Man Gets to Where He's Going

2013-05-11

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

A few days ago Gawker ran a piece that was sort of but not exactly about something that has been bothering me for years:

http://gawker.com/don-draper-is-a-lousy-adman-482927043

Drew Magary says that Don Draper on Mad Men is actually bad at advertising, which people (including me) might not really get if they (I) haven’t worked in advertising themselves. Basically, Don is good at ideas for ad campaigns but bad at turning those ideas into actual campaigns with actual ads. He tends to rely on his eloquence (and the bubble, surely) to snow SCDP’s clients into thinking they’re getting better work than they are. This squares with Mad Men because, Magary points out, Don’s whole character is built on lies, on only showing people selections of his carefully cultivated self, and his professional work reflects his personal nature. So that’s why the piece is sort of but not exactly about what it got me thinking about, the thing that has been bothering me for years, namely “experts” in movies and television shows.

2013-02-24

My Top 10 Movies of 2012

10. Prometheus
There is (almost) literally not a story, and a weak story is (almost) guaranteed to turn me off a movie for good. But by a wide margin Prometheus is the best-looking sci-fi movie I’ve ever seen. I watched it on an airplane and still couldn’t believe it. Slap a real writer on the sequel and count me in.

9. Cosmopolis
“The rich are different from you and me.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald. What’s great about Cosmopolis is how fully it commits to how weird it is: the dialogue, the structure, the performances, the wife. It doesn’t require as much acting from Robert Pattinson as those of us who believe in him post-Twilight would like to see, but…baby steps. Also, this exchange:

“Speaking of sex…”
“We’ve been married only weeks. Barely weeks.”
“Everything is barely weeks. We have minutes to live.”
“We don’t want to start counting the times, do we? And having solemn discussions on the subject?”
“No, we want to do it.”
“And we will. We shall.”
“You want to have it?”
“Sex?”
“Yes. ‘Cause there isn’t time not to have it. Time is the thing that grows scarcer every day. What, you don’t know this?”

8. Everybody in Our Family
It goes off the rails in the last 20 minutes, but until then it’s a brutally dark picture of how divorce and child custody can bring out the ugliest sides of family members. By the time the credits roll, the title phrase—which first pops up about one-third of the way through—has been redefined in a way that sticks with you long after you’ve left the theater.

7. Seven Psychopaths
The two filmmakers who excite me the most right now are Edgar Wright and Psychopaths‘s Martin McDonagh, who also wrote and coproduced this, his second feature. It’s not as polished as In Bruges, his debut, but it’s more ambitious, self-reflexive, and narratively twisted—more of a movie, really. It’s also got a perfectly realized Christopher Walken performance and some sparkling instances of the mini-stories-within-a-story that McDonagh excels at (see: the Quaker).

6. Holy Motors
A metaphor for whatever you want it to be. The only thing we can say for sure is there’s no way to know where Monsieur Oscar’s acting ends and his real life begins. What does that mean for the rest of us?

5. Zero Dark Thirty
Remarkably restrained, ZD30 is a straightforward account of professionals doing their jobs. It doesn’t glamorize or chest-thump. It calmly, level-headedly—and with storytelling ease and acumen that may not be apparent until the movie’s 160 minutes have flown by—shows how years of unsung work led U.S. operatives to Osama bin Laden.

4. Amour
Exquisitely crafted and perfectly rendered. Love in Amour isn’t an emotion, but rather dedication to another person when the emotions are gone or hard to come by.

3. Beasts of the Southern Wild
Probably the best movie of the year, and the only movie I’ve ever been able to describe as “magical” with a straight face. It’s so completely a unique vision that writing about it just feels like taking time away from watching it again.

2. Wuthering Heights
A love story about falling for someone unequivocally, about being so given over to another person that he or she is your world. It’s also about being connected to a place while your connections to it dwindle. The Yorkshire Dales locations are bleakly beautiful, the stylized photography is stunning, and the emotions are raw and pure, juvenile and unconcerned with justifying themselves. Also, the end credits have what would win the Oscar for Best Original Song in a just world; it’s the movie in 3 1/2 perfect minutes.

1. The Comedy
The movie of my generation. It made me want to apologize to everyone I know.

2013-01-15

A Few Amour Things

While watching it, I found that Amour reminded me to a distracting degree of a Ben Gibbard line from “What Sarah Said” on Plans: “Love is watching someone die.” This understandably soured me on the movie, due less to its exquisite photography, precise editing, measured acting, etc., than to how my opinion of Death Cab for Cutie has changed since 2005. I also wasn’t sure what to make of the title. Obviously, literally translated, it means “love.” Just “love.” I was used to Michael Haneke’s movie titles having a double meaning, or at least one that wasn’t as blatant as that, so the obviousness felt disappointing. Compare: Funny Games, Cache, Time of the Wolf, The Piano Teacher, and so forth. But Love, in which an old man takes care of his dying wife. As I joked with a few friends after the screening, I wished there was Amour to it. Some part of me was trying to reconcile that Haneke’s movie was about the same thing as a Death Cab song. Certainly there’s something—a lot—to be said for rendering a story perfectly in every detail, and Amour certainly did that. But it seemed like that’s all it did. The story was just so emotionless, on the surface, at least. That’s what bothered me. But over the next few days I started thinking that the lack of apparent emotion was actually what I liked about the movie. I’m a big believer that love isn’t an emotion: it’s a commitment. Being in love doesn’t mean that you feel emotionally positive toward someone, though that’s sometimes a symptom of it. Being in love means you want to commit to that person, for good, and that’s what the movie is about. There are clear moments of tenderness between the couple, when you can see the affection that brought them together. For a good amount of the movie once the wife gets sick, however, emotion seems not to be important. This is the man’s wife, she’s the woman he’s committed to, and so he’s going to take care of her, that’s all there is to it. That, I think, is the double meaning/wordplay/what-have-you that I wanted from the title: the movie called Love is far from an obvious movie love story. The other side of this is something a friend pointed out recently, how the husband smothering the wife represents the darker side of love. The point of love being a commitment, not emotion, is that there are days when you don’t even want to look at the person you love, when everything you say and do gets on each other’s nerves. When you might feel like killing each other. It isn’t that you don’t love the person anymore. When the old man smothers his wife, he does it because he wants her to be at peace, but he also does it to free himself. Tricky, that title.

2013-01-05

Things I Liked in 2012:

The view from the West Hollywood Library’s second floor
“The Enemy,” Mumford & Sons
Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Twitter
A Kiss in Space, Mary Jo Salter. I mean the whole book; link is to one of the only poems I could find online.
Alice Glass’s voice
William Katt’s ultimate deep-V sweater in House
This Paris Review interview with Mary Karr
In Space, Evening Man
The Tree of Life’s zero Oscars
Mutemath’s live show

Things I’m Looking Forward to in 2013:

Pacific Rim

2013-01-02

The second-best movie of 2012 was Wuthering Heights. The only music in it is a Mumford & Sons song that director Andrea Arnold commissioned to play over the end credits. To the best of my googling, the only official way to hear the song is to see the movie; a soundtrack has not been released, and the song isn’t on any Mumford records that I’ve found. Some people think the song ruins the movie, but those people are insane. The song caps the emotions and tone of the movie wonderfully. You can almost hear Heathcliff listening to it in the final scene. So, “The Enemy,” which became, as songs do, the theme music for my end of 2012.

“The Enemy”

Give me hope in silence
It’s easier, it’s kinder
Tell me not of heartbreak
It plagues my soul, it plagues my soul
We will meet back on this road
Nothing gaining, truth be told
But I am not the enemy
It isn’t me, the enemy

But I came and I was nothing
And time will give us nothing
So why did you choose to lean on
A man you knew was falling?

Give me hope in silence
It’s easier, it’s kinder
Tell me not of heartbreak
It plagues my soul, it plagues my soul
And bury me beside you
I have no hope in solitude
And the world will follow
To the earth down below

But I came and I was nothing
And time will give us nothing
So why did you choose to lean on
A man you knew was falling?

2012-12-23

Some of the Best TV Characters, But Not All the Obvious Ones, I Think, of the Last Few Years

(Major spoiler alert for Nip/Tuck and minor spoiler alert, sort of/not really, for Dexter)

Rules for Inclusion: Must be a major character on the show, and preferably not obvious. (For example, Omar from The Wire isn’t on here because duh. Ron Swanson is great, but if characters have inspired memes, they, too, are too duh for this list.) No minor characters unless they appear a whole lot. Shows should be from the last decade, give or take.

Lady Mary (Michelle Dockett) and Thomas (Rob James-Collier), Downton Abbey: The former because the English, richer Blair Waldorf makes it look easy; the latter because he looks like a British Carlos D, his relationship with O’Brien is wonderful, and unicorns http://www.vulture.com/2012/12/downton-abbey-thomas-unicorn-rob-james-collier.html.

Early-season Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley), Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), and Georgina Sparks (Michelle Trachtenberg), Gossip Girl: Dan is preternaturally smart, quick, and cute for the first few seasons. Blair because there was never just one. Georgina because as the show went on it seemed like the writers were spending more time on her one-liners than the episode plots (which no one could object to).

Dan Egan (Reid Scott), Veep: Because he had that press release all ready to go in the “Me” file under “Phase 1.”

2012-09-21

Some Things about the Emmy Categories I Care About:

Spoilers for some nominated shows below, including Boardwalk Empire. A few of these awards already happened at the Creative Arts Emmys last week, but that doesn’t change how I feel about them.

Outstanding comedy series
-Veep doesn’t need to be here yet but will be surely a contender soon. Name me a better funny show than 30 Rock and I’ll name you a show that is neither better nor funnier.

Outstanding lead actress in a comedy series
-Amy Poehler should win for the amount of heart she brings to Leslie Knope. I keep meaning to watch Nurse Jackie. Lena Dunham shouldn’t be here yet, but her show got so much buzz that maybe a nomination was inevitable.

Outstanding lead actor in a comedy series
-As long as 30 Rock is on the air, Alec Baldwin. Don Cheadle won’t win but is really, really good on House of Lies. Louis CK is good too but doesn’t need to win.

Supp actress, comedy
-(The already-won-an-Emmy) Julie Bowen is underrated.

Supp actor
-There is only Ty Burrell. But where’s Luke Dunphy on this list?

2012-08-18

The Boy Wonder Surprises (surprise!)

What I remember from The Dark Knight Rises is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s eyebrows. Did you notice them? They’re perfectly rectangular, clean-cut, sculpted—indicative of his character. They’re also a metaphor for the meticulously crafted movie as a whole. I waited a few weeks after seeing TDKR to write something about it because the movie is so big that the premium rush of watching it can overwhelm the brain a little. But once the adrenaline of those last 45 minutes has worn off, the real pleasure here, in the last of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, is in small things, though there are some pretty good big things too.

Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. The Dark Knight Rises is not as good as The Dark Knight. It’s essentially Spider-Man 2 with some nods to contemporary politics that don’t really make sense when you stop to think about them. As everyone has pointed out again and again, it lacks a villain as electric as the Joker. The editing is crisp and efficient, due in no small part to what Nolan had to learn to keep Inception from plunging even further into incoherence. And the targets of the movie are set higher than The Dark Knight’s, but it hits fewer of them, which may not be clear until it’s over.

2012-08-01

Magic Mike’s Money Shots

The internet scuttlebutt on Magic Mike is that the movie is better than A) it should be and B) it needs to be. One of these is true. As the story of a male stripper who’s aging past his best years—hey, that there’s a story to “the Channing Tatum stripper movie” at all—Magic Mike is better than it needs to be. But as the story of an aging dancer whose ambitions outstrip his most notorious job, Magic Mike is far from being as good as it should be. Parts of it are very good indeed, but the rest of it looks flaccid in comparison. Very simply, the movie doesn’t play hard enough to its strengths.

The thrust of the movie, where the flashes of something really good are teased, are the scenes in the strip club. This should not be a surprise. But Tatum’s moves, pretty startling to those of us who continue to avoid the Step Up series, are electric. He’s dynamite onstage. His character is part of a multi-guy act, all of whose members look great in almost nothing, but mostly they’re just muscled, pretty bodies with skin on display. Tatum is the show, and the most surprising thing about the movie is how the stripping scenes are both brief and restrained. It’s like a musical that has some great songs, but far too few of them. Tatum’s past as an actual stripper is well documented, and is of course what the movie is built around. The first time you see him slide across the stage with a fluidity that seem impossible for someone that big, you won’t want to watch anything else. So it’s a shame that the rest of the movie makes you do just that. As great as the stripping scenes are, Magic Mike can’t keep it up.

2012-07-27

The Avengers: You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet (Well, Maybe)

How to explain the success of The Avengers? I mean, it’s good, but it’s not that good. Obviously box office returns are no kind of check for quality, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that the highest-earning superhero movie to date is the third-highest-grossing movie ever. (Incidentally, have you taken a moment lately to reflect on how only nine movies in history have made more dough than Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace? That is, the worst Star Wars movie by a wide margin? And none of those nine is another Star Wars movie. You say you haven’t? Then take a moment now, and while you’re at it consider that the next-highest-grossing Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith, is only the #28 all-time moneymaker.) And yet. It’s obvious to anyone with eyes connected to his brain that Spider-Man 2 was, is, and will remain the best superhero movie ever made. That isn’t what this post is about. Neither is it about The Dark Knight or The Dark Knight Rises, the second- and third-best superhero movies, respectively, probably. The Avengers can’t touch those three in quality or sheer entertainment, so how to explain its success?

2012-07-20

The Newsroom? More Like The Booze Room, Starring Sam Waterston

Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen the first four episodes of The Newsroom by now, don’t bother.

I was waiting for The Newsroom to get a few episodes in before I wrote anything about it, because I wanted to write something about it but a brand-new series needs some time to settle in before it can fairly be assessed (see also: Girls), even if entertainment demigod Aaron Sorkin is writing it. There’s been plenty written about The Newsroom—four episodes have aired as of this posting—particularly about its men-are-serious/women-are-frivolous-and-scatterbrained-and-flustered characterizations, and much of it has been spot-on. Fueling criticisms of the show are comments Sorkin made to a female reporter right around the time of the show’s debut; the general agreement seemed to be that Sorkin based his male characters on himself to varying degrees and his female characters on his opinions of women to varying degrees. All of this, I think, is true, and obvious to anyone other than Dan Rather. So I don’t want to repeat what’s been said, and I don’t need to. I’m always interested in the script-level quality of movies and TV: the characters, the dialogue, the narrative construction. Going on those alone still leaves plenty to opine on in Sorkin’s latest venture.

One of the most annoying Sorkin traits is that he sets up all his own jokes. Things happen the way they do and people talk the way they do and do the things they do because Sorkin wants them to, not because they follow naturally from whatever else is going on in the show. Take the first episode’s opening scene, in which Jeff Daniels’s news anchor launches into a blistering tirade against the notion that America is the greatest country in the world—a bit of pontificating inspired by a young female college student’s inane question on the topic. It was hard to find an early review of The Newsroom that didn’t mention this scene, largely because it was a sort of thesis statement for the show, revealing Sorkin’s I-did-a-lot-of-research-and-now-you’re-going-to-listen-to-it mode of writing. You can tell when Sorkin thinks he’s really in the zone because the characters switch from using specificity-heavy phrases like “a loaded .38 caliber Walther PPK/S” to simple, blunt words like “smarter” and “nobler” and “better,” the simplicity and bluntness underlining and alerting you to how serious the speaking character is being. But I was more interested that the girl asked the question about America to begin with, and how that fact is a wonderful example of the self-congratulatory Sorkin Method. Why would someone ask that question? If I remember correctly, she even asks the three anchors onstage to state in one sentence why America is the greatest country in the world. Is it just me? Does that question not seem stupid? The girl who asks the question certainly looks stupid—she stumbles once or twice as she starts to speak, she has a big, goofy grin on her face, and she’s blonde. The only reason for that particular character to ask that particular question in that particular manner is so that Daniels, playing the Sorkin surrogate character, can mouth off for a while on that particular subject. This is The Newsroom in a nutshell: the entire show is the opening scene of The Social Network, but worse (see also: “Because you go to BU”).

2012-07-13

Time flies like the wind, fruit flies like bananas: Infinite Jest #1

I’m 134 pages into Infinite Jest and thinking about the idea of sponsored years, or corporate naming rights, or (I just googled it and remembered it’s called “subsidized time,” but that phrase doesn’t make sense). So there’s The Year of the Whopper, The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, and others. I was wondering what subsidized time would look like if it actually happened. Would companies be able to buy more than one year? Could there be a Year of the Whopper and then, later on, five years/a decade/a century after, The Year of the Whopper Jr.? It seems obvious that each product could only have one year named for it—i.e., no years of the Whopper—or the resulting confusion would be catastrophic. How would Y2K have been affected by subsidized time? (Then again, considering nothing happened, maybe not much.) But how do you catalog years at all if they aren’t numbered? You really just have to memorize them, like kings, but even kings have sequential numbers. Subsidized time would have sidestepped the Y2K scare altogether in that respect, or maybe it would have confused computers even more.

2012-06-04

anneyhall:

Steve McQueen

Source: anneyhall

2012-04-21

If I had a flower for every time I thought of you, I could walk in my garden forever.

— Alfred Lord Tennyson (via vashti)

(via elizabitchtaylor)

Source: sleepypsychedelia

→

bbook:

oh god it’s wonderful

to get out of bed

and drink too much coffee

and smoke too many cigarettes

and love you so much

Source: anneyhall