Here’s a wonderful flash animation of Radiohead’s Creep, apparently animated by one lone fella (whose name I’ve forgotten).
By way of BoingBoing
Author: tedmills
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2001
Saying that The Corrections is a tale of a nuclear family coming together for one last Christmas–the father is slowly dying of Parkinsons–is like saying Ulysses is a story about two guys wandering around Dublin and only meeting in the evening. Jonathan Franzen’s amazing novel made me laugh many times, not just at his humorous turn of phrase, or his ability to cut to the heart of an absurd situation, but his absolute skill at jumping back and forth in non-linear time in a fresh way, of spinning the reader round until familiar situations and locations are rendered strange and wondrous. It’s a laugh at the deft slight-of-hand that he’s perfected.
The Lamberts were once a traditional Midwestern family, but their three children who have flown the coop, leaving a large, empty house, a mother who obsesses over Christmas and a father who is slowly losing his grip on reality. The eldest child Gary, is a successful businessman/depressed alcoholic with three kids and an awful, manipulative wife (Franzen gets in good digs at the generation of hassle-free parents raising sonofabitch children); middle child Chip is a failed professor and scriptwriter who is gamely hanging on to his youth and who leaves for Lithuania to join the dot-com revolution; finally, youngest daughter Denise is a famous chef whose sexual shenanigans have been a constant disruption in her life.
Each section of the novel is devoted to one of these five characters, but freely jumps about when it needs to. Although comic, it’s also tremendously sad, but not in a maudlin way. Characters have epiphanies, but are usually in no state to change anything. Or they continue on their merry way.
The novel brims with three-dimensional characters to such an extent that I started to dream about situations in the novel as if I was sorting out events of the past day. Even more peculiar, there is a scene in the last part of the book where Gary, staying in his childhood bedroom, has a late-night hallucination that he can’t leave the room because of the horror that waits for him in the hallway. He is forced to pee in a commemorative beer stein. It was only after putting down the book, falling asleep, and eventually rousing myself from a similar troubled non-sleep that I realized that the sequence suggests that Gary has the gene that is causing his father’s dementia (father’s basement, indeed, is full of empty coffee cans full of urine.) But it’s again to Franzen’s credit that he doesn’t signpost this foreshadowing. I mentioned this to my friend (who was the one to recommend the novel) the following day and he hadn’t caught it either. I suppose the novel would hold up to several rereadings, and Franzen seems to be making allusions throughout to the Chronicles of Narnia, among other things. But I can’t remember enough about the books to get it all.
I meant to highlight phrases that I liked, but I got into the book so much I just forgot. I will, however, leave you with the one I Post-It noted: “Soon they were engaged and they chastely rode a night train to McCook, Nebraska, to visit his aged parents. His father kept a slave whom he was married to.”
The novel is full of such turnabout sentences, and as such was a delight to read. Apparently, there’s much consternation over Franzen’s novel-writing style and/or his attitude to his characters. Just read the bloody book like I did.
(Check out this Franzen interview at Salon.com.)
Party Girl
Dir: Daisy von Scherler Mayer
1995
If it weren’t for Parker Posey, this film wouldn’t have much going for it, an irresponsible-youth-gains-maturity tale played out in a series of sketches. She plays Mary the titular party girl who lives day-to-day throwing rent parties in New York and waltzing around in fabulous clothes. There’s trouble in the opening moments where we’re not even shown how great these supposed parties are, before she is arrested for possession of a joint and sent out to get a real job. She does this by working for her godmother in a neighborhood branch of the NYC library.
There’s a lot of cutesy-cutesy running gags about the Dewey Decimal System and a rather bland romance with a bland Lebanese falafel vendor. A subplot, featuring Mary’s DJ roommate and his burgeoning spinning career, goes nowhere. As does a scene where they get in the shower together (she’s late for work, he jumped his place in line). They kiss and nothing happens. Too many scenes are like this, suggesting plot twists but dropping them by the end of the scene.
Apparently, the film has a minor cult following, which I suspect is based around Posey’s performance, which is always watchable, even though her character isn’t the most likable or her character arc that fulfilling.
(This was another random library pickup from their DVD shelf. Can’t win ’em all.)
Crazy Like a Sarcoptic Mangy Fox
Baltimore mystery animal case solved! It’s a mangy fox.
Baby Mystery Animal Caught, Identified
The mystery may be over as one of the creatures roaming through central Maryland was finally captured on Saturday.
According to the veterinarians at Falls Road Animal Hospital, the animal was a male red fox. However, Dr. Michael Herko — a vet at the animal hospital — and the man who caught the fox say it is not the mysterious creature videotaped in July, but a relative.
The Bourne Supremacy
Dir: Paul Greengrass
2004
I liked the first Bourne movie, despite not being the biggest fan of Matt Damon (although “Gerry” was also good (and completely unseen)). This sequel hurries along at a good clip, keeps its twists and turns to a minimum, and generates enough excitement to qualify it as a decent summer movie, but the film doesn’t do as well under the director Paul Greengrass (“Bloody Sunday”). He comes from the “chased by a bear” school of action shooting (nods to Paul Tatara), and the car chase at the end is completely incomprehensible despite the hero and villain being in different makes of cars. Previous director Doug Liman knew how to move the camera through space and how to simulate weight and movement. Greengrass just shakes the camera a lot. He was hired because of his newsreel/verite style of his previous film, but placing a camera near the wheels of a car is not verite, unless you are just about to be run over.
Typically dark, blue and grey cinematography (even in the isle of Goa sequence) by Oliver Wood, which becomes quite dull to look at. Fortunately, the script isn’t too dumb, and violence comes sudden and silent. It also helps to have Julia Stiles in it, reprising her role as a CIA op, primarily because, well, I think she’s cute. Nice scarf/jacket combo, miss!
Fahrenheit 9-11
Dir: Michael Moore
2004
No, I haven’t just watched Fahrenheit 9-11. I caught it opening weekend, and I’ve been making return visits since. Most recently, I took my dad to see it (he’s sort of a reformed centrist. When we lived in England he got the Telegraph and the Daily Mail. I’m not too sure if he realised they were Tory papers.)
It was a 1 p.m. showing on a Thursday, and the theater has about 20 people. Instead of the whooping laff-fest of opening weekend, laced with jeers and screams (the appearance of Britney Spears after the horrific Iraq footage prompted a Yamataka Eye-style evisceration from the front row), there was studied silence which later broke into laughter around the time of the “fear of terrorism” segment. And the film still earned applause at the end (which is rare when there’s few in the audience). In the lobby afterwards, one elderly lady was in tears and being comforted by her daughter. Blimey.
It’s still a powerful movie. Whether or not its main function–to toss Bush out of office–succeeds, we won’t know until November. But it also serves in other ways:
* Doing the job of what journalism used to do: making connections, pointing out hypocrisy, showing the President unedited.
* Pushing the meme of Bush’s “seven-minutes-in-a-classroom.” To many of us on the left we knew of this for a long time. But a majority of Americans didn’t, and Bush lied when he told his version of things (he was active, decisive). Watching a bit o’ CSPAN last night, I watched a voter roundtable of calmly talking Americans, all with different views, but all pretty centrist. And the “7 minutes” meme is among them, mentioned and not disputed.
* Reminding us, as documentaries have to do every now and then, that war is hell. But I would say that it’s the American public who have done the best job of telling themselves that war is not about your friend’s guts exploding everywhere but video-game point and click fun stuff. Sure, the Armed Forces ads look like promos for adventure camp (the one with jet skis is a hoot), but how stupid are you to think that’s what the army is? Isn’t this part of our culture-wide arrested adolescence, of how we’ve taken on the teenager’s faith in our own immortality?
* If not creating a new style of documentary, he’s cemented his style as a new genre. It’s not confessional, like Ross McElwee, but it is polemical, up to date (due to digital technology in editing), and appropriates the mass media to explode its methods. Oh yeh, and documentaries can be funny, too.
So far, the only fair criticism I’ve read of the facts (as opposed to Moore’s patriotism, etc. etc.) presented in the film is over at Juan Cole’s blog, in which he smooths out the rather convoluted Saudi-Bush connection. I’m glad Moore gets all this in the movie, but due to pacing, he has to compact enough info for another film into a short segment. It’s not that he plays fast and loose with the truth, but what are actually separate episodes of BushJunta awfulness (the coddling of the Taliban regime, the Karzai-Unocal pipeline connection, the Bush-Saudi conneciton, the Carlysle Group), appear in the film as a linear tale (at least when I watched it this time). And there isn’t time to sit and wonder if that actually makes sense.
Moreover, if it is true that the Saudis have so much invested in this country, then it makes no sense for wealthy Saudi entrepreneurs and governing figures to wish the US harm. Can you imagine the bath Saudi investments took here after 9/11? The Saudi royals and the Bin Ladens lounging about in places like Orlando, who were airlifted out lest they be massacred after the attacks, didn’t know anything about the apocalyptic plots hatched in dusty Qandahar, and if they had they would have blown the whistle on them with the US so as to avoid losing everything they had.
