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I can't really say why I felt so sad when I saw the news about Heath Ledger scroll across the closed captioning at the TV in the coffee shop I was having a business meeting in yesterday afternoon. For the most part, I always feel that it's really unfortunate when a celebrity dies unexpectedly and young, but no more so than the news of anyone I don't know. But Heath Ledger...he actually made me feel sad.
Part of it was that I saw Brokeback Mountain again recently and was reminded just what a tragic story it is. Part of it is that the Fourth of July scene in that movie (as well as Jake Gyllenhaal's Thanksgiving scene) really hit me hard and has always stuck with me, acting out a desire to be able to stand up for your values by backing it up with your fists. But even besides that, his character was tragic. It's hard to divorce him from that character.
And I was really excited (and still am) by his turn at Joker, but I really got sad when I found out that he'd obsessed over Nick Drake and had wanted to tell his story. Even though he had given it up when he apparently felt he couldn't do the story justice, that didn't keep me from imagining what an incredible--if difficult--movie it would have been.
I watched the first part of No Direction Home last night, which--I'll tell you as though I'm the first person to say it--is fantastic. It hasn't necessarily changed my feelings about Scorcese, but it's a beautiful movie. Dylan's story is the kind that makes you think that if someone had written it as fiction, it would come off as exaggerated and too fairy-tale to be plausible.
There were two great revelations in part one. The first one was the song "Let Me Die In My Footsteps", which sounded so immediately good that I assumed that it was a traditional song. Nope: a Dylan original, and an outtake--an outtake!!--from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. The man puts out four classic albums of mostly-originals in two years, and he has outtakes that sound like this?! It's SICK. It's beyond "talented" and getting more into the idiot-savant/channeling realm.
"Let Me Die In My Footsteps"
The other revelation was the non-Dylan music in it, which sadly doesn't seem to have been compiled anywhere. There were amazing songs by Odetta and John Jacob Niles that were immediately powerful. I wish someone had the foresight to put all of those songs together, because if we can all agree on anything, it's that my convenience is priority one.
Last on this topic is that, as the film was rolling on (or, more appropriately, as the disc was spinning still), I thought of my favorite Dylan song, "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", and why it's my favorite. When I was re-learning guitar at the age of 19, my mom picked up the guitar and started playing this song, one of the tunes she still remembered how to play from her folky college days, though she sang it with the slight melody change of Joan Baez's version. The chord changes absolutely killed me, and she taught me the chords and it's still one of my favorites to play to this day.
Any number of clichéd synonyms popped in my mind watching The Darjeeling Limited last night: self-reverential, self-indulgent, masturbatory. Every single shot in the movie is framed and blocked in such a stylized way that it's impossible to not notice it, and the man makes an art form of the forced plot point. In Anderson's movies, logical human behavior takes a backseat to style, plot twists and witticisms. Actually, you're lucky if logic is in the backseat; it's usually in the trunk, bound and gagged.
But for most of the movie last night, I found that I not only didn't care, I enjoyed it. I found myself shrugging off the pointless cobra purchase, the non sequitur shoeshine and massive set of matching luggage because the plot, personalities and metaphors that they brought along were enjoyable enough to let it go. I did get a little frustrated that a beautiful story was so often sacrificed for Anderson's obsession with his own style, but for the most part, it was really enjoyable. Maybe it was because I've stopped expecting a solid plot from a Wes Anderson film, but I just sat back and took in the scenery instead of picking at the story.
Okay, okay...so I still picked at the story a bit, not to mention some of the more over-the-top stylisms, and this is what I picked at (spoilers ahead):
The trip to visit the brothers' mother felt totally unnecessary to me. It didn't add to the story and just made the film drag. Granted, it set up that fantatic final scene with the brothers literally and symbolically getting rid of their baggage as they ran to the train, but otherwise, that entire section of the movie seemed to exist only to give Angelica Huston a part in the film.
