Jesus Christ... Superstar

I only have time to write this blog because one of my classes was moved an hour later, and I forgot and showed up to an empty classroom, and now have an hour to kill.

So, ever since a couple years ago, when I walked into Kim's and they were playing this movie downstairs, I have wanted to watch Jesus Christ Superstar. Nearly the entire thing is posted on youtube, so I "prepped" myself and finally worked up the will to rent it.

As you may or may not know, Jesus Christ Superstar was a rock-opera double-album *before* it was ever staged as a musical. The album, from what I can tell, "stars" Ian Gillan, the lead singer of Deep Purple, as Jesus---a part he obviously was unfit to play in the film version. The premise of the whole thing is, Jesus as a charismatic proto-rock-star, with fans and groupies, etc.

What I am surprised at, is not that Christian groups protested the musical, but that they did it for all the wrong reasons and have evidently now embraced it. Because, kitsch aside, the film is completely heretical and anti-Christian. (Which was surprising to me).

Main heresies:
- That the deification of Christ is just a "myth."
- That his immediate followers "twisted around" his words (ie: the Gospels)
- That his political mission was more important than his personal charisma, for which it was sacrificed.
- Judas is resurrected (for the main show number: he descends in white fringe on a cross from heaven), but not Jesus.
- The Crucifixion scene is a bum-out after which everyone gets on the bus and leaves, wondering what "went wrong."
- That Jesus didn't die for our sins, but rather for some mistaken hubris and political naivete.
- That Jesus' mission on earth was not really a success.

WHOA. I can't believe that Christians go to see this. As I was telling my co-watcher, if there is ONE principle of Christianity, it is Jesus' divinity, which this movie shits all over. So bizarre.

There are the requisite horrible songs, the shameless pastiche of soul styles onto klezmer, folk, gospel, and faux-orchestral parts; NO sets; the entire film is shot from 50 yards away from the actors; Judas has all the best songs but Jesus' are easily the worst; there are plenty of false notes and self-conscious kitsch, where one wants to say, Who felt the need to ADD kitsch to this?; and finally, it's a directorial hack job-- Norman Jewison.

Evidently, reasons for protesting this film in the day (1973) have now been turned into the bedrock of the Christian youth movement: irony, "rock" music, a bunch of kids having fun, slight irreverence (calling Jesus "JC"), little attention to church dogma, etc. In short, a total triumph of style over substance, which is ironic, because the movie is so awkwardly-insistent upon its substance. Or maybe that's just me, who can't believe that any Christian would go along with this movie's point: basically a replication of Borges' story, "Three Versions of Judas"--Judas is the real protagonist of the Gospels, his suicide is the real martyrdom, etc. What remains (for me) is to think how much the movie intends its blasphemies *as such*, ie: if Tim Rice really thinks, "Jesus should have done things differently and not thrown his political mission away on this fantasy of being god," or...well...that seems to be the only option right now.

And, to anyone who thinks it is weird that I am thinking about this, or watching this movie, well--then you don't really know me. But I should say, the movie is pretty much HORRIBLE, and I totally recommend it, but not in a "so bad it's good" way; rather, in an "it's horrible AND it's good" way.

Five Favorite Movies of 2006

Army of Shadows*
The Proposition*
The Hidden Blade*
The Departed
Children of Men

*--2006 US release, previously released abroad.

Best Westerns (top 40)

1. Shane
2. Rio Bravo
3. The Wild Bunch
4. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
5. The Naked Spur
6. The Searchers
7. High Noon
8. Once Upon a Time in the West
9. Red River
10. My Darling Clementine
11. Warlock
12. One-Eyed Jacks
13. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
14. The Big Country
15. Ride the High Country
16. The Man from Laramie
17. Winchester 73
18. 3:10 to Yuma
19. Ride Lonesome
20. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
21. Unforgiven
22. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
23. For a Few Dollars More
24. Man of the West
25. Stagecoach
26. Fistful of Dollars
27. Comanche Station
28. El Topo
29. Rio Grande
30. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
31. The Proposition
32. Keoma
33. The Last Movie
34. Ride in the Whirlwind
35. A Bullet for the General
36. The Ox-Bow Incident
37. Django
38. The Tall T
39. The Shooting
40. The Professionals

honorable mentions: Blazing Saddles, Hud, The Last Picture Show.

muppets

This post is about the film "A Muppet Christmas Carol" (which I just saw for the nth time).

