|
Sunday, January 31, 2010
the problem with happiness
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
walken's first weirdo
Annie Hall is a film with many great moments, and for me the best of them is the movie's single scene with Annie's younger brother, Duane Hall, played by Christopher Walken, the first of his long, brilliant career of cinema weirdos. Visiting the Hall family home, Alvy Singer — that's Woody Allen — bumps into Duane, who immediately shares a fantasy:
|
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
ja!
|
Sunday, December 20, 2009
on this year's best movies
By the time Warner joined this new specialty business 10 years later, with Warner Independent Pictures, all the studios were in the indie business. Films like Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Ones Are” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Informant!,” both released by Warner, might represent the end of that era. Even so, I like to believe that the industry’s central irrationality (its human factor) will remain and that there will always be one madman willing to give an artist like Wes Anderson millions to make a puppet movie about a family of foxes. And Colin Firth’s face crumbling like pulverized stone as he receives the awful news of his lover’s death in “A Single Man.” Some of the greatest filmmaking of the year was represented by the story of a happy marriage, which was represented with breathtaking narrative economy and a great depth of feeling in four sublime minutes in “Up.”... A restless camera tracing lines of love among grieving family members in “Summer Hours,” a French film poignantly true to everyday life and emotions and almost impossible to imagine being made in America if only because of its insistence on ambivalence as a condition of human relations. |
Saturday, December 19, 2009
the city if full of ghosts
|
a radish-like beast
|
Saturday, December 05, 2009
wes anderson's fantastic mr. fox
At times this adaptation of Roald Dahl’s slender anti-fable — truer to the spirit than to the letter of the source — does not even look like a movie. In spite of the pedigreed voices (Meryl Streep and Bill Murray, along with George Clooney in the title role), it feels more like an extended episode of what progressive educators call imaginative play. The sets might just as well have been built out of available household stuff, the stiff figurines animated and ventriloquized on a classroom or bedroom floor by precocious children. All of which may only be another way of saying that this is a Wes Anderson film. His live-action subjects often move like stop-motion figures through landscapes that resemble drawings and models more than real places. (Think of the cutaway ship set in “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.”) There is a deadpan, understated quality to his performers that also suggests puppetry, and he shows a stubborn reluctance to let story take precedence over style. Is it is a movie for children? This inevitable question depends on the assumption that children have uniform tastes and expectations. How can that be? And besides, the point of everything Mr. Anderson has ever done is that truth and beauty reside in the odd, the mismatched, the idiosyncratic. He makes that point in ways that are sometimes touching, sometimes annoying, but usually worth arguing about. Not everyone will like “Fantastic Mr. Fox”; and if everyone did, it would not be nearly as interesting as it is. There are some children — some people — who will embrace it with a special, strange intensity, as if it had been made for them alone. |
manhood for amateurs
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael ChabonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Even though it took me a while to get through this book, I have to say that I enjoyed it greatly. Michael Chabon is one of those writers that make me want to write for the rest of my life. He is just so brilliant.
I welcome his adventures in the non-fiction territory, and even though I am not a Jewish male in his 40s, I found a lot of what he had to share to be very relevant to my life. Some of the essays had me rejoicing with nerdery, some of them moved me deeply.
The only thing that keeps me from giving this book five stars is that although I am most of the way there with him on almost every topic, sometimes his geeky comics and science fiction knowledge (and the showing off of this knowledge) can make me a little edgy and I lose interest. However, his observations about reading, writing, relationships, and purpose were extremely interesting. His essays about childhood and how being a child has changed in the last forty years in this country were fascinating. I had heard three of them before, in a reading that Michael Chabon did during his visit to my university campus last year, but reading them made me appreciate his eloquent carefulness with language and choice of words. Moreover, his description of his younger son's mild OCD and his issues with symmetry (as one of the kinds of OCD) got me thinking about the last book I read.
I highly recommend this book to those of you who are feeling reflective about life lately.
View all my reviews >>
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Saturday, November 28, 2009
too much happiness
|
Thursday, November 19, 2009
embedded episode - "the decemberists, hazards of weirdness"
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
heather and her mother's dog
Friday, November 06, 2009
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Friday, October 09, 2009
julia wertz cracks me up

|
Monday, October 05, 2009
illustrated missed connections
|

















