The Secret of NIMH. I’d heard about it for ages, but this was the first time I’d seen it. Stumbled on a big-screen showing on a recent trip to San Francisco, and I figured why not? So much more funny and bizarre than I expected. I’m having a hard time imagining a similarly weird movie like this coming out any time soon. Refugee displacement, magic, biomedial ethics, eugenics, interspecies rivalry and cooperation, etc. I’ve been watching (slightly) more animated stuff lately, with good results.
Margin Call. “Be first, be smarter, or cheat.” Good ensemble corporate thriller. I don’t understand Kevin Spacey. Given the strength of this and All Is Lost, I guess I should get around to seeing A Most Violent Year. Other good movies about corporate crises: Arbitrage, Michael Clayton, The Insider, The Social Network, The Informant!.
The Cine-Files » THE TINNITUS TROPE: ACOUSTIC TRAUMA IN NARRATIVE FILM.
How—if at all—do increasing or changing representations of acoustic trauma articulate with changing notions of nation, security, and warfare? Tinnitus is the top disability in American troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and untold numbers of westerners have experienced it after terrorist attacks in New York, Madrid, London, and Boston. It does seem plausible that consequence-free cinematic explosions began to strain credulity (not to mention morality) after such attacks, even for those who have not directly experienced acoustic trauma. Tinnitus offers an economical representation of trauma in films that aspire to some level of realism and empathy—and in fact, researchers view tinnitus and PTSD as related. Could a nation’s trauma be sounding in the ears of its onscreen heroes?
Listen for follow-up questions, because when those dry up, that means your companion’s interest usually has, too.
When we talk about the 1970s for instance, they think about ABBA as one of the icons of the decade. They don’t know that ABBA at the time was considered to be extremely bad taste – vulgar and completely unfashionable. ABBA was still wearing platform shoes when everyone else had already moved on. What I mean to say is that it’s not always the best versions of the past that live on.
The Heart Machine. I liked it! Good movie about FOMO, longing, lies, relationship anxiety, and the going bonkers as a result of all that. Other highly recommended movies about technology and mysteries about the person you’re falling in love with: The One I Love, Her, Ex Machina, and Blade Runner. Apparently this is one of my favorite genres.
There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.
The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child’s books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are a series of smaller mysteries in the meantime, too, a new one appearing as soon as the last is resolved. J. K. Rowling is another master of this technique — Who gave Harry that Firebolt? How is Rita Skeeter getting her info?
The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes “Pride and Prejudice” so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions.
I’m kind of exhausted with food talk these days, so I almost skipped this interview. Glad I didn’t. It’s a great change of pace.
Farm products are not food; they are the raw materials for food. Turning plants and animals into something edible is just as difficult, just as laborious as farming itself. Very few of our calories come from raw, unprocessed food. And if those calories are from fruits and vegetables, then it’s only because centuries of breeding has made them less chewy, more tasty, and easier to digest. Cooking, which is one part of processing, went hand in hand with becoming human. Human food is processed food. And there are good reasons for this. Overall, processed foods are easier to eat and digest, more nutritious, tastier, safer, and longer lasting. The idea that any change made in the raw material is detrimental is just flat wrong. […] That we can talk about “A cake made from scratch” when the butter, sugar, and flour that go into it are are highly processed shows how we have lost awareness of the energy that formerly went into food preparation.
Mad Max: Fury Road. Ridiculously fun, and so refreshing. I do wish the dialogue were more intelligible. I would have killed for some subtitles or something in the first 10-15 minutes. Sneaky side-effect, though, is that it makes you dial in a bit more, and pay attention. On the other other hand, it doesn’t matter too much, though, as it’s a (very extended) chase film where the details don’t matter too much. (Made me think of Apocalypto in its relentlessness.) Furiosa joins a long, storied line of shaven-head heroines like Ripley, Lt. Ilia, LUH-3417, what’s-her-face in V for Vendetta, et al. Filed under: road movies.
The Loveless. Gotta admit I got really restless watching this one. Funny to see old fashion from yesteryear that’s still around today, but the cultural associations are so different. I love Willem Dafoe. Another willfully slow-paced and stylish movie with a hero on the fringe: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Easy Rider is a better movie focused on bikers. Can I count The Place Beyond the Pines, too? And yeah, Sherlock Jr. has one of the best motorcycle scenes you’ll ever see.
Blue Steel. It took me a while to realize I’d seen big chunks of this one before. Jamie Lee Curtis is a cop with itchy trigger finger issues, but she’s also in a frame and no one believes her! Interesting to watch this in the wake of The Thin Blue Line and see how easily cops are over-committed to their early suspicions and prejudices. Slowly catching up on Kathryn Bigelow films. She’s good.
On two strains of Greek narrative (economic and theological) that continue in modern science fiction storytelling. Good stuff. Filed under: Daniel Mendelsohn.
A reservation can cost up to $220 per night for a minimum two-night weekend stay in midsummer. Coffee delivered at your tent-flap is $9 extra. This is the worst thing to happen to public camping since poison ivy.
The Thin Blue Line. I appreciated it more for historical/influence reasons than for the viewing experience. Charles Musser’s Criterion essay helps put it into context.
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga. It tracks a year in the lives of Siberian trappers, mostly. Deep Russia is such a strange place. I’m both in love and terrified. Definitely want to see more Herzog, documentaries in particular. So far I’ve only seen Grizzly Man a couple times, and The Bad Lieutenant: Port of New Orleans.
I read Elmore Leonard’s Three-Ten to Yuma, and Other Stories because I really liked the old movie that was based on the title story. The others are similarly brisk and evocative of more than they say explicitly. This was a great fit with my current reading cycle. Some small tasty bits to shake things up between a couple longer ones.
Don’t You (Forget About Me) – A Tribute to 80’s Teen Movies. (via). So many formative feelings here.
A new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, and willow. The words introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player, and voice-mail.
The Secret of Kells. Gorgeous, but a little thin, story-wise. It focuses on Brendan, and hints at so many possibilities about creativity, religion, fear, duty, and so on… but only hints, and left me wanting more. Not sure there’s enough in here for kids, either, now that I think about it. Beautiful, though. I love that it embraces the frame and uses big chunks of the screen borders just for mood/decoration when it feels like it.
Mark Larson 