After spending a good deal of the film setting up the flashback to the afternoon of their father's funeral, the actual scene was filled with illogic that was too hard to shrug off, especially considering the weight the foreshadowing had given it.
Some of the little stylisms were just so loud they drowned out what was around them: Natalie Portman's toothpick, the omnipresent iPod, the over-used shot of the brothers crowded together unnecessarily...these were the things that made me feel a little impatient with the movie.
But there was a lot that I loved:
The end scene that I already mentioned
The themes of family and spirituality, which I'm always a sucker for, and which the guy next to me, intent on seeing a hilarious Wes Anderson movie, laughed at the entire time.
The absolutely brilliant exchange in the prologue*, Hotel Chevalier, which I'm typing here from memory:
Her: Can we still be friends? Him: I promise you I will never, ever think of you as a friend. Her: If we fuck, it'll make me feel like shit. Him: I'm okay with that.
Wes Anderson's insistence on framing every single shot in a considered style can be annoying, but the annoyances are outweighed by the stunning by about five to one.
Blame an indoors Sunday for my rambling on this one. But feel free (and encouraged) to leave your thoughts in the comments.
* I can't believe that they advertise this as a separate feature that they're showing "specially" along with the film. One of the clinching, great scenes of The Darjeeling Limited is when the bit of dialog in the "short" is quoted in the end. If they didn't show the short before the film, that scene wouldn't have half it's power. It's a prologue, not a separate, special feature. I can't imagine this film without it, and my guess is it will never be shown without it.
God, I've been so bored. Being sick sucks anyway, but being in the same apartment for four days without any decent human contact just adds insult to infirmity.
But my best friend in the whole world was there for me, as he always is. TV, you never let me down. Here's what me and TV talked about over the last four days.
Pan's Labyrinth ...which I can now put just behind the The Sweet Hereafter and Dead Man Walking on my list of Movies That I Loved But Never Want To Watch Again. I'm not ashamed to admit that, after about the first 15 minutes, I had to turn the lights back on. I would say that it's a triumph to create a human character so evil that even the most grotesque fantasy creature couldn't come close to his scariness, but then again: X ALMIGHTY DID YOU SEE THAT DUDE WITH EYES IN HIS HANDS?!! Nightmare city.
This Is England A fantastic movie whose incredible acting was only outdone by the soundtrack selections. This song should be part of everyone's collection, which I say because it's now part of mine:
Toots and the Maytals, "54-46 Was My Number"
Football There were some great games on this weekend. Thanks, TV! You always know how to cheer me up when I'm sick. TV and I noticed that, once again, it seems like ownership trumps talent in the NFL. It doesn't matter what kind of talent the Saints and Bengals put on their teams: ultimately, they're the Saints and the Bengals, and that beats out any amount of Bushes, Palmers or Johnsons. Hmmm...that last bit sounds like the punchline to a stupid dirty joke. Sorry.
Shot at Love with Tila Tequila I usually consider myself pretty channel-blind when it comes to my TV surfing. Whatever looks interesting, I'll watch, but I rarely pay attention to which of the hundreds of cable channels I'm watching.
But I can usually tell when I've come across MTV when all of the people on my screen seem borderline retarded. Seriously: in the '80's, I was one of the worst students in my school, barely scraping by and making terrible grades. But if I was 15 years old now, I would guess I'd be the smartest kid in class, getting A's from frustrated teachers only because I know how to spell "you're" instead of "ur".
So I turned on Shot At Love for a trainwreck, and I got it. But while I question the "reality" of this show, it's actually a pretty interesting concept: contestants vie for the affections of the hostess, but the hostess is bisexual, so it's a house full of vacuous men and stripper lesbians¹ (a third, less-known category of lesbian). I really wish I could trust the sincerity of the contestants and the hostess (who I believe is looking for "love" as much as Brett Michaels is), because it's a kind of fascinating psychological study in gender and sexuality.
But from the "scenes from the season" shown at the end of the episode, it pretty much looks like they're all idiots, so "fascinating" is probably far, FAR down the list of adjectives that anyone would use to describe this show.
