eye of the storm

so i sat up last night and watched ghajini, on the rec of my student charlie. it's supposedly the highest-grossing bollywood movie ever. it is excruciatingly bad, and i might just leave it there but i won't, of course. i should say that i don't know from bollywood, which could be part of the problem, but it will...stay that way.

one thing that's remarkable is the juxtaposition of genres. ghajini is based on memento, and (half-heartedly and half-competently) conjures up the super-dark tortured paranoid collapsing-time atmosphere of that film, but it's also a light-hearted screwball romantic comedy and a series of michael-jackson-influenced music videos and an oprah-like uplifting social commentary. the incoherence is absolute, but maybe it also accounts for the fascinating trainwrecky charm.

anyway, as a dark concept/action film it has everything that memento had except the intricate jigsaw plot, the cool cinematography, and the intelligence. it revolves the backwards time structure into a flat series of flashbacks. the super-bloody action scenes seem to be the only really decently-directed moments, and really, not so much.

the romantic comedy elements are far less believable than, say, the average sandra bullock movie, which is saying something. it's about a supposedly super-cute billionaire who meets a poor...model. together they save orphans etc. it at once gives you an absolutely uncritical cult of consumption and an unbelievably superficial commentary on the brutality and injustice of poverty. there's also no apparent actual connection between the actors, though the girl is kind of whimsically charming like bullock on a good day or whatever. the dude wears three-piece suits that also in every scene grab his biceps like a claw so you always see how buff he is, the real theme of the film, the only thing that holds it together.

so if you had an interminable sandra bullock romantic comedy juxtaposed with and ending in a bad imitation of a quentin tarantino bloodbath...but even that doesn't do the thing justice

because then there are the music videos: we just stop the film entirely and lurch into, say, a desert landscape, where the actors do pelvic thrusts in florescent polyethyline outfits to mind-numbing hindu techno. when the first one came on i thought it was a super-ironic joke or parody. by the third i was just screeching and writhing in terrible pain. the music is utterly empty, meaningless, with overthtop hyperemotional lyrics. really, india, like continental europe, should produce no popular music domestically, but import it all from us; they just have no frigging idea of any kind.

the "acting" is appalling. i guess my favorite performance was by the pop-tart/lingerie model who played a "medical student." the plausibility of her being a medical student was entirely expressed in the fact that literally every other sentence she uttered started with "as a medical student, i.." "hello, i'm a medical student and..."

the sub-titles were only sort of in english, which did help the comedy: "her trivia are priceless!": a deep expression of love.

but you know somehow i didn't turn it off. i'm not sure whether i watched it because i was charmed by the idiotic kitsch, or because i somehow got caught up in the absurd story, or because the world series is over, or because i was too demoralized to press the power button, or what. but i did watch to the ohsotragic yet uplifting end (an amnesiac birthday party at the orphanage!), rooting for the whole cast to die, painfully but forgodsake quickly (the thing is over three hours long). and i guess i learned something about art, by contrast.

so i'm sittin here watchin crank 2, which is approximately the baddest-ass movie ever made, with the possible excption of crank. the visual language, the music (perfect), the unbelievable chases and action sequences: incomparable, like its star, jason statham. also it's very very funny. plus it features the great dwight yoakam as an utterly vice-saturated (booze, pills, hookers, etc) defrocked doctor. not to mention, unbelievably, david carradine as a sex-addled 100-year-old. no autoerotic asphyxiation, though, but damn near everything else. somewhere right now, quentin tarantino, the great genius of pomo cinema, is watching crank 2 for the sixth time, having a filmic orgasm. one thing though: probably you shouldn't take the girlfriend, the wife, etc. she's not going to like it. it's so guyish that you got to check your estrogen at the door.  don't worry about the premise, which is insane. but within that, the plot does make sense, not that that's necessary. whoever these people are (="neveldine and taylor"?), they're dragging cinema past the millennium.

took my daughter jane (9) to ponyo, the new hayao miyazaki film. both of us are cultists. our all-time movie (like a lot of dads and daughters, i'd think) is totoro. also kiki's delivery service and castle in the sky. the recent ones have been almost too elaborate - like spirited away and howl's moving castle - for small children, with amazingly-visual horror-film animation. but even sam will actually put on princess mononoke, which is beautiful and disturbing.

anyway, ponyo is a perfect synthesis of these two styles; it was so breathtakingly beautiful and real for janie. it's a masterpiece of visual imagination: just teeming with hand-drawn images. girls dancing on tsunamis. it would surprise me if miyazaki (like jane's sister emma (21) hasn't been looking at winsor mccay, with his hyper-replete images, and the sea is the perfect chaotic environment that allows you to go beyond psychedelic. not to mention the transparent/reflective qualities of water, here presented in a tour de force of animation.

for reasons a trifle elusive, i've always hated meryl streep. i guess i feel like it's not exactly watching a great actor, or it is, but also someone who, at every moment, is saying "look at me, the great ack-tor." one more accent would kill me. but i do appreciate the fact that she's now making movies that i wouldn't see even if she wasn't in them, movies about, you know, abba or julia child. this relieves me not of my dislike, but of my bad conscience about it.

perhaps only tarantino could make an incredibly bloody/incredibly funny/incredibly stylish japanese-gunfighter/american-samurai movie. well maybe someone else could. but only tarantino could do it as a re-make of shakespeare's henry vi - the war of the roses as scored by ennio morricone, cast with beautiful asians, and set in nevada - or at any rate such is my speculation. but one other thing. not all men, putting it mildly, have quite understood the incredible sexiness at the heart of feminism. tarantino does (cf kill bill). in sukiyaki western django, drunk grandma turns out to be badassest gunfighter of all. the film is not attributed to tarantino, who "acts" in it, as the only white dude. but i'm speculating more or less that he made it. one nice touch: the credits are all in unsubtitled japanese-looking script, so that it's origins remain obscure, at least to me.

the earth is under invasion, by an army of keanu reeveses. this world does not belong to us. it belongs to 2x4s from outer space. stop...me...before...i...act...again.

just watched quite the film: "in bruges," with ralph fiennes, colin farrell, and in a best-actor-type turn, an utterly convincing brendan gleeson (mad-eye moody from harry potter). it seems to have been produced by the bruges (belgium) tourist bureau, until it ends up identifying bruges with hell. three suicidal hit men bouncing off the medieval walls. midget jokes galore (it broaches a devastating future in which there is a race war among the little people), and an interpretation of hieronymous bosch. a comedy of errors until it unfolds with the irony, inevitability, and extreme seriousness of a greek tragedy.

perhaps the deepest, most profoundly moving moments in brokeback were the scenes of jake "selling big equipment." anyway, every second, every frame, every idea (true, there was only one) was entirely devoted to political correctness. if stalin was still making movies, he'd have mad bm. anyway, i actually agree with the political agenda. only i object to being subjected to an endless string of cliches, or a mechanical reversal of cliches, in the service of any agenda. maybe you should try to tell a story. maybe you should construct a cogent argument. maybe you should think of these as different operations.

i think what i admired most about brokeback mtn was the characters' passive acquiescence in their own misery. of course, the fact that neither of them could utter an english sentence may have reduced my empathy. but that of course was the key part of the movie's brave, yet entirely mechanical, reversal of stereotypes. i'm working up a script for brokeback 2, just because i don't understand how the heath ledger character escaped being beaten to death.

so i finally saw "brokeback mountain" last night, and here's my review: slow, dull, depressing, pretty, and pervasively didactic.

ain't easy

the poilsci department at dickinson college is an extremely hard place to be a pimp.

biopics

and speaking of great biopics. perhaps the greatest of all was "seabiscuit." jamie foxx was incredible. by the end, i actually believed he was a horse. and his singing!

johnny again

actually, i thought the singing in "walk the line" sucked. one of those things where every ten minutes you're going: christ, i wish i was listening to johnny cash.

johnny

saw "walk the line" yesterday. excellent, but they should have cast jamie foxx as johnny cash. here's an obit i wrote.

just saw perhaps the worst movie ever made - or at least the worst waste of talent: john travolta, uma thurman, danny devito, james woods, ced the entertainer etc in "be cool." it had its comedic moments, i guess, but they were swamped in a mind-numbingly earnest and mind-crushingly stupid plot about the attempt of the cast to break the next beyonce, or whatever. the girl is cute as a button and emits idiotic lowestcommondenominator pale blackpop pap of the "believe in yourself" variety while everyone gasps at her transcendent talent. truly, cinema idiotique. meanwhile i saw a recent western called "renegade" that looks b-movie conventional by the cover, with the only participant you ever heard of being juliette lewis. but it disintegrates from standard "you killed my ho" revengeplot to a complete meltdown into the most amazing peyote trip ever achieved on screen: the plot's never even resolved, just transmuted into snakes which are transmuted into persons which are transmuted into spinning madalas depicting the cosmic circle of life or something.

fuck! it's the fucking scientologists!

hey my daughter jane (almost 5) is absolutely enraptured by the truly lovely and moving miyazaki animation my neighbor totoro. i don't think she's ever been quite as into a movie, and me too: we watched it maybe five times in the last 2 days. for one thing, it's about spunky-cool girls and their dad. it's whimsical and surreal and smart. the other miyazakis i've seen (spirited away, princess mononoke, etc.) are lovely, but maybe pitched at older kids, though i'm definitely gonna give kiki's delivery service  another try.

the lovely and talented but challenging marion winik and i watched the movie "garden state" last night, urged on in particular by our students. maybe it's a generational problem (as if i had a generational problem! haha!) but it struck us as incredibly superficial pseudo-profound claptrap. but i liked natalie portman.

i want to thank my lawyers . they are the only people who really, deeply care about me. but most of all, i want to thank my grandmother, who whipped my white ass every day. when i was really bad she used to manacle me to the wall in the basement and leave me for days. once when i didn't say "please" she poured gasoline on me and set me on fire. she would light me up and then talk to me about why she was lighting me up, though it was hard to hear her over the roar of the flames. she shoulda gotten an oscar for the way she lit me on fire.