Art Star: WHayes

Showing posts with label WHayes. Show all posts

It's Getting Worse?

My first Star Wars toys
Originally uploaded by Mike McInnis

I don't know if you heard, but men are fucking up again:

Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children. Today, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. This "pre-adulthood" has much to recommend it, especially for the college-educated. But it's time to state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn't bring out the best in men.

That opens a Wall Street Journal lamentation by author Kay Hymowitz, and though I want to scream a) people should give this subject a rest, and b) how she's full of shit, she has a point. While I'm torn between raging in agreement with and balking against at the idea that guys are increasingly trapped in this slightly loser-ish bubble, I can't pretend I don't dip a toe in it. Sure, I'll read Jean Toomer and some Zora Neale, but the Star Wars DVDs aren't too far away. I volunteer with homeless children, but recently got the worst (and most humiliating) reprimand of my life for acting like a jackass. It's life, and people make mistakes that sometimes include collapsing beneath a juvenile impulse. The conflict comes when we don't grow from (and out of) our foolish decisions.

The causes behind questionable behavior are myriad, but what if there was a generational culprit? Hymowitz' emphasis on how naturally unrooted our peers are seems strikingly plausible: we "write [our] own biographies," travel abroad, and study longer and harder than before in pursuit of the questionable stability higher educated provides. Anecdotes and warnings on the importance of "getting out there while you still can" saturated our pivotal years to a point where settling down became shorthand for a type of failure. On one hand, this allows us to see and experience a world much larger than our parents, the trouble becomes finding where you actually fit within this greatly expanded landscape. Arrested development is just a side effect, and our cultural taste in entertainment -- the Xboxes, the useless apps, Transformers 3 -- just further signifies our commitment to staying forever young.

GQ occasionally gets called to task for being one of the "lad mags" that fuel our gendered problem, but the February 2011 issue features a great essay by Mark Harris highlighting the problem with our entertainment, Hollywood specifically: story comes second to marketing, and the products that sell are those that appeal to the largest group of spenders: teenagers. "Good movies aimed at adults tend to make their money more slowly than kid stuff," so kid stuff dominates. After that, of the "four quadrants" -- male and female, young and old -- of movie marketing, young and male by far makes the most money. Quoting Harris, "That's why, when you look at the genres that currently dominate Hollywood—action, raunchy comedy, game/toy/ride/comic-book adaptations, horror, and, to add an extra jolt of Red Bull to all of the preceding categories, 3-D—they're all aimed at the same ADD-addled, short-term-memory-lacking, easily excitable testosterone junkie. In a world dominated by marketing, it was inevitable that the single quadrant that would come to matter most is the quadrant that's most willing to buy product even if it's mediocre."

So now, we have a feedback loop that convinces me these trends are feeding off of each other: we stay young and lost, and steadily eat up entertainment that keeps us lost and young. There's a pretty direct route from Animal House to Ferris Bueller, to American Pie, to (sigh) "The Situation," and that picture will only get more absurd as the entertainment industry becomes more insulated and afraid.

To that end, I wonder if we'll ever change? Real-world obligations to becoming better/actual men aside, it's not like we're running out of teenagers, Children of Men style (although our societal craving for infinite youth would only get worse in that situation), so our entertainment will largely be designed to cater to them. Even the amazing, largely original, and video game-esque Inception could have been more "adult," if you will. Our only refuge, then, is TV, specifically, cable*: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Rubicon (R.I.P.), Terriers (R.I.P.), Justified, mature dramas with the kind of intrigue we would ideally want from movies, the majority of which featuring male leads fully aware of their responsibilities to the world, and the consequences of their actions (even if they're running away from them).

But then what? Those shows are, well, TV shows, and how we occupy free time can't be the only key to bettering our behavior. It'd be insulting to suggest otherwise. Here's the question, then: if it seems our elders are caught in a cycle of utter insanity, our middle-agers are fueling some greed-induced reversion to infinite childhood, and our young men are, well, forever young, who exactly do we look toward to become better? Seems the women are ready to leave us behind.

*I won't completely discount network TV. I've recently become a massive fan of The Chicago Code, and not just because Jennifer Beals makes my heart go thump.

1 Comment(s)Read On >>

Dueling Film Reviews - Round Two: WHayes on JDub

Firstly, I dig your point on how bringing a physical camera to an otherwise animated world adds an element of realness to the fantasy. Knowing that at some point the sets and characters were solid objects that you could shape or take home sounds like the underpinning of every fantasy, be it by a child or adult.