¹ These two words are going to bring a lot of unwanted search engine traffic my way. Sorry to disappoint you, boys.
Ever since I shuffled off the shackles of that last job, I've been having great weekends. I don't know if those two things are related, but it feels like they must be, because every night's been filled with activity and a wide variety of friends who keep me thoroughly and constantly entertained.
Labor Day weekend set the bar even higher. Vodka with multiple groups on Friday, a baseball game whose Teddy controversy was shared with some fantastic folks that I see too rarely, dinner last night with The Best Friends™ and also...well, this weekend I got to do something that I haven't done in a long time that I can't tell you about because I don't tell you about those sorts of things, but me not being able to tell you is probably pretty telling. That's all I'll tell about that.
One thing that I did do on Sunday that I can tell you about is the movie I saw on Sunday, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. It's a fascinating documentary about the all-time high score of Donkey Kong, and while you'll be tempted by it by the possibility of seeing levels of social awkwardness and nerdiness that defy imagination (and will not be disappointed), what you'll be amazed by is the sheer obsession of everyone involved. Donkey Kong's role in the film is secondary; the focus is on selfishness, arrogance, and pure competition. It's an incredible film.
And for those of you keeping score at home, I just picked up a couple paperbacks that I can't wait to read: Spook by Mary Roach, who also wrote the fascinating and hilarious Stiff, and The Blind Side by Michael Lewis who wrote Money Ball. I'm going to try to read them both simultaneously, one with each eye.
I also made a bet in which I claimed that every single coastal state has a town called Surf City. I will probably lose that bet.
I would love nothing more than to write a long, rambling review of Jesus Camp, which I watched last night. But, hey...time, time, time, see what's become of me. So we'll just have to get all stuffy and business-like and bust out the bullet points.
Amazing. Not at all surprising and horrifying at the same time.
While it sometimes seems heavy-handed, I can see the evangelicals that are in this movie seeing it as a perfect portrayal of them; not having a problem with the editing at all. They come across as I'm sure they'd want to: as doing absolutely anything for Christ.
There are two charismatic kids that they follow pretty closely. One is a 12-year-old whose confidence and belief is incredible to watch. His faith is so sincere that he makes even the most genuine of the adults look wishy-washy in comparison.
While I would hesitate to say that I admire the people running the camp, I do respect their conviction. While it's a conviction that I feel hurts the country, there's nothing in the liberal or secular world that comes close to the kind of community and involvement that religious faith brings to a group. It's a flaw in the the logical, scientific way of looking at the world that we can't just put our blind faith in something and allow it to carry us through inconsistencies, scandals and petty differences.
I like a good scary movie as much as the next guy (actually, not quite as much as the next guy, but I like a good scare every now and then), but there's a huge difference to me between a movie where people are getting killed and one where people are getting tortured. It's a literal morbid curiosity that makes people want to see death, but it's a sick and evil impulse—maybe subconscious, but still there—that inspires a fascination with torture.
But it's the torture genre that's sweeping the theaters these days. As usual, everyone's trying to pass it off as harmless entertainment, that it doesn't say anything thing about the people who are clamoring to see it. If the booming ticket sales doesn't say enough about them, what they're saying to Hostel director Eli Roth says a whole lot more:
People told me after Hostel that they had thoughts about burning people's faces with blow torches. They had fears about it. And they [now] felt like they weren't crazy.
But they shouldn't feel like that, because they ARE crazy. I don't know who this might come as a news flash to, but if you're having thoughts about burning people's faces with a blow torch, you are crazy and you need help. I'm sorry you had to hear it here first.
We've all been in the situation where we've used some common phrase inappropriately. We mean it as just a brush-off or subject change or just to say, "Well, how about that", but we pick the wrong time or place. It happens.
But last night, watching the documentary Rize, I heard possibly the worst use of a common phrase ever. In a section of the movie where they were talking about the horrible crime in South Central LA and Inglewood, they showed an older man who owned a casket store talking to one of the young dancers. Laughing, the casket store owner says, "You young people are dying out faster than us old folks, the way you're killing each other off! Ah, well...to each their own."
