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February 5th, 2010

Viewing Habit: Lorna’s Silence, Import/Export = recommended

Two strong films about desperation amid tough times in Eastern Europe. The bleakness of the former is haunting even as it verges on becoming a crime thriller. Import/Export paints a much seedier, grittier portrait. Much (all?) of the interior scenes are filmed in static/unmoving camera shots reminiscent of the recently released 1975 classic Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

The Seagull = Fine
Screened as part of the National Gallery of Art’s “Celebrating Chekhov on the Russian Screen” series. The best parts were the subtitled translations of Russian insults. I’m still waiting for an opportunity to call someone a “Bourgeois Kievian.”

Encounters at the End of the World = recommended
Werner Herzog’s documentary about Antarctica focuses on the people who live there: scientists, adventurers, wandering philosophers. A nice detour touching on some of Herzog’s old man vs. nature themes. The shots of strange ocean creatures living deep under the Antarctic ice are amazing.

New World Order = highly not recommended
Clearly at least one of the “best documentaries of the decade” lists I added to my Netflix queue was a mistake of enormous magnitude.

Categories: Blog, the cinematical

February 3rd, 2010

Nominations for Best Insult of a Best Picture Nominee

I have no problem with the Academy’s choice to expand best picture nominees to ten this year. It is high-profile exposure for great films. Unfortunately, I’ve seen most of the just-announced ten and they are not great. A look at Metacritic’s assessment of Blind Side inspired me to highlight that site’s clearest critical insult of each nominee.

Avatar
“Avatar clears the hurdle in terms of being optical candy. Its story, though, is pure cheese.”
—Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News
The Blind Side
“…peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them.”
—Melissa Anderson, Village Voice
District 9
“It’s a bad joke that District 9 will be hailed for its ‘originality.’”
—Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun
An Education
“…a third-act tonal shift makes for an incongruous, excessively moralistic fit with everything that’s preceded. Most insulting, though, is the way in which the climactic passages miraculously tidy up every frayed edge of Jenny’s life.”
—Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York
The Hurt Locker
“Stretched both timewise and for plausibility.”
—Kyle Smith, New York Post
Inglourious Basterds
“The only hope for Inglourious Basterds is that audiences will embrace it the way the Broadway crowd did “Springtime for Hitler”: because it’s so bad they think it’s good.”
—Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun
Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
“In its eagerness to drag us through the lower depths of human experience, Precious leaves no space for the audience to breathe or to draw our own conclusions. For a film about empowerment and self-actualization, it wields an awfully large cudgel.”
—Dana Stevens, Slate
A Serious Man
“All the Coens come up with is a movie about bad things happening to limited people.”
—Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun
Up
“Save for a few inspired canine gags and a handful of very pretty visual details, Up left me cold. Its charms appear to have been applied with surgical precision; by the end, I felt expertly sutured, but not much else.”
—Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com
Up in the Air
“[Writer/Director Jason Reitman] feels the constant need to “deepen” his characters, granting them wants and motivations–especially during the moralistic third act–that are totally alien to how they’re initially portrayed.”
—Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

I’ll probably try to see The Hurt Locker and Up in the Air before the 22nd, but so far I’m not excited to call any of these films the best of 2009. The big winner this year might end up being The Baltimore Sun.

Categories: Blog, the cinematical

February 2nd, 2010

Eat: Mandoo Soup

Mandoo Soup

Mandoo Soup at Java Green

The best thing I ate this week was Mandoo soup at Java Green here in DC. The broth is flavorful, the dumplings are pleasantly plump, and a nice mix of vegetables and rice cakes (with perhaps a touch of sesame) round out the soup. Highly recommended.

P.S. Eat is the second in a series of series I think maybe I can possibly post to this space regularly. Eat will highlight the most delicious things I eat.

Categories: Blog, dc, the edible

January 28th, 2010

Viewing Habit: Moon = Fine

Moon poster

Moon = fine

My recollection of the trailer for Duncan Jones’ Moon deceptively had me believing that the film would be a long, drawn out contemplative work focusing on boredom and isolation in a mining shack on the Moon. I am a big fan of films about boredom. Instead, it turned into a tight little corporate dystopia flick. On the moon. Sam Rockwell was great. The film was enjoyable. Not enjoyable enough that I’d call it “recommended.”

Lesser films seen this week:

  • Vision = not recommended. Saw this as part of the Goethe Institute’s “Film | Neu” German language festival. Hopefully there were better films in the series. This story about a group of 11th Century nuns earning a tiny degree of liberation under the leadership of a charismatic absinthe-addict certainly offers an unusual historical setting. Unfortunately, the narrative is completely conventional.
  • Up = fine. Watched via Netflix because it figured prominently in respectable end-of-year lists. As a part-time curmudgeon who likes to travel, I identified with Carl. I just didn’t find this particular flying house adventure all that entertaining.

P.S. Viewing Habit is the first in a series of series I think maybe I can possibly post to this space regularly. “Habit” does not imply that each post will involve nuns. I will continue to rate films on my five point scale as either highly recommended, recommended, fine, not recommended, or highly not recommended.

Categories: the cinematical

November 30th, 2009

Wes Anderson Films

Wes Anderson Films

I’m happy to report that with The Fantastic Mr. Fox Wes Anderson seems to have turned things around. The chart above is probably a bit unfair, but his films have definitely had diminishing returns for me over time. I’ve always loved the aesthetic of his films, but I’ve been less and less patient with his stilted characters, relationships, and plots. Animation is a great match for his his visual language, and adapting Roald Dahl’s children’s book gives him a simple enough story to tell that falls in line nicely with the families and teams-on-a-mission he’s chronicled from the start.

Categories: Blog, the cinematical

September 19th, 2009

Is Julie & Julia the best food-activism film of the year?

Movie posters for Food Inc, Fresh, King Corn, and Julie and Julia

Movie posters for Food Inc, Fresh, King Corn, and Julie and Julia

I’m not going to defend Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia as Oscar-worthy when that season comes around, but I think it has an important lesson for Documentary filmmakers. Watching it made me a lot more excited about eating good food than any food-policy documentary I’ve seen. I’m thinking specifically of Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., Ana Sofia Joanes’ Fresh, and Aaron Woolf’s King Corn. With various degrees of success, each aims to educate Americans on the ills of industrial agriculture by weaving a storyline or four around an interview with Michael Pollan.

Julie & Julia does not mention corn subsidies or perhaps even the word organic. It simply tells two true stories about people who love food. It makes you want to go home and cook something wonderful in your kitchen. This is the radical action that the food docs (and Michael Pollan) aim to accomplish. If you get excited about cooking, it won’t be long before you start seeking out fresh vegetables at your local farmers market and learning about evil corn lobbyists.

Cinema (especially activist nonfiction) succeeds when it remains focused on showing through storytelling.

Categories: Blog, the cinematical, the political

August 3rd, 2009

Bringing it All Back Home: 140,000 Characters You Might Have Missed

Sally Grossman and Bob Dylan as featured on the cover of the 1965 Dylan album Bringing It All Back Home

Sally Grossman and Bob Dylan as featured on the cover of the 1965 Dylan album Bringing It All Back Home

Over the past couple of years my undying need to share with you, dear reader, has increasingly been occurring elsewhere. Facebook friends get updates targeted to a small audience. Google Reader users get shared articles and comment threads (links available on the front sidebar of this blog).

Both of these are indispensable in their own very specific ways, but the tool I turn to most often for sharing ideas and creative outbursts is Twitter. Easy mobile use and mandatory brevity have proven to be a powerful combination. As I near my 1,000th Tweet (née update) I’m realizing that a scary amount of my travel documentation, creative output, political commentary, and electronic shout-outs over the past three years have been taking place over there. Yes, most of these are nanostories of marginal interest given a few days’ (hours?) hindsight. Of the rest, I’m hoping a lightly-edited weekly Twitter digest will spark an occasional item of longer than 140 characters. If not, at least I’m archiving these ideas far from the reach of the hated fail whale.

Note: Many thanks to Alex King and his excellent Twitter Tools plugin for Wordpress.

Categories: Tweet Tweet, the technical

August 2nd, 2009

Weekly Twitter Digest for 2009-08-02

Fire tears through long-neglected building at 4th and Rhode Island NE. Photo via Eckington listserve.

Fire tears through long-neglected building at 4th and Rhode Island NE. Photo via Eckington listserve.

  • "In the Loop" = highly recommended. Thx to @youngamerican for excellent TSOYA with director. #
  • Preparing to dominate at Commonwealth pub quiz #
  • Porch status: gimpy chocolate lab #
  • Porch status: torrential downpour http://twitpic.com/bvfuh #
  • Veggie bibimbap from cart at 14 & L = recommended http://twitpic.com/bxlnv #
  • Porch status: muggy with vines starting to poke through the floorboards. #
  • I shot a man in Reno http://digg.com/d1ysK0 #
  • NextBus gave me just enough time to visit the new Chinatown Coffee Co. Intelligentsia beans! http://twitpic.com/c2o60 #
  • DDOT is now twitpic-ing accidents so you don't have to http://ow.ly/iBu3 (and yikes!) #
  • Pinkomag gets quite a tip, re: Obama's (alleged) birth: http://ow.ly/iC1Z #
  • @emilysaysso lots of variables. My commute is 20 blocks and = 15 mins. in reply to emilysaysso #
  • Long-neglected building on fire in Eckington, 4th & Rhode Island NE http://twitpic.com/c7dlm #
  • …fire is under control. Oddly, the Eckington listserve just had a thread about this building's tax debt. #
  • OBSERVED: Protagonist in Truffaut's "The Soft Skin" looks very much like @hodgman – This makes the film much zanier than it used to be. #
  • Wishing Sen. Dodd a speedy recovery http://ow.ly/iHXz #
  • Quality preventive care led to diagnosis. Expect Dodd to redouble his commitment to quality HC for everyone via @mbrownerhamlin @Taylor_West #
  • Orlando Cabrera to Twins? Interesting. Wasn't expecting any deadline deals. #
  • @Dave_WISC_olson Let's hope that's the difference between second and first! in reply to Dave_WISC_olson #
  • Lovely evening with Indian food and old friends on Baltimore rooftop. Waiting for the train back in to DC. #
  • Porch status: total silence alternates with extreme bass at intervals equal to those of left turn arrow at rhode island avenue #
  • @bigbearcafe Exciting! But I wonder how well those mixing boards will hold up to all those spilled cups of coffee. #
  • Mid-city cafe now open above Miss Pixies on 14th/R! Getting dizzy from all the new coffee options DC suddenly has. (h/t @bigbearcafe) #

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Categories: Tweet Tweet

July 26th, 2009

Weekly Twitter Digest for 2009-07-26

Web Design sign, Dupont Circle

Questionable approach to marketing. Found at Connecticut Ave. and Dupont Circle

Categories: Tweet Tweet

April 7th, 2009

Go-Go Spring Bounce ‘09

spring bounce

Apparently the President will be there. Another possibility is that Barack Obama clip art can sell anything. I’m buying my ticket now.

Categories: Blog, dc, the political