Synedoque, NY

This movie helped me regain my equilibrium. Well, this movie, the departure of my boyfriend for a week-long business trip, and landing a role I actually very much wanted to play.

When I was reading all the Pulitzers (I forgot I'd stopped - must restart reading of Pulitzers), I complained to my Father that every Great American Novel was about a white man going through a mid-life crisis. As a white man going through a mid-life crisis, he was not only unsympathetic, I think he might even have taken umbrage.

After seeing Synedoque NY, a film about a white man in a mid-to-whole life crisis, my frustrations with these topic have finally shifted. Women are most appealing as literary heroines when they are teetering on the brink of puberty. When I was 11, I was indomitable in a way I have never recaptured. It's exciting to read books about girls who are unbreakable, since most of us become so very fragile once we enter junior high. Just as prepubescent girls are fascinating for their strength, middle aged white men are mesmerizing in their fragility. These are the world's most privileged DNA strands, and to watch them lose themselves in a self-inflicted morass of loneliness, boredom, mania, fear, paranoia, bankruptcy, adultery, you-name-it-I've-read-it-in-a-Pulitzer does make for great fiction and one great, great film.

When I watch a movie or see a play, I have only one demand as an audience member. Surprise me. Once is all I really need. One minute of the unexpected will get me through the remaining 1 hour and 59, and might even make me feel like I learned something. Somehow, Charlie Kaufman's films manage to incite, not a drip or a trickle but an endless wave of surprise that builds builds builds like a massive intellectual orgasm, the rosy after effects of which I have felt for at least an hour after the films are over.

A surprise in theater can be almost anything, but the ones I prefer are the familiar, quotidienne moments made beautiful, unique, even unrecognizable through a shift in perspective. Kaufman builds layers upon layers of these twists in all his films, all the while anchoring us in a (somewhat) creditable story and characters, so that, by the story's end, everyone is hopelessly enmeshed in a horrific nightmare fantasy which still manages to provide the audience with a satisfying catharsis and denouement. During this film in particular, I marveled at the disconcerting familiarity I felt with some moments (this is what my dreams are like too! this is why I think theater is irrelevant and narcissistic too! that's what I was like as an actor too!) while at the same time feeling overwhelmed by the sheer weight of his invention.

I hope to never look at my overly-optimistic theater friends the same way again. I hope to never look at middle-aged men in the same way again. I hope to never forget this feeling of having been simultaneously plumbed to my depths and given the blueprint to the soul of a stranger.

Sarah Palin

As a rule, I shirk from angry tirades against our political figures. Too many Democrats take the problematic view that because they are "liberal," they hold a moral high ground. Let's not confuse being a Democrat or a Republican with being "good" or "bad." It makes for ugly cocktail parties.

That being said, I am...disappointed that Sarah Palin, a candidate chosen to win female voters, is so opposed to many of the policies and practices that women come to the United States to enjoy, and women born in this country feel privileged to exercise. I am insulted that the GOP and McCain would think women voters pliant and silly as to vote for a ticket with such a dangerous woman at its back.

For shame.

Price of a Rapier Wit

I don’t know how or when it started, but when we weren’t physically coming to blows, my sisters and I were always at least sparring. Dueling is more like it, because the tips of our tongues were tempered steel from age eight on, and we fought for blood. It was what it was, and we all survived in our way.

I emerged a warrior, and it has cost me. It has taken me years to realize how sharp and bright my rapier can be, and how deep its snicker snack can go. I don’t think I try to hurt people. Well, maybe I do. I don’t try to make them hate me is more like it. I mean, I do care about whether people have been hurt by me and hate me. But I love to duel. I love to clash swords, but I always assume that I will be met. That’s not true. I hate being met. I love…flesh wounds. Quick little stings that scratch and then retract, just enough to know who’s in charge here, mister, or at least that I am fully present and not intimidated by you, mister. I love to do this. It makes me feel huge and indomitable. I can feel the blade enter, and when I do it just right, it feels very, very good.

Of course, it’s difficult to judge how far a blade will go. And sometimes it goes much too far. I feel it go in, and if the flesh is too yielding or my force is too strong, it just keeps sinking in deeper and deeper, and all I can do it watch while the damage is irreperabley done. I have my kill, standing wide-eyed in front of me, blinking, not yet aware that it is dead. That we are dead. Or a part of us. A kill is a lonely triumph.

I'm Afraid

Maybe the voice of the Everyman has become a little too loud.

I'm fine with micro-demographics bringing back TV shows. I'm fine with insignificant people making videos in which they knee other insignificant people to the groin and then posting said videos in the public domain.