"To each their own"?!! I'm sure he just meant is something to say, with no more meaning than, "Yup". But it came off sounding like, "Hey, if you want to drive around the neighborhood picking random victims and gunning them down on the sidewalk, that's your business. Who am I to say whether that's right or wrong?"
The argument of the Experience Of The Big Screen has existed at least since the invention of the VCR, and probably before that, back to when The Wizard of Oz first aired on network TV and only the kids with color TVs even came close to experiencing it.
The Big Screen argument says that there are some films (or maybe even all films) that you HAVE to see in a theater, that you just can't get the same experience on a small screen. You can't feel the brush of the slightest whisper or get your brain knocking around in your head at every explosion. You don't get the same level of visual detail, don't get the same big-room-big-screen experience, and can't feel the rush of a lake-sized diet Sprite spilled down your back (unless you're into those sorts of things, pervert).
I usually touch on this argument as I put a Netflixed movie into the DVD player. Maybe I should be better about going to movie theaters, I think. This movie that I'm about to watch would probably be much better if I didn't have to put the subtitles on or pause it every half hour to move the laundry from washer to dryer.
In this last week (laundry needs+no social engagements=catching up on Netflix) I saw two movies that tossed the Big Screen Argument around my head even more.
King Kong Like, say, Gladiator, I couldn't help but wonder if I would have enjoyed this movie if I had seen it on a big screen and all at once, instead of broken up over two nights. But as it was, I spent a good chunk of the movie (as I did with Gladiator) talking to the screen ("Good Lord, this is TERRIBLE!"), and playing a game where I would guess what was about to happen ("That crazy guy with the accent is totally gonna die. And there he goes"). I was really hating it.
It was the fact that I was outright bored during action-packed scenes that made me wonder if I could have felt more excitement in the theater. But just when I was starting to wonder if maybe it was because I was watching on my mono small screen, the movie moved to New York, and in spite of the stupid ice-skating bit, it was really beautiful. The detail didn't escape me at all, and I actually enjoyed that last hour; feeling the excitement and emotion that was meant to be there, all on my (relatively) small screen.
ADVANTAGE: Draw. I'm sure it would have been more enjoyable in some big movie screen with unbearably loud speakers, but the fact that I was able to (relatively) enjoy the last bit of the movie on my TV means that the big stuff can still fit on the small screen. I tend to think it was the lousy quality of the first part that made it so unenjoyble.
Capote Sometimes, I think that the tons-of-talk movies translate even worse to the small screen than the big sound-and-vision blockbusters. Nothing takes the enjoyment out of a movie faster than putting the bright yellow subtitles on or having to do the "what'd he say?" rewind. So I didn't have a whole lot of hope of enjoying this movie, especially because I heard that it was kind of slow and quiet.
But I LOVED it. What an amazing movie. And even if the sound didn't come through so well, the cinematography and framing still looked fantastic, even with those yellow subtitles stepping all over it. I'm sure I would have liked it more in the theater, but it's hard to imagine loving it much more than I did.
ADVANTAGE: The small screen. Quality still translates.
Home sick with The Mother Of All Colds, I yesterday discovered (to Comcast's money-grubbing delight) the joys of On Demand pay-per-view. I swore to myself that I'd only ever do it when I'm sick, because I hate giving more of my money to those Comcast bastards, but...it's a pretty great service. I don't move from my couch and there's all these new movies that I've been meaning to see. It's a sick boy's dream (now playing in my head: "Sick Boy" by Social Distortion).
