A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël)

Ever had a Netflix movie hang around your neck like an albatross? (Literary allusion explained here, for those who fell asleep in 10th grade English class).

In my defense, A Christmas Tale (in French Un conte de Noël) seemed to sneak up in my queue. It was meant to arrive around the holidays LAST YEAR, but instead got co-opted by repeated Party Down (RIP) viewings. The disc arrived around April, and I had been putting off watching it. So many excuses: it’s long, in French, and Christmas-themed.

The disc seemed destined to return unwatched, but a cold front in the Bay Area sometime in August inspired me to make some tea and watch it. (That’s right, this post is fraught with procrastination, from watching, to writing, to posting).

Now that it’s actually the holidays, I can justify a recommendation, for it’s a lovely, rich movie, if perhaps more melancholy than your typical Christmas cinema (although It’s a Wonderful Life is quite dark when you think about it).
Mid-way through watching, it struck me how much A Christmas Tale reminded me of The Royal Tenenbaums. There’s a sick parent, an elegant matriach (Catherine Deneuve, natch), a killer soundtrack, depressed grown-up siblings, a suicide attempt, a family hanger-on, even a play put on by children.

The two movies would make an interesting side-by-side viewing. Anderson’s films have such wonderful, tightly manicured art direction but the characters verge on being caricatures. Any sort of real emotion on their part creeps in on the edges. A Christmas Tale, directed by Arnaud Desplechin, has  similarly beautifully shot scenes in French hospitals and the wonderful, rambling family home, but the  characters in A Christmas Tale wear their childhood  traumas on their sleeve and always seem ready to erupt.  One especially harrowing scene has Deneuve and her grown son  joking about how much she didn’t love him after the childhood death of another son. Another example of Gallic cruelty: if a partner of mind slept with someone else under my nose, would I be able to wake up and breakfast with them both? Is this another of those Gallic things? Yes? OK.

In short.  It’s a rich and devastating movie. Recommended pre or post actual holiday interactions with family (i.e. good for some perspective).
Plus, it introduced me to this Otis Redding song, which I’ve listened to 8 times a day so far this month:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBmPIQvovD0]

Leonard Cohen, the Paramount (12/6/10)

Last night I saw Leonard Cohen at the Paramount Theater in Oakland. Tickets were not cheap, but I’ve been a longtime, if not intense, fan, and I had heard really good things about his live shows. Plus, he’s getting to that age when it gets to be a “now-or-never” kind of deal (meaning he’s going to stop touring, you morbid folks out there).

I did a little prep work Sunday night by watching McCabe and Mrs. Miller, an early 1970s Robert Altman Western starring Julie Christie and Warren Beattie. It’s definitely not your typical Western, and the use of Cohen’s early work made the movie more atmospheric and moody. That’s the Cohen era that I’m most familiar with – the intimate, quiet yet sarcastic late 1960s and early 1970s work.

His live show these days is much different. First off, his voice is STRONG. It is full and rich and enunciates so clearly, I realized how rarely a singer actually does lyrics justice. I could hear and appreciate every word! These days the songs’ arrangements include a whole band and three back-up singers, bringing to mind a Vegas revue show: tightly performed and well-rehearsed, every member an amazing musician but not a lot of room for improvisation.

That being said, some of the songs veered too far into a “soft-rock” sound for me. Saxophones are like a musical garnish for me, not a main course. I loved “Dance Me to the End of Love” (concert starter) and “Suzanne” and “Ain’t No Cure for Love.” “Hallelujah” is never going to break your heart as much as the Buckley or Adams version, but listening to Cohen’s you remember that it was more of a kiss-off than a lament.

It startled me at first, but Cohen has a the habit of bending and kneeling while he sings, almost in a prayer position. I’d wager it came from all that time in the Zen monastery, and he is one of the most fit 70-something year old I’ve ever seen. He was gracious to the audience, courtly to his band and singers, more wry than I would have expected. When he took the final bow and skipped (!) off stage, I felt pretty touched that I’d shared the evening with him (“on a school night too,” as Cohen remarked).

