13 March 2011

justin, film

Posted by admin @ 15:02 pm    categories: film/movies

Every so often I try to write down, with brief reviews perhaps, the films I’ve seen in the preceding weeks/months. Seeing as how I don’t watch movies all that often these days, this is not a regular occurrence, although I likewise have been lax at posting on the blog, and therefore I last did this not so long ago.

In any event:

The City of Lost Children (La Cité des enfants perdus), dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, 1995
This was a weird film—but then again, it’s Jeunet, who’s the director who also did Amelie and, before this, Delicatessen. There were some things I really liked about it. I loved some of the Rube Goldberg machine style events. I liked the set design. The plot itself is very weird, and intentionally so… but I enjoyed it, as a whole.

127 Hours, dir. Danny Boyle, 2010
James Franco plays Aron Ralston, who was trapped under a boulder in Utah when he went solo exploring, and ended up cutting off his own arm to escape. I remember reading about Ralston when this happened; I really enjoyed watching this movie, although I think it could have had about thirty minutes cut (it was already only an hour-and-a-half; I understand why they didn’t cut). Franco is great; the cinematography is wonderful. It made me want to go to Utah.

Enter the Void, dir. Gaspar Noé, 2009/2010
(See my review/thoughts)
I think in the end I would say I am really glad I saw this movie, but it definitely inspired mixed feelings.

El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret of Their Eyes), dir. Juan José Campanella, 2009
This movie won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film last year; I’d been meaning to see it but hadn’t gotten around to it. I really liked it, but I guess there were some things I disliked about it. Still, a pretty cool movie; I definitely recommend it.

Black Swan, dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2010
Really amazing. I know some people hated this movie (starring Natalie Portman as a dancer in the Tchaikovsky ballet), but I really liked it. It may have had something to do with the excellent company, but I think most of me liking this film had to do with it being an excellent film. There was one scene (the hospital scene near the end) that I think was wholly unnecessary, but the movie struck just the right cord of creepy with me (especially the feathers stuff—gah, but that was effective). I think of all the movies on this list, this one’s up there as the best. Although many of them were great, actually.

Wit, dir. Mike Nichols, 2001
This was an HBO movie (co-written by Nichols and Emma Thompson, who starred in it) that I watched the day after I saw Black Swan, with the same company. It’s about a woman (Thompson) dying of ovarian cancer, and struggling with her own death. It was really intense, and certainly sad. Like 127 Hours, it’s essentially a one-character film, and that’s great—Thompson is wonderful and funny and sad. Definitely recommend.

True Grit, dir. Joel & Ethan Coen, 2010
I liked this film, but I didn’t quite see why people raved about it. I liked the acting; I loved the oddly stilted English (although it reminded me a bit of Diablo Cody’s writing in Juno in a weird way). I never quite felt like I cared, though, and I’m not sure why not.

The Fighter, dir. David O. Russell, 2010
I really liked Russell’s I &heart; Huckabees, but this was better. I guess I might’ve liked it more than Black Swan, actually; it’s the first fight movie I’ve seen in years that was this good. All of the acting is amazing—woah, but Christian Bale is wonderful here—and the story is damn-good as well. The movie’s about Mark Wahlberg as a boxer; his older brother (Bale) was once reasonably successful, but now has a drug problem. Wahlberg is struggling to figure out what he wants as a man and as a boxer. There were plenty of things to love in the movie—the fact that boxing was more the vehicle than the story helped a lot, if that distinction makes sense.

The Virgin Suicides, dir. Sofia Coppola, 1999
This was Coppola’s first film, and I had never seen it. I loved the novel (by Jeffrey Eugenides, who also wrote the amazing Middlesex) when I read Emily Alves’ copy in high school. So I figured it was finally time to watch it. The movie’s really beautiful, and very Sofia Coppola. Seeing a young Josh Hartnett is pretty awesome. On the whole, I didn’t feel like my attention was entirely held. I guess it’s sort of the same reaction I had to Marie Antoinette.

I’ve been watching the David Lynch-directed TV show Twin Peaks, slowly, with my folks; it’s good fun. I also went through the entire first season of Veronica Mars, which is considerably lower brow, but also fun.

This past week was the Miami International Film Festival (MIFF), and I only went to two films this year, primarily because I was busy.

Black Field (Mavro livadi), dir. Vardis Marinakis, 2009/2011
I saw this movie last weekend with two high school friends. It was kind of ridiculous. Definitely my least favorite of the movies in this post. It’s about a convent in Greece in the 1600s, where a wounded Janissary who has desserted is nursed back to health by the sisters, and about the young nun who becomes fascinated by him. The general story was, sure, interesting. But the plot was somewhat convoluted and didn’t really follow; the ending left me thinking, “Wait, what?”