That said, exactly what defines "breathtaking" in cinema is too porous to make valuable sense of, because what makes Mary and Max so appealing to one person may be the exact thing that made me turn the movie off three times before finishing it. It's an ugly-ass movie, inside and out. They've created a consistently-realized world, yes, but one where nothing is pleasant to look at. Everyone has the same distended paunch, the same Peanuts-style squiggle of a frown, and the same ill-fitting clothes. I've personally understood that grotesque art direction speaks more to the director's desire to create a world reflective of the "ugliness" he sees within real life, versus a want to create something breathtaking. Then again, maybe the inner-beauty depiction is breathtaking, to which I'd counter that there's other claymation fare even more capable at portraying the off-kilter and "unpretty" without the crutch of slimy world-building: see Coraline, and The Nightmare Before Christmas as two examples of such.

Really, I take issue with this idea:

As one Web reviewer has already noted, nothing Pixar or Dreamworks could create can touch this painstaking attention to detail, as "the computers couldn't render it, or only ass slow." What's more, these details ooze with character and fascinating imperfection, adding quirk and charm to the film.

I'll concede that CGI is a time-consuming process, but let's not forget that claymation is equally tedious, since -- as pointed out last week -- each object must be built and shot on a reasonable enough scale for the filmmakers to get maximum use from it. Yet while the inherent crudeness integral to claymation is central to said charm, animating three million individual hairs for one CGI creature defines painstaking. Then, once an audience grows accustomed to the baseline level of spectacle, they can look beyond the glitz to parse out the heavier elements of a story. Because of this, I'd argue that it's precisely the level of detail good CG brings that can make for a more emotionally grounded, more "real," experience. The animators paradoxically create something so incredible that it becomes effectively invisible -- something Mary and Max's blunt clay doesn't here achieve.

0 Comment(s)Read On >>

Dueling Film Reviews - Round One: WHayes on Max and Mary

How much can you stand to see someone put-upon? More specifically, when it comes to movies, what's your misery threshold?

"Dark." "Edgy." "Haunting." "Gritty." "Subversive." Industry buzz words tailored to describe the illusion that the film you're watching is somehow made all the better through subjecting its characters to random and heartbreaking misery simply for misery's sake. It's a practice no less superficial than giving a comic-book heroine a rape backstory, and is one Adam Elliot's Mary and Max dives wholeheartedly into. Inspired by the director's 20+ year pen-friendship, the story follows lonely 8 year old Mary Daisy Dinkle through 20 years of her own correspondence with her spiritual kin, Max Jerry Horowitz, age 44.

Their world is wholly unpleasant. That picture? That's Mary's alcoholic mother, Vera. Her father works at a tea bag factory, her nose is big and unwanted like the birthmark marring her forehead, and her only pleasures in life are cartoons and condensed milk. Obese, neurotic Max isn't much better. All this nastiness gets enhanced, mind you, through depicting Mary's life in sepia tones, while Max get's black and white. The color red holds some undefined symbolic place in Mary's aesthetic stew, but we aren't missing much by leaving the connection unexplained; whatever Elliot explained would likely be as ham-fisted as every other statement the film tries.

If you guessed that the moral of the story was "we can't choose our lives, but can choose our friends," well done. It was telegraphed from the moment the narrator first described Mary's birthmark as "the color of poo." A lonely misfit who finds some form of joy in the world? Novel, indeed. I will give the movie credit, though. The array of flaming hoops they make our heroes dance through was well-imagined: Mary's parents die, her childhood crush-cum-husband leaves her for another man (he made her wedding dress, if you needed some foreshadowing), and some of her letters open up Max's repressed childhood memories, sending him to a mental institution for eight months. Life is war, and war is hell.

I'll give Elliot further props for choosing claymation. Embedding a serious story in the skin of something benign is a proven tactic for subverting audience expectations, but when you introduce your primary protagonist a having a birthmark "the color of poo" (can you tell how much that annoyed me?), you create a counter-expectation that the rest of the film won't pack too heavy an emotional punch. This very problem forms a through-line for the rest of the film: what exactly am I supposed to take seriously here?

Sure, your story may be about the resillience of friendship in the sake of nearly impossible hardship, but what good is the message if everything else drives people away before they realize it? The reason audiences cherish Pixar movies is because they're clever about their philosophies. If you lose the subtlety that could really let a message simmer within an audience in favor of beating them over the head with it, if you skip even implied rationale for certain aesthetic (and definitely for plot) choices, you come across preciously earnest -- "look at this gritty magical realism! Such suffering!" -- and thus push the audience away from your desired effect.. Dark for dark's sake doesn't work, but Mary and Max does give it a good try.

