The movie did not work for me at all, it was crass. I felt it was hyped because of the director-actor combination, but lacked substance. The acting was brilliant, no two ways about it. But what I hated was that, there was not a single sane character in the movie. I dont enjoy a movie thats filled with characters/caricatures but lack depth.

You have Kevin Spacey who is suffering from inferiority complex and the only thing he looks forward to is his daughter’s friend, that’s a sick mind where sex becomes a goal to work for; not family, not wife or children but an object of lust tat too someone who is 20 years younger; I can still accept that becasue its not a moral issue. Meena Suvari, who actually reciprocates Spacey’s lust; does she have a mind of her own or what? Annette Bening is shallow too; she cheats on her hubby by sleeping arnd instead of confronting the truth, and continues to live selfishly in a bad marriage. Thora Birch who is low on confidence and the only thing that would cheer her up is a boob-job; and the sudden interest shown by her nerdy neighbour actually turns her on because no one has ever seen her in amorous way.

The drug peddler who tries to find beauty of life in shooting flying polythene bags and death, how demented. And his army-burdened dad who suspects that his son is gay.

While i do agree that America has lots of such families with such characters, but I would definitely not believe that all these characters would be found in the same family. Yes, you can find these characters but in different families, you dont bring in all fuckin nerdy characters in the same house. Come on .. gimme room to breathe. This is a potboiler situation where you bring in all the wacks/freaks you can think of and put them in the same frame and call it ‘american beauty’

I remember being asked one time during a group discussion what was the most beautiful thing about a woman. The question had been bouncing off each of my friends and most of them named a physical attribute. Her booty, her smile, her face. A few of them named something like her femininity or humility. I agreed that each of these characteristics were beautiful. But I was having trouble thinking of the one thing about a woman that kept me interested in her, or maintained throughout even when certain aesthetics started to fade. I could not think of a single characteristic that was sovereign.

It was not until later when I truly understood what I found to be most beautiful about a woman; much later. It came when I was talking to a woman that had everything one would desire. She was attractive, incredibly intelligent, and had ambitions on top of ambitions. As I got to know her, I still felt something was missing. What I felt was missing kept me from truly appreciating everything else about her.In fact, my attraction to her was at a stalemate, even though she seemingly had everything going for her that I liked.

She was educating me on fine arts, current events overseas, and our ideals contrasted to form many different shades of gray. I felt like she was perfect; which slightly intimidated me but more importantly caused me a lot of confusion. I could not figure out what she lacked that I was searching for.

I searched within myself to try to find what it was; and it hit me the moment she told me about her emotionally scarred past; more specifically the disconnect she had with her mother. For the first months of us talking, she only revealed to me the good in her life, and she had a lot of good. When she told me about the severed relationship she had with her mother, and the hurt that came from feeling neglect as a child, her insecurities started to show.

While some would have viewed those insecurities as bitterness, or potential drama, or future obstacles from an unstable person. I saw those insecurities as something more. I thought her insecurities were beautiful. I realized that her imperfections are what made her beautiful to me. Her imperfections enhanced her efficacious qualities. Her imperfections made her human to me; being human is what I desire, not being a perfect robot incapable of a mistake. While those insecurities are certainly obstacles. But who says obstacles are bad anyway? Obstacles are healthy since they help to define character.

As I grew I started to comprehend the small things that I found to be most beautiful about a woman and why. I never wanted a woman that never made mistakes or needed help. A woman above a mistake or that hides them is a woman that is not real to me. If a woman is not transparent, then I dont see her for who she is. I dont want to see a woman for her good deeds, I want to see her for her heart. I need her to be transparent and honest. If everything she says about herself is in a positive light, she is neither transparent or honest. Furthermore, if she truly believes everything about herself is positive, then she is even lying to herself. I see strength in humility, crying, and honesty.

I started to notice that the women I thought the least of tended to be the women most people thought the most of. I’m a simple man, more progressive than conservative, but still believing that genuine beauty is all around.

One of my favorite movie scenes is from American Beauty when the kid everyone thought was weird said the most beautiful thing he ever filmed was a plastic bag floating in the wind.

I felt that scene in more ways than one, especially in regards to a woman. It did not have to be anything intentional or blatant. Sometimes life’s beauty is so subtle, that you have to pay attention to catch it.

The most beautiful thing I ever saw was when I was conversing with that woman that had everything going for her. She was the textbook definition of a career-driven, strong, independent, woman. This same woman broke down and cried on my shoulder because she felt overwhelmed before she was suppose to organize an event for her family; which included hearing the annual comments from her mother. Comments such as “You should be more like your sister” or “I’m dissapointed in you”.

Her crying, drying those tears, and subsequently organizing that event despite of her fears showed courage, and strength, and love, and faith, and above all us beauty. One of the single most poignant things I’d ever seen.

On Slumdog Millionaire, when Jamal and Latika finally got their chance to be together, he did not kiss her lips first. He kissed her physical scar. The symbolism in that goes beyond the physical for me. That is how I look at the flaws and scars of a woman in general. Scars represent history, a history that reveals who a person is. He recognized that scar by kissing it. I recognize the emotional scars of a persons life by being intimate with them regarding it. In the scene after Jamal kisses her scar, there is a flashback of events that led to her receiving that scar. She looks at him, maybe embarrassed but certainly vulnerable. It was not until after he acknowledged her scar and its history that she felt comfortable to ask him to kiss her. It’s a visual tale of what this blog is all about.

On a smaller scale, I find beauty in a woman that allows me to show my love. If you are familiar with the Bible, in reads that God created a perfect people in the perfect environment. But why did God place something in that Garden that could have lead to imperfection? Why would he intentionally create something that could destroy the world that he said was perfect?

It’s quite simple. That tree allowed Adam and Eve to exercise their obedience, loyalty, and love to their master. Although death came as a result, it also allowed God to show his love to his creation by sending his son to die for them. Jesus exercised his love by sacrificing his life. I’m not anyone’s master or savior, but I feel that duality of pain and love to the fullest.

A woman making a mistake allows me to exercise forgiveness, sympathy, empathy, patience, and unconditional love. What is unconditional love without a crisis? While I dont think anyone wants to be hurt and there are some things that severe trust (such as cheating), but lessons are always learned from painful situations. I would never ask for someone to never hurt me, that is unfair. But a woman that has my best interest at heart and would not intentionally hurt me is a woman that I can exercise unconditional love for. A woman that can do that is beautiful to me, despite her flaws. It’s not necessarily the actual first steps of a child that bring tears to the parents eyes. It’s the stages of being immobile, to crawling, to attempting to walk and falling that culminates to an upright child that is most rewarding.

Humans have inherent things about them that many perceive as flaws. Something as simple as a woman farting has become sensationalized. I personally think its funny, and again can remind me that this attractive woman is still capable of emitting a gas that can clear a room. That only enhances her beauty to me. Some women spend hundreds of even thousands on weaves or wigs, but its the look on her face when I catch her on a bad hair day that is priceless.

While it can be a turn on to see a woman walking confidently in sexy heels, I can be just as aroused by seeing her trip and try to catch her balance (while looking around to make sure no one saw her). It’s those moments, when she is most vulnerable that I find her to be her most beautiful. Maybe that is a flaw in me as a man, maybe I find pleasure in the vulnerability of a woman. Maybe that is my imperfection or insecurity. Maybe that is just an extension of me thinking being submissive is a good thing. Even if it is, I never said I was right in my feelings, I only said I recognize that they exist.

