I’ve noticed a rash of websites lately that cater to the harried film buff (who may not have time for the kind of review Pauline Kael cranked out–the kind that takes longer to read than the movie takes to watch…or perhaps film) by turning film reviewing into a lapidary art: Four word film reviews, Haiku movie reviews, and Movie-a-minute. The review for Dr Strangelove perfectly summarizes both the movie and this approach to criticism: “Oops.”
Time was I thought that blogging was cool, in a geeky sort of way. Not anymore, now that Barbie has a blog. So do Madison and Chelsea. It’s official–blogging has been co-opted by the pernicious powers of mediocrity.
Via BoingBoing, via ishbadiddle
Saw Auto Focus last night. A good movie, but very emphatically not a bring-the-whole-family movie: I mentioned to Gwen midway through “we’ll need to bathe as soon as this is over.
The bizarre story it tells, of Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane’s descent into an obsession with random sex and (ahem) home movies, and a relationship with a friend, John Carpenter, that can only be described in the psychobabble of today as “co-dependent,” is disturbing and absorbing. The complete disconnect between Crane’s self-image and his behavior is fascinating.
It’s a Paul Schrader movie, unmistakably so. He’s one of those directors you can just recognize by the look and the subject matter. In his case, dark, stylized lighting and strong colors. And dark, often sexualized stories.
Another way George II’s upcoming war really feels like a sequel to George I’s gulf war: I was in traffic today, behind a new SUV with a yellow-ribbon sticker that had the attached text “Support our troops.” This definitely wasn’t a leftover from the last gulf war–it just looked like it.
Caught a performance by an Indian drummer named Ganesh above the Clay Pit last night. Some of the usual suspects were there, including Adina. Ganesh was playing a tiny handheld drum–smaller than a tamborine–that produced uncannily deep, liquid sounds, somewhat like a kettle drum. I believe it’s called a kanjira. It was a good show, and despite the Indian connection, it was really more of a jazz improv session (they even played Billie’s Bounce, I think it was).
There’s a truly hilarious website out there, blackpeopleloveus.com. It satirizes a quiet and unintentional sort of racism sometimes found in white people.
Evidently, not everyone gets it. And some people who do get it feel that racism is too serious to make light of (violating my personal prime directive, “fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke”). The site has gotten enough public attention that it was featured on ABC’s Good Morning America.
Take a look at the ABC page discussing this–it doesn’t actually link to the site (though it does give the URL, so you could get there), and at the bottom, the page has a feedback form which starts off with “Now that you’ve heard about blackpeopleloveus.com, we would like to know what you think.” Note that they are subtly discouraging you from actually checking the site out for yourself, and encouraging you to treat the ABC writeup as the only source you need–to make decisions and offer feedback based on incomplete information when the source is right under your nose.
They just don’t get it.
I’ve been seeing a lot of ads lately for a videogame called Desert Storm: Conflict. Although it putatively is a simulation of the 1990 Gulf War, is it clearly intended as an anticipation of the upcoming Gulf War, Episode II. Cashing in on war fever with a videogame? There’s something about this that strikes me as wrong, wrong, wrong. And weird.
Microsoft Word is legendary for its awfulness. This is not news. But I just ran across a quirk so funny that I had to stop working on my tight-deadline job and blog it.
I’ve got auto-correct turned on. I’m zipping along and type “arcana.” Word corrects it to “arcane.” That’s odd–I couldn’t imagine that there would be an arcana/arcane pair in the auto-correct dictionary. And there isn’t. But there’s another feature (that can be disabled, fortunately) that will auto-correct based on the regular spellcheck dictionary. Apparently that dictionary doesn’t include “arcana” but does include “arcane,” and the spellcheck algorithm decided the latter was the only viable candidate to replace the former. So it did.
Here’s where it gets funny. Word also includes a regular dictionary with definitions–the whole works. Arcana is in that dictionary. Go ahead, make jokes about one hand not knowing what the other is doing, the insane redundnancy of two different word lists, etc. I’m with you.
Saw the Mr Sinus treatment of Crossroads last night. No, not the one with Ralph Macchio, the one with Britney Spears.
As usual, they did a fine job. Of course, with this material, their job was like shooting fish in a barrel, but nevertheless, I was in tears from laughing so hard.
A couple of recent news items about China have intrigued me. NPR reported that a stage adaptation of Animal Farm is showing in Beijing (audio link). And a Chinese national who has spent much of his life in America but recently returned to his hometown, Shanghai, reflects on how much things have changed there.
It seems amazing that Animal Farm could be showing in China. But the story makes clear that while the older generation found it moving and relevant, the younger generation just didn’t get it–perhaps because they were all busy sending text messages to their friends on their cellphones during the play. The story in the NY Times is even more astounding:
I listened to my 14-year-old cousin sing rap in Chinese about the fantasized martial arts, jiang hu. When I asked him about Chairman Mao, he gave me a blank stare, just like teenagers in Harlem had when I inquired about Malcolm X. “Who is Mao?” my cousin asked. “They might have mentioned him in school, but I didn’t pay attention.”
If nobody except for politicians care about politics, then everyone else will leave the politicians alone to do…whatever they want.
Is it possible that China’s political class has secured its future by making the citizens fat and happy, and pretending that it is irrelevant? Is it possible that the same thing has happened in the USA?