Jamestown

Snippets of an Overheard Phone Conversation Involving a Woman Who Almost Certainly Should Not Be Permitted to Raise Children (And What She Was Really Saying)

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:20:00 -0400

Woman: “…Sitting them down facing a wall is too harsh. I believe in a good firm swat on the butt…”

“I have trouble properly prioritizing things.”

Woman: “We signed a contract to raise a good, responsible person.”

“We are in a cult.”

Woman (derisively): “Should we sit them down with some milk and cookies and explain to them what they did wrong?”

“COMMUNICATION IS FOR PUSSIES! LET THE KID GUESS WHY HE’S GETTING BELTED!”

I would totally stop paying attention to politics if that wasn’t what leads people to elect...

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 19:00:49 -0400

I would totally stop paying attention to politics if that wasn’t what leads people to elect economic terrorists who do things that make me want to stop paying attention to politics.

I should have been keeping this blog during the period in my life when interesting things happened...

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 18:52:53 -0400

I should have been keeping this blog during the period in my life when interesting things happened daily.

Saw Captain America today.

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:07:39 -0400

He wouldn’t hold the economy hostage over some bullshit.

Looking Forward to Breaking Bad: Season 4

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 21:16:00 -0400

Note: This post contains SPOILERS for the first three seasons of Breaking Bad.

Jesse Pinkman’s (Aaron Paul) arc over Breaking Bad’s third season seemed pretty straightforward: after learning in rehab that the first step to recovery is accepting who and what you are, Jesse decides to accept and embrace that he is “the bad guy.” To that end he spends most of the season posturing as the amoral drug dealer; he coldly and calculatedly connives to screw his parents on the sale of the house they evicted him from, seemingly severing that relationship permanently; he throws himself back into the meth game with a newfound ruthlessness and zeal; and he generally conducts himself not with the affability which had heretofore characterized him, but with a dead-eyed stare, monotone voice, and callousness to the concerns of others that protests too much, “I am a sociopath.” But Jesse can only pretend for so long; when he discovers that his boss, meth kingpin Gus (Giancarlo Esposito), employs underlings who use children to deal and carry out hits, including one on his friend Combo, Jesse’s inherent sense of right-and-wrong wins out—he may manufacture drugs, but in no way can he condone enlisting children into a life of meth-slinging and murder. Jesse devises a plan to kill the guys responsible, but is ultimately prevented from carrying it out, and it is at this point that Jesse realizes what we in the audience have long suspected: that, for all his general cluelessness and wannabe gangsterism, it is Jesse, and not square protagonist Walter White (Bryan Cranston), who is this series’ moral compass. Despite his earlier protestations to the contrary, Jesse is not, at heart, “the bad guy.”

And then Jesse murders Gale.

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems on Breaking Bad, and creator Vince Gilligan is not afraid to upend the status quo. The high concept description of the series—high school science teacher Walt receives a cancer diagnosis and begins cooking crystal meth with former student Jesse to leave money behind for his family—makes Walt sound like the series’ everyman, and in the most basic terms of plot he is. Walt is the upstanding citizen, the ordinary man who finds himself embroiled in extraordinary circumstances, while Jesse is already a criminal when the story begins, but these characters are sketched too specifically to be just types. Fueling Walt just as much as, if not more than, his external circumstances is his own pathological self-destructive streak, and the deeper he digs himself into this criminal underworld, the more we see that it was only the strictures of society keeping his worst impulses at bay. Jesse, meanwhile, may be a minor drug dealer when the series starts, but we quickly glean that this is due more to a lack of motivation and guidance than to any true malevolence, and the great tragedy of the series seems increasingly to be that, when Jesse finally finds a strong and nurturing mentor figure willing to give him individual attention, it is not the Walter White who tried to teach him chemistry in school, but the Walter White who’s ready to break bad, cook meth, and transgress any moral, social, or legal boundary obstructing his path.

