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In Pixar’s “Wall-E,” we encounter an adorable robot who is left to clean up the mounds of trash associated with the global spread of the consumerist lifestyle across the planet. Ancillary thereunto with the disregard for the natural world is the disregard of one’s own body and one’s own wellness. Pixar seems to be sugesting: “Hey, stop buying stuff and eating neon-colored food, get back to the basics and enjoy living as an able bodied human.”

In Pixar’s “Toy Story 3,” heart strings are tugged as toys are left behind, subject to jeopardy, or wage petty internecine battles. All of this tugs at our emotional response as they toys seem to say “Remember to play, and play with us, don’t get rid of us — don’t throw away your sense of childlike wonder by scrapping us.”

And so I am confused, Pixar, what am I to think about the acquisition of gizmos and geegaws of plastic and metal?

Over at The Signal Watch, Ryan takes a few moments to talk about the latest cash grab from Darren Star enterprises: “Sex in the City 2.”

I think SATC2 suffers from a bout of ill-timing and age. Accordingly, these make it seem tone-deaf to the mood of the country. It’s not the case that this latest offering was exceptionally bad, it’s just that the scales have fallen from our eyes and the inherent ridiculousness shines through.

A certain someone I know told me that she loves “Confessions of a Shopaholic.” I understand why, Isla Fisher is cute and funny (Exhibit A: Wedding Crashers). The movie failed and failed hard. If there was any message the world didn’t want to hear as the mortgage bubble was bursting, retirements were being be-Madoffed, and venerable banking institutions were requiring infusions of tax dollars, it was “sometimes I buy too much pretty stuff!” So perhaps that movie got an unfair shake owing to the vicissitudes of the release cycle.

Yet “Shopaholic’s” message has always been the message of SATC. In 1998 as we danced at the peak of the tech-bubble, that a newspaper columnist’s primary concerns would be a good lay, a good stiff drink, and fancy shoes on her inexplicably inexhaustible bank account (I can imagine Carrie Bradshaw bankrupt and back in Mom’s basement after her 19 credit lines forced her to file for bankruptcy looking at heaps of shoes going: “What the hell was I thinking?”) seemed to be an avatar of the zeitgeist. And contrary to expectation, as real-world NYC went to hell in a handbasket, her lifestyle aligned with the post-9/11 advice of the buffoon, George W. Bush who encouraged America to, in a time of crisis, “go shopping.” Because the terrorists hate our freedom to buy lo-rise pants and belly tops, slap them on nubile jailbait, apparently.

Roger Ebert hit the nail on the head with:

Their defining quality is consuming things. They gobble food, fashion, houses, husbands, children, vitamins and freebies.

In a time when America is generally tightening its belt, to keep promulgating this message takes their lives and actions from “wouldn’t it be great if…” fantasy to “get a grip you bobblyhead” reality. Most of the criticism I’ve read is from those wondering just how entitled Charlotte is to feel that she barely makes it with hired help or what sort of an ungrateful woman doesn’t like that her husband, reformed skirt-chaser wants to spend time with her in their opulent (of course) home — oh right, Carrie.

Anecdote: Success

Bono once said that if you were successful enough in the music business, you eventually become a parody of that (young, hard charging, awesome, gritty, great band) you once were. Ironically, he said this at the opening of Zoo TV.

Or, as Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle said:

A little background for our younger readers: U2 is a band that was cool throughout the mid-1980s, then it briefly sucked, then it became cool again, then it sucked for a much longer time — and then it got sort of cool for a third time but the band members sold their musical souls in the process. This video was taken right at the beginning of their first period of sucking.

I think this has a lot to bear on the SATC universe. SATC clever:

Miranda Hobbes: The only two choices for women; witch and sexy kitten.
Carrie Bradshaw: Oh you just said a mouthful there sister.

not the dubbing of a certain vigorous male “Lawrence of my Labia. (SATC overwrought)”

Question: Why does Kim Cattrall deliver all her lines like Snagglepuss?

Really. Check it out.

Lauren and I, when encountering a situation which is SATC-like, and which calls for a ham-handed double entendre (see above) often deliver it with a:

<span style=”voice:snagglepuss; referenceto:SamathaJones”> Mmmmm, Carrie, you could say that it wasn’t a ham-burger, but a man-burger.</span>

Anecdote: The Gay Vote

I think I knew there was a sea-change afoot on Friday. I went to get a slice of pizza at Marcello’s at Castro and Market and as I walked past the beautiful Castro movie house I overheard three men walking ahead of me one of whom said:

“…God he was like a horse, speaking of horses, we’re all skipping “Sex and the City 2”, right?”