I had to take this out of a paper the other day (because it had nothing to do with my topic), but it might fit nicely here:

Speaking reductively, there will be only three authors in the English Canon: Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens. Their works have all lived up to the real measure of canonical texts: their capacity to be reinvented, made relevant again, for latter-day audiences. Recent years have seen a number of films transposing Shakespeare and Jane Austen's plots into high schools (Clueless, Ten Things I Hate About You, and O retelling Emma, The Taming of the Shrew and Othello), and in turn, high school drama departments around the nation sense the urgency that could be conveyed by an "update" of Shakespeare into period analogues. Dickens sits less easily in this trend. It is impossible to conceive of a "mod" Bleak House or a Civil War Our Mutual Friend. Because the specific British reforms of the nineteenth century which Dickens tackled do not universalize well, and so much period and local detail transcends the incidental to become integral to the plot, his novels are almost unthinkable outside their Victorian context. Two obvious exceptions are A Christmas Carol, so capable of being universalized that it jumped over the category of human as to be acted out by Muppets in A Muppet Christmas Carol , the definitive orphan narrative Oliver Twist, which became the orphaned-kitten cartoon Oliver and Company. You will notice, however, that these children's versions, however clever, are still more juvenile than the high-school adaptations that crown Austen and Shakespeare's careers in reinvention. To which I propose that Dickens' real, serious achievement of universal appeal lies in Great Expectations--a statement borne out by Pip's sharing with Prince Hamlet that dubious apotheosis of universality, being portrayed by Ethan Hawke in a modern adaptation.

So, I got home, I rented A Muppet Christmas Carol, and I just watched it. It's great. I cried a few times. Having only one major role played by a human is PERFECT for Charles Dickens, because his characters are so incompletely-developed and yet freakishly memorable--like muppets. I mean, Tiny Tim is far too maudlin a character to be convincingly played by any real human child; he would be insufferably cute and tear-jerking. Recall Oscar Wilde's famous quip about Dickens' "Old Curiosity Shop": "A man would have to have a heart of stone to read the death scene of Little Nell and not...laugh." But Muppets really solve this problem entirely. They are deformed yet instantly likeable.

Also, by having Gonzo play Charles Dickens, the movie keeps in a great deal of the actual prose from the novella, without reducing it to weird voice-over narration, which really would not have fit in. And although not all of the songs are good, a few are really funny--the opening scene, the one with the Marleys (played by the two grumpy old men), and the song with the ghost of Christmas Present, are all good fun.

The two parts I cried at: when Scrooge rewatches the scene where he first meets his lost love, and then begs the Ghost not to show him the later scene, when their relationship falls apart. I guess there is something heartbreaking about having to see the pointless acts of self-loathing we drive ourselves toward--that, with the remove of years, become retroactively inevitable and constitutive, and so lose some of their smart. Having to experience such senseless waste *as if* it were possible to then undo it...seems very cruel. The other part is when you suspect that Tiny Tim might die. This would be the most awful thing imaginable, to me. Why should the probable death of a FROG PUPPET upset me so? I think the answer is precisely not that Tiny Tim is so sweet, so cute, so helpless, etc. That would be be the dumb route, and I think Dickens (or Henson) is so much smarter for making it the case that this misshaped green blob is actually what the whole family is based on--their whole crappy lives are lived in this above-board cheeriness so that Tiny Tim won't have to know otherwise. Hence, what appears to be his innate goodness ("God bless us, every one") isn't 1) that he is young and doesn't know better, or 2) that he is a perfect angel who doesn't know better, but rather--that this unsustainable hope in the goodness of people is exactly what his family and everyone else have to act out around him, so that for as long as he is alive, he won't see the truth. And if he were to die, there just wouldn't be any point. SAD.

