Happy Fez Day

If you haven't already seen it, check out An Idiot Abroad. Originally aired in Britain, this Ricky Gervais produced travelogue sends a clueless schmuck around the world. As they say, hilarity ensues. It's airing now on the Science Channel. He does often rock a fez, though, so there is hope for him.

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Originally uploaded by jimread99

Happy Birthday, EAP! It seems somewhat appropriate to honor the poet with his original gravestone.

Angel-a

Angel-A

Why is it that movies about angels almost always suck? Even the best of the genre, a classic like It's a Wonderful Life, is best when the 'angel' isn't on screen (and by the way, give me Potterville over the sappy Bedford Falls any day of the week. No wonder Jimmy Stewart wanted to get the hell out of that place!). All of which brings us to the movie I watched on the treadmill this week, Luc Besson's (the Fifth Element, Transporter 1, 2, and 3) Angel-a. Besson's best work has paired frenetic action and quick cuts with thumping Europop, creating a instantly recognizable style. Angel-A deviates from this style. It's more of an homage to New Wave directors like Godard or Truffaut, and the occasional music that is in it is mostly distracting and more traditional. Paris looks gorgeous filmed in b&w, and the physical difference between the two stars, Jamel Debbouze (the Arabic grocery boy in Amelie) and Rie Rasmussen is heightened by the use of b&w. I couldn't take my eyes off the two of them, which is a good thing, since nearly every scene focuses on the pair. It's a visually impressive film, and if you feel like you've seen the plot before (including the ending), you'll forgive it because of the stylistic flourishes--and because it's so damned short. I didn't make it through two days of treadmilling before finishing the movie. This isn't a deep or thoughtful movie, and like most angel movies it treads closely on the line of being maudlin, but it's good to see Besson try something out of the ordinary (for him).

Paris, the Movie

Haven't posted for awhile, but now that I'm back in my routine (teach all morning, watch movies while working out at the gym at noon), I'll get back into this. I had low/no expectations for this movie. Name a movie after a city, and you usually end up with a travelogue of pretty shots and minimal plot. I was happily surprised by this movie. Binoche, as usual, offers a performance that suggests more than the words her character utters. Mélanie Laurent (of Inglorious Bastards fame) steals scenes, but the real heart of this movie (pun intended) is Romaine Duris, the (perhaps) dying brother. Like Crash did (less successfully) several years ago, this movie follows three seemingly disparate subplots through Paris (but much less preachy than Crash, and when they do intersect, it doesn't seem quite as forced as in that movie). Paris isn't the star here, until the final scene (I'll leave it there), but instead it's the stage where three stories develop. Not Citizen Kane, but a hell of lot more entertaining and moving than I expected. 

Take a look at my new book

After two+ years, I've (sort of) published my book on the Paris Metro. Check out the etext at Lulu:

The Road and A Serious Man

I've been knee deep in grading finals research papers, so this is the first post in quite awhile. During the last week I treadmilled my way through two seemingly disparate works: The Coen Bros. A Serious Man and Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road. What brought the two together for me (other than the happenstance of choosing them on the same week) was the ending of each. And Cormac McCarthy, in a way, since he also wrote the novel that the Coen's based their last (and better) movie on. Each left me in a state of befuddlement, wondering what was going to happen next. I generally like works that end this way, as they send me back to the texts and ask me to keep thinking about what I've read. Still, I think one ended much more successfully than the other.

I really wanted to like A Serious Man. The Coen's have made some of my favorite movies, including the best American movie of the 00's (No Country for Old Men), the best movie ever based on Homer (Oh Brother, Where Art Thou), and my favorite movie of the last 20 years (The Big Lebowski). Like those other movies, there is subtle, bent, and occasionally slapstick humor in A Serious Man; but it all comes in the last half an hour. The movie felt like a a story where the storyteller takes so long to get to the punchline that you lose interest. The best moments are wonderful (Grace Slick as the oracle of wisdom? The incongruous opening scene?), but I was left, like Gertrude, wanting "more matter and less art." Very much a retelling of the Job story, this one suffers because we're not sure why the universe wants the main character to suffer. I never liked the Job story anyway--god's got nothing better to do than screw with a poor schmuck because of a bet with the devil? Works better with rich guys in Trading Places that with divine beings. Back to the movie. Best moment: finding out the consequence of changing a student grade. The movie looks great, takes forever to develop, and leaves you wondering wtf? when a tornado comes along at the end to conveniently undo everything. Or not. Too much like an inside joke or a story that doesn't come together, and you know it's storyteller's fault that it didn't come together.

McCarthy's novel also leaves the reader wondering just what the ending suggests. After wandering around in a post-apocalyptic world made palatable only because of the father/son relationship, the novel ends by asking us to consider if our point of view had been wrong all along. Would the boy have been better without his father? Should they have stayed moving on the road? Who does the boy meet at the end? I don't like most modern fiction, but I have enjoyed rediscovering McCarthy. I'd read All the Pretty Horses years ago, and when No Country came out I worked my way through most of his novels. Good stuff. The typical cliches are that his prose is uncompromising, and his vision poetic and mythic. I won't disagree with the cliches here. Good stuff. Not Faulkner, but he's leaps and bounds above most of the rest of the modern shite I've read lately. I can't imagine making a good movie out of it (too much interior monologue, not enough action) and am sure they mucked it up, but I've got it on the Netflix Queue and will be treadmilling with it soon. Unless of course the world blows up and I'm left to get my exercise by running away from cannibals and the scarred detritus of our world.

Oceans: Tastes great, less filling

Ok, this wasn't on the treadmill. For Mother's Day we all went to see Oceans at the local indy theater. If you're not familiar with the movie, it's the latest nature porn from Canal+, right out of the Jacques Cousteau/March of the Penguins mold. It was undeniably beautifully filmed, the kind of movie that you smile at the whole time you're watching it. My first impulse was to get out the scuba gear and book a trip in warmer waters (nowhere near the gulf coast, mind you.) Afterwards you think about how banal the anthropomorphism is or how the voice over added nothing at all to the gorgeous images. Why don't directors ever make these nature pictures without narration? The images certainly should speak for themselves. Seeing the movie also made me think about the futility of good-intentioned nature films like this. We're a generation raised on nature movies, yet as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico demonstrates, we haven't learned a damned thing. Just two years ago our presidential election debate on energy policy gave us the choice between "drill baby drill" (how's that look now?) and meaningless empty verbiage. Not surprisingly we still don't have a coherent national policy on energy. Industry can't self-regulate--it's purpose is to make money--and the government can't get its regulatory acts together. The only good thing to come out of all this is that our own governator has stepped back from his support of drilling off the California coast, a lesson we learned after the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil spill, but had forgotten in the space of one generation. So my review of the movie? Makes me cranky. Seen it before. We're a slow learning people.