0 Comment(s)Read On >>

Flirting with Poetry Analysis: Jayne Cortez

JC3-MF-040307-6749
Originally uploaded by arimajohn

Let's jump right in: Jayne Cortez is definitely not Harryette Mullen, but their work compliments one another. While the Black Arts movement heavily influenced Mullen, her experience came through the filter of being states away from its locales (Texas versus California or New York) and was assuredly tempered by her collegiate career at the Universities of Texas and California, Santa Cruz. Cortez, who is twenty years older (b. 1936), began her career twenty years earlier, coming of age artistically at the height and center of the Arts and Civil Rights movements. While Cortez would later begin her own academic career as a lecturer and eventually professor, and the passion both poets bring to their work unites them, they remain distinct via a near mind (Mullen) versus body (Cortez) duality.

I Am New York City, written after Cortez’ move to New York and first collected in her 1973 “Scarifications,” appears first and foremost on many a website dedicated to her work. After watching her perform it I understand why. She has a powerful way of reading the poem, a pushing momentum which communicates not only a familiarity with her work, but blends a tone both proud and searching for connection. There is a way select stanzas are arranged:

“give me my confetti of flesh
my marquee of false nipples
my sideshow of open beaks
in my nose of soot
in my ox blood eyes”

-- suggesting an interplay of statements and asides familiar to African American tradition. This call and response, a musical tradition transposed from African song onto the blues, is reflected in the poem’s delivery and format. As published in “Coagulations: New and Selected Poems,” I Am is broken into short lines arranged in stanzas varying in length: pinpricks of thought, each one celebrating an aspect of the New York environment, and provoking the next into a turbulent, but near seamless reading of the piece. The effect is not the stream-of-consciousness embodied by Mullen’s work, but it does not have to be to remain potent.

Like I Am New York City, Do You Think continues Cortez’ use of call and response, but extends the rhythm and organization through the entire poem. Your understanding changes with the format; those pinpricks of thought now hang like an army of independent clauses, forcing you to ponder each individual image and its connotations before moving onto the next phrase. From the first stanza:

“Do you think this is a sad day
a sad night
full of tequila full of el dorado
full of banana solitudes”

-- the poems tone shifts very visibly; “full of tequila” calls to mind a faulty remedy for weighty issues, and “el dorado” an image of both elusive fantasy and epic heartbreak for those standing in the way of attaining something so impossible. The terms “chorizo,” “cuchifritos,” and “barrio” reinforce the cultural blending seen in I Am New York City. Do You Think lacks, however, the celebratory spirit of I Am; its tone instead feels pained and nostalgic (“in the crème de menthe of my youth, the silver tooth of my age”). It is hard to explain where your mind goes with the poem’s last lines:

“Do you really think time speaks english
in the men’s room”

-- but you get the sense that image, that “men’s room” is a locus for metaphors of regret, shame, miscommunication, and sexual and ethnic politics.

So Many Feathers, first collected in 1977’s “Mouth on Paper,” continues the use of political metaphor through invoking Josephine Baker: actress, entertainer, and banana-skirted Twentieth Century political/sexual/racial powder keg. In tone, the poem embeds hints of the bitter nostalgia permeating Do You Think within unabashed adoration for Baker and her legacy. In the first of three large, emotional stanzas, Cortez’ Baker dances a “magnetic dance,” and possesses “such terrible beauty.” The praise darkens when the second stanza invokes the political terrors of Durban, South Africa. It feels like Cortez -- reflecting on her own life in racially charged 1960’s Los Angeles and involvement in the Civil Rights movement -- pleads with Baker, who was unaware (but must have known) about the “death white boers” (Afrikaans) and their “torture chambers made of black flesh and feathers.”

The repeated image of the feathers refers to one of Bakers more famous costumes, itself topless by design, a symbol of beauty, but also the baggage attached to black sexuality: is it art, or exploitation? Cortez never answers the question, instead moving toward another tier of Josephine’s life, and the third (and longest) stanza of the poem. Here, “Josephine of the birdheads, ostrich plumes, bananas and sparkling G-strings” is also Josephine the “rosette of resistance;” the concept of doubling and “double-jointed” repeated a dozen times, implying the cascade of dualities Josephine’s (the name itself would later repeat into infinity) black body twisted and expanded to satisfy.
Cortez’ poetry is not always as nostalgic and loving like So Many Feathers. As a product of turbulent times, she also created works reflective of the tension, frustration, and bitchiness (as she describes it) necessary for creative expression at the time. While Rape is one of the better expressions of that explosive passion, the idea of where giants like Cortez think we will go from here appeals more strongly. Tell Me, from the 1984 collection “On All Fronts” blends the lamenting passion shown for Josephine Baker with the free jazz rhythm begun in Do You Think, with the rage expressed on Inez’ behalf and all the struggle of 40 years of attempted civil progress. Through images of “plutonium sludge,” “contaminated puss,” the vexation of nerves, ideals of being a “nameless homeless sexless piece of shit” getting high off of neutron bombs, and a desperate plea for it to be all a dream, she asks if, after everything we’ve been through, is this all we have?

