Drive. Third viewing. That elevator scene is still top notch. I’m a sucker for any movie that suspends time to drift into a moment just because. Oscar Isaac has some of the best casual menace in the game right now. Filed under: Drive.
Magic Mike XXL. My appreciation for it grows as time passes. It’s more aimless than the first one (which I really liked), and I think that “this isn’t gonna be like last time” shift is pretty obvious right away with the “Pony” solo. This one seems more gentle and… appreciative? Everybody learned some lessons over the years since the last one. Now it’s time to celebrate, honor that time, and move on. It’s a shame their crew only has like 1.5 decent dancers, but it kinda works. I really enjoyed KameronHurley’sseriesoftweetsaboutthe movie, which had me shouting in agreement. Filed under: Magic Mike.
Team America: World Police. A mixed bag. Some brilliant satire and some painfully juvenile stuff. Interesting to see things that were casually fun back then that just won’t fly today.
Three Colors: White. Second in the Three Colors trilogy. A dark and funny revenge (?) tale, with a little bit of shaggy dog thing going on. Another thumbs-up from me. I like when movies lull you into getting invested in a terrible protagonist.
Three Colors: Blue. On grief (+ separating yourself from it) and human connection (+ separating yourself from it). I dig it. It doesn’t play like a weepy melodrama because our lead is in such a shambles, she’s unpredictable and hard to read. Never gonna argue with a Binoche movie. This is the first I watched from the Three Colors trilogy.
I read a quarter of Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, and bailed. I’m pretty sure I won’t finish, anyway. Might grab it again later to make sure I’m not missing out. For now, on to the next.
Rationally, no one should be happier about a score of 96 out of 137 (70 percent) than 72 out of 100, but my students were. And by realizing this, I was able to set the kind of exam I wanted but still keep the students from grumbling.
To pluck some things from the list, while ignoring others, strikes many Buddhists as absurd. McMahan said, “It would be as if somebody went to the Catholic Church and said, ‘I don’t buy all this stuff about Jesus and God, but I really dig this Communion ritual. Would you just teach me how to do that bit? Oh, and I want to start a company marketing wafers.’
In a show that saw artworks exploding off the wall to form couture gowns, Viktor and Rolf created garments that exaggerated the balancing acts that lie at the heart of all clothing. On everyday clothing, common pattern shapes are regurgitated so that designers don’t have to deal with pesky things like gravity. However, once materials become harder, heavier or stiffer the ability to shape and control the structure of a garment to form extreme silhouettes becomes more and more important.
“You’re about to get an exclusive here,” Bonner said. “I hate to make excuses, I was raised to never make excuses, but I went through a two-and-a-half month stretch where I had really bad tennis elbow, and during that stretch it made it so painful for me to shoot I’d almost be cringing before I even caught the ball like, ‘Oh, this is going to kill.’ ” […] “Everybody is going to find this hilarious, but here’s my theory on how I got it,” he said. “When the new iPhone came out it was way bigger than the last one, and I think because I got that new phone it was a strain to use it, you have to stretch further to hit the buttons, and I honestly think that’s how I ended up developing it.”
Loved this essay from Clive Thompson. The part about exporting his marginalia into a little mini-book is very intriguing. And how compelling reading changes our habits:
The phone’s extreme portability allowed me to fit Tolstoy’s book into my life, and thus to get swept up in it. And it was being swept up that, ironically, made the phone’s distractions melt away. Once you’re genuinely hankering to get back to a book, to delve into the folds of its plot and the clockwork machinations of its characters, you stop needing so much mindfulness to screen out digital diversions. The book becomes the diversion itself, the thing your brain is needling you to engage with. Stop checking your email and Twitter! You’ve got a book to read!
“When you’re an actor, you can act on your own, but you kind of need to get hired. You need to be chosen. And when you’re chosen to act in something, the thing itself is already validated—it’s already real in some way. But for the most part, people who are creators—writers and directors—are always starting from zero. Nobody is asking them to make what they make. Every time you set out to create something from nothing that nobody has asked for, you feel the void more than you do in any other art form. I do, anyway. I’d never experienced that with a film before Frances Ha, where at first there was nothing, and then there was something because we made it. Frances Ha felt like I gave birth to it. And then I realized that that’s what you have to do on every single project for the rest of your life, if this is what you want to do.”
Reading Amazon reviews of MAGIC MIKE reinforces my view that it might be one of the most incredible acts of cinematic subversion of our time. Soderbergh tricked a bunch of horny Midwestern housewives into watching a super dark treatise on modern American culture by cloaking it in the trojan horse of a “sexy Channing Tatum movie” (and made a bucket of money while doing it).
FURY ROAD getting a bunch of bro’s to watch a dystopian, feminist revenge flick and SPRING BREAKERS tricking tween Disney fans into seeing a fucked up Harmony Korine neon fever dream are the other other recent examples that come to mind.
I read Lily King’s Euphoria, and loved it. A love triangle among anthropologists on assignment in the jungles of New Guinea! Loosely based on/inspired by the life of Margaret Mead, who seems fascinating after doing a bit of side reading. Finding lovely turns of phrase like this is one of the reasons I read:
One woman had bright gold hair, the other eyelashes like black ferns.
“I asked him, how does it feel when people say [Phil Jackson] won only because he had Jordan, Pippen, O’Neal and Bryant? He brightened. “Feels great!” he said. “I’m so glad I had those players. Made all the difference.””
When a series about a handsome and charming male stripper serves up two dud love stories in a row, you have to assume it’s intentional – that the films are genuflecting to the idea of including a “love interest,” but not trying too hard to make a convincing one, because it might interfere in with the films’ true, great, ongoing romance, between the audience’s eyeballs and Channing Tatum’s body.
Mark Larson 