I Am Love

I Am Love is an odd movie.  It's full of things that ought not to work.  I kept thinking things like, "Oh no, not another movie about falling in love through the erotic powers of food," or "Really? A lesbian subplot featuring prurient close-ups of hot girls kissing?" and "That twist at the end, so cheap."

There's more, too.  It's shot oddly - there are outdoor night-scenes that are very poorly lit, so that all the actors are dim and grey; there are lengthy close-ups of rain on statues and multiple flat, disposable-camera style shots of buildings passing by from the window of a car.  The movie is lulling, a slow burn rather than a firecracker.  Especially at first, it's hard to really get a grip on what's going on - all the characters are self-controlled, not particularly emotive, and it's a game of reading into their non-reactions as events unfurl.

But it does work, despite all of the elements that would sink a lesser movie.  Because all of the twists and turns that would have evolved into high drama in another film are dulled or blunted here, I Am Love is a film all about subterranean, core-deep tectonic shifts that slowly build up pressure until finally, as the movie nears its conclusion, the cracks that begin to visibly split the family apart really do feel like earthquakes.

After I walked out of the theater, while I was hashing out my thoughts with my cousin, who'd accompanied me, and then later as I read through a few reviews, I realized exactly how well-balanced the movie is.  My cousin asked if I thought it was a movie that glamorized adultery and leaving one's family to pursue the thrill of true love.  And I answered: no, I didn't get that sense at all.  That was what Tilda's character did, yes, but it didn't seem like a victory or a prescription; and there's another sub-plot, about a son who finds a nice girl and settles down with her, who seems perfectly happy to do the expected thing, that's presented with the same lack of judgment.

And the things that stuck me most, which seem to strike everyone the most, are all self-consciously quiet.  A scene when Tilda asks her housekeeper to have dinner with her while they're both doing chores in the laundry room.  A shot when Tilda's character laughs, a rare occurance, while sitting on the toilet.  A tense, absolutely perfect moment between Tilda and her husband near the conclusion, when a scene ready-made to overflow with sturm and drang instead went the way of a silent but shocking nuclear explosion.  The movie is full of scenes that illustrate the power of understatement.

Final note: I just re-read the New Yorker's review of the film (Second Helpings) - it's utterly glowing, beginning with the strict admonition to see the movie in theaters rather than waiting for it to come out on DVD.  The only thing that the author, Anthony Lane, complains about is the scene where Tilda's lover gives her oral sex.  It cuts between the coupling and shots of insects going about their business, and he's right that this is not exactly a fresh metaphor - but the whole movie is like that, full of cliched imagery that still somehow works.  In the same paragraph, even, Lane gushingly describes the film's metaphorical use of the changing seasons, from winter to spring.  If he's willing to enthuse about the weather, his excuse about the bees doesn't hold water.  When I watched the sex scene, I remember thinking about This Film Not Yet Rated, which argues very strongly that the ratings board penalizes movies that show female pleasure and in particular oral sex on women.  Even at the time, I was surprised and delighted to see a filmmaker so clearly and unapologetically go there.  Shame on you, New Yorker critic, for jumping on the bandwagon and telling us that scenes of cunnilingus are unnecessary.  The truth is precisely the opposite.

Wouldn't it be nice.

I was chatting about the new Sex & the City movie, and how I don't plan on seeing it.  I was a fan of the TV show, not a huge fan but I made a point of watching new episodes when they came out.  I liked the love letter to New York, I liked the idea that people could be friends even when they were so different, I liked the clothes, I liked that all the girls met each new romantic adventure with hope, though the shows contained no shortage of disappointment and frustration and heartbreak.

The new movie has been so widely and thoroughly panned that I don't need to describe, here, why I don't plan on seeing it.  But during this little chat I did think of something that would have made a 2nd Sex and the City movie watchable, justifiable, and interesting.  What if it had been a movie where those 4 well-heeled, materialistic girls...were poor?  What if some of them suffered a lot during the economic downturn, but others didn't...would the friendship endure, and how?  What if Big didn't work for a year and a half - would Carrie still find him so utterly hot?

It would have been nice to see a movie about a friendship that lasts through disasters and disparities of that magnitude.  And I bet it could have been fun and inspiring as well.

It was suggested to me that there were probably a lot of other potential plots that could have resulted in a better movie than the one we got.  No doubt.  Any other ideas?

Bruno

This movie is one of two things: a failure, or a product of homophobia. I'm not really sure which.

I started from the assumption that Bruno was cut from the same mould as Borat - that Cohen was adopting an absurd persona in order to elicit funny/damning reactions from ordinary citizens. The state of homophobia in America today + laughs.

But Bruno doesn't get much of a reaction from anyone. Most people respond to his pranks with a stony, "I'll just pretend this isn't happening," impassiveness. When Bruno arranges an interview with Ron Paul, only to corner him in a hotel bedroom and attempt a clumsy seduction, Ron Paul stares fixedly at a newspaper and refuses to take the bait.


The set-up, where Ron Paul tries to behave professionally while Bruno does everything he can to prevent it, is similar to an incident that took place last week...at the Ultimate Fighting Championship. One of the fighters, "Rampage" Jackson, started dry humping a reporter, Heather Nichols, during an interview.

Here's the video if you want to see it (and if I'm able to embed it):


Rampage Dry Humps Cagepotato Reporter - Watch more Funny Videos

The interview sparked a lot of controversy, but even in the UFC - a testosterone-drenched, hyper-macho sport organization - there's no question that Rampage's behavior was inappropriate, and is generally described as what it was: sexual harassment.

On the other hand, I also think Nichols has gauged her audience well by being a good sport about it. In an interview Nichols did over at Sports Illustrated about the incident, she maintains a positive attitude but doesn't hesitate to call a spade a spade:

Jimmy Traina: What did you think when Rampage started, um, getting frisky? Did you think it was funny or did you take offense?

Nichols: At first I was just shocked when he grabbed me, and all I could think was, "Oh my gosh, what is he doing?!" Then I tried to play along a little bit because I knew he was trying to be funny, but after about the first 5-10 seconds, it was just plain awkward. I kept thinking, "What should I do? Knee him? Keep going?" So I decided to keep asking questions, assuming he would stop if I did that. So I asked another question, and he kept going. I asked ANOTHER question, and he kept going. At this point I was just freaking out, but still trying to be a professional and ask all the questions I was assigned to ask, and this has been interpreted by some viewers as me liking it and egging him on. This was definitely not the case. I was hired to do a job, which was to interview Rampage, so I decided to put up with his shenanigans and finish the interview.

Traina: Has he apologized since then?

Nichols: No, not at all. He was very, very pleased with himself.

You know what's funny about this interview? If you changed "Nichols" to "Ron Paul" and "Rampage" to "Bruno", the whole thing would still make sense. And Rampage's attitude, which is so clear, sheds an interesting light on Sacha Baron Cohen's prank - Rampage is opportunistic and smug, taking advantage of Nichols' good will (and fear for her livelihood) in order to demean her.

What Nichols should have done - and probably would have done, if the balance of power had been different - is something like what Ron Paul did in Bruno: when she decided that the prank had gone too far, she would have said "Enough," she would have walked out, and she would have been openly angry about it.

Some of the "ordinary citizens" in the movie are clearly homophobic - the hunters that Bruno camps with, for example, or the swingers at the party he crashes. But there is not enough shame about homophobia for its mere existence to trigger a gotcha moment. And the hunters and swingers, like Ron Paul, are very restrained in their responses to Bruno's antics - they seem positively dignified in comparison.

So, ultimately, the more Bruno tries to humiliate his victims the better they look. While Bruno's character is increasingly charmless, the homophobes in the movie appear to be reasonable, polite, and tolerant. If Bruno is an attempt to expose American homophobia, it's a failure.

You know who really looks bad in this movie? Bruno himself. He's narcissistic, superficial, stupid, and insensitive. He doesn't have anything like Borat's naivete, no characteristic that makes his bad qualities forgivable. I think the nation of Kazakhstan registered an official protest about the character of Borat, and how badly it misrepresented the nation; as valid as their complaint was, Borat was so clearly a foil, an ends-justify-the-means vehicle of cultural criticism.

I don't think that can be said about Bruno, and as a result the offensiveness of the character itself remains front and center. Not offensive because Bruno is flamboyantly gay. Offensive because Bruno consistently refers to his anus as his "Auschwitz" and makes flattering comments about Hitler. Since Bruno saves his most provocatively anti-semitic comments for the staged portions of the movie, not the documentary portions, and given that Cohen himself is a committed Jew, what is the reason for that?

Why is the character, who treats every other person in the movie with the level of consideration granted to his adopted child/accessory, "O.J.", conceived as a borderline sociopath?

It really seems to me that the object of Cohen's animosity here isn't the torpid, complacently sinister American public - it's the character he inhabits, Bruno. And as such, the movie is itself an example of homophobia, not a strike against it.

Plus - last but not least - it's not funny. I think I laughed a couple of times while I watched it. A total waste of time.

So a couple of months back, I rented this movie:


It's a gruesome Swedish movie about a young boy and his vaguely romantic relationship with an ancient vampire who looks like a young girl. The vampire girl, Eli, is hard to romanticize - she butchers humans without much remorse, keeps a human slave and treats him poorly, and generally does a bad job of seeming human enough to like or sympathize with.

But she develops a soft spot for little Oscar, a sweet kid who's tired of letting the local bullies beat him up on a daily basis. Her lesson to him is, more or less, that if he wants to avoid the daily shake-downs, he'll have to beat them at their own game. He'll have to hit them back, hard enough to send them seeking greener pastures.

I thought the movie was ok, but it's grown on me with time. I like that effect, partly because it seems like such a disaster from a commercial standpoint. There's something appealing about a virtue that is hard to exploit for cash.

So it turns out I had a hard time forgetting this movie, and it's partly what inspired me to start taking martial arts classes. I've been doing strength training for a while now, with more or less intensity, but there comes a point where it's not enough just to be strong. I wanted to do something with the muscles I've been developing, and Let The Right One In was percolating through my brain at just the right time.

So I started taking mixed martial arts classes. Mostly kickboxing and jiu jitsu so far. Every class beats home a similar lesson. I find it very natural to try to escape from a sticky situation - squirm out of a choke hold or avoid an arm bar - but have a much harder time taking the next step, to go on he offensive myself. But the fight isn't over until someone wins or loses. So the only way not to lose is to win. I guess this is obvious, but it's been a bit of a revelation to me.

Aside from a few little nuggets of wisdom, I'm mostly collecting bruises. Great big ugly ones that bloom in all the colors of a radioactive swamp and make me look like a battered woman. I'm kind of proud, so take a look:

This one was the biggest and ugliest. Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture until it was past its prime. Try to imagine what it would look like with more purple, red, green, and yellow.


This is the best one I've got going right now:


And this one is on the inside of my knee:


More to come, I'm sure!

movies

Lars and the Real Girl - This is the movie where Ryan Gosling buys a Real Doll (a life-like and life-size sex toy) and then parades around with it as though it were a real person. I went to see it because I figured it had to be good for a laugh or two, and I was really surprised to find that it's actually a really good movie. The premise is so patently laughable that it overcomes the very strict taboo against laughing at the handicapped; and so the inhabitants of the small town where Gosling lives can be both mocking and caring. His friends and neighbors aren't divided between the good people who treat him kindly, and the bad people who ridicule and talk behind his back. Laughter and disbelief are part of how they cope with the disruption to their community; nonetheless, everyone closes ranks and helps him cope. Of course, the audience experiences the same mix of hilarity and sharp sympathy. It's a very well-done movie.

The Darjeeling Limited - If you like Wes Anderson, you will probably like The Darjeeling Limited. If you don't like Wes Anderson, you probably won't like The Darjeeling Limited. The guy has a schtick, and it's a good one, and he doesn't depart from it here. I think it's my least favorite of his movies, but I'd still come back for more.

You won't regret going to the movies to see...

Sicko - Michael Moore haters will observe that he is up to his old shenanigans, pulling ridiculous stunts and sometimes not telling the whole story (I walked into the movie knowing next to nothing about the health care systems in Canada and England, but pretty well informed about France - and although he got the country's excellent health care system right, random Americans yammering about their kids going to college for free gives the wrong impression. Students who excel go to college for cheap; kids who lag behind or don't make the grade get cut at a very early age, starting around 11 or 12, and about 80% of all French college students fail their freshman year. This doesn't make it any less true that it's easy and cheap to have doctors make home calls, or that the public access medical care is both cheap and high quality. Nor is it entirely untrue. It's just an inadequate and unnecessary tangent). Somehow I feel like I got this review started on the wrong foot, though, because my point is that the movie is great and you should go see it.

Live Free or Die Hard - A worthy installment in one of the best series of action movies ever made. I alternately laughed (at funny things) and cringed (at scary things) through the whole movie. Love Bruce Willis. Love the Yalie who plays the mac guy in the commercials, and, more or less, plays a slightly geekier version of the mac guy in the movie. Love the fact that the Die Hard movies always zero in on some important issue of the day and have something to say, if you can look past all the metrosexual, Europeanish villains. And thank heavens for metrosexual, Europeanish villains in a time when most movies muck around with politics and feature Middle Eastern/Eurasian villains. In fact, I'm going to say that again, in the form of a useful advisory:

Moviemakers of the world: if you want to avoid making asses of yourselves, stay away from the Middle Eastern/Eurasian can of worms and go for the metrosexual Europeans. They work every time.

round up

- Last week I went to the "Voices from South Africa" reading at the Housing Works used book store/café - three South African writers giving short readings from their works, about twenty minutes each. I only thought one of them was any good, a poet whose first poem, called "True" was about a carpenter making true, straight lines while preparing to tile a bathroom. It really pulled a lot out of the pun - like the French type of puns, which are meaningful, rather than the American type, which are funny - in a very understated, sensitive way. As my major carpentry accomplishment is tiling the upstairs bathroom of the family farmhouse in Kentucky, I remembered all of the kneeling and slow labor that goes into it. Though, frankly, I doubt any of my lines were true. The other two readers were ok, but not extraordinary.

- Finished Paco Underhill's Why We Buy, an interesting guide to how retailers do, or should, try to get the most out of their customers - secrets to managing multiple target audiences, to encourage impulse buys, etc. An interesting primer for anyone who spends a lot of time in stores, and wonders how and why they are organized the way that they are.

- Finished Barbara Defoe Whitehead's Why Are There No Good Men Left?, the title of which is an utter misnomer. It doesn't even begin to answer the question of why there are no good men left; it does, however, do an utterly brilliant job of answering the question: Why Are So Many Wonderful Women Still Single? I picked it up because I was in the kind of mood to appreciate a bit of male-bashing, but I was pleasantly surprised: the book is positive and hopeful and straightforward, not cynical or bitter, and it cured my mood rather than indulging it. The author says that she got the idea for the book from the Chick Lit phenomenon, this whole genre of books about precocious, urban career women who are successful at the office but unlucky in love, and she takes it as being a sort of - emblematic crisis for this generation of young women. Then she goes back and tries to figure out how and why it occured, using census data and tracing it through the history of women's lib. Very interesting.

- Last night I watched The Godfather for the first time. As expected, I thought it was brilliant - through much of the movie I was stunned senseless by the perfect combination of pastoral bliss and utter brutality. I could go on for a long time, as many people have, about the various merits of The Godfather - probably the two things that linger the most, at the moment, are the scene where one man is assassinated while another is standing in a wheat field in Jersey somewhere, with the Statue of Liberty a little speck in the distance - I could almost feel the wind on the wheat, and it gave me chills. The other is when Marlon Brando says "A man that doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man," - I couldn't help but compare it to other crime-culture movies, like the new Oceans franchise and Smoking Aces and reflect on the extent to which those other movies are really, truly about boys. By the same token, I realized for the first time the extent to which Spielberg was paying homage to Coppola in Munich.

Gambling and revenge!

The title of this post is intended to frighten my mother. I never gamble but every time I play cards in her vicinity she'll fix me with a steely eye and ask me suspiciously if I think I might be addicted to gambling. I guess Gin Rummy is a gateway vice.

Also because I just finished reading Le Tour du monde en 80 jours by Jules Verne, a book about a very daring gamble. I'm not sure I would say it's profound, but it is hilarious and witty and great fun. I had no idea, but the protagonist - Phileas Fogg - hates to travel, and wants nothing other than peace and quiet and routine...that alone makes all of the madcap adventures he runs into, but wants so desperately to avoid, pretty funny. Whereas Verne writes about the world, and traveling, every mishap and opportunity, with great relish. It's a pleasure to read, and if you have any interest in brushing up on your French, it's not a difficult read.

I also went to see The Page Turner. It's a French movie by the same guy who did Merci pour le chocolat, which is fantastic, so I went in with high expectations. It's about a girl who once had dreams of being a concert pianist, but she's refused entry into a prestigious conservatory as a child and blames one judge in particular for having spoiled her audition. So she abandons her dreams and focuses on finding a way to get revenge on this judge. The movie starts as she sets her plan in motion.

I left the theater feeling a disappointed, but I like the movie in retrospect. It's clever - in little ways, like when a character playing the piano both pushes the plot forward and provides appropriate music to illustrate the importance of the scene - but in larger ones, too. The protagonist is a very smart, very patient girl, and she has cooked up a pretty devastating plot. I was never sure if the protagonist is actually crazy; and disturbingly enough, the victim is an incredibly sympathetic character.

Ralph Nader

I did a Ralph Nader double-whammy a couple of weeks ago. I was listening to an interview with Nader on NPR, and it mentioned at the end that he's touring to promote his new book, The Seventeen Traditions, and would be speaking at the Union Square Barnes & Noble that evening. I didn't have anything in particular scheduled, so I decided to go.

Nader is a pretty fascinating speaker, because he's both incredibly eloquent and touchingly awkward. His words are very well-chosen, very apt, and he speaks thoughtfully and with deliberation. But he's not very good at transitioning from subject to subject, so his talk was very choppy (I noticed this at Barnes & Noble where I hadn't on the radio when an interviewer talked him through everything) and he doesn't have the kind of slick polish I associate with an orator.

What impressed me most about his talk was the way he dealt with the heckler in the audience. Events like this naturally attract the extremes - supporters and opponents. This heckler kept shouting out things like, "If you were so selfless, you wouldn't have cost Gore the White House," and other similarly angry comments about the 2000 election. I know Nader has a lot of experience with this sort of thing, but I admired his response. He didn't get angry, he didn't snap, nor did he ignore the heckler. Instead, he treated all of his loud-mouthed blabber with respect, and responded to all of his allegations calmly and rationally.

I actually really liked what he said - something like, "Well, and if I agreed with you then what, we accept that there will never be a third party?" Personally, I think it would make more sense to focus on reforming the electoral college and instituting instant runoff elections on a state by state basis, but the principle of the thing is right.

Later that week, I sat down to watch An Unreasonable Man with Melinda. It's playing at the IFC here in the city, but now all the independent movies that come out at the IFC are simultaneously available on On Demand, so anybody who has full cable can sit down and watch it anytime they want at home.

And I really recommend this documentary highly - first of all, because it's a good documentary. The filmmakers definitely have a point of view, and it's not hidden, but they do a good job of showing all sides of the story. In particular, they spend a lot of time interviewing apostates - people who were once active Nader supporters, but who have since either cooled towards him or turned against him.

But also because the documentary charts the whole history of Nader's career, and most people my age won't really know a lot about his accomplishments in the sixties and seventies, or have a solid sense of how he became who he is today. I certainly didn't, and I have to say I respect him a lot more know that I do. It also delves into all the controversy surrounding the 2000 election.

The title, and the full quotation that appears at the beginning of the film, gives away the documentarian's opinion on the man:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw

And I leave you with a photo of Nader back in 1966, when he was young and looked like a more attractive version of Eric Bana:

3

- My grandmother died this week. This doesn't seem like the kind of thing to discuss in a blog, so I'm not going to. It wasn't a surprise, but it's been a tough year with her going in and out of the hospital, and it's hard to lose her. I'm going home for the funeral on Monday.

- I saw Night at the Museum and found it thoroughly delightful - a childhood fantasy brought to life. Also Children of Men which I found pretty amazing. Worth a try, at least, although I heard plenty of people slamming it on the way out of the theater.

- I'm going to an SAR gala ball (that's Sons of the American Revolution) in February, and I was just informed that I need a pair of white gloves for the receiving line. I find this sort of delightfully absurd. Also, I don't think I've ever been to an event to which the word "gala" was attached, but maybe what I mean is that none of the ones I've been to have lived up to the word? It's like the thing about not wanting to be a part of any club that would have you as a member. I don't really know what gala is, but I'm pretty sure I'm not invited to it.

silver screen

Some movie reviews.

off the black

I went to see this because a friend of Prue's directed it - it was the opening weekend and the director was hoping to up his sales figures however he could. Also, it really is exciting and inspiring to see people my age (not that I'm very young anymore - I turn 26 in two weeks) and people who I'm only a couple of degrees of separation away from accomplish something so huge.

The movie is good - not just good for a first movie, or good for his age, or whatever, legitimately good. Good scene setting and atmosphere, good dialogue, well acted. The story is as old as the hills - an unlikely friendship develops between a boy on the cusp of manhood and a man with one foot in the grave. Life lessons are doled out generously. It's the sort of story that bears retelling, if it's done well, and it is here.

I will say, however - it's definitely a guy movie. Not just the whole sacred masculine friendship thing. There's a lot of baseball. Playing baseball, dreaming about baseball, reminiscing about baseball. And if you're going to go see the movie, you've got to be prepared for a soundtrack of Nick Nolte's inarticulate grunts and groans. He grunts when he sits, he grunts when he stands, he grunts when he ruminates, he grunts in order to express primitive, sub-verbal thoughts and feelings. Phlegmy, rumbling, straight-from-the-gut grunting. As Nick Nolte would say: ugh.

Eragon

I went alone, because I know by now that nobody else is interested...and for once, the naysayers were right. It was deeply, almost miraculously, atrocious. In order to be bad this movie had to squander:

(a) a story about boy hero and his dragon - if you are the target demographic for this plot, you will be inclined to like it no matter how mediocre the execution. I know I certainly was.

(b) Jeremy Irons! He has a huge role and he is, as always, reliably magnificent. It was tragic, really, to see him on screen, so gorgeous, so capable, giving all his horrible lines such grace and dignity. His perfection only highlighted the awfulness around him - he really made the dopey blond lunk playing Eragon look pathetic.

(c) John Malkovich! Who usually makes a fantastic over-the-top villain, and should have been able to phone this one in with flying colors...and yet he's awful! Wooden and awkward and buried under his massive costume and silly throne. What happened, John Malkovich?

(d) Rachel Weisz! Who does the voice of the dragon. She sounds as though she's speaking through a tin can and delivers all of her lines with truly painful sincerity and gusto.

The movie was unsalvageable, even by a trio of fantastic actors whose agents must be really upset about their clients not getting roles in the Harry Potter series. There's a boy, and all this cool stuff just drops right into his lap. A dragon! A dashing mentor! A daring escape! A girlfriend! A big red sword! Magic powers! A fabulous suit of armor! An epic battle! And then respected elders congratulate him as though he'd worked hard to obtain these things. Eragon is more like a sword-and-sorcery wet dream than an epic journey or heroic quest.