0 Comment(s)Read On >>

Flirting with Poetry Analysis: Harryette Mullen

As you read this, I am now two full years into my love affair with Harryette Mullen and her poetry. For someone who never fully “got” what poetry was all about, who is just now building a lexicon of terms to define the types of prose I come across -- in rhyme, slant rhyme, iambic pentameter -- it came as a shock to read an author whose work almost instantly expanded my mindscape, whose words were no longer clumps of alphabet soup, but virile, moving images. A poet’s pressures, lifestyle, and location drastically influence the product they create, and Mullen crafts works endowed with such divergent meaning that her every stanza reflects the massive network of influences and emotions that culminate from a lifetime of teaching and absorbing. In doing so, her poetry pulls your mind outside itself: a sensual, psychedelic journey.

In Mullen’s first book, Trimmings, she fashions a collection of “serial prose poems that use playful, punning, fragmented language to explore sexuality, femininity, and domesticity,” corresponding to the “Objects” section of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (Mullen, ix). In reading Tender Buttons as a reference point, I found that Mullen’s style -- sexual, entendre-laden stream-of-consciousness -- was indeed a direct reflection of Stein’s influence. While Trimmings poems go unnamed, their structure -- often short bursts of streaming thought -- allow for many of the one to five line pieces to be quoted in their entirety:

“Starving to muffler moans, boa scarfs her up. Feathers tickle

her nose. Kerchief, fichu. Gesundheit.” (Mullen 6)

When this collection was published in 1991, Mulled had just begun teaching at Cornell University in New York. I find it hard to understand just what this poem’s tone is, but the many ways the language could be dissected keep the mind occupied past the initial mood assessment. The muffler could be a scarf, connecting to the boa the unknown subject wears, or could refer to stifling her moans, which connects to “fichu” in the second line. Fichu is a French word, from the past participle of “ficher”: to stick in. Muffler: scarf, as moans: stick in. The feather boa calls to mind a provocatively dressed woman, while “boa” itself could refer to a snake, and, in turn, a (large) penis. “Scarfs her up,” suggests the garment wrapped around her, or the woman gobbled down via oral sex.

In all, Mullen’s work forces us to ask just what is poetic language? Does a simple sentence like the previous work qualify? How should the way the words are structured compare in importance to the actual words? Is it enough for a poet to choose language that sets the reader off their expectations, or does it need to be eclectic as well? Consider the final poem from Trimmings:

“Thinking thought to be a body wearing language as clothing or language a body of thought which is a soul or body the clothing of a soul, she is veiled in silence. A veiled, unavailable body makes an available space.” (Mullen 62)

Formatted with no particular structure save that dictated by the confines of the page, this poem is a great capstone for the poet’s first collection. The interplay between alliteration, repetition, and the varied interpretations of tense mood and bundled symbol goes off like a subconscious explosion. There is nothing extraordinary about her vocabulary here, but her form suggests a connection between the mental and the tangible, that the two are intertwined and inseparable.

S*PeRM**K*T, released one year after Trimmings, again responds to Stein’s Tender Buttons, albeit this time the “Food” section. Appropriately, the collection was fully realized through Mullen’s culinary memories with Cornell friend Gil Ott, who provided the photographs of his local supermarket. In her own words, S*PeRM**K*T materialized from an interest in “the stuff of life” combined with “the collision of contemporary poetry with the language of advertising and marketing, the clash of fine art aesthetics with mass consumption and globalization, and the interaction of literacy and identity.” (Mullen, x) As a result, many of the works read like this (also unnamed) poem:

“Plushy soft tissues off screen generic rolls as the world turns on re-vivid revivals rewinds reruns recycling itself. A box of blue movie equals smurf sex. Poor peewee couldn’t shake it. Wished he had a bigger one. Per inch of clear resolution’s color window, more thick squares snag a softer touch.” (Mullen, 78)

Mullen represents branding and pop culture via “Pee-wee Herman” (Paul Reubens) and his 1991 indecent exposure arrest and the daytime soap opera “As The World Turns.” This and further brand imagery gets swirled with technology references (clear resolution and color window could refer to a television), an aside of sexual anxiety (penis size being a major component of masculine identity), and the supermarket consumer conflict of generic versus name brand purchasing power. Mullen never attempts to provide a sort of answer or solution to the images she summons; that would be anathema to her style -- as poet, her words merely point you in the right direction. It becomes the reader’s job to interpret the prose accordingly.