Vince Gilligan pitched his show to AMC as “Mr. Chips becomes Scarface,” but the show’s true trajectory seems to be one of showing that Mr. Chips was Scarface, deep down, all along. In The Sopranos, mob boss Tony Soprano often wondered if he would have become what he was if he had not been raised in a criminal environment; as that show progressed, Tony’s inherent vindictiveness and sociopathy signaled that the answer was pretty clearly, “yes.” In his own way, Walter White is who Tony Soprano might have been had he been afforded the opportunities Tony was denied; Walt has to overcome the social stigmas against murder and lawlessness that Tony never had to contemplate, as well as the general learning curve a straight citizen faces becoming a successful criminal, but he overcomes these pretty quickly, and the trade-off is an understanding of and ability to operate in regular society, a Nobel Prize, and an intelligence and respectability that Tony Soprano could only dream of attaining. And when it comes to morally compromising and corrupting the loved ones around them, Walt has proven himself just as adept as Tony; he has trained Jesse to be a better, more careful and motivated criminal and induced him to commit murder; he has compelled his wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), to be complicit in covering up his criminal misdeeds; and now that he is paying for his DEA Agent brother-in-law Hank’s (Dean Norris) medical care with his ill-gotten finances, it is only a matter of time before Hank finds out the truth and has to decide whether or not he, too, will break bad. Walt’s cancer may be in remission, but the malignancy of his criminal misdeeds has spread far beyond the bounds of his own body, infecting the lives of everyone around him.

It’s hard to predict, meanwhile, what effect Jesse’s murder of Gale (David Costabile) will have on Jesse, on Jesse’s relationship with Walt, or on the rest of the show itself, and indeed, those effects might not be immediately apparent in season 4’s premiere episode, as Walt and Jesse have more pressing matters at hand than dealing in matters of conscience. Jesse only killed Gale, reluctantly and at Walt’s insistence, as a last-ditch effort to ensure their own safety with Gus because Gale was the only person who could reproduce Walt and Jesse’s trademark blue meth. If season 4 begins immediately where season 3 ended, it will be with a Walt and Jesse who are only alive owing to Gus’ economic necessity, who will probably be his captives, and who will likely need to devise even more desperate and unsavory schemes to further ensure their survival. The moral reckoning and ultimate effects of the murder on Jesse’s soul could still be several episodes away, but whatever happens, it’s bound to be breathtaking.

When targeted advertising fails:

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 23:15:34 -0400

No, Facebook, I am not interested in the Lolita Clothing Store, and I’m not sure what makes you think I would be.

When I hear Ravel's "Bolero" I think of two things:

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 21:15:49 -0400

1.) A wonderful afternoon/early evening spent in Barcelona’s Parc Güell with my girlfriend, and

2.) The heist scene at the beginning of Femme Fatale.

"If you only write when inspired you may be a fairly decent poet but you’ll never be a..."

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:43:04 -0400

“If you only write when inspired you may be a fairly decent poet but you’ll never be a novelist.”

- Neil Gaiman

I should tattoo this somewhere I’ll see it everyday—like backwards, across my face.

It's always nice to take a nap and see your long distance girlfriend in your dream.

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 18:30:48 -0400

Even if it’s a fucking strange dream, where you’re traveling by covered wagon despite all other indications pointing to the dream taking place no earlier than the 1970s, and where you find yourself being chased at one point by a rottweiler through a shopping mall in Minsk, it’s still nice to get some imagined face time with the gf. Love you!

"You know, LeChuck was a deviant, obnoxious, slithery, creepy-crawly sort of guy, but I’ll say..."

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:56:47 -0400

“You know, LeChuck was a deviant, obnoxious, slithery, creepy-crawly sort of guy, but I’ll say one thing for him: he sure looks nice exploding against the night sky.”

-

- The Secret of Monkey Island (1990)

Happy Fourth of July, everybody!

Thanks a Lot, Hackers

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 01:56:00 -0400

In high school, all my friends played Magic: The Gathering. I played once on a class trip, but I never really learned the game and I didn’t feel like spending a bunch of money on a card game I didn’t think I could learn. So thanks a lot, Playstation Network, for offering the online version of Magic for free after your huge network fail and actually teaching me how to play the fucking thing. I am sufficiently addicted and will probably buy it now when my free month of Playstation Plus runs out. Go fuck yourselves.

Tactile Images: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 20:03:18 -0400

I do not like 3-D. I think it’s a gimmick, and despite what James Cameron portends, I do not think will become the norm in cinema the way color has. Sure, the 3-D in Cameron’s Avatar was impressive, but more impressive than it’s look was how successfully it distracted from the film’s awful writing. Up and Toy Story 3 were perfectly fine films regardless of the format one viewed them in, while movies lacking in imagination like Alice in Wonderland and Thor did not make up the deficit with the addition of visual “depth.” I’m holding out hope that Captain America will be a better-than-average superhero adventure, but I feel safe in saying my opinion will not be swayed in one direction or the other by whether I have to wear plastic glasses while watching it.