What I am not fine with is ordinary people affecting the lives of extraordinary people by making them second-guess their choices.

Who says that this is not a stunning and significant photograph? Not Vanity Fair. Not her family. Some soccer mom in Texas? No. 4 million soccer moms in Texas. And now, thanks to the internet, they all get to say so. And suddenly, a beautiful, candid photograph that makes useless teeny-bopper Miley Cyrus look like she might have something worthwhile to say someday about something (maybe) is what? Degrading? Exploitative? Please. That girl's life has not been her own for years now. Don't make her feel "embarrassed" for having a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz. Don't make her put "artistic" in quotes when talking about the photoshoot. Don't knock on the French windows of our Elite, middle America. And Elite, please please don't let us in.

As I See It: Hills v Obama

I heard this old crusty pack-a-day lady call Hillary Clinton as “mensch” at a post-Pennsylvania Primary party on NPR the other day. She was so happy and human, and yet so instinctually off-putting to me. And I thought…God, I am such an elitist. Maybe I should be supporting Obama. That’s what I DESERVE. Because honestly, the thought that this middle aged, probably-doughy, slouchy, mottled woman is as supportive of Hillary as I am was horrifyingly, uncomfortably, but unmistakably, like…repugnant to me.

PLUS, when I heard Obama say that stuff about po’ folks clinging to religion and guns I was like, “Right on, Obama. Maybe I DO want you to be my President if you’re going to actually say the stuff most of us silver spoon folks just think to ourselves all the time.”

I have a choice to make here. I mean, it's a choice that's going to be made for me in two months anyway, but due to my socio-economic background and age bracket, I've been feeling lots of pressure to reassess my personal position every second of every day. It's akin to the deep-seated compulsion I feel to repeatedly hit the refresh button on the Go Fug Yourself homepage.

Let’s get back to that lady. That $10.50 an hour lady is the key, I think. If I want to keep loving myself some Hills, I need to give that lady a hug. I need to throw open my arms and drink her in. Smell the cigarettes and the Bud and the stale sweat between the folds of flesh around her pink and white neck and just squeeze.

And honestly, I think that’s what I want to do right now. Because I have a feeling that to jump ship and love Obama, I might have to go kick that woman in the junk and run away cackling. And that just ain't right.

For Godsakes, People, Know Your Credit Crisis

I've found that NPR's Fresh Air, usually reserved for insightful interviews with the smart and famous, is also an excellent if unlikely well-spring of knowledge regarding the snowballing credit crisis.

If you have no idea what's going on with our current economic state or why, please start with Terry Gross's interview with Alan Greenspan:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14500893

and then proceed to today's even more illuminating explanation of the horrors of deregulation

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89338743

Just doing my part to spread the word.

Letter to My Boss's Boss

Dear Scott;

Thank you for scheduling this talk for our team. The SMS-Specific Circumplex in today's Corporate Culture meeting highlighted the most insidious source of unhappiness within our department, by showing that while we are rich in passive green, we are also high in aggressive red. This opposition seemed incongruous to me at first, but I believe I now have an explanation.

This email may be frank, but it is not intended to be bitter. I enjoy my job overall. I think you have probably heard from a very small sampling of people about their work experiences as SMSes, and I'd like to add my voice to theirs.

Members of our department work for an hourly rate and are expected to achieve a quantifiable product at the end of each and every day. We are not free to play video games. We are not free to attend extended informative meetings. We are not free to put people before the product. The product is King. I feel guilty just writing this email because surely I am "wasting time." The way in which we are monitored and assessed in our Portfolio performance and, newly, in our overall quarterly editorial output as well, only heightens the universal feeling that we are rats on a wheel, fighting each other for a way out.

But just as our daily work requirements can make us competitive and aggressive amongst ourselves, it also fosters a great deal of passivity. The same carrot is dangled in front of us day after day. We naturally fall into step with those around us, only doing as much as everyone else is doing, just keeping our heads above water. We don't want to do extra projects because we aren't allotted extra time for them. We don't want to elongate our meetings with questions or go to extra meetings because we have a certain number of things to do everyday and we are being monitored to make sure we do them. Such an environment does not foster creativity.

This would be all very well if everyone around us was in the same leaky boat. But they are not. We hear them playing darts and foozeball in the kitchen. There are people steps away from us who can come in at 11 and leave at 4 and make three times what we make and are intellectually engaged in their work everyday. Intellectually, we know why this is. We know we are just as smart and capable as they in our own fields. (Theater, music, literature, cuisine...) But it still rankles. I think it is this perceived inequity that is most disspiriting of all, exacerbating all the other problems and making us feel more overworked, more undervalued and less lauded than perhaps we really are.

I think our reticence as a department can make our internal politics a bit bewildering to people looking in. I hope my epistle helps in some small way to remedy this.

Sincerely,

My name

Juno!

This one is a little bit gushy. I guess that means it happens to everyone.

Romantic comedies are strange, amorphous creatures. Unlike other genres, their goodness or badness seems to hinge, at least for me, on how in or out of love one is at the time. This makes them almost impossible to judge objectively if one b) has a soul or a) is a woman. Being in firm possession of both b) and a), I feel obligated to inform my readers that I was in love when I saw Juno. Worse, I am in love with the person I went with to see Juno. Yep, he was sitting right next to me. I know, I know. It’s like saying you saw French Kiss on your third date with your current fiancé. OF COURSE you loved it. God. Get a room. Now that we’re all on the same page, I’ll continue.

I heard some people say that Juno was too talky, too smarty pants, too nobody-talks-like-that. True. No, true. Sure. No one does. Well, except for screenwriter Diablo Cody. I heard her on NPR. But no, yeah, valid. A whole town of people doesn’t talk in three-to-four syllable banter. Except on Gilmore Girls. But let’s not talk about that.

Basically, I don’t care. And no one else does either. Not Ebert, and not the Oscars. Why? Well, because Ellen Page, Jennifer Garner and Michael Cera are real people who we really care about, that’s why. I could give a fuck about the pitter patter dialogue.

We watch movies to see life in its best light. Moving pictures provide a forgiving veneer that makes every love story shattering and every death unforgettable. At least, all movies have this potential. And Juno does it. Juno takes first love, new love, young love, puppy love and reminds us how powerful and real and scary and….enormous it is, just as Shakespeare did in Romeo and Juliet. Yes, I just made that comparison and yes, it is that good. Maybe you need to be sitting next to someone who makes you feel…enormous in order to agree. But hopefully you just need to b) or a).

Spears for President

The "tragic downward spiral" of former teen idol Britney Spears dominated national news in 2007, and may well do so again in 2008. No longer the exclusive domain of gossip rags and E! news shows, talk of her exploits has insinuated itself into a broader arena. Britney supercedes, interrupts and is interwoven into discussions on a range of topics, from the Presidential race to the Iraq thingy to Iran’s nuclear capabilities to Jacques Shirac’s love life (shudder). Even people who couldn’t care less know more about her than they’d like to admit. Even my Mom has an opinion, and she’s…my Mom.

What the hell is going on?

One perky news anchor suggested we prattle on about Britney because she makes the rest of us feel normal. Wrong. Sit down for this. We care about Britney because Britney is normal.

Middle class Americans have been lied to all our lives. Every news organization, every politician, every plastic talking head has blithely lied to us since we were born. Everything will be okay. Trust us. Give us your money. Give us your time. Give us your sweat and your hopes and your dreams and we will spin it all into college tuition and cars and a home and a happy retirement for you. We are good. We will help you. Trust us. And we bought it. Well, most of did, and the rest didn't really have much of a choice anyway.

Until Britney.

Britney Spears is not crazy. Britney Spears is not stupid. Britney Spears has all the money she will ever need at 26. Britney Spears divorced her husband (whom she loved very much) and is desperately fighting a losing battle for custody of her two children (whom she loves very much). She put out a very good album about it last year. Her frustrations and fears are normal. She expresses herself like a normal human being. And she is pretty much the only Person of Note in America who does.

We consume Britney with such hunger because we are starved for truth. Why did Clinton win New Hampshire? Because she really cried real tears. Why is Huckabee doing so well in the Republican race? Because he really says things he really believes. He is also a fucking Nazi, but that is quite beside the point, isn’t it? Apparently.

And so, in lieu of Huckabee the Nazi, I propose that Generation Next launches a Spears for President campaign. Britney will not tell us what she thinks we think we want to hear. She will tell us the truth. Britney doesn’t know what do about Iraq, and she will say so. Britney doesn’t know what to do about the rising cost of health care, and she will say so. Britney doesn’t know how to pay for Social Security in forty years, and she will say so. Spears in 2009? Why the fuck not.

Eastern Promises

When I heard Terry Gross’s Fresh Air interview with Eastern Promises director David Cronenberg and lead actor Viggo Mortensen, I could tell that she had been unusually impressed by certain aspects of the film. This is high praise. After years of interviewing everyone who is anyone for NPR, Terry Gross is a pretty tough customer. But even her gushing did not quite prepare me for how good Viggo Mortensen would be in the film, or how fresh and original a scene they spoke of at length, a bloody duel to the death in a Russian bath, would appear on screen.


I lived in Russia for a total of three years. I lived primarily in Moscow, but did spend two summers in the island of Yuzhno Sakhalinsk, a far less European place. While there, I heard hundreds of English speakers stumble with Russian. I also met many unsavory mucky mucks, for whom I worked as an English tutor. Viggo Mortensen has somehow managed to not only speak Russian with a very convincing accent, but to embody the peculiar soulful emptiness of this tiny subset of Russia: the ruthless romantic affluent male. I am still wondering over it. Were this group a little more visible, more people would know what an incredible feat of transmutation he has accomplished. As it is…well, I know, and that’s something anyway.


Unfortunately for the film, Mr. Mortensen is too good. No one else is remotely convincing as a member of the London Russian mob. Not Frenchman Vincent Cassel, who plays the archetypal son and heir, nor Armin Mueller-Stah in the role of boss. Their bungled Russian and sinister leers would work fine without any competition, but as soon as Mortensen enters the scene, they look like actors trying to be Russian mobsters. Not good.


Naomi Watts does a very good job playing an English midwife who stumbles upon a secret, but she too is supposed to be half Russian, and that is absurd. Russian people have a very specific look. They have high cheekbones and almond eyes and, well you can just tell if someone is Russian. Only one person in this film actually looks Russian, a whore who makes good. That annoyed me.


In fact, the whole concept of the film, that David Cronenberg could pull back the curtain on
London’s most elusive mob, annoys me. They didn’t even know that Russian prisoners covered themselves in tattoos until Mortensen showed them a book about it. A book? It sounds like Mortensen was also the only one of the bunch to actually go to Russia. I mean really. I think Americans are too complacent about their ignorance of Russians and Russian culture. We think of Russians as second class Europeans, poorer and more religious and with less good food. They lie somewhere between the French and the Chinese on our Cultures We Don’t Get continuum. We don’t get the French just enough to know we should cast French speaking actors in roles, as Atonement did. We don’t get the Chinese at all, so we pretty much let Ang Lee cover it, as he did so well in Lust Caution. But Hollywood doesn’t even seem to try when it comes to Russian themes. And Russians know it. They watch these films. They know we don’t get them and don’t try to get them, even as they try harder and harder to get us.


My advice to Hollywood is this: slide Russia to one end of that continuum. Either cast Russians in Russian roles, or find a talented Russian director to do the dirty work for you. This is just not working for me.

Talkin Bout My Generation

There seems to be rising interest in this, my Generation Next. The online-only, network-quality, eight minutes-per-episode drama Quarterlife has made something of a splash despite being only mildy addictive and even occasionally silly. (It will be aired on NBC this spring, which sort of negates its whole appeal, but business is business and business must grow.) And now, as part of its ongoing series of stories on Generation Next, NPR has announced studies revealing that Americans between the ages of 18 and 26 are still not quite adults according to themselves, their parents, and the rites of passage generally associated with growing up. These not only include marriage, kids and a mortgage, but moving out and financial independence as well. Why? Are we just dragging our feet, or is there a method here?

My generation terrifies and fascinates me. When I think about all 42 million of us collectively, I despair. Forty two million young men and women just as tongue-tied, embattled, beset and directless as I? How will this fadge? I think all of we Gen Nexters, particularly the liberals, would agree that the big picture looks appallingly bleak. I don't know anyone in her twenties who thinks we will have Social Security to rely on in retirement, or who believes that our country will still be "Number ONE!!!" in forty years or even ten, always assuming we haven't all drowned an an apocalyptic maelstrom by then. But who's going to solve all that? Certainly not us. We are so paralyzed by fear that we can barely muster the strength to move out and pay off our college loans, let alone effect change. And yet these are our problems. Climate change will not be our parents' problem. The oil shortage is not our parents' deal. Globalization is not our parents' concern. The same parents who are coddling us now, who hold us so firmly to their ample bosoms now, do so with full knowledge that some day they will be gone and we will be stuck with a smoldering shit pile of a country and a world and it will be ALLTHEIRFAULT NOTOURSTHOSEASSHOLES. So what does Gen Next do in the meantime? The only thing we can do. We close our eyes, turn away and party like it's 1999. Old fogies of earlier generations think us shallow, spoiled and entitled. They aren't wrong. Gen Nexters from the upper middle class and up have had to go looking for need in order to find it. We were born in the midst of a long slow economic expansion that to our wondering child eyes seemed boundless as the sea. Our parents told us everything would be all right and we looked around and everything was all right, so we believed them. Can they really begrudge us our softness and frailty now?

That being said, I don't think most of are all that spoiled or lazy, at least not after we've lived alone for a bit and seen some of the world. What we are is running scared. Of course we're in the slow lane to adulthood, NPR! The weight of the world is quite literally on our well nourished shoulders. Our parents and grandparents rushed right into adulthood and look what it got them. THIS. If we're going to solve this shit, we're going to need all the extra time we can get. Don't begrudge us that, after all the crap you've pulled.

Atonement

A friend of mine just asked me if I would only be writing movie reviews on this blog. Probably not. But I'm watching movies right now. And so, without further ado...

I might be the one to cast the first stone when it comes to Atonement. So be it. It is a poor adaptation of a fairly good book and features a surprisingly misdirected performance by an almost inaudible Keira Knightley. I don’t understand the hype. Not at all.

As an actor in Seattle’s bustling fringe theater scene, I understand the difference between bad acting and bad direction. As someone who read the book, I understand what Atonement the novel did well and what it did not so well. I am a peon. I am baffled as to how so many polished professionals managed to make such a misguided movie in the first place, and how so many professional critics ended up falling all over each other to laud its mediocrity once it came out.

Atonement the novel is compelling because at some point in the story each of the central characters is given a voice. Ian McEwan has done this with uncanny empathy, particularly in his descriptions of Briony Tallis as a 13 year old girl and a 77 year old woman. I am rarely asked to care about female characters in either their early teens or their late 70s and I found myself surprisingly engrossed by the challenge. After the central plot line has run its meandering course, it is this device and not the plot which makes the book a page-turner.

The screenplay makes two mistakes. First, it chooses to focus on this rather thin storyline rather than the engrossing inner lives of the characters, which means the movie evaporates after the first half hour into a true-love-against-all-odds “I will return to you” type deal. Second, and this was surely also the director’s decision, it chooses to take a very detached point of view. We watch the movie not as omniscients or even interlopers, but through a pane of thick glass. This makes the story’s final twist, so shocking in the novel, rather uninspiring and even unnecessary in the movie.

Why have critics been gushing? Maybe because they didn't have as much time as I did to think things over. I must admit that I left the theater fairly content. I was very impressed with leading man James McAvoy, whom I had only seen as Mr Tumnus the Faun and who now seems destined for well deserved stardom. Ditto for Saoirise Ronan, the second very good teenage actress I have seen in a movie this year (the other being Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra in the Golden Compass debacle). Finishing off the film with a monologue by Vanessa Redgrave also helped to muddle my critical thinking skills for a good hour. But I just couldn't shake my disappointment with Ms. Knightley, and it was that discontent that led me to the truth.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

It is lovely to wrap oneself in a masterpiece every once in a while, especially a recent one. It is right and good to occasionally expose oneself to tangible proofs of mankind’s continued ability to reinvent the world from the bottom up. Dazed and weakened by months of stultifying platitudes from Presidential candidates without Stephen Colbert and others to serve it up funny, I had forgotten that artists still have an audible voice somewhere in our society. And then came December. Thank God for the Oscars. Art is still relevant for another few months thanks to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Yes, yes, the movie’s subject is startling, the acting is superb, the camera work is arresting and the American director had to learn French for the movie. Oh, and it’s on most critics’ short lists for Best Movie Of The Year. That was more than enough to get a snob like me in the theater and keep me there. But this is also one of the best movies I have ever seen, and here is why.

Most movies, indeed most Western dramatic works thanks to the Aristotelian model of playwriting, work hard to illicit an emotional response from their audiences. When they succeed, when the comedy makes us laugh or the tragedy makes us cry, the work is generally deemed good. When it fails, it is generally deemed bad. This constant pressure to feel what they would have us feel, even if that feeling is simply “Wow, this movie is so fun!” is something I often find oppressive, but it is also integral to the audience experience in the Western world and as such it’s part of why we come out in the first place.

About halfway through this film, I became conscious of a strange and wondrous freedom within and without me. I have not felt that way while sitting in a theater….well, ever, as far as I can remember, and it took me most of my walk home to figure out what it was. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly does not impose. It does not assume. It does not illicit. It does not decide. It is therefore not easily categorized by a genre. Despite this, it still manages to be gripping, moving, transfixing and most of those other words that we all bandy about in describing films that are much less than this one. A film in this day and age that somehow manages to change the rules? To me, that is genius. Enjoy.