By the time Muse & Drudge was published in 1995, Harryette Mullen had returned to California, and was teaching at UCLA. Her poems changing structure reflects the change in situation. In a pattern holding throughout the entire book, four tight, lyrical stanzas have replaced Mullen’s trademark sips of lucid thought. An imagined meeting of Sappho, the Greek poet, with Sapphire, “an iconic black woman who refuses to be silenced”, inspired the shift. (Mullen, xi) The overall effect is not as poignant as her first two collections, but she still provides her reader with intriguing imagery:

“I dream a world

and then what

my soul is resting

but my feet are tired” (Mullen, 101)

Through this first stanza of yet another unnamed poem, Mullen asks the reader (and, more importantly, herself) the most inspiring or damning question available to an artist: what next? What is the point of dreaming these perfectly false landscapes if all we create are shadows on a cave wall?

Continued next week in Part 2: Jayne Cortez

0 Comment(s)Read On >>

The Top 5 Art Star Series Of All Time

0 Comment(s)Read On >>

We saw "The Social Network," and so should you

The Social Network begins with a familiar ending:

"I think we should just be friends."

"I don't need friends."

"I was just being polite. I had no intention of being friends with you."

And lives by a simple maxim: There's power in being rejected.

Not always, mind you, but get the right person good and pissed, and he'll craft a brilliant, eloquent, ground-breaking fuck you that -- if effective -- will flash for a brief but satisfying moment. Yet if effective becomes lucky, he'll take an idea and mate it to the zeitgeist, creating something that resonates and has purpose, that can transcend original intent and become a cause people get behind. Think Tea Party in ones and zeroes.

Directed by David Fincher (Zodiac) and adapted by Aaron Sorkin (Charlie Wilson's War) from Ben Mezrich's 2009 book/creation-myth The Accidental Billionaires, Network sets Facebook's formative months against the company's 2005-2008 legal troubles over whose property the site actually was. The quick-cuts across the timeline are entertaining, aptly described by io9's Annalee Newitz as "the perfect way to tell the story of a guy who invented the ultimate short-attention-span site."

We're finally understanding how the web and its infinite flashing lights have altered our brains, and this is a movie about those changes in practice: what happens to friendship in the face of distraction, making no distinctions between the intellectual and material obstacles. They're one in the same now, as we're in a future where the digital ink will neither dry nor ever, ever go away. Look at us: we willingly pay real money for the experience of "farming" fake crops. This is a time where a few lines of code can carry more weight than all the money you will ever make, and social media marketing somehow transcended its laughable original conceit to become a billion dollar industry. I'll spare talk of "generational indictment," because it honestly doesn't apply here. The real Mark Zuckerberg is only 26, as much a product of the digital world as he is its new-wave pioneer. Fincher and Sorkin do an excellent job of drawing life's social circles in sharp relief -- even offering a great tilt-shift sequence explicitly framing the Have's trappings as trite and meaningless -- but this reality transcends the Millennials blurry age boundary.

Appropriately, The Social Network takes itself as seriously as it's spotlighted industry does, paying major lip-service to the self-imposed costs of being paradoxically connected-yet-alone. Its a film preaching the rewards of being Somebody while warning against the road that leads there. Take the message as "there's always a way to exaggerate just how outside the norm you are, but likewise there will always be situations that leave you outside looking in." Like Pete Campbell with Asperger's, Jesse Eisenberg's Zuckerberg is the type of character who operates in full awareness that he's smarter than most yet entitled to nothing. This makes him reliably bitter, driven by an unrequited desire to be a part of something, anything, and prone to sabotaging even well-meaning conversation with an underhanded remark. He incorporates criticisms about himself into takedowns of others without the slightest wink of irony. He's the guy who heard your idea, flipped it, and made himself a king off it. Coupled with other abstinence parables like Justin Timberlake's Sean Parker, Fincher/Sorkin make good on a truism that could get (ironically) lost in a world bleeding into transparency: a punk with a good idea is still just a punk.