I started the day off with Friday Night Lights, a movie that I really liked a lot in spite of the its-more-exciting-if-the-camera-never-stops-moving style of direction. The music was fantastic (mental note: pick up soundtrack), but mostly, it was really fun to relive Texas 5A High School Football, with the huge Friday night games that everyone would go to (football as God intended: Friday, High School; Saturday, College; Sunday, pro), the disgusting adoration of the football players (the player-shaped rice krispy treat was nothing compared to the stuff that happened at our high school...ask me about it sometime), and the excitement of the high school playoffs (the playoff game in the Astrodome reminded me of my school's own short-lived playoff run in the Astrodome my freshman year). And all that was more words (and WAY more parentheses) than I should have used on this subject.
What I was really here to talk to you about was the annoying sound of most movies now, something I was particularly annoyed by when watching the latest Harry Potter movie. While I appreciate what they can do with sound and that these movies are really made to be watched in the theater or on some insanely large and expensive home theater system, a large percentage of us movie-watching folk only have the speaker(s) on our TV, meaning that we have to watch these movies with our hands on the volume button the entire time.
Almost all the sound in this Harry Potter movie (and a lot of the other big movies I've watched) falls into one of two categories: near-whispered dialogue and ear-splitting action. The action I can understand...action is loud. But do people in real life actually speak that quietly that much? My experience is that people in real life speak way too loudly, and almost never whisper, especially in the movie theater. On the screen, though, people prefer to whisper very emotionally all the time. That's fiction for ya.
The last movie I watched was Mean Girls, a movie that I thought was actually pretty brilliant. It's like one of those rare pop songs that's sugary and formulaic on the outside, but has a complex, interesting center that's fun to analyze by those of us that want to, and easy to ignore for the people who don't want to be bothered with things like social commentary. Also, I want to marry Tina Fey.
I think it's been made well clear that I avoid chains stores and restaurants for the most part. It's not that I have any problem with the stores themselves. As much as I believe that corporate greed will be the eventual ruin of this country, I have to admit that chains tend to be better run and have better quality and prices.
The main reason that I avoid chains is more because I feel that they homogeneous life. People are robbing their lives and senses of nostalgia by going to the same stores and restaurants in every city they live in. I'd rather have a mediocre meal that reminds me of a particular time and place than a good meal that's the same in every place I get it. It reminds of the time my family was driving through west Texas, where they must film all those car-breaks-down-in-desert commercials and we stopped at this hamburger place that was nothing but some spare lumber and plastic-sheet windows, and the place was packed. My family always remembers and reminisces about that place, but we don't think twice about the Wendys we stopped at in Alabama or any one of the billion Chilis or Outbacks.
So while I'll occasionally go to a Chipotle or Starbucks (and enjoy it), and while I believe that the competition has generally been good for the quality of life, both local-owned and chained, I'm sorry to see when local places go out of business.
EXCEPT...(yes, it took me this long to get to the main point)
...in the case of music stores. Those places were the bane of my existence growing up. Any given music store that I went into in any place in the country was a den of snobbery and nastiness. No one was any help and if they employees could stop talking long enough to even pay attention to me, they would be so condescending, rude and short that it would make me promise to never set foot in there again until I absolutely needed a new pair of sticks.
It's not that the Guitar Center is much better. They're a little more helpful, but that probably has more to do with the fact that I'm now a grownup with my own income and much more likely to be buying big-ticket items (even though I'm actually looking for the cheapest deals) and there's still those guys shredding on the flying Vs. I'm just completely fine with seeing those small time music stores fall away. If they're gonna be snobby, rude and unhelpful, at least they can have a good selection.
As an extra added bonus today, I'll now present my favorite moments of Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster, which I watched last night:
New bassist Robert Trujillo being completely awestruck at being told he'd be a full member of the band and getting a million dollar advance.
Watching the band argue about what to name the new album
Lars getting all excited about one of the songs come together
Lars's son playing drums
Watching the therapist getting all worked up about getting dumped
Watching the band, after going through years of putting an album together, finally getting on stage
Garden State is a difficult movie, one of those that seems to force a cataloging of emotional pains you may have. Maybe I shouldn't say "you". It was tough, sometimes in something of a forced way, but good, and I'm going to pretend that I can't hear you saying that I'm about 8 months late to the conversation on this movie. Actually, I'm not that good at pretending, so I won't talk about the movie.