I have always argued that I think chivalry is not only outdated, but perpetuates the ugly inequality attitudes that women and men have worked to rid our societies of. But, a woman that is willing to get her hands dirty is a woman that I am willing to help. Just being willing to pay for dinner makes me happy to pay for it. I dont believe a woman is flawed in comparison to a man, which is why I dont do things just because she is a woman. I believe we are equally flawed, with some things being directly related to our gender. But it’s the imperfections in our character that I speak of. No one is completely good or bad. No role model is above a mistake.

Not even the worlds villains are completely devoid of good intentions. More or less, we are a contrast of good and bad, and I find beauty in people willing to acknowledged both sides of them. When I tell a woman I love her, I dont mean I love all of the good things about her. That’s not who she totally is. It means I love her in full, her as a whole, her good, her bad, her ugly, her lovely, her good smells, her bad smells, her brilliant ideas, her dumb ideas, her smile, her frown, her happiness, as well as her anger. A relationship should not be a funeral service or eulogy. I dont want to just hear about how great you are. I dont think realizing flaws justify grimey behavior. Nothing I say is meant to be the at either extreme.

True friendship begins at accepting the person for who they are. I will not be with a woman that is not my friend. At the heart of what I see in a friend is understanding who they are. I cannot understand someone that is not honest about themselves. That would include their great qualities as well as their less than ideal qualities. So in essence, the foundation of a womans beauty is built by her willingness to expose and acknowledge her imperfections.

Beyonce wrapped it up pretty well.

There is a tendency in art house cinema towards the pseudo-intellectual.  It is a tendency not merely to tolerate witless navel-gazing, but to actively celebrate it.  To elevate its whiny introspection above all other forms of human activity.  To revel in its portentous self-indulgence.  To confuse its bourgeois posturing with grand tragedy and genuine insight.  This tendency is best summed up by the films of Sophia Coppola.

Coppola’s best known film remains the Oscar-winning Lost in Translation (2003).  Lost in Translation is a sordid tale of two wealthy Americans coming together in a foreign land and forging a bond of some kind out of their shared alienation despite the differences in age and life-experience.  It is not really a film about love.  Nor is it a film about cross-cultural alienation.  In fact, it is not really a film about very much at all but it does have lots and lots of footage of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson looking vaguely depressed in the middle distance.  Coppola’s skill as a director lies not in her understanding of the human condition, but rather her mastery of techniques used in art house cinema to create an aura of depth and thoughtfulness regardless of whether any actual ideas or insights are present in the text of the film itself.  Indeed, it is telling that two of Coppola’s other films deal with the emotional lives of people who are effectively children.  In the case of Marie Antoinette (2006) we have a film ostensibly about the ennui and alienation felt by a child-like Queen of France and in The Virgin Suicides (1999) we have a film that purports to be about the ennui and alienation felt by actual children.

Behind much of modern American independent cinema is the adult equivalent of a temper tantrum.  Grown-ups who throw themselves on the ground and roll around screaming because they do not know what to do with themselves.  They do not like their jobs.  They do not like their families.  They do not like their towns.  They do not like their children.  But they do enjoy staring wistfully into the middle distance while some pleasingly arcane piece of rock or pop plays over the soundtrack.

In a way, it is surprising that it has taken until 2009 for American film makers to realise the degree of similarity between the existential dramas favoured by certain strains of art house cinema and the simple coming-of-age tales favoured by much of children’s fiction.  Wes Anderson  – one of the acknowledged kings of middle-brow malaise – capitalised on these similarities by transforming Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (1960) into a tale of mid-life crisis and existential alienation.  Spike Jonze continues this trend with Where The Wild Things Are, his adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book of the same name.

Film Poster

Max (Max Records) is an unpleasantly petulant spoiled brat.  Growing up in a nice middle-class suburb with a nice middle class mother (Catherine Keener) and a nice middle class sister (Pepita Emmerichs), Max smoulders with resentment at the fact that neither his mother nor his sister are at his entire disposal.  When Max’s sister Claire and her friends leave Max after a snowball fight, Max reacts by angrily smashing up Claire’s room.  When Max’s mother scolds Max for making a nuisance of himself while she has a friend over for dinner, Max promptly bites her and runs away.  The comparisons with scenes from Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (1999) in which Kevin Spacey walks out of his job and throws his dinner against the wall make themselves.

Max runs away to an island populated by huge monsters.  Initially, the monsters want to eat Max but the boy convinces them instead to make him their king.  After the group bond over an evening of destruction, Max attempts to prolong the happiness he has felt by constructing a utopian civilisation for the monsters.  However, Max’s imaginary landscape soon reveals itself as being contaminated by the problems he faces back home.  As King, Max has to try and solve these problems and so he has a space in which to think about the problems he faces in the real world.  For example, when Judith (Catherine O’Hara) complains to Max, Max responds truculently but Judith immediately lets him know that it is not okay to be angry with someone because you realise that you have upset them.  Other people have feelings too and they are just as valid as Max’s.  Similarly, when KW (Lauren Ambrose) turns up with her new best friends – a pair of owls she has just captured – Max sees them only as squawking animals but KW gets something out of them and so do some of the other monsters.  This suggests that just because you might not see the value of someone’s other friends, those friends are valued by the other person and you have to respect that.  Your friend is not merely pretending to like these people in order to annoy you.  The biggest similarity between the world of the monsters and that of Max lies in the similarities between Max and Carol (James Gandolfini).  Carol is petulant and destructive.  His response to situations he does not like is to smash things up.  He is jealous, intolerant, paranoid and completely incapable of controlling his emotions.  When Carol realises that Max is not a real king (or father-figure) he goes mad.  Terrorising the people he loves just as Max does back home.

The Wild Rumpus

While this psychological landscape struggles to maintain a narrative thanks to its comparative thinness, there is no denying that its realisation is impressive.  Jonze revisits the blend of surrealism and grittiness that characterised Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002) but here it is projected not against an over-developed urban landscape but rather an unkempt wilderness.  There are flickers of Terrence Mallick in Jonze’s forests and the camera returns again and again to the middle distance as first Max and then his monsters find themselves “lost in translation”, consumed with existential angst and alienation as Max’s real-word problems relating to his family keep finding their way back into his imaginary land.      Jonze also uses that old expressionist technique of having the island change to suit Max’s emotional state.  When Max and the monsters are unhappy, the background becomes filled with fires.  Burning out of focus.  Started by means unknown.

A desert of loneliness?

The result of all of this is a film that is undeniably clever, undeniably intellectual and undeniably beautiful to look at.  However, as with the films of Sophia Coppola, it is not clear which, if any, truth is being groped towards.  Unfortunately, while the bulk of the script chooses to extemporise on rather than strictly follow the events of the book, the ending sticks rather closely to the book’s child-friendly use of parental authority to provide emotional closure.   As Max prepares to flee the Monsters’ island, he forlornly wishes that they too could have a mother.  When he returns home, his mother receives him with open arms and lavishes attention upon him, almost justifying not only his running away but also his earlier tantrums.  We are never made privy to whether or not Max realises that the problems he faced on Monster Island are the exact same ones he faces at home.  In short, Where The Wild Things Are fails to resolve in anything approaching a satisfying manner.  Its content is too sophisticated to cohere happily to the source material’s yen for parental love and authority.  Mum simply cannot solve Max’s problems.

Comme-ci... Comme-ca...