The Saudi bashing in the Moore film makes no sense. It is true that some of the hijackers were Saudis, but that is only because Bin Laden hand-picked some Saudi muscle at the last minute to help the brains of the operation, who were Egyptians, Lebanese, Yemenis, etc. Bin Laden did that deliberately, in hopes of souring US/Saudi relations so that he could the better overthrow the Saudi government.
The implication one often hears from Democrats that the US should have invaded Saudi Arabia and Pakistan after the Afghan war rather than Iraq is just another kind of warmongering and illogical. There is no evidence that either the Saudi or the Pakistani government was complicit in 9/11.
But, of course, it’s usually only “us liberals” who get our panties in a bunch over the intricacies of facts and figures. The BushJunta and their propaganda ministers over at Fox just plain out lie. (However, for a long-ass breakdown of the facts from the right, you could do worse than check out Dave Kopel’s site. See how “fair and balanced” I am? Wow. (Gun rights activist Kopel goes overboard–as is typical–and enters “Moore is a terrorist symp” territory near the end. Yeh, yeh, yeh. Okay, we get it.))
Moore has posted his own footnotes to the film over at his own site.
Finally, it is a very patriotic film, even nationalistic in its exclusion from the film anything to do with the worldwide protests or (apart from two mentions) the Blair government’s role in cooking the Iraq books. But as I said to Jessica, it’s only in America would such a film get made and released during the administration it was criticizing. When I asked her if such a film would be made in her country (revealing the nefarious dealings of Chen Shui-bein and released before his next election) she said “the filmmaker would probably be killed.” When you see the slugfests they have in Taiwan’s parliament, I have no doubt she’s right.
So cheers to Michael Moore, and here’s to sticking it to Bush.
Also, is anybody going to ever take to task the Democrat members of the Senate for not signing the Black Caucus’s complaint letter, as seen in the beginning of the film (one of the few events in the film that I didn’t know about)? How do they justify it? And how do they sleep knowing that a little bit of bravery could have saved this country from four years of savagery?
Dear God, What Have We Done?
For years, women have been asking men to be more sensitive, communicative, more emotional. Now all the young dudes are like that and it’s driving the single women nuts! This funny article from the NY Observer is a discreet lesson in “watch out, you may get just what you wish for.”
Glaringly obvious
Here are some sites that I often use, but I’ve never linked to because I assume people know them. I must have forgotten the “ass out of U and me” ur-Prince adage.
Snopes should be in everybody’s bookmarks. A one-stop-shop for Urban Legends, Snopes is up to date on the latest hoaxes. When I get a forwarded email from a friend of a friend of a friend saying “George Bush called fetuses ‘feces’ in a speech” or “Tom DeLay eats children,” I go to Snopes, no matter how much I’d like to believe it. (The latter is absolutely true, however). Snopes also tells you if something is true, with references. I then copy and paste and email the forwarder back. The madness must end!
I just started using Phil Gyford‘s revamped Internet watcher called Byliner. A simple and effective free service, it allows you to track your favorite writers across the web. Find a writer through Byliner’s search engine, subscribe, and then receive emails when that writer has posted a new piece. Obviously this works (as it was designed to) best with newspaper columnists. You can have up to 30 writers on that list.
(Update: As of 2008 Phil Gyford discontinued Byliner.)
I’m also surprised at the people who don’t know about the Internet Movie Database, even people who are obsessed with films. This has been around since the beginning of the Net (I think). Time ya got with the program.
Oh, and brand new is my friend Rachel Howard’s web page and blog. She’s come a long way since our days at the Independent, and now has a book coming out next year, as well as a steady gig as a dance reviewer. I write on dance too, but she knows far more than me. She use big words too. Ugh.
TMBG Meets Homestar Runner!
I don’t know how recent this is, but They Might Be Giants have teamed up with Homestar Runner for a music video. Guest appearances by Homestar Runner, Strong Bad, and Strong Mad. Um, and if you don’t know of it already, we all love Homestar Runner!
The Cocoe Conspiracy Headquarters (TCCH)
Here’s what you can do with After Effects, the always helpful Prelinger Archives, and a good deal of talent. A secret history of the Cocoe Conspiracy. Quictime Movie, 20 mb download.
By way of Tween