Incendies, dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2010
This French-Canadian film was pretty wonderful, if occasionally a wee bit over-the-top; I just watched it last night. It was nominated for an Academy Award, although it was beat out by another film that was at MIFF (last weekend), which I didn’t make it to. It did, however, win a bunch of Genie Awards, Canada’s highest film prize. Understandably so. It’s about twins whose mother dies and, in her will, leaves them a mystery which they unravel during the film. It’s based on a play (whose title is translated to English as Scorched, although the word incendies means fires/blazes; the movie is presented without a translation for the title). I have several criticisms beyond that “occasionally a wee bit over-the-top,” but I was definitely perfectly engaged throughout the film, and I really liked the acting, the setting, and the Radiohead soundtrack (although I’m sure some people will dislike this). I have mixed feelings about the fact that they chose to set the film in an unnamed, imaginary Arabic country; more than anything, the mixed feelings have to do with my being confused most of the film about where they were. (Some of the movie took place in Canada, but much of it did not.) I thought it could be Lebanon, but they intentionally used names that could be real but were not. (Obviously, this was intentional; I think it was probably a good move, but it is mildly confusing.) In any case, a really excellent movie, and a moving one (hah!).

Okay, that’s the present.

8 March 2011

a few songs I’ve been obsessing over

Posted by admin @ 12:27 pm    categories: music

I don’t know if I’m going to say anything about these songs, today. But here are four songs that I’ve been listening to a bit too much in the past few weeks:

I’m not hosting any of them here, apologies. But most of those links should be good for a while, at least.

I also really quite like the new Radiohead album. Yes indeed.

28 February 2011

on wasting time

Posted by admin @ 21:45 pm    categories: writing

(a little exercise in writing—I guess imagine that they’re all different, connected voices? which means some are more mine than others. some of them I’d like to expand, but it’s been too long since I wrote much.)

1. I wish you would write me back, he says.

2. When we were younger, I felt convinced of my innocence. Never omniscient, not even as a freshman*, but fully blameless. Not responsible. O self of the past, put up your sword: you know not what you do. Yet who am I to blame myself?

3. Once, I met a friend I’d never met before, and it was the most mundane excitement I’ve had in years.

4. I am afraid that you might misunderstand.

5. In my second year out of high school, I learned to stop interpreting and overdetermining. This is a lie: I will never learn. I find it impossible to not secretly believe that everything is directed at me. It can be wearying, you know.

6. A young girl I had a crush on, at summer camp in North Carolina, sitting with the fan whirring in the background: I think I’m a solipsist†, she tells me. How can I believe you’re truly there? Later, the other boy in the room will make a movie about two solipsists who meet each other. It will be silly and wondrous.

7. I write long letters to my imaginary fiancé, each one meticulously penned. It gives me some solace.

8. I lit the small pieces of grass afire, and soon the entire fire-pit was ablaze, the evergreen wood crackling as its sap ran.

9. We are skipping through the open meadow. She curtsies deep in the wild grass. This is no untruth: we do erect a gibbet of woven vine, and on its solemn rigidity we hang the skinned rabbit, and watch the flies buzz pass.

10. I spent the summer after I finished college doing two things: dreaming, and wasting time‡.

* ah, verve pipe
† i do not exist
‡ nothing is truly a waste of time

24 February 2011

words

Posted by admin @ 21:11 pm    categories: writing

Tonight, my mother and I went to see Karen Russell read at a great café and bookshop in Coral Gables (Miami) called Books & Books. I saw her in the end of 2008, at the Kelly Writer’s House at Penn, which was in some ways a very different experience. Russell wrote St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves, this ridiculously imaginative book of short stories that I loved, and which garnered some good press—the title story was in The New Yorker, and selected for that year’s Best American Short Fiction. Now, just this month, Russell’s released a novel, Swamplandia!, which has received excellent reviews from places such as the New York Times book review.

I haven’t read it, yet, but it was fun to see Russell in Miami. She’s young—not quite 30—and somewhat nervous in front of audiences, but I liked hearing her read (she gets into her stories, but then will jump out for an interjection). I wanted to ask, but didn’t, about how people in Miami interpret her Everglades-based stories differently from folk in the northeast, or in the pacific northwest. I just remember, seeing her at Penn, thinking that there was some element to her fiction that you missed out on by not being a Florida kid. Not too much; she does an excellent job of describing it. But you experience it differently, when it’s novel vs. when it’s comfortable.