That film-makers such as Jonze and Anderson have decided to work against the tide of American cinema is interesting.  While recent years have seen the infantilisation of genres previously aimed at adults, films such as Fantastic Mr. Fox and Where The Wild Things Are import grown up concerns into films that appear to be aimed at children.  However, by doing so, Anderson and Jonze are also drawing attention not only to the childish self-absorption and egocentrism of these kinds of stories, but also the limited intellectual and theoretical pallets used by many contemporary film-makers.  Have we really reached the point where “Don’t be a dick to other people” is a valid dramatic epiphany?

Film Poster

While there is much to praise in Jonze’s adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are, my mind is drawn back to Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960).  Antonioni’s film not only pioneered some of the story-telling techniques that Jonze uses, he also used them with an awareness of the limitations of the kinds of stories these techniques allow you to tell.  In L’Avventura a collection of self-involved middle-class people go for a boat ride.  However, when one of their number go missing, nobody goes looking for her.  Nobody cares.  If the characters do not care what happen to each other, why should the audience?  This is a question never far from my mind as I watched Spike Jonze’s beautiful, technically skilled but ultimately lightweight adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are.

A Serious Man is not a nice movie. Like both No Country for Old Men or Burn After Reading, it’s a film where the pieces don’t quite add up. You could compare it to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, except the Coen Brothers are less interested in sifting through history than grappling with the eternal mysteries. Man depicts a kind of war against God, a war which is always going to be one-sided. As the protagonist Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) puts it at one point, why does God give man so many questions if He’s not going to provide any answers?

Larry is a milquetoast surprised to find himself in the center of circumstances that might turn into a movie. We’re somewhere outside Bloomington, Minn., sometime when Jefferson Airplane were on heavy rotation. Larry’s wife is leaving him for another man. His neighbor is slowly encroaching on his property. He lusts after the siren next door. His brother hogs the bathroom so that he can drain a cyst on his neck. Larry’s chances of tenure are endangered by poison pen letters accusing him of moral turpitude and a South Korean student is annoyed that his professor won’t adjust his failing grade after a few thousand dollars are left on the man’s desk.

Gopnik is introduced at his job, explaining Schrodinger’s paradox. Later, conferring with the student he’s failing, Larry explains how he uses fables “to help give you a picture, the math is how it really works,” a key to the film’s method. He confesses that even he sometimes doesn’t really understand the math. There are certainly a lot of fables in A Serious Man. The movie begins with an episode set in a shetl where a Jewish couple find themselves entertaining a dybbuk. The hero’s progress has a fable-like structure, as Larry goes from rabbi to rabbi, seeking some succor from his trials. Each offers a different lesson which doesn’t really apply to him but throws up another signpost to the viewer. Novice Rabbi Scott (Simon Helberg) encourages Gopnik to find God in a parking lot—a somewhat futile suggestion that the audience look for meaning in the sharp angles and forbidding geometrics of this Minnesota suburb. The tea-sipping Rabbi Nachtner (George Wyner)offers the ludicrous story of the goy’s teeth. Like many of the stories in A Serious Man, like A Serious Man itself, it’s an absurd parable whose meaning appears to be that there isn’t any.

This leaves Larry to comfort himself with equally empty aphorisms like “Actions always have consequences.” In a way, he is a Kafka-esque figure, a persecuted man unaware that he’s being persecuted for his inactivity. As he puts it, “Everything that I thought was one way turns out to be another.” He is powerless to prevent his fall. Soon Gopnik and his brother have been exiled to the Jolly Roger hotel.

The film also chips away at language as an acceptable recourse. The use of Yiddish in the film’s opening episode acts as a kind of alienating effect for gentile audiences. Larry’s son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is preparing for his bat mitzvah. The boy wrestling with Hebrew implies that the Old Country is as much another planet for him as for the audience. Indeed, he is introduced surreptitiously listening to “Someone to Love” instead of paying attention to his Hebrew School lesson.

Words frequently assume nonsensical meanings. On the school bus, Danny’s friends use obscenities to the point where their offensiveness is dulled. On top of his woes, Larry is being hounded by the Columbia Record Club, who insist he owes payment for a copy of “Santana’s Abraxas.” In the film’s funniest scene, the phrase is repeated until the syllables become unmoored from their referent. Even the word “serious” is suspect. It’s used as a term of appreciation for a dead man. Gopnik tries to apply it to himself. What it means to be A Serious Man—as opposed to a frivolous one–is never really defined, perhaps because the filmmakers assume that it can’t be.

Even the film’s paragons of seriousness, ranging from doctors to lawyers to rabbis, cannot be trusted. The officials of the temple are ineffectual blatherers. Larry Gopnik is in some ways a cousin to Barton Fink, who made the mistake of entering Hollywood’s absurd universe. The Coens acknowledge a link with their earlier film by casting Michael Lerner, Fink’s tyrannical studio boss Jack Lipnick, as a senior partner who drops dead during a consultation. (Bodies fall in A Serious Man like autumn leaves; in its way, the film is as violent as Old Men.)

Kafka surfaces again in the film’s concern with isolated body parts. Man’s credit sequence ends with the camera traveling through an ear canal to emerge through Danny’s earplug. (This possible homage to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet hints at A Serious Man as a satire of the U.S. suburban film genre as represented by Velvet and American Beauty, whose Lester Burnham deals with a more benevolent God.) The parable of the goy’s teeth turns into a motif when Danny, having successfully completed his bar mitzvah through a haze of marijuana, is invited into the chambers of the inaccessible Rabbi Marshak (Alan Mandell) and sees a diagram of a jaw among his clutter.

Danny also gets an eyeful of a picture of Abraham and Isaac. The myth chimes with A Serious Man’s depiction of man pitted against a willful God, although Danny mainly needs his dad around to fix the TV aerial. Gopnik, however, is outfoxed at every turn in his effort to make right with unseen forces. His dreams urge him to do the right thing, to perform an action—anything—which might have a consequence. When he finally does, however, by adjusting the Korean student’s grade, God (or the Coens as His surrogates) suddenly changes the terms and sics an apocalyptic tornado to blow Larry’s entire world away.

It’s been suggested that the Coens are paying a visit to autobiographical territory. If so, it’s clearly not a place they view with Proustian attachment, nights watching F Troop to the contrary. Their ‘60s are a time of drab polyester relieved only by the lurid boudoir of Gopnik’s neighbor, which may have been decorated by Dante. It’s also been suggested that Man is anti-Semitic. The Coens encourage a sense of corporeal disgust verging on appalled wonder, just dig that extreme close-up of the Hebrew School principal’s ear, crowned with a nimbus of wiry hair, or the procession of faces with more lines on them than a map of pre-war Europe. Even before the proper title, the credit sequence features of a host of unknown, but very Jewish, actor names flying at the screen—as if they had been unleashed from Pandora’s casting service. There’s also a joke in the final credits: “No Jews were harmed during the making of this picture.” This admits to the cruelty of A Serious Man. But when have the Coens not been cruel?

The largely unknown cast functions to further alienate the audience, who lack familiar faces to identify with. However, these are pretty magnificent faces. Standouts in the cast include George Wyner and Fred Melamed as Gopnik’s supercilious love rival. Cinematographer and longtime Coens collaborator Roger Deakins photographs a world where the only curves are represented by the characters’ out-of-shape bodies. It’s been dressed by production designer Jess Gonchor and art director Deborah Jensen. Carter Burwell’s piano-led score provides plenty of red herrings, turning the most innocuous moments into ones of utmost dread.

1. Think it would be rude to send the above clip to my realtor? Probably so, huh? I don’t think a soul has even been to look at it and I want that house gone yesterday.

2. Do you do holiday cards? I have for years, but I’m not doing them this year. I have absolutely no holiday spirit and judging by the number of cards I’ve gotten so far, no one else does either. And guess how many Christmas gifts I’ve bought so far? ONE.

3. I’m taking next week off. It’s the first time I’ve taken a whole week off and not gone to the beach in, well, maybe ever. Of course that means that eleventy million things must be done THIS week. And when I have a full plate, I just need to be left alone to get it done. Meaning if the Boss Man walks in to change his mind for the fourth time on how something should be done today, I might go postal. Not sure exactly what I’m doing with my week off. Will be heading to West Virginia at some point to spend Christmas with my friends and family there.

4. Still have some Christmas shopping to do? (Lawd knows I do!) Well look no further than Lohan House! That’s right kids, that pumpkin orange sometime-lesbian, all-the-time crack ho Lindsay Lohan, her pinched, tucked, and pulled mama Dinah, her allegedly teenaged sister Aliana, and her never-heard-of brother Mikey Junior are having a big ole internet yard sale where you can buy everything from their used gym shoes to their tacky throw pillows. No word on whether the items have been laundered, so you might have an extra bonus waiting in the pockets!

Yes, I should be grading (30something more research papers to go) or Christmas shopping or cleaning, but a girl needs a break, so I drank a little vino and read my new New Yorker last night while in the background Jimmy Stewart did his thing on that movie, you know the one.

I skimmed most of the issue, though I read about Roman Polanski and the rape he got away with for 30 years, which got me thinking about being 13 again, which reminded me of the grad student I’m working with who is writing about teen chick lit focused on teen girls who are psychologically or physically damaged in some way (books with titles such as Cut, as well as that old standby, Go Ask Alice).

So it wasn’t exactly a “light” and “leisurely” night of goofing off.

Then I read this story. This story may be the antidote to my failed attempt at Infinite Jest this summer. David Foster Wallace’s “All That” is in this week’s New Yorker.  A seminary student tells the story of a toy his parents gave him when he was 5 years old, or so, a story that reflects his first recognition of his own religious faith or “impulse” as he calls it. 

Having very shaky, if nonexistent, faith myself, I’m surprisingly a sucker for literary stories that depict characters who struggle with such feelings.  I adore A Prayer for Owen Meany,  the latter stories of Raymond Carver, most of Flannery O’Connor’s stories. I’ve read everything Mary Gordon has written since I was a teenager, and then the same with Mary McCarthy and Alice McDermott. And no, I don’t just read Catholics and ex-Catholics: Anne Lamott (her essays, not her fiction) and Marilynne Robinson are my Presbyterian writers.  And don’t forget the Jews: when I was growing up on Long Island I read Chaim Potok’s novels (anyone remember The Chosen?), of course Anne Frank, and later Philip Roth, Rebecca Goldstein, and much later, Dara Horn and Allegra Goodman.

There’s more, but you get the picture.

Most of these writers (with some exceptions) depict young people going through either a crisis of faith, or a struggle with a religious institution or figure, or, less commonly, recognizing the rarity of their own innate belief in a higher power–which puts them at odds with the secular world around them.

What’s so powerful about Wallace’s story (besides its “voice”: the character’s voice, deliberately un-intellectual, is exceptionally affecting) is  the man describing his childhood feelings of ecstasy as physical sensations, analogous to the physical and random but intense moments of love he felt with his parents.  The story ends with two long  nearly unquotable paragraphs (the last sentence of the story is parenthetically rich 25 lines long) that (perhaps not entirely successfully) leave us with two images the young man remembers, images that the reader assumes will restore the faith that is momentarily failing him as an adult. I’ll quote from one of them, since I think this quote can work for those who haven’t read the story yet.  By this point in the story, the reader is well aware that the boy is unusual, and he explicitly tells us that the voices he heard as a child in his head were not a sign of mental illness, but a concrete, physical manifestation of his own religious experience as a child: 

• “At any rate, the best analogy for the experience of hearing these childhood “voices” of mine is that it was like going around with your own private masseur, who spent all his time giving you back—and shoulder—rubs (which my biological mother also used to do whenever I was sick in bed, using rubbing alcohol and baby powder and also changing the pillowcases, so that they were clean and cool; the experience of the voices was analogous to the feeling of turning a pillow over to the cool side). Sometimes the experience of the voices was ecstatic, sometimes so much so that it was almost too intense for me—as when you first bite into an apple or a confection that tastes so delicious and causes such a flood of oral juices that there is a moment of intense pain in your mouth and glands—particularly in the late afternoons of spring and summer, when the sunlight on sunny days achieved moments of immanence and became the color of beaten gold and was itself (the light, as if it were taste) so delicious that it was almost too much to stand, and I would lie on the pile of large pillows in our living room and roll back and forth in an agony of delight and tell my mother, who always read on the couch, that I felt so good and full and ecstatic that I could hardly bear it, and I remember her pursing her lips, trying not to laugh, and saying in the driest possible voice that she found it hard to feel too much sympathy or concern for this problem and was confident that I could survive this level of ecstasy, and that I probably didn’t need to be rushed to the emergency room, and at such moments my love and affection for my mother’s dry humor and love became, stacked atop the original ecstasy, so intense that I almost had to stifle a scream of pleasure as I rolled ecstatically between the pillows and the books on the floor.”

Since I have been known to write such long, parenthetical sentences, I have some affection for them, so part of my reaction to the above is aesthetic and personal.  But for me, the only way I can truly “get” religious belief is to have it explained to me in such a physical, visceral way.

And while it may not be exactly the same thing (depending on one’s definition of belief) that scene in American Beauty with the plastic bag floating, dancing in the wind which controls it, but doesn’t, comes to mind: no, it’s certainly not a film about religious belief, but that empty bag is begging to be filled by something.

Lindsay Weir boards a bus to hide from her parents that she's really goin' truckin'; image courtesy of jeffzittrain.com

I was talking with my friend and neighbor Rosa-María during Glee’s fall finale about Freaks and Geeks. We were specifically talking about the final episode, “Discos and Dragons,” which she just rewatched. In it, Michiganian teen protagonist Lindsay Weir is loaned a copy of The Grateful Dead’s American Beauty by her hippie high school guidance counselor Jeff Rosso and steps into a larger world.

An album that blew Lindsay's mind; image courtesy of esquire.com

I’m not a Deadhead. For those of you watching Community, main character Jeff Winger’s religion/Paul Rudd analogy in this week’s episode is pretty much exactly how I feel about the band (i.e., we understand the appeal and don’t begrudge it, but also don’t share it). To me, I’ve long wondered why anyone would listen to the Dead when there’s Santana, a peer jam band that was more rhythmically intesting with a better lead guitarist. And before anyone starts mailing me bootlegs, I have also heard American Beauty. My first listen even took place around some pretty optimal conditions. It didn’t take. 

That isn’t to say that I’m not fanatical about other things. For one, I’m a huge Animal Collective fan, who are themselves a bunch of hippies with a rabid fan base. And while I don’t think the two bands sound that much alike, both espouse feel-good truisms like “What do you want me to do, to do for you to see you through?” and “You have your fits I have my fits, but feeling’s good.”

I’m fanatical about this show too. It’s one of my favorite television programs, perhaps of all time, and unlike some of the critically-acclaimed fare of the decade (ex: The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, 30 Rock, The Office, season two of Friday Night Lights, season three of Arrested Development), I don’t think I know anyone who has seen Freaks and Geeks and doesn’t like it. I’m especially fanatical about how much music factors into both the characters’ lives and the tone of the show. For a show set in pre-MTV suburban Michigan, it nails the radio domination of classic rock, the percolation of punk and post-punk, and the general antipathy toward disco. Thus, it makes sense that Lindsay and many of her peers would be into the Dead, as they’re also into The Who, Led Zeppelin, and Rush.

