Lists are big on the internet these days. Let’s do this.
Spoilers after the jump. You have been warned.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Memorial Day Weekend
It's been a week. It being Tuesday now, the week I'm referring to would be last week, more or less. Going backwards, yesterday to Saturday my parents were here, so I was showing them around my stomping grounds in the Maryland area. (When last they had visited me here, more than a year ago, I had done hardly any stomping at all, so there was no stomped ground to show them. Now, on the other hand, when my parents want to know what I've been doing with my life, I can at least show them where you can get really good nachos.) Then, on Friday, was Girlfriend's 8th-grade class's production of Romeo and Juliet, which in spite of the odds was something many people could justly be proud of.*
We cleaned over the week, so the house is simultaneously comfortable and slightly alien. Things which I am used to seeing "around" have been put "away," which in this case could refer to either a place where they usually belong or simply a place where I would not think to look for them.
As is often the case after a long weekend, everything feels "off." Today is a Monday that is not a Monday; it is a Monday three days before Friday, a two-sided triangle. We have entered the non-Euclidian workweek.
* Protip: When watching live middle school theater,** sit closer to the front than you would for the same show performed by adults. Remember that the actors are smaller.
** Protip: When watching recorded middle school theater, drink.
We cleaned over the week, so the house is simultaneously comfortable and slightly alien. Things which I am used to seeing "around" have been put "away," which in this case could refer to either a place where they usually belong or simply a place where I would not think to look for them.
As is often the case after a long weekend, everything feels "off." Today is a Monday that is not a Monday; it is a Monday three days before Friday, a two-sided triangle. We have entered the non-Euclidian workweek.
* Protip: When watching live middle school theater,** sit closer to the front than you would for the same show performed by adults. Remember that the actors are smaller.
** Protip: When watching recorded middle school theater, drink.
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Reviews (including one of mine)
Friends, fans, literati, and cinemaphiles will want to check out my review of The Great Gatsby over at Gent's Pub.
On the subject of reviews, I've run into a depressing phenomenon this summer. As some of you know, I follow movie reviews, because I would rather waste time reading other people's opinions than waste time watching a movie I won't like. Anyway, since I am one of the doesn't-get-a-paper generation, I read snippets and watch the aggregate score on RottenTomatoes.com. While it's not a perfect system (for example, I absolutely loved The Fall, despite its very mixed reviews*), it's served me fairly well.
I had high hopes for Iron Man 3 (spoiler warning: I still haven't seen it) given the presence of the director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Sir Ben Kingsley in addition to Professor Robert Downey Jr. I hoped perhaps (fantastically) that Marvel studios had been chastened by the silent rays of contempt I had been sending them over Iron Man 2. And I was heartened to see, a week before the movie's release, a healthy Rotten Tomatoes score of 90%.
The next day, I was a little less heartened to see a score of 89%. And a little less heartened to see each progressively lower aggregate score over the week, until it settled on opening day at its present 78%.
I'm neither surprised nor scandalized that a studio would solicit early reviews from people who will shill their movie. This is the first time I've seen it move the needle so profoundly, though. Is this new? I wonder. Has something changed? If Rotten Tomatoes has been compromised, who will tell me what to think? (Because, the bit of luck that I mention at the top of this post notwithstanding, there may not always be someone willing to pay me to form my own opinion.)
Perhaps someone who already understands exactly what's going on can explain to me why I'm being silly.
* I may appreciate exaggerated visual style more than most reviewers do. Or be more forgiving of uneven stories if they go interesting places. Ip Man is another place these things come together, and I seem to be the outlier in thinking that it is decisively superior to its sequel.
On the subject of reviews, I've run into a depressing phenomenon this summer. As some of you know, I follow movie reviews, because I would rather waste time reading other people's opinions than waste time watching a movie I won't like. Anyway, since I am one of the doesn't-get-a-paper generation, I read snippets and watch the aggregate score on RottenTomatoes.com. While it's not a perfect system (for example, I absolutely loved The Fall, despite its very mixed reviews*), it's served me fairly well.
I had high hopes for Iron Man 3 (spoiler warning: I still haven't seen it) given the presence of the director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Sir Ben Kingsley in addition to Professor Robert Downey Jr. I hoped perhaps (fantastically) that Marvel studios had been chastened by the silent rays of contempt I had been sending them over Iron Man 2. And I was heartened to see, a week before the movie's release, a healthy Rotten Tomatoes score of 90%.