What I will talk about is the fact that this one movie features both one of the best as well as one of the worst Uses Of Music In A Crucial Scene. Pulling out "The Only Living Boy In New York" for the primal scream scene was shear song choice perfection, with the bittersweet melody being the perfect tune for the beautiful climax. But I refuse to believe that the person or people behind that song choice could have also been behind using the truly rotten "Let Go" as the movie went into the fade to black. I thought we had all agreed that trip-hop died when everyone realized that no one could do it better than Portishead and that Massive Attack were added big guitars. No, that's not entirely fair. There's been other good music that's gotten called trip-hop before and it's still a good musical theory, but that's beside the point with such a fake vocal track and affected disaffected lyrics like "There's beauty in breakdown." Ending such an emotional movie with such a painful lack of genuine musical emotion is something I can only accept if I one day find out that it was intended to be painful.
Welcome to a very A.D.D. edition of Word Practice, where there's way too many thoughts and laughs and songs roaming through my head, so I'm going to have to resort to that move of the desperate blogger: the list.
Hotel Rwanda is not a movie that I could say is "good". Looking at a visual version of a story that seems horrible beyond imagination is so overwhelming that it goes beyond good/bad reviews. It had some things that you could pick at (not in the least Nick Nolte), but none of those matter when you're given a story of such unimaginable--and real--horror. Outside the theater afterwards, Dupont Circle looked like the most peaceful, privileged place on earth, and I wondered how I ever complained about my job, my love life, or Republicans.
My office mate and I had one of those dizzying topic-jumping conversations this morning, mostly about history, but about a LOT of history, and I was reminded of one of my fantasy jobs: teaching a college course on the history of the Cold War through film. It'd definitely include Dr Strangelove, Wargames, and Red Dawn and would have a few surprises in there. No grade inflation in this class, though, and the jocks that took it for an easy A would be very, very disappointed. I would measure my success as a professor by how many students hated me.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around this new Bright Eyes song ("Landlocked Blues") that Christian steered me in the direction of yesterday. On one hand, the melody is crazy beautiful, it has Emmylou Harris on it, it has a horn and piano midsection that could overwhelm even the hardest of hearts, and it's low-fi acoustic. On the other hand, Conor Oberst should just call all of his songs, "Don't you GET IT?! It's a METAPHOR!" The song is in the jukebox for you to make up your own mind.
Even though it was already posted on Stereogum, the people who haven't seen it need to see Jennifer Garner's hilarious iTunes celebrity playlist, notable not for its song inclusions, but for her 6th grade descriptions of each:
JENNIFER GARNER'S "WORKOUT MIX" 1. Outkast "The Way You Move" "this is a great song to either warm up to or cool down to. it makes me really want to move!" 2. John Mayer "Daughters" "john mayer is one of my favorites so i had to include him in my workout mix!" 3. Alicia Keys "Fallin'" "she is so talented! i love how she plays the piano. and her voice is incredible!!" 4. Gwen Stefani "What You Waiting For?" "this is a great song to workout to! It really gets me going. and the video is awesome." 5. Beyonce "Crazy In Love" "this song really gets me going!! it makes you want to dance." 6. Justin Timberlake "Rock Your Body" "anything justin timberlake is good to work out to!! and I love the beat to this song!" 7. Maroon 5 "This Love" "i really like this song. maroon 5 is a great group and it's a good song to sing along to." 8. Pink "Get The Party Started" "this song is just so fun. she makes me really want to move when i hear it!" 9. Usher "Yeah" "this is a great song for working out!! and usher is an amazing dancer." 10. Destiny's Child "Lose My Breath" "this is a great new song. all these girls are so talented!!"
Huh...that's interesting. Putting a song on a mix because you really like it? I should try that sometime.
That should give you enough to think about for the weekend.