The movie does have its groan-worthy moments, like when the only South Asian character (Max Minghella as Divvya Narendra) shoehorns "fatwa" into a joke. Similarly, the majority of the female characters are mere cutouts. Zuckerberg muse Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) has one mood: justified indignation, and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin's (Andrew Garfield) girlfriend Christy (Brenda Song, dialing down her manic Disney energy) abruptly changes personality mid-film, as if some of her scenes vanished in the edit bay. In the worst case scenario, Song's character got reduced solely to make a now-cliche joke about relationship status updates. This says nothing, of course, of Stanford panties girl, coke-on-her-boobs girl, bathroom bj girl, 7" bong girl, other stoned girl, and the fuck truck girls who open the movie -- no, really, its called a "fuck truck."

Foibles of characterization aside, the film is spotless technically. It makes good use of Trent Reznor's ominous -- and omnipresent -- soundtrack; Very Serious Music saturates each scene from the moment the first, heavy bass line drops. Dialogue is crisp and delivered with spot-on timing and humor that almost makes you root for the antagonists when they (frequently) speechify. The effects shots are seamless to the point where I forgot that twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss -- who seemingly always appear in the same frame -- were both played by real life old money Armie Hammer. This isn't the type of movie that required a slick palette to get the point across, but Fincher's typically dark filmmaking works here.

Some reviews are sure to claim Network's final moments are haunting, damning, or both. Don't buy that. Its an undeniably strong image reflective of a common, ambiguous experience native to the site, but don't take it as a final judgment. As mentioned earlier, the real Mark Zuckerberg has only just started his career; it'd be silly to accept him as some predestined pawn waiting to fall. Yet if you do take anything away from this, remember there are many ways to end up alone, but realize we have too much life ahead of us -- on and away from the screen -- to worry about that now. Enjoy the ride.

The Social Network opens October 1st.

1 Comment(s)Read On >>

Dueling Film Reviews - Round One: WHayes on "Wait Until Dark"

The mystique of old thrillers is much like the allure of an old car. At first glance: sturdy and elegant, with just enough nostalgia to flavor them with the inevitable shell of "back then, they had it right. This was the way to make a movie." Films like Psycho (1960 version), Night of the Living Dead, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 version), The Shining, and Elevator to the Gallows [Ascenseur pour l'échafaud - a tense 1958 French noir scored by Miles Davis] very much earned this veneer. 1967's Wait Until Dark is no exception.

Like its peer cinema, it has the pacing, atmosphere, direction, lineage (adapted from a 1966 play by Frederick Knott), and star power make for a well-executed and satisfying ride; its that 67 Camaro that looks like sex but drives like a tank. We lose something beneath the pretty memory paint -- we forget the shady ignition systems that took forever to start, the poor fuel-delivery tech that could leave you stranded with somewhere important to go, and the four wheel drum-brakes that couldn't stop you without a prayer.

Similarly, we forget that while the payoff made "old-school" thriller pacing so satisfying, we first had to slog through the monotony of slow, tedious character building. That buildup can add unneeded bloat to the runtime. To reach that payoff at journey's end, we'd occasionally be faced with moments that break the carefully constructed atmosphere.

Susy is a fantastic character (Hepburn's performance was Oscar-nominated), but she's also the focal point of all the films lumps. They're all cultural inconsistencies. Both alluring and childlike, intelligent yet helpless (she cracks the grifters' scheme quickly after easily picking up on the flaws in their performance, but is happy to stay with Sam though he constantly belittles her), beautiful but insecure, she's the conflicted portrayal of what we today understand the 60s "ideal woman" to be. It's a persona who'll be defiant and wily in misleading her captors, but also sincerely spout groan-worthy dialogue like "I wish I could do important things like cook a souffle, pick a necktie, or find wallpaper for a room."

I love this movie, and there are some great elements that make it memorable even today. The humor of watching the characters winkingly cycle through different personas, as if to say "we really do love this job," is priceless. We play along and savor the ride, especially as Alan Arkin and Richard Crenna ham it up as Roat Jr./Sr. and Mike Tallman, but its also incredibly frustrating to see Susy be spun around so cruelly. Look at that damn picture. There's something undeniably sensual in Hepburn's expression while Arkin hatefully looms, ready to penetrate her. Its undeniably problematic (that position doesn't even happen in the film), but, culturally, maybe we should expect no less than this. As Mike says, "this is the big, bad world full of mean people, where nasty things happen." Thankfully, Susy isn't so willing to accept those nasty things happening to her, and Dark gives us a great climax to attest to this. Its too bad our superwoman goes back to her old dependance in the denouement.

0 Comment(s)Read On >>

Four Music Videos I Want You To See

As a film buff and de facto cuter half of the Art Star film boys, I spend far too little time looking at music videos. With respect to Katelin's essay on Lady Gaga, I stopped paying attention somewhere between illicit nights watching BET Uncut and a confusing first impression of Tokio Hotel, which is a damn shame because some great things have been happening.