The next day, I was a little less heartened to see a score of 89%. And a little less heartened to see each progressively lower aggregate score over the week, until it settled on opening day at its present 78%.
I'm neither surprised nor scandalized that a studio would solicit early reviews from people who will shill their movie. This is the first time I've seen it move the needle so profoundly, though. Is this new? I wonder. Has something changed? If Rotten Tomatoes has been compromised, who will tell me what to think? (Because, the bit of luck that I mention at the top of this post notwithstanding, there may not always be someone willing to pay me to form my own opinion.)
Perhaps someone who already understands exactly what's going on can explain to me why I'm being silly.
* I may appreciate exaggerated visual style more than most reviewers do. Or be more forgiving of uneven stories if they go interesting places. Ip Man is another place these things come together, and I seem to be the outlier in thinking that it is decisively superior to its sequel.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
A brief Mother's Day post
A year ago I posted this on Facebook:
We owe them a lotI'm not sure my mom actually got it, but I have no regrets.
Women who taught us to live
Word to your mother
Monday, May 6, 2013
The Sun Also Dances, and so does Gatsby
Usually I resent physical mail delivery, since there is hardly ever anything I want in it and yet it never. stops. coming. except on Sundays, I guess. But I have in hand an advertisement for something I would not have thought existed: it turns out that the Washington Ballet is adapting The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway.
If it takes an English degree to think that's funny then my college education has done me some good. It's not merely that I am still uncultured enough to find ballet itself funny when juxtaposed with just about anything (although that is also undoubtedly true), but a Hemingway-ballet combination is the sort of thing one imagines exploding utterly, like matter and antimatter. Hemingway was such a strange animal in himself, a hyper-masculine and eminently taciturn writer; The Sun Also Rises itself is so bleak and uneventful that what I managed to read of it, in my two separate attempts, is largely a lacuna in my memory. To make The Sun Also Rises expressive, to make it flamboyant--I can hardly imagine that Hemingway would approve.
But then we live in an age of maximalism. The pendulum is at its far extreme from 1926, and if this generation is lost, most of us got that way without ever actually seeing the war that scattered us. Some of the best social commentary in the last 10 years has involved Batman. We don't do understatement anymore. So while Hemingway almost certainly wouldn't approve, maybe something as overblown as ballet would be able to expose the trenchant pathos that he was content to leave unsaid.
On the back of the flyer, the ad announces the ballet as "following on the success of The Great Gatsby." So apparently that was a ballet as well, but I missed it. (Not that I was going to go to Rises, mind you. I'm still in the process of coming to my main point. Thanks for staying with us.) However, I think that Gatsby is a more amenable story to bombastic presentation. Fitzgerald was more comfortable with stylistic flourishes, and excess is in the bones of the story.
In fact, it was the idea of just such a presentation that excited me back when I first got wind of Baz Luhrmann's movie version of The Great Gatsby. In a book that trades so heavily on prose and tone, any straight adaptation of the plot will fall flat--one of those increasingly self-evident truths that I think the brains of Hollywood are immune to. Linguistic flair should translate to the screen as cinematic flair: style and cinematography, of which Mr. Luhrmann at least has no shortage. At any rate, until a movie has come out, you can really only pin your hopes on mistakes that the production has apparently avoided, and I think it's a safe bet that Luhrmann's Gatsby will avoid the mistake of being dull.
I wish I did not have as many hopes for this movie as I do, but I have been pessimistic about the summer movie season so far. Recalling my intense distaste for Iron Man 2, I have few hopes for this year's vaunted sequels (the Iron Men and the Star Treks), precisely because I expect the expectation of money to have thoroughly crushed the life out of the spontaneous originals.
The irony is certainly not lost on me (is any?) that the movie I anticipate most this summer is based on a book that I am ambivalent towards. It read The Great Gatsby in high school, and then again when I was actually old enough to understand it, and I appreciated it but certainly didn't clamor for more. It is perhaps this lack of investment that allows me to hope at all. There is little threat of actual disappointment, as with The Hobbit. I have respect but not affection for the source material. The movie's failings should not gall me; its successes should entertain me. It's all gravy.
Except in spite of my protective disinterest, I find myself in a sort of informational purgatory. I want to read reviews, partly because they will help me determine what I'm doing with me weekend, and partly because I'm bored. Partly because while I'm not invested in the movie per se, I'm invested in my prediction that Baz Luhrmann is a good match for the source material, and I want to find out if people agree with me. All this in spite of knowing full well the aggregate reviews of this movie will be useless. 25% of viewers will hate Baz Luhrmann on principle. 25% of viewers will hate Leonardo DiCaprio on principle. 25% of viewers will want to flaunt their literacy by complaining about how the movie missed the spirit of the book. 25% of viewers will love it as empty audiovisual spectacle. 25% of viewers will be convinced that Gatsby and Daisy are a love story for the ages, no matter how shallow and awful they are supposed to be.
So we'll see. Or, anyway, I probably will.
If it takes an English degree to think that's funny then my college education has done me some good. It's not merely that I am still uncultured enough to find ballet itself funny when juxtaposed with just about anything (although that is also undoubtedly true), but a Hemingway-ballet combination is the sort of thing one imagines exploding utterly, like matter and antimatter. Hemingway was such a strange animal in himself, a hyper-masculine and eminently taciturn writer; The Sun Also Rises itself is so bleak and uneventful that what I managed to read of it, in my two separate attempts, is largely a lacuna in my memory. To make The Sun Also Rises expressive, to make it flamboyant--I can hardly imagine that Hemingway would approve.
But then we live in an age of maximalism. The pendulum is at its far extreme from 1926, and if this generation is lost, most of us got that way without ever actually seeing the war that scattered us. Some of the best social commentary in the last 10 years has involved Batman. We don't do understatement anymore. So while Hemingway almost certainly wouldn't approve, maybe something as overblown as ballet would be able to expose the trenchant pathos that he was content to leave unsaid.
On the back of the flyer, the ad announces the ballet as "following on the success of The Great Gatsby." So apparently that was a ballet as well, but I missed it. (Not that I was going to go to Rises, mind you. I'm still in the process of coming to my main point. Thanks for staying with us.) However, I think that Gatsby is a more amenable story to bombastic presentation. Fitzgerald was more comfortable with stylistic flourishes, and excess is in the bones of the story.
In fact, it was the idea of just such a presentation that excited me back when I first got wind of Baz Luhrmann's movie version of The Great Gatsby. In a book that trades so heavily on prose and tone, any straight adaptation of the plot will fall flat--one of those increasingly self-evident truths that I think the brains of Hollywood are immune to. Linguistic flair should translate to the screen as cinematic flair: style and cinematography, of which Mr. Luhrmann at least has no shortage. At any rate, until a movie has come out, you can really only pin your hopes on mistakes that the production has apparently avoided, and I think it's a safe bet that Luhrmann's Gatsby will avoid the mistake of being dull.
I wish I did not have as many hopes for this movie as I do, but I have been pessimistic about the summer movie season so far. Recalling my intense distaste for Iron Man 2, I have few hopes for this year's vaunted sequels (the Iron Men and the Star Treks), precisely because I expect the expectation of money to have thoroughly crushed the life out of the spontaneous originals.
The irony is certainly not lost on me (is any?) that the movie I anticipate most this summer is based on a book that I am ambivalent towards. It read The Great Gatsby in high school, and then again when I was actually old enough to understand it, and I appreciated it but certainly didn't clamor for more. It is perhaps this lack of investment that allows me to hope at all. There is little threat of actual disappointment, as with The Hobbit. I have respect but not affection for the source material. The movie's failings should not gall me; its successes should entertain me. It's all gravy.
Except in spite of my protective disinterest, I find myself in a sort of informational purgatory. I want to read reviews, partly because they will help me determine what I'm doing with me weekend, and partly because I'm bored. Partly because while I'm not invested in the movie per se, I'm invested in my prediction that Baz Luhrmann is a good match for the source material, and I want to find out if people agree with me. All this in spite of knowing full well the aggregate reviews of this movie will be useless. 25% of viewers will hate Baz Luhrmann on principle. 25% of viewers will hate Leonardo DiCaprio on principle. 25% of viewers will want to flaunt their literacy by complaining about how the movie missed the spirit of the book. 25% of viewers will love it as empty audiovisual spectacle. 25% of viewers will be convinced that Gatsby and Daisy are a love story for the ages, no matter how shallow and awful they are supposed to be.
So we'll see. Or, anyway, I probably will.
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