Of course, seven or eight years ago I was saying the same thing about HD replacing film. Filmmakers were starting to shoot their movies on significantly cheaper digital and trying to replicate the look of film and, at the time, failing. Shooting on HD has more or less become the industry standard by now, but what convinced me back then about the merits of HD was not its inevitable ubiquity, but the works of those filmmakers who were using it not to simply ape the look of film, but rather to exploit its differences as a medium. To look at the seemingly impossible depth-of-field in the nocturnal landscapes of Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004) or Miami Vice (2006), or Michael Haneke’s medium-as-message Caché (2005), or the crystal clear simulacrum of Jia Zhang-ke’s The World (2004) is to witness artists looking at the new tool in their toolboxes and asking how it can create something new rather than simply replicate what has already been done.

With Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog has made the first 3-D film that actually uses the medium to create something previously unseen. Herzog takes a 3-D camera and a small crew into the Chauvet Cave in southern France; discovered in 1994 and containing cave paintings dating back over 20,000 years, the cave is not open to the public, and Herzog and his crew could only film inside the cave for a few hours per day. While most of Hollywood is using 3-D as a crutch to prop up the same stale stories they’ve been selling for years, Herzog has made a film whose total effect can only be communicated in three dimensions. Watching this film in 2-D would be like looking at pictures of the cave art in a book or on the internet: we might know what they look like, but we wouldn’t know how they feel. Sitting in a darkened theater, with the caves looming over us on a big screen in 3-D, we feel what it’s like to stand inside the cave. We see the contours of the walls and the play of shadow and light on the art, and we understand the role the environment plays in shaping that art. Herzog presents us with tactile images that would not be possible in a regular film.

Herzog even uses the limitations of 3-D to his advantage. Projecting a film in 3-D significantly darkens the image, but in a film set in a darkened cave, that only adds to our sense of immersion. When Herzog shoots the walls, illuminated only by flashlights, every pan or cut leads to our having an afterimage and having to readjust our eyes. The uncomfortable feeling that some viewers (myself included) get when wearing 3-D glasses also becomes part of the film’s aesthetic: I found myself squinting watching this film probably as much as Herzog and his crew did while making it, and I cannot think of another possible film where that would be a benefit and not a fault.

One film does not spell salvation for an entire medium. This film benefits from 3-D because of the imparted sense of immersion, but of course immersion is not a desired goal in your average Hollywood blockbuster, and Herzog has said he does not plan to use 3-D again. This film may be a one-off, but once again, Herzog has made good on his promise to deliver new images to audiences.

Jay-Z And Kanye's Watch The Throne Is 'Ready To Go'

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:11:03 -0400

Jay-Z And Kanye's Watch The Throne Is 'Ready To Go':

Earlier this month, The Source magazine reported that the album would be dropping July 4. With Independence Day coming in less than a week, those chances are looking as slim as the girl in Calvin Klein pants is. But on Wednesday’s (June 29) episode of “Rap Fix Live,” G.O.O.D. Music artist CyHi the Prynce did give fans a bit of hope.

“They are ready to go. Right now, all the music and everything is done,” CyHi told Sway. “But you know my guy — we over here with [Kanye], so ‘Ye is gonna add his last little pizzazz, and it’s going to be ready for you guys soon…You never know what they gonna do and how they gonna put it out. They might put it out yesterday.”

I think MTV buried the lede here. The pending release of Jay-Z and Kanye’s collaborative album seems pretty trivial in light of the fact that Hova and Yeezy have apparently mastered time travel!

Better Late than Never: Beginners

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 23:18:02 -0400

There’s an early scene in Beginners where Oliver, played by Ewan McGregor, sits on a park bench with his recently deceased father’s Jack Russell terrier, Arthur, while all around them other park goers run around and play with their friskier canine companions. Oliver tries to encourage Arthur to go play with the other dogs (throughout the film, Arthur communicates back via subtitles) and, failing that, explains to Arthur the history of his breed: Jack Russell terriers were bred by John Russell in the 19th century for fox hunting, and although fox hunting has mostly died out and his breed has been domesticated, he still possesses these contradictory urges. In lesser hands this could be an insufferably twee scene in an insufferably twee film, but writer-director Mike Mills possesses two key traits that many of his indie film contemporaries lack: a genuine sensitivity and understanding of his characters as people and not as mere vehicles for dispensing quirk, and the knowledge that historical, societal, and familial networks play just as much a part in the formation of his human characters as they do in the dog.

Beginners follows stories in three time periods concurrently: in 2003, Oliver’s father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), has just died; Oliver struggles with his grief as he meets and falls for an actress, Anna (Mélanie Laurent). Earlier, after the death of Oliver’s mother, Georgia (Mary Page Keller), Hal comes out as gay at the age of 75; he is diagnosed with cancer quickly thereafter, and Oliver plays witness to Hal’s remaining months living, for the first time in his life, as himself before he dies. The film jumps effortlessly between these stories; because Hal’s death is so recent and Oliver’s grief and desire to reassess his father’s life so potent, it is as if Hal is still present and the events of the recent past are still occurring as Oliver continues to process them. We also see scenes from Oliver’s childhood, where his father is present only in his mother’s unhappiness.

These scenes of Oliver’s childhood take up the least screentime of the three time periods, but in many ways they’re the most important. Hal didn’t suddenly realize at the age of 75 that he was gay—he knew his whole life, but couldn’t live the way he wanted in a society that declared is very identity illegal. His best friend asked him to marry her, knowing full well he was who he was, and though they loved each other until the day she died, the portrait of romantic relationships they passed down to Oliver was one of coldness and distance and barely concealed disappointment. Oliver—and by extension, all of us—is not just a product of his own upbringing and society, but of historical, political, and religious contexts dating back decades before he was even born (a graphic designer, Oliver illustrates this in his work via a “History of Sadness” stretching back to the beginning of time. This film makes a great double-bill with Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life).

In one of the film’s most emotional scenes, Oliver sits with Hal in Hal’s hospital room. Hal, a museum curator in his earlier years, is heavily medicated and asks Oliver about the “meanings” of various objects around them, mistaking the hospital room and its contents for an art installation, and Oliver must gently explain to his father that they don’t “mean” anything: the sprinkler on the ceiling and the painting on the wall have no relationship to one another beyond their being in the same room. But what Oliver begins to realize over the course of the film is that he, and Hal, and Anna, and every one of us, are “collections” in the manner of the hospital room: collections of random events and incidents that nevertheless form a whole, whose only “meaning” derives from their connected-ness.

Mills based his film on his relationship with his own father, who, like Hal, came out late in life and only had a short time to enjoy the freedom the present provided. He treats all of his characters with a humanity and respect that is too often lacking in contemporary indie cinema, and his actors respond with warm, generous performances. Ewan McGregor and Mélanie Laurent play characters who, upon meeting each other, manage to find islands of in-the-moment happiness in the seas of too-familiar sadness that regularly permeates their lives (the scene where they meet—at a costume party where he’s Sigmund Freud and she’s Charlie Chaplin communicating via written notes because she has laryngitis—is another that could have been excruciating in a lesser film but works wonderfully here). Mary Page Keller and Goran Visnjic make strong impressions with little screentime as, respectively, Oliver’s long-suffering mother and Hal’s flighty-but-devoted younger boyfriend. And as Hal, Christopher Plummer just shines: his is a radiant, joyful performance, infused with a youthful exuberance in his new found freedom that remains constant even as death creeps closer. This is one of the year’s best films.

Great moments in realizing you’re sitting in the middle of...

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 19:53:27 -0400

Great moments in realizing you’re sitting in the middle of a visually interesting frame.

Midnight in Paris Harkens Back to the Golden Age of Woody Allen Films

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 20:46:39 -0400

That Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen’s 41st feature film, tells the story of a writer’s nostalgic yearning for a bygone age seems appropriate, as it’s a condition collectively shared by most of the writer-director’s fans. Every year the Woodster releases a new film, and every year that film is accompanied by a spate of articles and opinion pieces pining for the Woody films of old. The particular charms of Allen’s current work are all too easily ignored in favor of a desire to return to, say, the great run of films he made in the 80s. “Everyone loved Woody’s 80s work, right?” we may ask ourselves, even though a cursory glance back at Stardust Memories will remind us that, as early as 1980, a lot of Woody fans were pining for the “early, funny” films of the 70s.

It’s this understanding of the illusion inherent in nostalgia that lies at the heart of Midnight in Paris. Owen Wilson plays Gil Pender, a successful screenwriter who would rather be a novelist, who travels with his shallow fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), and her über-WASP parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy) to Paris. While Inez and her parents obsess over superficial success in the present, Gil romanticizes the idea of Paris in the 1920s, when expat writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote and drank and caroused. Gil finds himself drunk and walking the streets alone at midnight and, before he knows it, he’s whisked away by an old-time taxi to the 20s of his dreams, where he’s partying with the Fitzgeralds (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill) and Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and having his manuscript critiqued by Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates). He meets and quickly falls for Picasso’s current muse and model Adriana (Marion Cotillard), but Adriana longs to live back in the Belle Époque: the 1920s—the “present”—are too fast and complicated for her.