Though a lover of Neil Peart and a skilled disco dancer, Nick Andopolis never got over the death of John Bonham; image courtesy of 2112.net

As an aside, one of Lindsay Weir’s clearest televisual counterpart is not a Deadhead, even though the band was fashionable at the time of her show’s season-long run. Angela Chase, the angsty protagonist of ABC’s ultra-90s’ drama My So-Called Life was given her father’s tickets to a Dead concert in “Father Figures” because he couldn’t make the show. She scalped them out of anger toward her father, who she caught talking to an attractive woman who was not her mother outside their house. She also did it for the chance to talk to her crush Jordan Catalano, who was willing to buy the tickets from her. But it’s also clear that Angela doesn’t get what all the fuss over the band is about, much to the ire and bewilderment of her Deadhead friend Rayanne Graff.

Guess which one of these girls listens to the Dead; image courtesy of galateageorge.com

I think Lindsay becoming a Deadhead is really interesting. Throughout Freaks and Geeks‘ 18-episode run on NBC and the Fox Family Channel, Lindsay worked toward defying expectations. Sometimes, these expectations were put upon her by her peers, whether they be her kid brother Sam and his nerdy friends, the Mathletes she used to be close with as a geeky good girl, or the burnouts she hangs out with throughout the series’ run. Other times, they were put upon her by authority figures, whether they be the concerned faculty and staff at William McKinley High School or her parents, who feared this bright girl was now running with a bad crowd.

But the best moments for me of this very special show were when she defied her own expectations, which were already considerable. She does it when dumping freak Nick Andopolis, an otherwise nice boy who was completely wrong for her, and afterwards when she tries to be his friend. She does it when she rejoins the Mathletes only to quit again after realizing that she didn’t get any joy out of it. She does it when she tries pot for the first time, only to discover that she really doesn’t like it. She does it when she sticks up for her friend Kim Kelly in English class when they both dismiss Jack Keroauc’s On the Road, to the disdain of their pretentious teacher. She does it to dazzling effect when promoting her family’s sporting goods shop while sticking it to Vice President George H.W. Bush and his lackeys for throwing out the original question she was going to ask him during his visit to her school.

She does it here too. Originally skeptical of the Dead’s profundity, she gets a gentle nudge from a stoner couple at her school (one of whom is played by Samaire Armstrong, who I enjoyed on The O.C. as Seth Cohen’s music geek girlfriend Anna and who had an enviable platinum blonde pixie cut with hot pink roots in the Lindsay Lohan vehicle Just My Luck). When Lindsay gets the record home, she slowly absorbs the music and ends up “getting it,” whirling around exhuberantly in her room.

The guides on Lindsay's quest; image courtesy of sepinwall.blogspot.com (if interested in Alan Sepinwall's appraisal of the finale, click on the image)

As an aside, kudos to actress Linda Cardellini for being able to make what could be an otherwise cheesy scene believeable.

Discovering the Dead couldn’t come at a better time for Lindsay. As her junior year winds to a close, she finds out that she’s been selected to participate at a state-wide academic summit at the University of Michigan. The idea of spending two weeks of summer vacation participating in competitive seminars and hobnobbing with her supposed intellectual peers sounds like a flattering offer but a pointless exercise to her (it sounds like little more than résumé padding to me, though I probably would’ve gone if offered it at that age).

However, the idea of following the Dead from Texas to Colorado with her Deadhead friends and Kim sounds like an ideal way to spend part of her summer vacation. So she decides to skip out on the symposium, opting instead to go truckin’.

These girls have other summer plans; image courtesy of thelipster.com

And while I have no doubt that Lindsay ends up going to a good college anyway, I’d imagine that those two weeks did more to shape her as a young woman than battling wits with a bunch of eggheads about great literary and philosophic work ever could. She’s probably the kind of person UC-Santa Cruz are looking for to manage their Grateful Dead collection. At the very least, I’m sure she’s got some items to donate.

Shelf Life: Fight Club

By all accounts, 1999 was one of the best years in film history, featuring an amazing glut of debuts and career-defining follow-ups from a rich and varied roster of directors who are steadily working some ten years later. For example American Beauty, which was also released in ‘99, was one of the first films revisited in our “Shelf Life” series, and it seemed most likely to lose its luster, especially given its Oscar win and almost universal critical acclaim, but thankfully the film sustained most of its initial appeal and impact.

Fight Club, meanwhile, faced markedly more polarizing reactions from audiences and critics, although like Alan Ball’s film it captured a moment in the zeitgeist that made it important almost regardless of how good it was. Ten years later, Fox Home Entertainment just released the film on Blu-ray in a gorgeous new set, and after a decade of conspicuous consumption and ironic detachment, it’s time to see whether the weight of its message or meaning still holds relevance.

The Facts: Released on October 15, 1999, David Fincher’s Fight Club is an adaptation of the Chuck Palahniuk novel of the same name, adapted by screenwriter Jim Uhls. Its incendiary deconstruction of contemporary culture and the narcotizing effects of consumerism, particularly on men, was met with mixed reactions: some hailed it as a brilliant social commentary, while others condemned it as empty provocation, or worse, irresponsible.

Regardless, the film eventually earned $100 million domestically against its $63 million budget (reportedly $17.5 million of which went to star Brad Pitt), and enjoys an 80 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was nominated for only one Academy Award, for Sound Effects Editing, but it was also nominated for several awards by different critics groups including the Online Film Critics Society, and subsequently netted several awards for its DVD release, which featured several commentaries and featurettes exploring the world within the film.

What Still Works: While during its original release the film was deliberately, perhaps even conventionally reactionary (“f*ck Martha Stewart!”), it really serves as a powerful reminder that contemporary consumer culture is still designed to satisfy us in superficial ways and ultimately distract us from the human connections and more visceral accomplishments that prove more meaningful. Particularly with the benefit of hindsight, the film’s analysis of overmodulated consumption, broken down to the details and objects in our life that supposedly define us, is especially potent, and deserves to be revisited as a reminder to remain vigilant against that kind of complacency.

fight2

Meanwhile, I think especially now the film escapes being mere provocation or dangerous advocacy because it ultimately acknowledges that these characters are trading one oppressive structure for another, and that even the intentional absence of order eventually creates its own organized sense of routine, if not full-fledged cultural mores (hence Project Mayhem, the “space monkeys”‘ blind devotion to their anarchic causes, etc).

In terms of the performances, Pitt and Edward Norton are both really terrific as, essentially, the same guy, albeit in different iterations of his self-confidence, much less self-awareness. Fincher, coming off of the menacing polish of The Game, finds a gorgeously gritty aesthetic that really brings the narrator’s oblivious self-examination to life, and creates a truly subversive and valuable portrait of what is essential schizophrenia, filtered through both movie-star sheen and the thematically-reinforced, exacting opposite of stardom’s supposed “importance” – namely, that all of that beauty and truth is as illusory as anything else.

What Doesn’t Work: Surprisingly little, although the unwieldy structure, oddball rhythms of the storytelling and its eventual descent into (self-) destruction seem more shocking in the context of real-life events like 9/11, not to mention our culture’s subsequent escape even further into conventional, comfortable forms of entertainment. There’s lingering resonance to the destruction of the banks at the end of the film, both in terms of domestic and international terrorism and the current state of our economic system, but it’s subjective whether that’s a virtue or a shortcoming for film, since it certainly isn’t the film’s fault.