I already had crime, drug-dealing and murder on the mind after going to sleep fresh off the end of City Of God, an incredibly violent movie that was also, unfortunately, fantastic (I hate that so many great movies are so violent, adding to the lists of the movie geek boys who can't call something 'one of the best ever' unless it involves at least 200 gunshot wounds). And I went to bed wondering what daily life is often like in parts of DC? Is it that bad? Was it that bad? Hey, maybe even the actual City of God in the 80's wasn't that bad, but we all know that there's places where people grow up and live their daily lives in war zones.
I woke up this morning (painfully early, thankyouverymuch failing body) to find this story in the Post:
With the images from City of God in my head, here's a scene close to home of drug dealers controlling neighborhoods and easily evading cops. I hope that the fence brings that neighborhood some peace, but it's hard not to see a short time between the finish of the fence and the day when someone takes some wire cutters to it.
What I find almost as upsetting as hearing about the good people of these neighborhoods terrorized by crime is that this underscores the problem of DC. Having the political boundries that the cops can't cross is just one more example of how DC is so often paralyzed by its small size and close borders, and how it will continue to have such problems until the size of the city is expanded, something that will never happen.
It's days like today when I feel all kinds of down about my writing. I was all prepared to share my insights on The Life Aquatic, which I saw last night, only to find that that Stephanie Zacharek in Salon and—God help me—Roger Ebert explained my feelings a hundred times better than I ever could have. This is both scary and sad.
It was a funny movie. It was a unique movie. It was a complete mess of a movie. I honestly wonder if Wes Anderson considered this movie a great success or if he was extremely disappointed by how it turned out in the end. It feels like a bunch of great ideas that just didn't gel, and I wonder if, most of the way through making it, they realized that they were never going to be able to turn it into a solid movie, and so they just sighed, went back to work, and finished it the best they could.
Or maybe it's exactly what Wes and co. wanted. In which case, they're all on drugs. Like, all the time. Which makes for interesting movies and music, but not always *good* movies and music.
I'll leave the final word to eBert: "I can't recommend it, but I would not for one second discourage you from seeing it."
I saw not one, not two, but THREE great movies on the planes to and from London. I think that being 39,000 feet in the air must make me more emotional, because they all struck me pretty hard. In order of viewing:
Fog of War: Incredible interview with Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Not only do you see the human side of someone who had to make terrible decisions that resulted in the death of millions of people, but you get to hear him called "foolish" by President Johnson. Things to think about the next time I'm having a bad day at work.
Big Fish: Loved it. Blubbered like a little baby at the end. I'm a sucker for those the-importance-of-family movies. I was afraid that it would be one of those movies where the bad southern accents were too distracting, but they were actually really good. I think it's the first time I've seen Ewan MacGregor do a good job since Trainspotting.
The Station Agent: Even though it suffered from a lot of the indie film faults (occasional forced plot points, slow moments, clumsy dialogue), it was a really touching movie, with an interesting angle on the human relationship stories, and the funniest Jersey Tough Guy character I think I've ever seen.
It's a subject that's been swimming around my head for a while now, but I'm just now putting pen to paper. Or, er, fingers to keyboard. It just doesn't sound as good...
The topic at hand is the criticisms of Lost In Translation as racist. One genius (please note completely un-notable sarcasm) on CNN called it "incredibly" racist, objecting that the only people in the movie with any soul were the white people (apparently, he didn't notice the inattentive husband and the shallow, airheaded actress) and that every Japanese person was "stupid".
Forgetting for a second that the word racist has been beaten into near-meaninglessness by people who can't think up a good argument, it's this guy's arguments that are racist. The movie shows how difficult and uncomfortable it is to be in a culture totally different than your own, and the Japanese culture is one that is often strikingly different than the general American culture. They have (again, generally speaking) a different sense of humor and a different way of living. For this guy to look at this difference and conclude that it's only Sofia Coppola depicting Japanese people as "stupid" is exactly the cultural narrow-mindedness that he thinks he's criticizing.
Ah. I'm finally glad I got that off my mind. Thanks for listening.