y'know, i haven't thought Nicole Kidman was attractive since I was about 12, and there was a little movie called "To Die For", but here ya go:



maybe it's that she just looks like a kind-of older hipster?, like one who would run the cool bookstore in your town and always wear cool vintage dresses

The Fugitive (no proust)

So I just wrote a presentation for my Derrida class, which anyone who knows me, knows this class has overtaken my life, has five times as much work as any of my other classes, all the kids are taking it, etc. And so I went over the same information several times: I read it. I re-read it. I wrote down what I had underline. I made an outline from that. Then I wrote a paper from that. And then I went down and wrote a summary of it in my notebook for safe-keeping. And so then I read my presentation to make sure it was under the time limit. It made no sense!!! But I had literally JUST written it.

Have you guys seen the Fugitive? The movie with Harrison Ford. (I should say, Proust's sixth volume of A la recherche... "La Fugitive" was disastroustly translated into English as "The Sweet Cheat Gone," and I really really really really really wish that the Harrison Ford/ Tommy Lee Jones film were called "The Sweet Cheat Gone"). Anyways, when I saw this movie when I was 10, I was obsessed with the TV show, which I had seen every day at 2pm when I was in bed with mono. Now, this is a great action film, probably the equal of that other 1990s juggernaut "Terminator 2: Judgment Day", and definitely better than "Time Cop", a film starring Jean Claude Van Damme which tried to combine the two (cops, time travel) with a sprinking of nudity (this is all I remember, except that someone MELTED when they ran into their time-double.) So, "Terminator 2" and "The Fugitive" were both massively difficult to understand, "Terminator 2" in an existential way, where how can you get rid of the future if you need someone to be sent back to the past to make sure that events turn out the same way, but you have gotten rid of the possibility of being able to send them back? Also: did ROBOTS invent time-travel? I think this is the claim of the film, but why would robots want to time-travel?

"The Fugitive" was impenetrable on a more "who did what and when?" level, because the one-armed man's motive was based on a covering-up of something that somehow necessitated murdering Harrison Ford's wife, but to my 5th grade mind it made sense only for like FIVE SECONDS when I somehow got all the elements in my head, thought "a-ha!" and then instantly collapsed back into a muddle when I tried to reorganize it.

This is what my Derrida paper reads like. I understood it while I was writing it, but reading it ten minutes later, (and let's be fair, it's 2 am and I'm sick), it reads like it was written in Martian. I know that I what I wrote is "true", but I'm not sure it makes any more sense than the impenetrable Derrida piece. Which is to say, next time you bash theory, or if you think my paper is boring, just remember: it's exactly like Terminator 2. That's just how exciting it is.

FUCK THIS MOVIE

Oh great. What the world really needs is this constipated character study of an inbred nincompoop, rendered as a deep meditation on progress and tradition. Let's be honest: there is almost no way that Elizabeth II can even read. Her IQ is probably hovering in the low 80s. Her portrayal in the Naked Gun seems far more accurate to me:



But TONY BLAIR is the voice of radicalism in this film? Or his wife? Can someone just drag a rake over my eyes? I feel like I am on crazy pills reading the reviews of this film. Are we supposed to take seriously the ultimate artificial event of our time, the pathetic finale of Princess Diana? I'm sure this film thinks it is like Noh theater or something, and that every small reaction in the throne room is a monumental event in the world, but I almost vomited watching the trailer, and dwelling on the fucking Kings and Queens of Merry Olde England and Their Grand Furrowed Brows seems like a desperate bourgeois attempt to chastise sovereignty while at the same time lavishing affection on its "good" representation (Diana) and imagine that retrograde, drooling idiots like Queen Elizabeth II are capable of the same profound reflection as we have come to expect from President Martin Sheen.