We've all been saturated with Gaga's "Bad Romance" inundated with Ok Go's "Here It Goes Again," and plenty of us saw Kanye's "Flashing Lights" (nsfw), but who remembers when he dropped "Paranoid" (one word: Rihanna), or when Mos slipped "Supermagic" beneath the aural doorjamb? For this reason, I've resolved to put some added purpose behind my Google searches, and will be on the lookout for new videos from now on. Sharing with you is sharing with myself, and who isn't down for a five minute sip of something sweet and avant garde?

0 Comment(s)Read On >>

Drill, Baby Jesus, Drill

A perspective by Esquire's Tom Junod. Worth the read.

See here:

Drill, Baby Jesus, Drill

Posted using ShareThis

0 Comment(s)Read On >>

Round Two: WHayes on JDub on "Where The Wild Things Are"

Dub, you're onto something when you note how Max's very presence among the wild things is what exacerbates the brewing tensions between them. I further agree that this realization was largely behind his decision to leave for home, as things were rough with his sand-blooded pals at first, but he handled the pressure well. It takes a tough kid to look up into faces that could (and do) swallow him whole, and want to not only befriend them, but be their king. That blind willingness to set aside fear in favor of awe and cooperation is what makes children special; its a quality more adults should share when dealing with their own issues.

Yet I have to say that asking, as you do, how these dark, angry tensions could come from a kid misses the point. While I stand by my position that (older) children have some great qualities we could all learn from, they've always had a capacity for cruelty and irrationality borne of fear or the suggestion of inferior difference. They know how to split into "good guys and bad guys." To that end, I'd say it makes perfect sense that bringing an angry and misunderstood Max into a limitless fantasy world would manifest his worst along with his best; it was inevitable. Especially in a world full of freakin' monsters.

As I said last week, the best children's stories are the ones serving as allegories for the struggles adults face as well, and there's nothing more universal to adults than the internal struggle to keep your world at peace despite the warring emotions inside you. Max experiencing the conflict first hand and in a very literal fashion was a pretty brilliant stroke of filmmaking, even if it takes a little while for the message to sink in.

***

Before we move off the subject completely, do you like monsters but need more Jonze? Wanna little Kanye with it? Watch this. I've heard it described as "face melting."

0 Comment(s)Read On >>

33 Ways the "Matrix" Trilogy Could Have Been Saved

Yes, its true: in some way, we were all disappointed by the failings of the Matrix trilogy that sapped Reloaded of the excitement and potential we heaped on it, and left Revolutions feeling totally unnecessary at best, and offensive at worst. I was a new teen in Omaha when this first teaser came out, and just about peed myself.

3 Comment(s)Read On >>

Round One: WHayes on Where The Wild Things Are

Art Star being a blog (for now, *wink*), I'd like to think we're allowed to make a few generalizations in setting up an argument, all for the sake of expediency. So while I could write you an entire thesis on how the best children's stories are allegories for the trials adults face as well, lets just accept that as a given for now.

Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are, adapted from Sendak original (haven't you read this part in every blog and newspaper in the country before?), falls into the allegorical window, but I'm not entirely sure why. Max does learn just how hard it can be for his mother to make a life for them through his attempts at living and loving with the Wild Things, but something about that moral just feels...unfinished, now that I've had a few months to stew on the film.

So, if unfinished is the case, how much higher should Jonze have reached? Teaching a child to empathize with a parent is definitely an admirable and lofty goal, but is there something more Wild Things could do with its premise? More importantly, what could it do without sinking (further) into a gloom that inadvertently ends up turning kids away from soaking up the messages? This isn't to say the film doesn't hit a few home runs on certain topics, like:

Showing that even a fantasy isn't always what you expect it to be.
Showing that love, even though it may be painful, is worth it to experience and give.
Showing that your imagination truly can build great things -- your own personal fort.
Showing how, nasty as it may be, it does take someone special to lead (to be a king), and that a lot of shit can splatter if you aren't who you say you are.
Showing how, as painful as it is, sometimes family members let each other down.
Providing a world that feels like a fairy tale, albeit one with real consequences. Trees get smashed, and so can little boys. Makes you wonder just how safe you really are, anywhere. Even in your own head.

I hate adspeak as much as the next guy, but I do recommend you see WTWTA as soon as possible. Go see it for the perfect use of real effects and CGI, for the imperfect steadycam (motion sickness is possible), for the fitting soundtrack, and to see some solid performances. Go if only so you can reflect on it like I've tried to and see where you think the film could have pushed for more. Max lives, learns, and goes home to (literally) eat his cake too. Did you get the sense his change was permanent? Does the semi-ambiguious ending serve the movie well? I don't think so, but I am curious to hear what you decide. Oh, and it doesn't sink into hipster moodiness nearly as much as some reviews suggest.