Last Thursday, my friends Tom and Carlos joined me for a poetry reading at Legal Art Miami, this organization I don’t quite get who have an artist residency downtown. The poet was Sandra Beasley, who none of us have heard of. In general, we enjoyed her poetry—she has a knack for ending poems—and the space was very cool. I was glad I went. After, we went to the Biscayne Triangle Truck Roundup, where they got tacos and I got a bacon-and-bleu-cheese grilled cheese sandwich. Fun, actually. (We made it to an open mic, too.)

I shouldn’t knock Miami. We can do literary events. I don’t know if I ever talked about the Book Fair—I think I mentioned it briefly—but that was pretty wonderful. Aw, Miami. I could grow to like you if it weren’t for the weather that was coming.

22 February 2011

for lack of something better

Posted by admin @ 22:37 pm    categories: art • mental states

i haven’t done this in a long time
I haven’t done this in a long time.

21 January 2011

Philadelphia

Posted by admin @ 23:31 pm    categories: mental states • music • people • traveling

I went to Philadelphia last weekend, which was all-in-all a really fantastic trip. I’m really glad I went. It was fun to see all of my friends from college, many of whom still remain there. One of my roommates from school, Joe, is still in Philly; the other, Jacob, came the same weekend as I did, so we all got to hang out quite a lot. Jacob and I stayed with our friend Alex, who lives in this beautiful shared row-house in the Fairmount district of Philadelphia, near the PMA.

I would post photographs; there are so many good ones but none that particularly lend to a blog post. No group pictures, yeah? It’s my own fault for forgetting to pull out the camera at opportune moments.

I’ve been obsessing with two songs for the past few days.

  1. The Hidden Words – “Temple”. (Ref. this bog post for a description and to download; facebook.) Really haunting good.
  2. Flight Facilities – “Crave You” (featuring Giselle). (youtube video.) Jesse, one of my friends in Philadelphia, mentioned this song while we were all dancing at the flat he shares with three other guys I really like. I looked it up later that night; it’s pretty wonderful. The video’s interesting.

See?, that was relevant.

In any case, interlude aside, I miss Philadelphia. I miss the city; I miss the feeling of connection to the city itself that I lack in Miami. I miss my friends a lot — that sense of having lots of people who I want to see every moment of every day if possible. I wonder if I will spend a lot of time in my life missing that feeling, which was very much a college thing. I always am interested by the way I feel about things like this; in many ways I’m introverted, and I like spending time by myself — but I really feel like I need a balance between self-time and good, happy, pleasant other-time. I don’t enjoy meeting random people, or talking with strangers, not unless they’re really cool. Some people who are particularly extraverted just love to go out and talk about whatever; that doesn’t work for me, although I can do it sometimes. Yeah?

In any case, I don’t think I really Did all too much in Philadelphia. Ate some good food; made some good food; ate the good food we made. Watched a movie; played a board game; played a light game of Exquisite Corpse and a rousing game of telephone pictionary (aka writey/draw-y), which Jacob or Jesse probably won. (No, fine, you can’t really win.) Walked around. Saw people. Went out to Haverford and hung out with some awesome past professors.

Really a lovely time.

2 January 2011

a poem, yes indeed

Posted by admin @ 22:54 pm    categories: writing

I really liked a poem in The New Yorker from Dec. 20, “Homage to Mary Hamilton.” I’m not usually such a big fan of the poetry in said magazine, and this one is like many others in its impenetrability. I’m not sure if the difference is just that I’m getting the reference, or whether it’s actually a better poem. I lean toward the latter. It’s by a man named Tom Sleigh, and the reference I’m talking about is to a ballad generally called either Mary Hamilton or The Four Maries. You can look for it on youtube; the Joan Baez version is one of the most famous.

I think what I like about this poem, though, is the way the speaker mixes up his life with the ballad, both structurally and textually. He becomes Mary Hamilton; she becomes the woman in his car accident. I also think I kind of just like the sound of it, the words themselves.

The reason that I came across the poem was that I was reading the print edition of an article that is available online, a pretty cool piece on Nintendo and one of its main designers. I circled this passage:

The Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga, in his classic 1938 study “Homo Ludens” (“Man the Player”), argued that play was one of the essential components of culture—that it in fact predates culture, because even animals play. His definition of play is instructive. One, play is free—it must be voluntary. Prisoners of war forced to play Russian roulette are not at play. Two, it is separate; it takes place outside the realm of ordinary life and is unserious, in terms of its consequences. A game of chess has no bearing on your survival (unless the opponent is Death). Three, it is unproductive; nothing comes of it—nothing of material value, anyway. Plastic trophies, plush stuffed animals, and bragging rights cannot be monetized. Four, it follows an established set of parameters and rules, and requires some artificial boundary of time and space. Tennis requires lines and a net and the agreement of its participants to abide by the conceit that those boundaries matter. Five, it is uncertain; the outcome is unknown, and uncertainty can create opportunities for discretion and improvisation.