American Hardcore

American Hardcore is a new documentary about American Hardcore Punk from 1979-86. So, no Ramones, no Youth of Today, no Dillinger Escape Plan. This is undoubtedly the strength of the film, where almost every book (This Band Could Be Your Life, Dance of Days) or movie about the subject has previously ended up wondering what happened after (and getting it wrong). By not asking Henry Rollins where punk is today, the movie avoids expressing the embarrassing and misinformed post-history which it undoubtedly believes in.

The main problem with the movie is its organization: having bitten off more than could be chewed, you never really get an idea of what any of these bands sounded like (unless you knew already), and while the film changes subject both on topical and geographical/temporal lines (which is smart), but then has NO breaks, which is like reading a novel without paragraphs. The topics, by the way, are: violent dancing, straight edge, police violence, women, DIY, and the end of hardcore. The problem is that, except for Henry Rollins and HR and Ian McKaye, there is a dearth of legitimately charismatic people in the film: the anti-charisma of Harley Flanagan and Vic Bondi are perhaps just as interesting, but then there are a couple dozen uninteresting, washed up weirdos who, despite having 20 years to think about these events, don't have much to say: Brian Baker...Greg Ginn...Dave Dictor...John Bloodclot. As a diehard fan, I still enjoyed hearing them, but cinematically they are dead weight. And because there are no "chapter" breaks, the film begins to seem like one long, unnarratable ramble.

The best aspects of the movie are the footage of Bad Brains, SSD, and the Adolescents, and just seeing what bands like Poison Idea, YDI, Necros, Negative FX, and Flipper looked like playing. The absence of HUGE bands like Husker Du, Misfits and Dead Kennedys from the film is obviously skewing in some way (also missing but less essential: Suicidal Tendencies and Bad Religion), but putting those bands in the movie would probably have crowded out footage of lesser-known bands, so whatever. Still, the film's focus is for the most part what mine would have been: it REALLY IS about American Hardcore, and not about Raybeez or crossover, or SST's indie bands, or how hardcore "grew up" INTO anything. Saying punk or hardcore is "dead" is clearly just a way of owning that memory, so whatever, but the film hedges its bets on that account by staying within the frame of America and 1979-86.

But actually, omissions aside, and a few clunkers (Jack from TSOL, Flea, Duff McKagan, a "hardcore artist" from NYC), the interviewed subjects were the important ones. The movie is funny, and for what it's worth, you'll never see YDI or Poison Idea on a big screen again. My overall review though, is that American Hardcore is best thought of as an advertisement for the new Bad Brains DVD.

little miss sunshine

So I finally got around to seeing this movie that everyone told me I would like, that it was enjoyable and cute, etc. The best review of it that I read compared it to Harold and Maude, which is way off in terms of quality, but pretty accurate in terms of tone: not quite a black comedy, sometimes not a comedy at all, embarrassingly life-affirming, episodic, has great acting. On the other hand, it was fairly predictable, from plot points (will the brother who is not speaking until he gets into the flight academy shockingly speak at some point?!-- will someone abusing heroin possibly die?) to the straw-men topics of motivational speakers, highway patrol cops, and beauty pageants. On the other hand, Steve Carrell is incredible, and the funniest part is this (I cite from another review): He makes the name "Nietzsche" (which he pronounces crisply as "Neet-chah") inexplicably hilarious. There's no way to imagine that, of course, but his whole performance is otherworldly-- and maybe that's the best thing I can say about the film. The desperately peppy and misguided dad, the stressed-out mom, the crude grand father, the stoic brother, the quirky and oblivious sister: they all seem like they came from the same writer's imagination. They fit in suspiciously well as dramatic foils to each other, although this produces surprisingly little comedy. But then Steve Carrell operates as a kind of "reality effect" in this movie (to wildly abuse that term), because structurally, tonally, in every way, he does not fit in to the more conventionally demented proceedings of the family-film that otherwise kind of stutters along.