For more on Jonze, love, and even a couple robots, check out the preview for his Absolut vodka-sponsored short "I'm here." You can watch the film in its entirety here, but /film says Absolut has it limited to about 700 views (yeah, thats globally) a day. Get in when/while you can.

2 Comment(s)Read On >>

Losing it

With all respect to Ms. Bowman, control may be the game, but I don't think any of our antiheroes is in it at the moment. As Walt grows aggressive in his fight to preserve his family, Jesse more desperate to stay some shred of sanity, and Hank more afraid of his own inadequacies, shit's likely to get real. Things will spiral so far past that point of inevitability that the moment everyone reaps their harvest will probably be one of the more memorable series of events ever shown on TV -- and you know how I try and use hyperbole responsibly.

Sundays episode, "I.F.T.," was, of course, outstanding. With the deliberate momentum the show builds, its hard to make a misstep at this pace. Not much action aside from a nice and bloody barfight -- Hank kicking the shit out of two larger bikers made me wanna throw some blows myself -- but again, considering how the episode was more introspective than explicative, not much was needed; Gilligan and company are stacking bricks for now. Bricks like:

Walt finalizing his move back in through outmaneuvering Skyler's threat of police intervention. She still called him in, but Walt put on all the right moves in the officers' presence to appear as perfect as possible at the exact wrong moment. I'm no expert on the accurate portrayal of the abused family dynamic, but I think it was well done here. Skyler's sense of powerlessness was pretty palpable, and the scene itself avoided feeling cliche, despite toeing the line a few times. As much as I love some Walter, it was hard not to feel like he'd gone too far here. I'm actually interested in seeing the cooking operation go back online, if only to watch how the business dynamic changes, but having the head chef play so handily into his desperation makes me think he might not get a chance to reunite with Jesse in the RV after all. As Skyler's lawyer says, "drug dealers have a way of getting caught," and Walt can't get much more reckless before he irreparably screws up.

The tension's got our anti's showing some regrettable personal tics. Jesse has been calling Jane's voicemail, maybe several times an hour, just to sate the profound loneliness thats surely been burning a hole through his gut. We can all empathize with his sinking feeling when the number finally gets disconnected -- the sting from losing that last link. Hank gets his El Paso gig back, but clearly has doubts. The panic attacks could prove debilitating unless he does something drastic to get over them, something like smashing a dealer's teeth in on a countertop. Skyler's smoking again (same room as the baby, no less), but the shoe really drops when she reveals what the episode title acronym really means.

"I fucked Ted."

I had my doubts on just how much Walt's heavy-hearted confession over how every dollar in that duffel bag weighed on him would affect her, and clearly his regret wasn't enough to reset the marriage dynamic. How could it be? So yes, she fucks Ted, and Anna Gunn sells the internal conflict behind reaching out for something, anything (even if it's just a revenge fuck), pretty well. Here's the thing, was telling Walt a satisfying release, or just welcoming another burden? More importantly, if Skyler's dilemma is a microcosm of this season's entire thematic stance, will coming clean save any of our characters? Maybe there really isn't a way out.

0 Comment(s)Read On >>

Round Two of Chasing Amy: JDub on WHayes

WHayes, I love it, dude. It seems to me that your feelings toward Chasing Amy have arisen because you romanticized it. You heard witty and believable dialogue where there really was none. You were smitten, and when you realized that, it left a bitter taste in your mouth.

Holden must have felt about the same way when he realized how far behind Alyssa he was sexually, and as men tend to do, he tried to fix the "problem," rather than accepting things for how they are. Alyssa can revisit her sexually adventurous years as readily as we can rewrite Amy's contrived dialogue and remake a more "perfect" film.

But just because two people can virtually never totally reconcile themselves to each other doesn't mean you can't go right on loving the film as before, nor does it necessarily mean the book is closed on Holden and Alyssa's relationship. After all, the whole sappy, over-wrought point of Chasing Amy seems to be that no relationship can be perfect, and two people don't have to be "perfect for each other" to be in love.

I heard somewhere that love is all you need...

In the end, I guess we're left right where we started. Holden is going to have to fall in love with Alyssa all over again for exactly who she is (for real this time), and WHayes, you must do the same with Chasing Amy. It's the original bromantic comedy, after all.

And, in other news, I finally understand that wordless conversation Holden and Banky shared at the end of the film, thanks to the very charitable work of some very skilled linguists and sign language experts: