first half hour when it's all light and carefree with the familiar but always welcome "putting on a show" tropes, but when it starts getting overly grave and self-serious about the Function of Art and Entertainment During Wartime, it just bored the hell out of me. Frears, my man, what is up? If you're in the mood for a movie about the London theater scene in the early-to-mid-twentieth century that follows the tragicomic misadventures of a saucy, sexy, spoiled older woman, skip Mrs. Henderson and rent Being Julia instead.

I'm only three or four stories in to Kelly Link's new-ish collection Magic for Beginners, but it's already lived up to most of its hype. "Stone Animals" contains the best written evocation of nightmare I've maybe ever read. Check out the first story from the collection, "The Faery Handbag," an early contender for my favorite piece from the book, here.

I highly recommend getting a cute English boy to try to explain the rules of cricket to you over pizza sometime. He will use a napkin as the cricket pitch and the salt and pepper shakers as the batsmen and a grated cheese shaker as the bowler, and you will not understand a word of it, but it will not matter. Thanks for trying, RW, and good luck with the interview.

A Subatomic-Size Flashlight

In the mood for a good, quick snark?

I was totally loving this article on nanotechnology as I read it over lunch today. There's something utterly charming about the weird, overly bubbly tone that eventually gives way to some of the most terrifying quantum mindfucks I could never come close to dreaming up on my own. I also love the way the author's little bio paragraph at the end of the article says, curiously defensively, "The ideas stated here reflect the personal views of the author. They are in no way related to his professional affiliation with [the university he works for]." Way to ratchet up our confidence that you're in any position to be giving us the down-n-dirty facts about fourth-generation recombinant DNA bioweapons, dude.

The Little Boy in Me? I Call Him Doug.

Shit like this totally brings out the little boy in me. I'm absolutely delighted by the food chain gross-out drama right now. Python vs. Gator Death Match '05!!!!!!! (Thanks, JP.)

On much the same note, I've been on a real science kick these days, especially after proofreading our forthcoming kids activity book Exploring the Solar System, so I also quite enjoyed Michael Brown's geeky/goofy insouciance here regarding the discovery that our unofficial tenth planet, 2003UB313 or "Xena," has its own moon.