best movies i saw this summer

The Apartment- Jack Lemmon, Shirley Maclaine
selling points: Shirley Maclaine is really cute, Fred Macmurray captures the creepiness of the 1950s perfectly
notable: whack gender politics
The Last Movie- Dennis Hopper
selling points: hilarious, meta, audience-baffling
notable: Talyatastic soundtrack, indecipherable plot
Time Regained- Catherine Deneuve
selling points: I cried. Marcel perfectly cast
notable: why film only the final book of a series?
Sword of the Beast- japanese people
selling points: looking for gold
notable: "What connection do I have with you? Why kill me?" "We ARE connected...because I'll see you in HELL!"
Army of Shadows- french people
selling points: Correggio-esque cinematography, every actor from every other French film of this era/style
notable: bizarrely brutal; great score
Manhattan- Woody Allen, Muriel Hemingway
selling point: Diane Keaton's intense perm
notable: rooting for Woody Allen to get with a 17-year-old
Hidden Blade- different japanese people
selling points: sequel to "Twilight Samurai," intensely thoughtful genre entry
notable: last scene almost exactly like the end of the Keira Knightley "Pride & Prejudice"
Clans of Intrigue- Di Long, Betty Bei Di
selling point: treacherous hermaphrodite japanese monks
notable: tearing off your own hand to use as a projectile weapon (YES)
L'Eclisse- Monica Vitti, Alain Delon
La Notte- Monica Vitti, Jeanne Moureau, Marcello Mastroianni
selling points: two of the best final scenes in cinema, Monica Vitti is a babe
notable: the strange shuffle-board scene in "la notte" rivals the mime-tennis scene in "blow up" in terms of "Best Imaginary Game in an Antonioni Movie"

the "real" ignorant hit of the summer

Miss Talya Cooper has advanced the position that the two upcoming football movies "Gridiron Gang" and "Invicible" (starring The Rock and Marky Mark, né Walhberg, respectively) are actually the movies people should be sending phone-exhortations to, and internetting about, instead of "Snakes on a Plane."

Let's look at the last unbelievably-good summer movie, the first "Pirates of the Caribbean," by all accounts should have been a disaster, as its sequel indeed was, but was totally awesome because no one knew that Johnny Depp was going to steal every scene. But it isn't as though director Gore Verbinski had a handle on the genius of that film, because not only did he water it down with an extra half-hour of Orlando Bloom time, but then showed no understanding of its charm in making the sequel.

Most of the time, when you know you have something good on your hands, you ruin it, usually by overdoing it. This is the case with nearly every minor Simpsons character, most of whom were loveable as occasional one-liners, but nearly all of whom have been milked for entire plot-lines they were incapable of supporting. Which is to say, what is charming is often so only in moderation, and it is no logical jump to say that "Snakes on a Plane" will not be about moderation.

In short, if there is only one thing going for a work, and it is good every time it comes on, you want to keep the audience expectant. Like Grant Hart songs on Husker Du records. Like Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn*. Like Randy Rhodes' solos on Ozzy Osbourne albums. and so forth. actually, I would love to make a longer list about things like this. But for now, let us just say that there is NO FUCKING WAY that "Snakes on a Plane" will keep itself in check, and you can bet your life that it will try to be "extreme" all the time, something that is nearly impossible to do and remain interesting (cf: death metal, Ezra Pound).

"Gridiron Gang" will not be as good as it should be, because it is a highly sincere movie whose star is bascially a con man (which is like being an actor, but not quite the same thing): The Rock. There was a great interview I read, where the interviewer admitted being impressed by the Rock's candour, intelligence, suavity, etc.... and then read a different interview the same month where he had given almost the exact same answers. I would almost prefer to rent "Walking Tall," because that movie was not attempting to disguise that it was a piece of violent trash. "Gridiron Gang" will run into a weird problem about 65 minutes in, when for a split second, you will enter a kind of moral worm-hole in which all you want to happen in the movie is for the Rock to pull some Scorpion King-style shit and rip someone in half, before you snap back into the Bruckheimer lull and realize that you aren't "supposed" to want that. Then, 15 minutes later, the movie will ASK overtly for you to want the Rock to tear some dipshit in half, and then when he does or doesn't, you will be satisfied/disappointed no matter what.

