December 2010
24 posts
“This was the trouble with [smoking crack]. After the peerless joy of the aerial...”
– Stephen Wright, Going Native
“This is the difference between hiring college rock bands to do kid’s...”
– Chris Stangl
“Don’t think of it as a movie about the rich, famous and beautiful from the...”
– Karina Longworth on Somewhere, from her annotated Top 10
“[Spit takes] externalize an emotional reaction in a semi-abstract manner only...”
– Chris Stangl, Permanent Monday
“In some of those portraits Eystein had also resorted to a weird form of...”
– Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
“It’s like Donald and Goofy, right, and they’re out in a life raft,...”
– Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice. I was reminded of this game-changer by a presumably less stoned but equally funny Donald Duck observation from Glenn Kenny.
Based on a true story.
I ordered a Coke Zero for the first time and it tasted exactly like Dr. Pepper and the only way to find out if it was a Dr. Pepper or if Coke Zero just tastes like that is to order another Coke Zero at a later date. I think probably they gave me a Dr. Pepper by mistake because I tried Googling “Coke Zero tastes like Dr. Pepper” and got no hits but I’ve learned never to...
“Images that seem wrenched from the most visceral side of the director’s mind—a...”
– Richard Brody on Shutter Island, from his outstanding year-end list. Very glad to see Brody put this amazing film at #1.
“His misshapen body, that gray mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of his...”
– Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
“The bread man carried old bread out and brought new bread in. He squatted down...”
– Charles Portis, Norwood. I remember trying to stifle some serious lolz in the library when I came across this passage.
“Imagine a pornographic twilight zone of beebee-eyed serial killers, drug-stunned...”
– Robert Coover blurb for Stephen Wright’s novel Going Native, 1994
The Terriers finale got me thinking about Spike Lee’s 25th Hour again. It just occurred to me that what Truffaut said about the impossibility of making an “anti-war” film also holds true for prison movies, in a way. For law-abiding citizens, screen representations of prison — no matter how gritty or hellish — are about as real as Star Wars; we know we will never be locked up, so...
Thoughts on BLACK SWAN.
Though I had a blast with it, I can’t fully get on board with Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s follow-up and B-side to his masterpiece The Wrestler. The two films are linked thematically, stylistically and structurally, but are polar opposites in terms of tone: the earlier movie’s tragic humanist realism is here replaced by a spirited attempt at gonzo nightmare artifice. Which is...
Looking at Zoe Kazan: Images from THE EXPLODING...
Looking at Zoe Kazan. Images from Bradley Rust Gray’s The Exploding Girl, one of the best movies of the year:
Elephant Micah, “Detailed Cathedral” —...
“John Garfield played a criminal on the run who picks up Shelley Winters at a...”
– Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice, describing the 1951 film He Ran All the Way. In a piece on said film for mubi.com, Glenn Kenny noted that Pynchon got the quote slightly wrong: “Garfield doesn’t say ‘Ya gonna eat dis toikey,’ but, rather, ‘Cawve da toikey,’...