We may not be able to travel back in time like Gil Pender, but we can compare Allen’s past films with his current work; even going back as far as “early, funny” comedies like 1975’s Love and Death Allen was weaving his philosophical concerns in with his narratives, but the last half decade has seen Allen explicating his ideas more straightforwardly than in the past. Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream are both essentially remakes of the Martin Landau portions of Crimes and Misdemeanors, while the existential viewpoint shared by Whatever Works and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger—that, in a fundamentally meaningless and indifferent universe, the acceptance of illusion is necessary for happiness—is explicated with thesis statement literalism by characters in both those films. It’s tempting to ascribe this explicitness to Allen’s own aging; he has not shied away from discussing his own fear of death in recent interviews, and it’s not hard to imagine he wants to communicate his ideas as clearly as possible before he goes, even at the expense of the subtlety of his earlier work.

What makes Midnight in Paris more interesting and more successful than those other recent films is that, much like its protagonist inhabiting two distinct time periods, the film manages simultaneously to embody the habits of recent Woody while harkening back to Allen films of old. Its characters communicate the film’s themes with the same literal-mindedness as in the last few films, but the film seems more sure-footed in spite of this, and Allen even finds ways to complicate the things the film seems to state so explicitly. A character’s long-winded description of Gil’s “golden age thinking” is easily the most painful piece of writing in the film, but Allen subverts it by putting it in the mouth of the film’s most pedantic character. Likewise, the film’s best piece of writing—a wonderful speech Gil delivers to Adriana about how no piece of art or literature or cinema can compare to a great city—is just as much a statement of authorial intent, but it also calls back to the film’s opening, a three-and-a-half minute montage of Paris street scenes that, while beautiful, is entirely idealized to the point that it seems to deliberately confirm Gil’s words: this montage can’t and doesn’t capture the beauty and intricacy of Paris, nor could it. There is a deftness and assuredness in Allen’s work here that he hasn’t approached in over a decade.

This assurance extends to every aspect of the film’s production. Cinematographer Darius Khondji imbues the film with a luscious golden glow that manages to be romantic but natural. Owen Wilson, as Gil, achieves what few Woody-surrogates manage: a successful blending of his own persona with the standard Woody tics rather than the distracting, full-bore impersonation so many other actors (Jason Biggs and Will Ferrell, to name just two) attempt and fail. Rachel McAdams and Michael Sheen take characters written as caricatures and underplay them just enough to keep them from becoming too broad; Marion Cotillard takes yet another underwritten romantic role and infuses it with dimensionality and gravitas; and Corey Stoll, as Hemingway, steals every scene in which he appears with his remarkable line readings. The humor in general feels more confident than in recent Allen comedies; it’s never forced, frequently unexpected, and never overstays its welcome at the expense of the scene.

For a director whose career and artistic development can more easily be broken down into distinguishable phases than those of other artists, it nevertheless remains difficult to predict what direction future Allen films might take. Rather than try to predict the trajectory of his career from here—wondering if this film is a one-off or the start of a new series of great films—or wish for his sensibilities to return to the style of earlier days, I wish instead to celebrate the present and the fact that Midnight in Paris is the finest, and the most fun, film Allen has made in ages.

Two things Yasujiro Ozu and his co-writer Kogo Noda would do when writing their screenplays

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 20:07:00 -0400

1.) They would write all of the dialogue for a film first, by itself, and then write the scenes around the dialogue afterward.

2.) They would drink sake pretty much nonstop until they finished.

I fully endorse both of these writing techniques.

Cars 2 comes out this week.

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 10:00:06 -0400

Or, as I like to call it, “The First Pixar Movie I Won’t Be Seeing.”

Going to the Rock Hall of Fame tomorrow.

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 18:48:25 -0400

I hope we get there before Lady Gaga’s meat dress spoils.

The Dark Knight Rises comes out next year...

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 12:00:06 -0400

So now is probably a good time to start taking bets on what the film’s “secret word” will be. The secret word in a Christopher Nolan-directed Batman film, if you hadn’t picked up on this yet, is the thesis-statement-like word that practically every character will utter numerous times throughout the film to make sure everyone in the audience knows what deep and elemental theme the movie is really about. It’s also the word that, if you took a drink every time a character said it, you’d be hospitalized for alcohol poisoning before the credits rolled. In Batman Begins the secret word was “fear;” in The Dark Knight it was “chaos.” Given the last movie’s ending and the fact that Nolan is completing his trilogy and wrapping up his storylines with this film, part of me thinks the secret word in The Dark Knight Rises will be “redemption.”

The other part of me thinks that three syllables is pushing it.

What do you think The Dark Knight Rises’ secret word will be?