I have never seen a film that captures dramatic tragedy better than Chan-wook Park’s Boksuneun naui geot or, to us non-Hangul speakers, Sympathy for Mr. Vengance. This film has all the epic tragedy of something by Sophocles or Shakespeare; and it has all the concomitant blood and tears. I grit my teeth throughout, except for the moments where I was taking sharp in-breaths in the “a-ha” moments as threads collapsed together in a symphonic story-path.

Simply put, a poor factory worker arranges to sell a kidney and give 5million won to shady organ harvesters so as to acquire a kidney suitable for his ailing sister. The harvesters double-cross him, a miracle organ arrives for his sister and he is now short a kidney and broke. This leads him to kidnapping and from there it goes horribly wrong. The father seeks his vengeance, the “hero” seeks vengeance against the harvesters who instigated the long causal chain that lead to greater tragedy than could be limned in a short review.

In a fascinating direction, the one who loses truly has to take on the life of his transgressor. In so doing he resolves the mystery, grows to understand he who did him wrong, grows to understand himself, but despite this he cannot forgive the transgression and its resultant loss. The plot threads are rich and every character, no matter how small or non-relevant plays a part in facilitating a horrific and tragic resolution.

The screenwriting is painfully tight. Everything works with everything else so flawlessly you’d think it was surgically broken down from something that would have been organically grown.

Park explores the familial blood obligation in a way that is unrelenting and probing with a relentlessness that I’ve not felt since I read Antigone. Everywhere there is desperation, everywhere there is loss, everywhere there is remorse, and everywhere is the thrumming blood-law whose thirst is never satiated. It is a very, very hard movie to watch but very rewarding for people who love the craft of film.

On top of it all the acting is top-notch all the way through. While the story setup might be a bit far-fetched, seeming contrived and designed to falsely ratchet-up the intensity, the movie delivers the experience of tragedy, really Greco-Roman tragedy in a way I’ve never seen before.

I am stunned.

“If you want to live, just leave”

Yes, but what if you’ve been so wronged, you don’t?

Recently released on Netflix is “Playing Shakespeare,” a program that aired on PBS in America in the early 80’s. The series features John Barton, director, and his cast of thespians from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Many of us will recognize X-Men heavyweights Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, British luminaries like Judi Dench and Ben Kingsley, as well as a host of other actors of note.

Barton will set up an aspect of performing Shakespeare and call forth the performers to illustrate the concept under discussion. Occasionally other actors of the company toss in observations and methodological notes. In that capacity the actor Alan Howard had come to notice as a particularly reserved if not nebbishly. In his collar and sweater and large brown plastic frames he was almost reminiscent of a mid-career Jarvis Cocker.

But then Mr. Howard was called forth to demonstrate his solicitation to the widow of his slain enemy, Queen Anne, in the guise of Richard III. Free of smoldering cigarette and spectacles the camera comes in on a tight close-up of another man: his body was crouched, his eyes glinted with malice, and his tonguue turned into a triangle, like an arrow’s point. He hobbled, crab like to his quarry and professed his love.

While this was noticable, the moment of truth is that the lady Anne spits on Richard, square in the face and Howard betrayed no wince, no flinch as her saliva sat fat on his face. Oddly, his eyes seemed to burn slightly brighter, this facial defilement being nothing but a mere annoyance on the hatiching of his plan.

He was stunning to watch.

In any case, the show, thus far, has been a joy to watch and I recommend it.

Let me leave with a review of Howard’s performance in this role:

Alan Howard’s Richard must surely rank among the few truly outstanding interpretations of this fascinating and exacting role seen during the last decade or so.

This Richard, the very epitome of bitter malevolence, heaves and wrestles his twisted body about a dark cavern of a stage, his vicious tongue as sharp and menacing as the dagger that is rarely far from his hand, and with which he points his vicious verbal barbs.

His mind as twisted as the body he so loathes and resents, he weaves his verbal spells around his victims with the cunning of a snake and the devilish impishness of a medieval Quilp.

From: http://www.alanhoward.org.uk/richard3.htm

I was very excited when Daniel posted the trailer for “Moon.” It looked like a slow, and elegiac science-fiction movie of the “2001” or “Solaris” model. It was indeed a movie of this variety.

While SciFi that blows stuff up and has one-liners (looking at you, Will Smith) is a dime a dozen, one that drives uncomfortable thoughts into your gray matter and makes you like it is a special type of art.