"Invincible" will be awesome. I bet there is a really trashy bar-maid he gets with, and hopefully something to do with the Mob/Vegas/corruption in football.

(* I like other things about Huckleberry Finn, too, but obviously Twain was concerned that people wanted more of Tom Sawyer, and when I read the book when I was 10, I felt that way, too.)

goodfellas

-- So, from time to time, I like to randomly put certain "classics" in their place. I just watched Goodfellas for the second time, which confirmed my opinion from when I saw it in high school. Overrated. It's great. Totally entertaining. Classic lines, great performances, good soundtrack.

But this is where I have to step in to set the record straight. Let's look at some of the accolades this film has received:
"The best mob movie ever"- Roger Ebert
#1 in Total Film's (??) 100 greatest movies ever list
#28 on IMDB's top 250 movies list
Sight & Sound magazine named it the fourth best film of the past 25 years

etc.

To which I would reply: THIS IS A FILM STARRING RAY LIOTTA. It's messy, rambling, and doesn't really end well. It lacks a moral compass, a plot, character development, pacing, relatable themes, etc. So, not only is The Godfather a better movie (it has all of the above in spades), but I think in Goodfellas you can see Scorcese making a great movie at the same time as he is showing why he has made utter crap since then.

Take out the Joe Pesci character, actually, and what have you got? Evidently, Pesci wrote and directed the "You think I'm funny?" scene himself, and the great scene with Martin Scorcese's mother (before they kill the guy in the trunk out in the car) is almost entirely improvised. So, you see how, if you threw, say, Leonardo DiCaprio into this film, maybe it wouldn't be any better or worse than The Aviator or Gangs of New York, which just come across as tiresome, sprawling period pieces with no direction. Actually, as shitty as Gangs of New York is, it at least had some big set piece scenes, whereas Goodfellas is oddly close, zoomed-in, and anonymous. Sure, that's an effect of the paranoia of the character, but give me a break. You remember the dialogue in this movie, not the visuals. And that is a liability. (although i have to give due credit to the long tracking shot into the Copa Cabana with Henny Youngman on stage).

Point being: change a few elements, lose the charm of the first-time-around, and Goodfellas is not very different from Casino. I know everyone loves this movie, and I do too, but let's keep everything in perspective. Flawed classic. Probably would be rank at about 140 on my all-time list.

who wants to see The Brink's Job tomorrow?

-- So, I switched over to the Scott-Moncrieff translation for volume 4 of Proust. I have heard some snobs complain about the title "Cities of the Plain" instead of the literal translation "Sodom and Gomorrah," but I dunno, I think "Cities of the Plain" is a beautiful title. Ironically, the Sturrock translation, while getting the title right, is clunky and hard to read. My french is not great, but I think he tried to stick too closely to the idiosyncracies of french (with redundant demonstrative pronouns, for example), and doesn't render the feel of the English language.
-- Also a beautiful title: a tiny subsection of vol. 4, not even a chapter really, is called The intermittencies of the heart.
-- Uh, so I am not a creative person. In NYC, a lot of people are turning commercial or warehouse space into living space, or starting their own businesses, or making films, or music, or are writers, or are doing their own design label, are freelancers of some sort... and I have a lot of respect for that, but it's not me. I will probably always live in a regular apartment in a regular part of town, I'm not a trailblazer/gentrifier. I am already on a "career path" that is long-established and, while maybe my work *within* academia will be interesting and new, the actual chart of my life looks pretty set right now. Which could be boring, I guess. I don't think I'm a boring person, so I'm not very worried, but you know. The other thing is that a main tenet of my beliefs is DIY, but the problem is that I don't "D" much. Maybe when school calms down, I can put out some records, but basically for the next few years I will be reading and writing constantly, probably not much else. On the other hand, that is what I am interested in-- it is largely a personality thing, since I have never been good at art or music, and can't write fiction or poetry. I guess I'm not complaining; I like what I'm good at, and I've enjoyed reading other people's criticism, but sometimes I wish I was more creative with either my life or my productivity.
-- Bad mood: week 4

