Big movie post

No poems today, but three movies to comment on. Have been depressed lately and rather than keeping up with my impressive gym schedule, have been bingeing, purging, and watching movies. It's healthy.



Rachel Getting Married

After watching this I found The Silence of the Lambs on YouTube and watched the first half. Think I'll finish it tonight after reading the Bernie Madoff story in Vanity Fair. Finished my classes for this week. Well, I found Silence of the Lambs because it, like Rachel, is directed by Jonathan Demme.

1. Rosemarie DeWitt is gorgeous and note to self, FIND AND LOOK UPON that purple dress she's wearing when she tells them she's pregnant. She looks like a combination of Mary-Louise Parker and Elisabeth Shue (hey! both mentioned on this tiny blog already!)
2. Anne's rehab shag was hot. Wait, the man, not her hair, which some might call a shag.
3. Anne, who lost to Kate Winslet for Best Actress for this role, is a bratty self-obsessed rehabbed hellion who gets out of a clinic to come to her sister's wedding. The wedding is all kinds of gorgeous, but will hipsters start imitating it? Have they already? We learn that while 16 and stoned, she drove her baby brother into a lake and couldn't stop him from drowning. She can't forgive herself, so can't do anything else but get fucked up and make the family hate her more.
4. Bill Irwin, as the dad, was gorgeous. So heartbreaking.
5. Their mum was played by Debra Winger (terrifying! she and Anne have a bitchfight with real punches - it's horrible) and their stepmum by Nancy McNally from The West Wing - awesome!
6. It's shot in hand-held but not vertiginous, nauseating Robby Mueller hand-held, and scenes are 'captured' rather than set up for the shot.
7. warmth, family, love, pain, family, noise, love
8. The wedding cake! A masterpiece.

Synecdoche, NY

The DVD had a critics' round table with various bloggers: now two of them are on my Favourites: Filmfreak, with Walter Chaw, and Some Came Running, by ex-Premiere Glen Kenny. It was naff but also worth it for those two.

1. Did not know there was a place in New York state called Schenecdaty, but now I do.
2. Agreed with external reviewers that first half great, second half dr-a-a-a-ag-g-g-g-ed a bit.
3. Caden Cotard, Adele Lack. As she has for a while now, Catherine Keener scared the shit out of me. God, she's a bitch.
4. Basically, life's what happens when you're making other plans. Or something. Spend too much time trying to make authentic art and your life is over.
5. Why do we have to find men who don't know how to live romantic and charming and tragic? Aren't they just losers?

Slumdog Millionaire

Tired now so will return to this later.

Short Story

Here's the idea for a short story that I woke up with this morning:

A man (i think he will be known as 'the man' throughout the story) has a dog. Its breed, appearance, temperament, personality and other attirbutes will be described in great detail. The man sees another dog in a park one day, a dog of a different breed, appearance, temperament etc. He goes home and starts thinking about and wondering about the other dog. His dog responds to its owner's change by alternately moping, begging and acting out for attention. The man starts to wonder what having this other dog would be like. He watches his own dog become sick from the lack of love and attention, and wonders how much suffering it can take. He has bad dreams about being a bad dog owner and feels guilty, but he wakes up and keeps on neglecting his dog and thinking about the other dog. Eventually he breaks the dog's paw to see what it will do, then goes out and acquires the other dog somehow. (That dog? A dog of its type?) I'm not sure what will happen to the original dog or the man in the end.

The level of detail about the dog comes from DFW; the tone will come from Herman Hesse and James Joyce, and the structure will come from how much I want to play about with the short story form. Not sure yet.

movie

http://www.observer.com/files/imagecache/article/files/sarris_0.jpg

Moody malaise means movie madness.

1. Hamlet 2
Wanted to be lifted up by Steve Coogan. (Would also like to be laid down by Steve Coogan, if anyone knows him). Steve didn't disappoint himself, but the movie was embarrassingly awful, on the whole. Catherine Keener can shrink balls with the lines she has. I wonder what drama teachers think of this?

2. The Strangers
I had to watch most of it on fast forward, because I am a total wimp. The Exorcist is the only horror film I can watch, and then it's only because I've seen it so many times. On FF, it was okay. Except that I agree with...AO Scott? Andrew Sarris? Whoever it was who said that the director, Bryan Bertino, is all kinds of skilled, but has used his powers for evil instead of good. It's such a nasty film. Who gets 'inspired' by the Tate/LaBianca murders and actually follows through? I mean, it's not really a cultural touchpoint for us anymore. Not that it should be forgotten, because as seemingly random post-hippie acid-induced cult slayings go, it is the benchmark, but we've had Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Columbine, bodies in vats, feet in harbours, and Paul Bernardo since then. I know we're supposed to fear the idea that people can kill not because they're sick or disturbed, but because they can, or they're bored, because that's not something we can contain or treat. But has that been borne out yet? Do rapists and murderers really go that far out of ennui and apathy and a kind of vulgar curiosity? Is this a post-Prozac movie? People need to stalk and stab total strangers in order to feel a spark of life? Seeing the masked killers push and twist the butcher's knife into the couple's bodies was really disgusting, gross, and hideous. It did suggest a clinical interest in the proceedings that perhaps the characters were supposed to have, but the audience isn't. Apparently there's a sequel already in the works.

3. The Dark Knight
Heath Ledger's Brando-sounding Joker is another soulless killer, although he has a touch more thought going on in the form of a love of anarchy and chaos. Did Bale's Batman always talk like that? Thank God for Maggie Gyllenhaal and the absence of Katie Holmes. Gary Oldman looks like an...oldman. Didn't realise Anthony Michael Hall was in it until the credits. Oldman has a terrible, rambling, melodramatic speech at the end. Ill-advised use of a small child.

I'm going to have mashed potato for dinner tonight and watch Lars and the Real Girl. I am this close to getting a mannequin myself.

End of 2008

Here's one selection out of the many sweet, painful verses on this breakup blog I found:

Choosing your words
Is incredibly daunting
When you say what you mean
But they hear what they're wanting

The blogger's name is LonePen.

Terrible Fish has been suffering the loss of her own relationship over the last few months. As well, she endured some blog bullying. Or whatever it's called (bullying might be too strong a word and sound too self-pitying) when you don't toe the party line and get flaming, snarky comments from other self-righteous commenters.

The relationship suffering is worse, I think.

DFW

What a terrible bummer this is. Writers like David Foster Wallace do noble work on behalf of the rest of us. They walk the treacherous paths, encounter the demons, and suspect the truths that we less skilled humans are unable or unwilling to do.

That's one way of looking at it anyway.

Tonight's poem is T.S. Eliot, because I've just read a piece on concentration and distraction that quotes him. I worry about that sometimes. There are mornings when skimming and scanning becomes so compulsive that it makes my regular anxiety bubble up (like the frozen beer in our kitchen) and explode. My interest in an article wanes long before it should. One of the books on this phenomenon/moral panic that the author cites is Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. I'll get it so that I can prohibit my students from surfing in class.

Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot - extract
III
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy.
Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

First,
eructation:a burp! Nice.
tumid: adjective 1 (of a part of the body) swollen or bulging. 2 (of language) pompous or bombastic.
Oxford Dictionary

I'm not even one of the people Eliot was talking about (although, I supposed I really am...) and I feel ashamed of my

Le weekend

Went to see the Whitecaps on the weekend. Right now I can hear the Guantanamo Bay interrogation video playing. What a bunch of c*nts. OR good investigators - time will tell.
I hate mascots.