In any case, I recommend continuing with the article — read the whole of it.

23 December 2010

a brief exercise in nothing very much

Posted by admin @ 18:37 pm    categories: children's and YA literature

I was going to type up an excerpt from Luka and the Fire of Life, which I’m really quite enjoying, but instead I realized that the entire excerpt I was interested in was already online, so go and look at it—the page I link to is a section where Rushdie is talking about video games, but you can start from the beginning if you like. It’s a sort-of-sequel to Salman Rushdie’s older YA book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Both are a lot of fun, although maybe a wee bit gimmicky. I like something about the way he writes, but I could see some people rather disliking it.

I’ve also been reading, as I think I mentioned, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. The entirety of the book is online, it looks like, but here’s a paragraph I was going to quote:

And, ah! his castle. The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds mewing about its attics, the casements opening on to the green and purple, evanescent departures of the ocean, cut off by the tide from land for half a day … that castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and the waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rock and waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned far away, long ago. That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place!

If you’re like to read more, it’s here; I recommend the title story and “Puss-in-Boots,” which is so much more engaging than any other version.

I should buy myself some more Polaroid film.

12 December 2010

pot pies & books

Posted by admin @ 22:01 pm    categories: children's and YA literature • Food • images

Individual chicken pot pies

I made these this evening. Individual chicken pot pies. You will perhaps note that there was not bottom crust. I think I preferred it this way. I’ll have to try it the other way sometime. I kind of patched together a few different recipes, and the ingredients we were in the mood for (although I forgot to add the peas!). After debating the crust for a while, I decided to go the easiest route and used pre-made puff pastry. Which was a good decision; it was fuckin’ delicious.

Right. I’m proud of my cooking tonight. But originally I wanted to post about reading.

I’ve been reading a number of different books, recently. I finished Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ right after Thanksgiving, which was pretty much a fascinating book (as one might imagine by the title). My sister made the awesome mistake of confusing Pullman with C.S. Lewis, which is mostly funny since Pullman explicitly disliked Lewis.

I also finished Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim quintet, and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy; both really good, although I think I liked the former more. (Although Collins really knows how to hold my attention. I think I read each book in less than two days.)

After seeing him speak (poignantly and humorously) about his father’s death at the book fair, I’ve started re-reading Pat Conroy’s The Great Santini, a semi-fictionalized account of his adolescence in his father’s home. Which is as amazing as I remembered it being when I was in seventh grade.

A Chanukah present was a new copy of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, which is every bit as haunting and sculpted as I remembered. I really should read something else of hers, but for the moment I’m happy to explore this again. Every sentence feels like poetry.

At the recommendation of Theresa, from Haverford, I’ve also been reading some actual poetry — Barbara Ras’ Bite Every Sorrow, which is really cool. When I get in the mood for poetry, it’s a great feeling.

On my soon-to-be-picked-up pile: Salman Rushdie’s two YA books (especially Luka and the Fire of Life, the most recent); Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Lucia Perillo’s poetry. And probably the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories.

8 December 2010

semi-lucid

Posted by admin @ 23:55 pm    categories: film/movies • mental states • Miami

My mind’s been kind of disjointed for the past while. It’s weird living in this place that holds so many memories, but finding myself having to reinvent an identity here. I’m doing it well enough, I think, but it’s not like moving to a new city, which in some sense is easier. It’s harder to find your feet under you in that way that doesn’t leave you in a chair, not really moving too often.

I saw Into the Void tonight, Gaspar Noé’s newest film. Here, read about it. I found it: fascinating, brutal, graphic, direct, beautiful, haunting, upsetting, boring, stupid, interesting, worrisome. Ostensibly, it’s about a young man and his sister, living in Tokyo. The young man is dealing drugs. But there’s a lot more going on. I hesitate to recommend a film by Gaspar Noé—his Irreversible is one of the most-walked-out-of films I know of. But there was something really interesting at least in the way this movie was made. I loved the way the camera worked; I really liked watching Oscar (the protagonist) stand silently in so many scenes, [like] a ghost. And yet.

I’m not going to get into a discussion of the pornography of violence, or talk about New French Extremism, which is the “genre” Noé is often grouped into. I’ll just say that if you’re interested, you should talk to me about this. (And I liked the review from the Miami Herald.)

In any case, my life is moving along its own course. As I keep on telling people, I’m gaining a lot by living at home, but also losing something about my 23rd year that I may or may not regret losing. I keep on changing my mind about whether or not I want to move out.

I’d like to start updating more regularly. Perhaps I shall.

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