Otherwise, there is a degree to which the idea of white guys bemoaning their pampered, IKEA-sustained existence feels, well, so 1999, and that their reaction feels like a more than slightly self-indulgent rebellion that people with constructive minds wouldn’t act out. But as a parable and a perhaps necessary reminder of the complacency and boring blandness that can come from a life lived within the lines – and in light of the fact it’s meant not to be taken literally - Fight Club still transcends such criticisms.

What’s The Verdict: Fight Club is a really terrific movie and I am genuinely relieved to say that it holds up beautifully for the most part. Not only was it the first movie that I bought on DVD, but it was an important one in my adult, intellectual maturation, particularly in discovering that as conceptually appealing as such reckless behavior might be, it ultimately serves as mush as a prison as any other philosophy or paradigm. I think I still prefer Fincher’s previous film, The Game, if only because it was just so shocking and cathartic when I first saw it, but Fight Club is a wake-up call and a punch in the gut that needs to still be felt.

by Todd Gilchrist

Away We Go is the 5th film from Director Sam Mendes. Known for American Beauty, Road to Perdition and last years Revolutionary Road which are very dark in tone and content, this is a step away from the norm from him and frankly is a breath of fresh air. Away We Go is the story of Burt, played by John Krasinski (The Office, Leatherheads) and Verona, who are a mid-thirties couple who find out they are going to have their first child. Burt’s parents played by Jeff Daniels (Gettysburg, Speed) and Catherine O’hara (Best in Show, Beetlejuice) decide to move to Belgium a month before the baby is born. Burt and Verona, having no ties to their home town any more, go exploring for the perfect place to raise a family. visiting lots of friends and family across  the country, it is a fun adventure of possibilities.

The performances in the film are all pretty good, but the one surprise performance that stands out is that of Maggie Gyllenhaal (Secretary). She plays Burt’s cousin and takes the idea of being close as a family to a whole new level, to the point of being creepy. Her performance is spot on as she delivers her lines with complete confidence without batting and eye as she talks about sharing a bed with her husband….and her kids! She is so good in this role, I could see her getting a Supporting Actress nomination.

Overall I don’t think this is Sam Mendes best film as the movies mentioned previously are very powerful films, but this is a very light, intelligent and delightful film. I would recommend seeing this movie, it is something fresh and not the usual rehashing of a story line you have seen twenty times already. Worth watching for sure!

Die Schule geht mir echt auf die Nerven. Und das jede Woche mehr und mehr. Unter normalen Umständen ist es da – aufgrund unfähiger Lehrer und dem daraus resultierenden langweiligen Unterricht – einfach nicht zu ertragen. Allerdings gibt es auch Ausnahmen. Und ganz selten macht man im Unterricht auch mal etwas wirklich Cooles.

So mussten wir dieses Jahr zum Beispiel im Englisch-LK “American Beauty” gucken, da dies Vorgabe für das Zentralabitur ist. Dieser Film war wirklich absolut fantastisch. Kevin Spacey ist dadurch zu einem meiner Lieblingsschauspieler geworden und Regisseur Sam Mendes genießt bei mir nun noch höheres Ansehen als zuvor. Eine so gelungene Mischung aus Tragik und Komik kannte ich vorher nur aus “Forrest Gump”.

Doch neben den tollen Schauspielern und der hervorragenden Regie, spielt auch die wunderschöne Musik von Thomas Newman eine sehr wichtige Rolle. Sie dient nicht nur zur Untermalung des Geschehens, wie bei es so oft bei anderen Filmen der Fall ist, sondern ist ein unverzichtbarer Bestandteil der Handlung. Ohne genau diese Musik, würde der Film nur noch halb so gut funktionieren. Und deshalb gibt’s nun diese wunderschönen Klänge:

Languidece noviembre, amarillean las hojas de los árboles y todo ese rollo… y como ellas, van cayendo marchitos los estrenos del fin de semana, sin despertar gran interés a un servidor. Algo me dice, sin embargo, que unos cuantos millones de personas se empeñarán a llevarme la contraria:

-Luna Nueva (estrenada el miércoles 18): Blockbuster palomitero apoyado en el fulgurante (y por mí no catado) éxito de las novelitas de Stephenie Meyer, aquí está la segunda entrega de… sí, otra historieta de vampiros y amoríos adolescentes, en la línea del producto HBO True Blood. Cómo será de pobre el guión cuando de lo único que se ha hablado es de si el vampiro Robert Pattinson, cansino como él solo, sale con esta o con la otra; y, sobre todo, con cuántos kilos de músculo se ha forrado el hombre-lobo Taylor Lautner. Pobre crío él, que a sus 18 años se ha visto obligado a machacarse en el gimnasio y engullir proteína tras otra, y quién sabe si metiéndose hormonas y otras mierdas, para cambiar su cuerpo cuando aún estaba desarrollándose, por culpa de unos productores que sopesaban la idea de largarle por alfeñique. Con más razón que nunca: para fans de la saga.

-Amelia: No parece que sea el caso, pero película que hace Hillary Swank… (casi) Oscar que se lleva; ahora encarna a una aviadora pionera que tiene que sufrir a Richard Gere y a Ewan McGregor (¡Dios!) mientras rompe barreras más chungas que el sonido, como la discriminación por ser mujer, bla, bla, bla.

-Un lugar donde quedarse: Sam Mendes, otrora admirado por American Beauty, parece cada vez más fuera de onda; ahora sirve una comedia gafapastiana y con airecitos Green Village, rollo cultureta/alternata/intelectualoide que tira para atrás.

-Tenderness: El título, la verdad, no invita nada. Luego, ¿quién sabe?, igual hasta engancha la historia de un poli (Russell Crowe) obsesionado con un chaval que mató a sus viejos y del que está convencido que, fuera ya de la cárcel, se cepillará a más gente, incluida una niñata enamorada del tal asesino. Una incógnita.

-La noche que dejó de llover: Luis Tosar se merece nuestro eterno respeto por su Malamadre de Celda 211; pero esto, hasta que alguien me demuestre lo contrario, es una ESPAÑOLADA.

DRAPER. En un capítulo de la primera temporada de “Mad Men”, Don Draper detiene su coche ante las vías de un tren. Horas antes, su mujer le ha pedido que vaya a la pastelería a recoger la tarta de cumpleaños de su hija. Abrumado ante el puzzle de perfección que es su vida y frente al rugido del tren, su mirada delata un profundo deseo de ser arrollado. Secuencias más tarde, el publicista vuelve al hogar, apaciguando a una alterada esposa y comprando el cariño de la hija con un enorme perro San Bernardo. Todo vuelve a la normalidad.

SEDUCTOR.  “Mad men” me tiene enganchada. Los escotes cónicos de las secretarias, los omnipresentes cigarrillos, su colorido estridente: todo destila un regusto vintage, que lo aleja de nuestra higiénica y esbelta corrección política. Seguramente en esta rebeldía estética radica uno de sus éxitos, pero lo que más me seduce de esta serie es precisamente que Don Draper es un hombre de hoy en día.

TRIUNFADOR. Este publicista triunfador, que oscila de la ternura hacia su familia al desprecio más devastador, que siente remordimientos por vender aire aunque no deje que nadie le arrebate el puesto de directivo estrella, que busca en la infidelidad la adrenalina para seguir adelante: en este señor, estamos tú y yo. Y es que la sociedad del bienestar nos ha enseñado que aunque podamos tenerlo todo, nunca será suficiente. ¿Quién dijo que el gran consumo nos haría felices? Sí, fueron ellos: los anuncios de los 50.

ESTRELLA. Probablemente el existencialismo burgués que respira “Mad Men” esté tan cerca de nosotros porque fueron los barros de los 50 los que trajeron estos lodos. El fordismo hizo del gran consumo el refugio frente a las penurias del pasado y así fuimos aprendiendo que el confort lo dictaminaban la cilindrada de nuestro coche, la altura de nuestro césped o las pulgadas de nuestros televisores. La ansiedad consumista es tan filosófica como cualquier otra y nos enseña que nunca tendremos bastante. Adiós Hambre, bienvenida Insatisfacción.

DON. Pero antes de Draper hubo otros y si tengo que elegir, me quedo con el bello americano Lester Burnham, abandonado a una segunda juventud de hamburguesas y marihuana en la piel de Kevin Spacey. Antes de morir violentamente en una zona residencial, Lester se reconciliará con su vida. Ya os contaré si Don Draper hace lo mismo con la suya. Mientras tanto, ya sabéis: sed felices.

I’m not sure exactly how many films I’ve seen in my lifetime.

It is probably over a thousand, the list below barely scratches the surface of all the films I’ve seen and it was surprisingly easy to come up with. Rather than systematically list films by era or genre I got my brother’s girlfriend Dawn to call out any films she could think of.

I thought of this idea about five minutes before I began typing and Dawn rattled off films as they came to her while I typed out brief verdicts for each one. I initially intended to create a system for rating but found it too restrictive so I just wrote a brief instinctual verdict for each one.

I have included a link to Rotten Tomatoes and the score of each film, I haven’t seen some of these movies in a very long time…

NOTE: The percentages at the end are not my scores but the percentage of positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

1. Men in Black (1997) – meh (91% – seriously?!)
2. Fight Club (1999) – brilliant (80%)
3. Unforgiven (1992) – immense (96%)
4. Shaun of the Dead (2004) – decent (gets worse every time I watch it)
5. Memento (2001) – pretty good (93%)
6. The Departed (2006) – good (92%)
7. Aliens (1986) – the best sequel ever made (100%)
8. Reservoir Dogs (1992) – great characters and dialogue (95%)
9. American Beauty (1999) – uplifting, brilliant (the stupid bag scene apart) (89%)
10. Goodfellas (1990) – excellent (96%)
11. Predator (1987) – one of Arnie’s best (76%)
12. 12 Angry Men (1957) – captivating (100%)
13. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) – meh (78%)
14. Shawshank Redemption (1994) – really, really good (88%)
15. Little Miss Sunshine (2006) – better than I expected (90%)
16. Sin City (2005) – flashy trash (78%)
17. Toy Story 2 (1999) – yep, it’s good (100%)
18. Bambi (1942) – I remember it being good (much to the amusement of Dawn and Sean, many gay jokes followed) (89%)
19. Final Destination (2000) -guff (30%)
20. Edward Scissorhands (1990) – pretentious crap (90%)
21. Stranger than Fiction (2006) – Surprisingly good (72%)
22. Shallow Grave (1995) – okay (71%)
23. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1996) – facepalm (49%)
24. Man on Fire (2004) – underwhelming (39%)
25. Ocean’s Eleven (2001) – meh (81%)
26. 28 Days Later (2003) – meh (88%)
27. Casino Royale (2006) – surprisingly really good (94%)
28. Psycho (1960) – I was expecting it to be better (98%)
29. The Flintstones (1994) – Jesus wept (18%)
30. Aladdin (1992) – good (92%)
31. Jackass: The Movie (2002) – hard to class as a film really, hit and miss(48%)
32. E.T (1982) – good (98%)
33. Independence Day (1996) – a glorified B movie (61%)
34. Titanic (1997)  – Good (81%)
35. Ring (2002) – fairly decent (71%)
36. Pulp Fiction (1994) – Tarantino’s best film by a long way (97%)
37. Hot Fuzz (2007) – fun (90%)
38. Monty Python: Holy Grail (1975) – classic (94%)
39. Good Will Hunting (1997) – good (97%)
40. Heat (1995) – pretty good, not great (89%)
41. Zodiac (2007) – boring (87%)
42. Little Mermaid (1989) – decent (90%)
43. Ghost (1987) – crap (80%)
44. Dirty Dancing (1987) – utter shit – that women like this film makes me wonder if they actually deserve equal rights (67%)
45. The Terminator (1984) – the best Terminator (100%)
46. Bean (1998) – a test of mental endurance, awful (41%)
47. The Mask (1994) – rubbish (76%)
48. Frailty (2002) – ridiculous (74%)
49. The Day After Tomorrow (2004) – shite
50. Donnie Darko (2001) – overrated pish (84%)
51. Apollo 13 (1995)– crap (96%)
52. Deep Impact (1998)– more crap (46%)
53. Volcano (1997) – even more crap (40%)
54. I know what you did last summer (1997)– yet more crap (36%)
55. The Matrix (1999) – first half decent rest shite (86%)
56. Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (2002)– boring (96%)
57. Addams Family Values (1994) – some good moments (74%)
58. Nightmare before Christmas (1993) – overrated, largely guff (97%)
59. Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983) – (see earlier blog) (75%)
60. Three Men and a Baby (1987) – sickening  (78%)
61. Transformers: The Movie (1986) – decent (haven’t seen it in 10 years) (50%)
62. Cruel Intentions (1999) – trash (47%)
63. Lock Stock and Two Smoking barrels (1998) – good if a little overrated (71%)
64. Clerks II (2006) – absolutely fucking diabolical (62%, seriously what the fuck?)
65. Baby’s Day Out (1994) – horrific (23%)
66. Home Alone 2 (1992) – decent (17% – that seems harsh!)
67. Liar Liar (1997) – pretty bad (84%)
68. Babe (1995) – Jesus wept (98%)
69. The Simpsons Movie (2007) – unfunny crap from a show that is a pale shadow of what it used to be (90%)
70. Mr Nanny (1993) – a holocaust of a film (7%)
71. The Thing (1980) – really tense, really good (80%)
72. Blair Witch Project (1999) – doing something different doesn’t make it good (85%)
73. Run Lola Run (1999) – see above (92%)
74. The Santa Clause (1994) – crap (Dawn: “What’s the film with Tim Allen dressed as Santa Claus?”) (79%)
75. Silence of the Lambs (1990) – they really should have just stopped at this one, a fine film (96%)
76. Matilda (1996) – another crap Dahl adaptation (89%)
77. A Bridge too Far (1977) – the quintessential war movie (67%)
78. Rocky V (1990) – laughable (21%)
79. The Sting (1973) – really good (91%)
80. The Sword in the Stone (1963) – good (73%)
81. The Witches (1990) – crap (100%, what the fuck?)
82. Starship Troopers (1997) – entertaining trash (60%)
83. Love Actually(2003)  – hated it (63%)
84. White men can’t jump (1992) – I liked it despite itself (78%)
85. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1999)– a pointless sequel (48%)
86. A Bug’s Life (1998) – meh (91%)
87. Hollow man (2000)– hollow is an appropriate adjective (but I like Bacon’s character) (27%)
88. Jaws (1975) – good but overrated (100%)
89. Jerry Maguire (1996)– oh Christ (84%)
90. Dawn of the Dead (1978)– awesome (95%)
91. Drop Dead Fred (1991)– mindless crap (still haunted by my little sister’s repeat viewing of this monstrosity) (9%)
92. Braveheart (1995) – good (it’s a movie, not a history lesson) (76%)
93. Saw II (2005) – crap (35%)
94. Mouse Hunt (1997)– hated it (really wanted the mouse to die) (44%)
95. The Mummy (1999)– didn’t like it (54%)
96. George of the Jungle (1997)– crap (53%)
97. Leon (1994) – ludicrous garbage (74%)
98. Death becomes her (1993)– had its moments (56%)
99. Meet Joe Black (1998) – meh (49%)
100. Dog Soldiers (2002) – entertaining (79%)
101. Cool Hand Luke (1967) – the best film ever (100%)

Yesterday, I hung out at Ryan’s house all day with him and Taylor. We watched Rocky Horror Picture Show, ordered some very delicious pizza, and watched American Beauty.

Taylor’s a really…interesting person. He’s nice and all, but his family is really redneck-ish. They go hunting a lot and his dad hates black people and Jews. (Way to be a stereotype, am I right?) Though, Taylor doesn’t seem to be like that. I mean, he seems to like me a lot. He said, “No lie, you’re a really awesome person.” So he doesn’t hate Jews. And he’s also friends with a lot of black people, so he can’t be racist against black people.

Taylor

Ok, so something really weird happened. When we were watching American Beauty, Ryan was laying next to me and we were sort of playing footsie. But only sort of.

Ryan

What am I doing? I can’t go around leading other guys on! I have Michael. But..but…Ryan and I really have compatible personalities. And he lives close by. And we both love watching movies. But I can’t- no way.

I really don’t want a boyfriend. I’m calling the Michael and the Ryan thing off. I hate dating- it stresses me out.

And some other things that happened when I was over at Ryan’s house:

• I bumped my head really hard on bed post. Both of the guys thought this was hysterical, which it kind of was. But my vision went all blurry, which I didn’t know actually happens to people.
• Chris called Ryan and found out that we were hanging out without him. Ryan and I laughed when we thought about the moment where you realize two people that you introduce become friends. It’s weird, right?
• I told the guys that there’s not a whole lot of things that will make me not date a guy. My two big things is that he can’t be girlier than me and he can’t have really bad acne. They burst into laughter and said that describes Chris exactly. I told them that the real reason I wouldn’t date Chris is because I thought he only liked me because I’m thin.
• We talked a lot about basketball. Or rather, they did. I made fun of them for being so obsessed with the sport. Ryan said he was going to try to get me into it.
• Taylor said he might be able to get me a job at this store that’s pretty close to my house. That would rock, especially considering I only have class past 11am two days a week.

In other news, I’m going to only post when I have something interesting to say. You can still probably expect posts 3-4 times a week, but I will not be posting anymore “Nothing happened today” posts. I was thinking, when I want to reread this blog, I’m going to hate myself for writing “Nothing happened today”

Bye

VERDICT:
10/10 Awesome Dads

One hell of a debut effort by director Sam Mendes and screenwriter Alan Ball. Also happens to be my good buddy Fred’s favorite movie of all time.

Good choice, Fred.

American Beauty is about Lester Burnham, a guy going through a mid-life crisis thanks to the “good job” he hates, the “good marriage” that failed a long time ago, the estranged relationship he has with his daughter that he sees every day but hardly even knows, and the facade of a “good life” he grudgingly maintains in suburban America for the sake of everyone but himself. Then one day he meets his next-door neighbor – a dope-dealing classmate of his daughter – who teaches Lester by example that life is too short to just sit back and accept the way things are. Lester listens, Lester abides, and so begins the story of the most entertaining and profound mid-life crisis I’ve ever seen put to film.

While I’m on the subject, I’m just gonna go ahead and get my Lester Burnham/Kevin Spacey rant out of the way, mainly because he’s a big reason this movie got a 10.

Alright, here it goes…

Lester Burnham is the man. Arguably one of the top three movie protagonists…ever. Part of that is because he’s played by Kevin Spacey, who also happens to be the man and one of the best working actors out there today (now if only he’d take better roles). It helps that Burnham’s such a well-written character to begin with, but it’s not often in movies that you see an actor really become the character he’s playing. The reason the change from Lester the Buzzkill to Lester the Hero is so effective is because Spacey is just so damn believable and invested as he sticks up a big ol’ middle finger to the life he can’t stand and punches it square in the kisser as he passes it by with an ear-to-ear grin on his face.

It’s an amazing display of character development, it’s an amazing display of life in general.

But everyone else is  great, too. Annette Bening is fantastic as Lester’s wife, Carolyn, the one person in the family who seems to relish in their superficial existence and has no idea how to cope with her husband’s sudden disdain for it. She’s a great counterpoint to Lester’s whole mindset and Bening does a great job of making her feel both trapped and

Thora Birch (where’d she go?) is good as Lester’s daughter, Jane. Mena Suvari (probably hiding out with Thora) is good as Jane’s best friend/Lester’s lust interest. I thought Wes Bentley (who has since taken up a campaign to destroy his own career from the inside out with big roles in Ghost Rider and P2) was really good as the terribly odd, yet terribly fascinating Ricky Fitts, Jane’s main squeeze and Lester’s weed pusher/personal idol next door. And Chris Cooper and Allison Janney are also awesome in their own disturbing ways as Ricky’s parents.

Probably could have just left that at “everyone else is great, too,” but hey, good casts like this deserve their props.

And like I said, what an amazing script by Alan Ball. Sam Mendes might be the reason this movie looks so damn good, but the brilliant characters, the wonderful dialogue, and the way this thing goes from great scene to great scene to great scene goes right back to Ball. We’ve all got our favorite moments, and that’s ’cause there’s a lot of ‘em here.

The plastic bag dancing in the wind.

Lester blackmailing his boss.

Lester chucking the asparagus and changing the music.

Lester working the drive-thru window.

Carolyn belting out “Don’t Rain On My Parade” right before she’s pulls into her driveway.

Just so many great scenes here thanks to a perfect little partnership between Mendes and Ball. Those guys should really get back together.

What more can I say about American Beauty. Best movie of 2000, deserved the freakin’ slew of awards it got that year, and it’s the best thing Sam Mendes has done for the world. Still the most insightful and eye-opening behind-closed-doors look into suburban life, and I’ll be damned if that statement ever changes.

…And the scene where Lester goes off on Carolyn after she stops his advances because he’s about to spill beer on their couch – one of my favorite scenes of all time.

“This isn’t life, it’s just stuff! And it’s become more important to you than living. Well, honey, that’s just nuts.”

Fuckin’-A, Lester. Fuckin’-A.

Quase comprei “Beleza Americana” (American Beauty, 1999, Sam Mendes) no Bourbon hoje. R$12,90. Aliás, do mesmo diretor, um filme menos badalado mas tão bom quanto é o “Foi Apenas Um Sonho” (Revolutionary Road, 2008). Leonardo di Caprio e Kate Winslet repetem o casal de Titanic (1997) mais maduros e excelentes. Os dois mereciam oscars (oscares?) ou outros prêmios pelas atuações nesse filme…

Both looks by Pauline Trigere, top image from fall 2009, bottom spring 1950

She (un)famously dressed Holly Golightly’s cougar nemesis in the film adaptation of Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and despite being overshadowed by Parisian hype, Pauline Trigere remains to be one of the most ingenious and dramatic of all American designers. Truly American in her cut, she understood like no other what a simple graphic contrast and sublime expanse of fabric could do for a  garment — appeasing both the wearer and viewer’s interest.

You can view some fine examples of her work at the current FIT exhibit American Beauty.