Coffee & cigarettes

Sometimes I get a craving for both.

Watching this video won’t satisfy that craving (in fact,  it might intensify it) but it’s one of my favorite things in the whole world.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6Mw6b1T50U]

If that doesn’t satiate your yearning, maybe this list from Mojo Magazine of the best Tom Waits videos will.

Happy freaking Friday.

Book review: Eating the Dinosaur

The library gods must have a curriculum for me! Shortly following the fascinating Reality Hunger, I picked up Chuck Klosterman’s latest collection of essays, Eating the Dinosaur.

Klosterman has made a very successful career based on his ability to analyze pop culture and sports and infuse both with meaning and historical context. Why obsess over Britney Spears? Because she was a sixteen-year-old blonde, virginal vessel where we whispered our hopes and dreams, and then punished her when she failed us. Klosterman articulates the absurdity of celebrity worship and provides deeper meaning for our cultural products in an accessible, yet undeniably clever, way. You wish Klosterman could write the script for your late night, boozey arguments on why Twitter represents the inevitable feminization of the internet. Or something. (Plus, his essay on the Sims always makes me giggle).

Now on his sixth book, Klosterman has landed the kind of success that has taken him from one more nerdy journalist, I Love the 80s commentator to being THE most famous and successful nerdy journalist type. In a nutshell, critics are experts on criticizing. Klosterman has moved from acting as critic to being criticized, from writing about people and trends to being written about.

The first essay of the book attempts to work through this transition by examining the rationale of interviewing. Klosterman interviews Ira Glass, host of This American Life, on the pratfalls of interviewing someone who interviews for a living. He interviews Errol Morris, documentarian, on the limitations of interviewing. Throughout the piece, there is a distinct sense of unease. Klosterman admits to lying in interviews, to not seeing the point of doing an interview for a Finnish publication when his work isn’t even translated into that language. Essentially, he undermines the Klosterman of 10 years ago, who made his name conducing the very interviews his present-day self loathes. It’s not a very easy place to be in, resenting the role that gave him his career, and Klosterman is self-aware enough not to bite the hand that created the monster (holy mixed metaphor!).

Reading Eating the Dinosaur so closely after Reality Hunger was an interesting exercise. Klosterman uses many of the same techniques Shields does (quotations from other sources, flipping from theory to personal history) in order to address a very narrow problem in his reality, instead of Shields’ admittedly broad analysis of our treatment of representations of reality. As he writes on the back jacket of the book,

Q: Is there a larger theme?

A: Oh, something about reality. “What is reality,” maybe? No, that’s not it. Not exactly. I get the sense that most of the core questions dwell on the way media perception constructs a fake reality that ends up becoming more meaningful than whatever actually happened.

As a teenager, I used to dream of someday having a celebrity profile written about me. Not to be famous, but because I thought the interview process would be a bit like therapy, and that the profile would be like a written up analysis of ME. Reading it, I would discover my hidden tics, depths and fascinations. How much I would learn!

Today, I would feel so uncomfortable having my brain picked by someone else who then produces a piece that attempts to “decipher” me. So as solipsistic as Klosterman’s problem is, it’s definitely the most compelling piece in the book. The rest of the essays are clever and well-paced, but can’t compare to that first essay, thinking about how odd it must be to suddenly have your study of celebrity refracted back at you, realizing that, all this time, you were only illuminating aspects of yourself, rather than anyone else.

Opting in, celebrity style

In a break from my attempts to understand conceptions of reality, let’s have some gossip reportage.

How great is the A.V. Club? I could read their feature essays all day. One new feature I absolutely adore is Then That’s What They Called Music!, a track-by-track review and analysis of the once ubiquitous compilations CDs that capture all the hits of the mid 90s and early 2000s. I was in middle school and high school at that time, so this series allows me to revisit some highly embarrassing song obsessions with a (slightly more) critical eye. It’s even more embarrassing considering I owned most of the CDs in question. Ouch.

Revisiting your pop culture past also allows you smugly judge (or pity, as the case may be) the artists in question. Two singers featured heavily on the NOW! compilations, Christina Aguilera and Jennifer Lopez, are both attempting to regain the popularity they had at that time.

Both women took time off to have babies, but today are everywhere, pouting and preening on magazine covers and talk shows, promoting albums (Aguilera and Lopez) and movies (Lopez) that really aren’t doing too well.

Now I work at a company that employs a lot of women, and from what I can tell, most mothers have to be back at work less than a year after having babies. Aguilera and Lopez are both trying to opt-in to their industries after taking some significant time off, and finding it’s HARD – even for multimillionaire celebrities. Aguilera, with her signature blond hair and tech-y videos, is accused of Gaga-copying (now Gaga-feuding). Lopez can’t seem to connect to the bland romantic comedies she once dominated, let alone the dance club music that she was known for (and what her voice has the capability for, really).

There really shouldn’t be any schadenfreude in their predicaments. Women need to be able to take the time to bond with their babies and raise them, and re-enter the careers they left. But the real world doesn’t work that way, especially in an industry as cutthroat and celebrity-hungry. While they were gone, we got more pop stars to entertain us, romantic comedy leads to charm us, and reality stars to allow unfettered access into their boring, boring lives. It doesn’t make me happy that they aren’t doing well, or at least, not perceived of as doing well, but part of me is happy that they, too might see the plight of a working mom who wants to take off that time, but really, really can’t. Celebrities: they really are just like us.

Book review: Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

Recently I moved cities, so the length of my commute has more than doubled. Frankly, I don’t mind it, because the number of books I get to read has increased exponentially.

I just finished David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Truth be told, I couldn’t tell you how I heard about it. Most times I’ll read a review or recommendation for a book online, scribble it down, request it from the public library, and then scratch my head with confusion when it arrives some time later. Now I imagine gracious library gods who do the selecting based on their infinite wisdom and wicked cataloguing system.

Reality Hunger definitely came out of the sky for me. It’s far more philosophical than books I’ve been reading lately (cough, YA lit, cough). Shields offers a “collage” (a word he uses a lot) of quotations and personal insights, divided into 26 sections (after each letter of the alphabet), attempting to define our understanding of, and desire for, representations of reality.

The quotations are cited only as footnotes, and at first I kept flipping back and forth between the front and back of the book (argh! the reason why I still haven’t finished Infinite Jest!), but then I realized that the quotations intentionally blended with Shields’ own writing. The book is curated rather than written, like a catalogue of information snippets arranged as a new product (again, collaging). It’s more like a Lil Wayne mixtape of a book – original sources selected, tinkered with and injected with original material to create something that had never existed.

Even if I can’t promise that I completely followed some of the denser theory points, the book nicely complements our blurb-y tech culture, in which we over-tab our browsers and attempt to voraciously consume googles of information only to let it pass right through us.

This “bite-sized” structure not only soothes your scattered, internet-soaked brain, but makes an excellent commute read. I was able to jump from section to section with ease, just the way I’ve been trained to do (helpful when you are being jostled on a crowded train).

I must expose my shallowness and say that the first chapters, when Shields expounds on reality television and the overwhelming popularity of memoirs (or misery lit as it is known), engaged me the most. Both promise reality, but are processed enough in order to adhere to templated characters, plots, and redemptive arcs. The bad girl on a reality tv show is as much a stock character as the acrobat clown was in the 1700s.

There’s so much more to the book that I am not doing justice to – death of the novel, performance art, power of the viewer. Etc. But I imagine that the book was not made to be consumed in one sitting (or in several BART rides), but opened occasionally and perused. I would suggest that it would make a great 365 day desk calendar. And I imagine Shields would not take that as an insult, at all.

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters

My favorite setting for novels these days is fairly specific – post World War (either will do) England. Two favorites that cemented it for me were Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. I love how both wars forced British society, as unyielding and formal as it was, to accommodate deep social and economic changes – about things like women smoking, factory work and the (gasp!) death of the aristocracy.

Sarah Waters’ last book, The Night Watch, I absolutely adored. It too took place after the Blitz in London, about two women picking up the pieces of their lives as the city did, too. Her writing reminded me  of Elizabeth Bowen, an English writer of the 1940s and 1950s: taut and sparse, but full of psychological intrigue.

Waters’ new book, The Little Stranger, also takes place after World War II,  in a ruined county estate belonging to a penniless gentry family, the Antrys. The plot is straight out of a Gothic thriller, but set against the exhaustion of the post war period rather than the romanticism of the late nineteenth-century. The narrator is a country doctor, who grew up in the area, where his father was a tradesman and his mother worked as a nursemaid at the estate in question. (Sidenote: why are so many narrators doctors? There must be another career that signifies detached, clinical observation skills).

Dr. Faraday, as he is called, begins to care for the Antry family, coming to help them as they try to navigate an England that has no room, or even use, for their kind. As a self-proclaimed fan of the “post-war Britain” novels, I can say that Waters generally skirts on the surface with her characters, flushing them out beyond stereotypes but not quite letting the reader connect with them.

And (minor spoiler!), for a thriller-type of novel, the ending petered out. I detest scary things, so this was an investment, and I felt minorly annoyed that I didn’t get more scared. Nothing at all wrong with anti-climaxes, but rather a let-down after the heights of The Night Watch.

The Red Shoes

Boy oh boy do I love revival movie houses. I studied in Paris for a semester in spring 2006. My host family did not have internet, and I never felt like I wanted to use their television. Without the internet, or television, I was forced into what seems already an antiquated cultural pastime: going to the movies.

A weekly Parisian publication, “Pariscope“, cost less than a Euro and listed all of the concerts, plays, and movies that were playing that week. When I say movies, I don’t mean subtitled versions of Hollywood blockbusters. Paris boasts so many small and hidden theaters – “salles” I think they were called – in each arrondissement.

And you could see anything. A Jimmy Stewart retrospective, Down By Law, Chaplin, etc. etc. Many people agree that there are some movies that work best on the big screen (no matter how big your television is). But I think there’s something to be said, too, for sitting in the dark with strangers, hearing the projector whirr, experiencing the same thing.

In the Bay Area, there are far fewer revival movie houses, but does boast some gems. The Castro Theatre in San Francisco is a beautifully restored Art Deco theater with gilt, painted ceilings, and an organ that gets played before each performance.

I finally made it there a few days ago, when it played the 1948 film The Red Shoes. I had heard of the movie from design*sponge, favorite blog, in one feature that shows products that try to capture the essence of a movie (I’m not doing it justice; it’s very well done and completely addicting).

The Red Shoes was the perfect movie to see in such a theater. It is the story of an English dancer, after World War II, that loosely follows a Hans Christian Andersen fable, in which a young girl puts on a pair of red dancing shoes, only to find that they keep her feet dancing and never come off.

The movie has been beautifully restored, and the color pop brightly. I adored the dancing, although some of the set design veered from Dali-esque surrealism to hokey musical cheesiness.

I was quite surprised at how many films that referenced The Red Shoes. The plot is very similar to that of Moulin Rouge, down to the female lead’s flaming red hair. The meticulous use of the Futura font (I think) in the credits? Pure Wes Anderson. And I’m sure that this must have been required viewing for classic Disney animators.

The best part was, after the epic dance sequences, the entire audience erupted in applause, as if  we were actually been transported to a show with live dancers. And it reminded me of those tiny theaters in Paris, and how strangely soothing I found it, uniting me and my fellow movie-goers, strangers no more for the two-plus hours we sat behind the flickering screen.

Oscah!

The Olympics hold very little appeal to me. Even this year, when I should have been at pains to choose between my two nationalities (Canadian and American), I felt very little.

But now that the Olympics are over, my heart rate really gets going – cause it’s Oscar time.

Now, I know that the Oscars are bloated, self-congratulatory, and are very poor representations of truly excellent, groundbreaking work in a given year. And I’ll never understand why we keep complaining about how long the ceremony is, except that’s just one of those things Americans have all agreed to complain about (see also: peanuts on airplanes, Christmas decorations arriving in August, et al).

But every year I can’t help getting sucked in by the fashion, the wheeling and dealing and the sheer spectacle. Entertainment Weekly (magazine version; can’t find it online sadly) had an interesting article about Miramax that included an interview with Harvey Weinstein. SO much goes on behind the scenes (like: actresses in a Miramax film start wearing more and more Marchesa-the label co-owned by Weinstein’s wife- around awards season).

But what’s great about the Oscars is that there is a finite, constrained cycle for the process, so it is very easy to track the buzz and fall of any film or star.  This year was made marginally more interesting as the Academy chose to allow ten Best Picture nominees. Two of the Best Picture nominees (James Cameron, Avatar, and Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker) were married to each other, which makes for some intriguing drama… or at least media coverage.

Avatar would have made a very cool video game, but the story flapped loosely in the wind. I’ll never get those last twenty minutes of my life back; I shudder to think how many more hours of meandering but awesome footage are awaiting DVD distribution. Obviously, anything that makes that much money will draw the voters’ attention and Cameron is the self-appointed savior of 3D and therefore the industry. I’m rooting for The Hurt Locker, historic win for women directors aside.

What really boggles the mind is that, especially for the Actor and Actress categories, an Oscar has come to represent pretty much diddlysquat. Think of the careers of some of the actors who have recently won Oscars (Nicolas Cage, Cuba Gooding Jr. for crying out loud). It doesn’t seem to ensure anything – except that we’ll all be watching you on Sunday night. And I guess that’s enough.

Review: The Hurt Locker

My roommate and I finally admitted to ourselves that the Netflix three-disc at a time option was not only wasting $4 a month for us (split!), but making us feel like failures. We would both get very virtuous and request documentaries about Katrina or Criterion foreign films….only to see them pile up and collect dust for embarrassing lengths of time. Somehow you feel judged by Netflix by not watching the “good” movie, like they know that instead you’re watching She’s All That on cable. Again.

What is so satisfying in sending back those red envelopes back almost immediately? I don’t know – but somehow it seems like you are beating Netflix at its own game.

Now that the Oscars are almost here, I feel an added (totally irrational) pressure of seeing the most-nominated films. Recently I caught Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Many critics have complained about the glut of war movies set in Afghanistan and Iraq. I too, was struck by how many movies were produced – but mainly because of how much the critics complaining about it (another clue that I spend more time reading movie reviews than actually seeing the movies being reviewed).

So to The Hurt Locker: I was blown away by the first third of the movie. Indeed, the opening ten minutes had the most graceful and elegant bomb explosion that I have ever seen.

A lot has been made of Bigelow, a female director tackling a so-called “masculine” subject matter. In my opinion, there was no marked difference in her style from other action, male directors. However, the film did lack female presence –  probably five minutes of footage total even included a speaking female character… but it’s impossible to say whether or not I would have noticed this had it been a male director.

The sphere of the movie purposely excluded women, focusing on three Marines in Iraq tasked with diffusing IEDs in Iraq. What was especially fascinating about The Hurt Locker was how different the art of war (at least the cinematic version) has evolved in the last sixty years. The most striking visual was the main character, Jeremy Renner, in what looked like a space suit, staggering in deserted, dirty Iraqi alleys, while the locals peeked from windows and balconies. We attack small pieces of wire now; there is no direct enemy.

Of course I couldn’t speak to how accurate the film is to what happened/is happening in Iraq. In movie trailer terms, it was “gritty” and “real.” But it certainly captured the desolation and impotence felt by members of the armed forces. And it hinted at what I see is the real tragedy: our inability as a country to reintegrate and heal our soldiers once they return.

It’s not a film that I would watch again soon, but I would very much recommend it.  Plus! We sent it back the same day that we got it! Us: 2! Netflix: 81!