"no direction home"

Just finished watching the Bob Dylan documentary that was on PBS ; what a fucking weird person. You can almost feel the wrench being thrown in the film's otherwise user-friendly texture by the MASSIVE WEIRDNESS that is Bob Dylan. By turns mercurial and taciturn, always refusing to give a simply-true answer (which is not charming or deep, but extremely frustrating), Dylan confronts the movie with the unfortunate paradox that this artist whose heart we think we have deduced from his hundreds of his songs is a complete enigma, almost a non-entity. He is so completely detached from his own life, from commenting on his work, from trying to place/label himself, you wonder how the man ever wrote a song in his life! Not to mention his completely dessicated, almost tacky appearance. And yet it is undeniably the same person.

By the way, undoubtedly Scorcese's best film since Goodfellas...

-- Musical development seems more and more like Seinfeld's routine about women's fashion: each season, they hide a different body part, until when the next season, they cover up some other part and reveal the long-awaited (say, calves), men go crazy. A rock act that turns acoustic. A rapper who puts out a pop song. An acoustic act that turns rock. A psych-noise-folk group who turn pop. A tough, forbidding artist putting out a sensitive ballad. Unbelievably, this is continually shocking to music critics and audiences everywhere. The fiction that people "grow" as artists is more laughable every year, when inevitably they are just shuffling the cards.
-- You can't get rid of your friends or quit a job very easily, or move, or get a new wardrobe, or anything very easily. So, on one hand, you see it taking an awful long time for people to drop out of things and become their parents already, just because they are still going through the motions. And on the other hand, it is a pretty arduous, tortuous grind to try and do anything interesting with your life.
-- This Side of Paradise is pretty crappy, but I am reminded of something wise a drunk told me at a party my parents had when I was in high school. I was reading The Great Gatsby, or about to start, and he said: Oh, Great Gatsby, that's one of my favorite books. There's a lot of truth in that book. They probably won't teach you this in school, but the rich characters in that book, they are a lot like crabs. In New England, when you go crab-fishing, the first crab that you catch, you have to put a lid on your bucket, or else it will crawl out and try to escape. But once you have a couple in there, they pull each other back in, if one tries to leave. Now, surely he heard this from somewhere else but damn if that doesn't sum the Great Gatsby up perfectly. Also this reminds me of reading "The Killers" by Hemingway the other day and crying at the part when the Swede says, “There ain’t anything to do now.” And Nick: “Couldn’t you fix it up some way?” “No. I got in wrong.”
-- The more Lacan you read, the more you cut people slack for being in some fucked-up intersubjective position vis-a-vis you, or for acting out on behalf of some field of the Other, or for erratic contradictions and most of all, instead of "taking the magic" out of things like love, what is more remarkable (like the movies, like Nabokov, etc), what is even more incredible about love (or other neurotic processes) is how perfectly they function even when we know how they work. Any "common-sense" criticism of this aspect of theory misses the point that there is no *undoing* the logic of these systems; they don't dispel once they are named.

who wants to see "Time Regained" next week?