Unlikely to say: “I gotta get me one of these!”

As you may intuit from the trailer, Sam Bell is a man working on the dark side of the moon. He is bereft realtime communication and as such can only trade video mail with his wife and young daughter on Earth. He manages the miner fleet for Lunar industries, a company who has turned harvested lunar He-3 into fusion energy that powers Earth industry, cleanly, greenly. His only companion, such as it is, is a delightfully clunky AI named Gerty who is voiced by the vaguely condescendingly friendly voice of Kevin Spacey.

One fine day one of the mining vehicles is stuck, so Sam hops in a moon rover, and roves out to it but accidentally crashes into the miner owing to some hallucination. He wakes back up with Gerty telling him he had an accident and is back in the infirmary. He recovers and, against Gerty’s protests, decides to cruise out on the surface. There he finds a crashed moon rover, just like his…and therein is a man who looks just like him.

And that’s where things get paranoiac and weird.

The real interesting part is that it’s basically Sam Rockwell playing all these hallucinations(?) of himself. I really like movies like this where an actor just has to perform relative to nothing (Cast Away, for example). You really get a sense of what the actor is capable of and the measure of their commitment to the character.

This film will invariably have a short run at select theatres only, so most of you will only have the chance to see it on DVD, I recommend you take that opportunity.

Recently I rented Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the film based off of Stanislaw Lem’s story of the same title. I was very much moved by the movie and consider it to be one of the finest science fiction movies I have ever seen. I esteem it so because in this science fiction future, humans, and our essential need for emotional contact and connection are so thoroughly explored without being directly mentioned. Further, the movie has some of the best visual tableaux and spatial constructions that I have ever seen.

The movie may not be easy for a Western audience. It has an extremely slow pace, sometimes glacial, sometimes brooding, crosses the 2-hour mark and suffers under the strictures of USSR film budgets. Humorously, the “city of the future” sequence is footage of driving through Japan with “future vehicle” sounds foleyed in. But the patient viewer will find visual richness, narrative complexity, long-take shots, and shall know Tarkovsky to be a true lover of the medium of his creation.

Beautiful and confused, Natalya Bandarchuk plays “Hari.” Here she realizes she is not who she is told she is, but is becoming who she wants to be, almost like a human.

The story opens on Earth — beautiful Earth! — where her greens, her water, her rain, her beautiful animals, her sensuous humanity is set up in long sequences to create a full character, a foil to space, and the sentient planet, Solaris. Here we are introduced to our protagonist, Kris Kelvin, a man burdened by his past, his widowerhood, his cold relationship with his parents, who is to be sent to the Solaris observation station to evaluate whether it ought be decommissioned. Having arrived, Kris finds a disheveled Solaris observation station populated by a bitter scientist, a frightened scientist, a recent suicide, and an inexplicable collection of apparitions: projections from the planet. Understanding the broken men, understanding the alien projections, and trying to understand himself urge Kelvin on a psychological and philosophical journey that attempts to limn the boundaries of what “human” means.

Animating the plot is Lem’s question, “What” if the aliens were fundamentally unlike us, non-anthropomorphic, could not speak, could not relate to us. What if we had only a dark, warped mirror in their consciousness in which to see ourselves? How would we interact with such an intelligence, and what if that intelligence were an ocean? What exactly would we do then? Given the difficulties or flat-out inability to relate to such an Other, Kris’ considerations implode into himself — saving when he discourses with the two other members of the skeleton crew, and the Solaris-produced simulacrum of his late wife — and provide the context for his psychological journey.

The gravitas of the movie is formidable, and the colors, the construction, and its love story — about loss being the only thing that truly makes us appreciate the now — are so rewarding that potential viewers should not be scared away. I recommend you view The Criterion Collection version.

Both Lauren and I were deeply affected by the film for several days and have tried to puzzle out Tarkovsky’s message to us. I hope you take the opportunity to do the same soon.

PS. Soderbergh: Pure folly to think you could remake this one, although Natasha McElhone as the visitor was a great casting call. No one could have gotten this right but a metaphysical post-Dostoyevskyist.

Quoth Stuff White People Like:

White people love Wes Anderson movies more than they love their kids. If a white guy takes a white girl to a Wes Anderson movie on their first date, and neither of them have seen it, they will immediately commence a relationship that is reflected in songs by Ryan Adams and Bright Eyes.

— On: “Wes Anderson Movies”

If you read my review on “The Darjeeling Limited” (“The Darjeeling Mumbledy”), I make no bones about my dislike of the cult of Anderson that has so thoroughly given him carte blanche to make vapid etchings into celluloid with pretensions of grandiosity-cum-naïvité.

It’s one thing to criticize an artist with words, but to criticize bad art with good art, now that takes a special breed of determination. I give you Alex Cornell’s vision: “A Hypothetical Wes Anderson Film Festival.” Thanks @meghatron.

[— Alex Cornell]

But what is it that irks me so about Anderson hipster juggernaut that the beautiful work of Cornell so successfully indicts him on? It’s the “tweed becostumed ingenue beneath a façade of gentle meekness” schtick that is absolutely calculated and drapes heavily on all Andersonia. It’s the “Anderson movies are the most insightful thing under the sun” that his fawning public holds as credo.

Dig that Howard Kosell Wide-World-of-Sports jacket in the photo in the mock-up above? Designed by a custom designer (Thom Browne) in Brooklyn, not some vintage off-the-rack find. And what’s with the Futura obsession? Ah, I get it, it’s an hômage to the Italian futurist movie-makers. Aren’t we clever. Oh, wait, I get it, you’re too naïve to be that hip, how quaint.

These ideas are effectively lampooned by Cornell, in a beautiful art design project it’s hard to believe he put so much work into a parody. That through simple design and typography he is able to communicate this is truly a commendation to his talent.

I might be asked, am I projecting this? An interview with Anjelica Huston documented this amore of affect. She described how she, playing an archaeologist, asked the esteemed auteur if she were playing his mother, also an archaeologist. She then related thaht he shook with a start of absolute surprise that this could have been latent in his script. Really, you didn’t realize your major matriarchal protagonist was based essentially on your mom. How darling! I don’t see that one could be caught unawares.

“But what about Rushmore?”

Yes, well what about it. Yes, it was a very good movie, and I would quite nearly forgive him the many sins that came after this movie for the lovely tale of Max Fischer and company. It’s the sort of achievement that gets used to justify all sorts of terrible movies post facto.

Let’s say on on old time balance scale that you have “Rushmore” and “Bottle Rocket” on one side. Now heap in “Life Aquatic”, “Darjeeling”, and maybe split “Tenenbaums” 50-50. I can almost see those scales balanced out.

But for me what makes the bad-Anderson pan weightier than the mass of the two good movies in the good-Anderson pan were the absolute howlers of “The Darjeeling Express”

“I guess we’re going to have to let go of Dad’s baggage”

…this is the quite-literal line delivered as the characters let go of their, uh, late father’s baggage and the inherited (emotional) baggage and run to the future. This could have been done with pictures (we are making a movie here). How about tight-framed gunfighter-style shots on the brothers, sweating, angry that they’re about to miss the train. A slow-mo of Owen Wilsons eyes pan left to a tight shot on Brody, Brody the same to Schwarzmann, a look of desperation, tight shot of their feet with India’s dust swirling on the colorful planks as one bag falls behind, close-framed shot, surprise dawns on each of them…etc.

And what about the conceit of Schwartzman’s character contending “All his characters are fictional” when they are so clearly à clef. I honestly thought I might bust an iris rolling my eyes.

I would love to see Wes Anderson take on M. Night Shamalyan in a pretension-off, Summer Slam-style. Both ride the coat-tails of their early work to make woefully bad movies in the present that are given far too much leniency.

[— Alex Cornell]

Yes, Alex Cornell, you say it so, very, very well.

Going to see “Revolutionary Road” was an exercise in controlled discomfort. I knew what the subject was, how it invariably would end, and what the upshot would be. I also knew it would be a chance to see two great actors ply their craft: Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are fine, emotional, and unafraid performers. The film, helmed by director Sam Mendes of “American Beauty” fame, rides like a Buick all over the “Suburban American Dream” with whitewall tires but does so in a clumsy and exploitative manner. Redeeming qualities of the movie are well-written argument scenes and the value of having a difficult mirror in which to examine one’s life.

This post has a light-spoiler warning: it’s not much you couldn’t have garnered from the trailer. For those who are going to see unaffected by any input shouldn’t read further.

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When I first moved to the Bay area I would see mentions of Harvey Milk’s name in The SF Chronicle like the name was common knowledge. I had no idea who he was and I suspect the same is true of most of America today. Gus van Sant’s movie about Milk is an attempt to educate the post-1980’s-born generation about the man’s life, his work, and to demonstrate that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are rights that all Americans are entitled to pursue by birth in this land.

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It’s really a delightful movie with a lot of heart. It felt fresh, lively, and fun the whole way through.