-- books finished this week: Jacques Lacan Seminar I: Freud's Papers on Technique, Sir A.C. Doyle A Study in Scarlet, Bruno Schulz Crocodile Street.
-- Dicks and Carbonas were great on Thursday night. Dicks shed a member since I saw them in Austin, so they were a four-piece (as in "the day"), and miraculously had not at all improved on their instruments since 1980. Their ineptitude, however, was somewhat mesmerizing, since it re-created the sound of their records perfectly, and since their not-quite-fast-enough, stomping beat has always been somewhat hypnotizing. Carbonas were too cool by half, but also sounded just like their records, but somehow blew the middle of their set by playing a string of uncatchy numbers and some KBD cover (which was alright but what are you gonna do it's 2006).
-- last night watched The Specialist, which made me realize I need to read Eichmann in Jerusalem really badly, but a few comments: 1) "the banality of evil" is pretty dead-on, but not quite in the way that I thought before I saw the movie; like, "banal" is not really equivalent to "bland" or "mundane" and is the only word that captures Eichmann's obnoxious, insipid, pathetic vibe. 2) also, dude is pissed off for most of the movie, since this is in some ways not a "real" trial and while normally I would sympathize with that sort of self-important indignation, y'know... you can't really, here. 3) best shot in the movie is when Eichmann is doing a typical oh I wasn't in charge of that or well we didn't *call* it 'burying people alive in mass graves', we called it 'deportation,' and the prosecuting attorneys play this tape of something similar he had said previously, and all you see in the camera shot is the bailiff rewinding the tape and on his arm the Camp tattoos. Heady stuff, people.
-- Talya was complaining about "post-Wes Anderson" films as being worse than the genre I was complaining about (the shitty independent films that Landmark and Angelika are always playing). Discussed: Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, You and Me and Everyone We Know, etc. I really liked Squid and the Whale, though, which is definitely "post Wes Anderson". The phenomenon that I was talking about was movies like "Happy Endings" with Tom Arnold, "The Good Girl", "Closer", "the World's Fastest Indian" and any movie where Paul Giamatti is the main character (I'm sure "Cinderella Man" sucked, but it isn't really the same phenomenon). Basically, movies that think they are more steamy/thoughtful than "average Hollywood fare," and are self-absorbed enough to try and make the Festival rounds but need someone to tell them "you aren't arty; you are just boring." This is almost exclusively what they play at the one or two independent theaters in Austin. SUCKS

"lady in the water"

I really
really
really
want to see this piece of shit. The person writing in place of Roger Ebert for Ebert's website gave it the WOSRT review in recent memory, and it's actually about two to three times longer than the normal Ebert review, because (not being a genius like Ebert), Jim Emerson is not able to contain his loathing in the standard # of words.

Ebert said that to call the plot-twist in The Village " 'anti-climactic' would be an insult both to climaxes and to prefixes." I saw that with my buddy Corey, who incidentally does not know how to whisper in a movie, and it was the most wonderfully atrocious conversation-piece of the summer. What a piece of crap. Implausible. Badly scripted. Boring. Facile. Pretentious.

And so, under the fucked up premise that Bryce Dallas Howard (get a real name, you rich fuck), daughter of Da Vinci code auteur Ron Howard, is somehow analogous to Mr. Shyamalan (whose initials are even pretentious!!!) as Robert De Niro was to Martin Scorsese, or as Diane Keaton was for Woody Allen, which is unbelievably insulting, and under the equally fucked up premise that we are in the hands of someone with any cinematic credibility or capital to blow, and with a vast critical apparatus massed against it like a bow-tied, pop-corn-inhaling phalanx, movie-theater-trailer-voice-guy tries to get us to take this film seriously as a continuation of not only Shyamalan's...ahem...legacy, but also of Hitchcock's, and Spielberg, and god knows whose else besides. (how's THAT for a sentence!)

Little do they know, what makes these movies so delightful (although honestly Signs was hardly watchable) is the ponderous, pretentious, arcane, pretentious, non-signifying, and pretentious Shyamalanalia that proliferates in his movies like the riff from "You're Pushing Too Hard" when it crops up in other songs by The Seeds.

It's like watching a precocious but dorky and unlikeable 10-year-old make up his own game and then try to get other people to play it with him.

Because I've always hated that kid. In my elementary school, his name was Michael Hemmings, and he had a rat tail, and the greatest day of my life was when someone cut it off on the bus. So fuck you, M. Night Shyamalan, I may pay $11 to see your movie but so help me god I hope your next film is about backwards-walking Xiardglopeths who fix your shoes in the night but really they are trying to find the Chosen One (and you'll never guess who it is!), and that it stars Bryce Dallas Howard, and that you play Jesus yourself in a shocking cameo.

fUcK you