Cold Weather

I might expand this review at some point, because I wrote it in kind of a rush and it's not really saying everything I meant to say, but I wanted to get it posted before the weekend. Short version: if you like good stories, and looking at pretty things, go see Aaron Katz's new movie at Cinema 21 this week.

Update: In hindsight, that short version sounds like I'm writing off the movie as some merely nice-looking entertainment. Instead I think I'll add this, which was halfway down a page I swear I just opened to at random, cruising a bookshelf for something anything a minute ago -- it's John Berger, talking about movies, and maybe it's a little on the heavy side but I think it fits okay:

"No other narrative art can get as close as the cinema to the variety, the texture, the skin of daily life. But its unfolding, its coming into being, its marriage with the Elsewhere, reminds us of a longing, or a prayer."

pretty good weekend

Fortunately, most of the antics this weekend were not recorded. But here's a sample of what can happen when you go off into the mountains with fifteen guys, a stack of wood, some gasoline, beer, light weaponry and no sign of authority whatsoever. Mom, don't worry, that cooler felt totally safe:

Our main task for the day was to build a ropetow system powered by motorcycle to get us and our ski bikes and sleds up the opposite hill. (Couple of photos posted at www.sang-froidridingclub.com.) In an exciting and unexpected twist, it actually worked. Later there was a bit of combat grappling, and as anyone knows who has seen me recently, I got socked in the face with a couch during some kind of dogpile, which I probably instigated, but really my only regret was failing to take a photo of the hot tub at its man-filled peak Saturday night. Never seen a spectacle like that before and I don't expect to forget it anytime soon.

Onward!

movie stuff

I posted a couple of movie notes on the KBOO site today. Sorry about the formatting, I lack the patience to fix it. Today was also the monthly Movie Talk half-hour. Check it out if you like. I really wish I could go see Rubber and Outrage at PIFF After Dark this weekend! I hope they come back - I'll be in Sunriver, bonding with sixteen motorcycle guys and shooting stuff and riding bicycles with skis for wheels, apparently. (Maybe we'll film it, for posterity.) Anyway. Go see them if you live in town - I want this late-night PIFF thing to continue.

Whatever you do, though, don't go see The Last Circus, unless you sneak a sharp object into the theater and can use it to immediately jab out the parts of your brain that store damagingly awful images of really stupid shit that no one needs to see ever. Stupid and ugly and weird and gross and TOTALLY not funny and just effing ridiculous. And I like weird! I even like stupid sometimes. But this was just pointless, like a migraine externalized and projected. I can't remember ever being so full of rage and scorn in a theater before. I can't even think about it long enough to explain in detail why I hated it so much. Who thought it was a good idea?!? Maybe other people liked it. A few behind me were laughing, but I think it was that hysterical laughter that seizes you uncontrollably at inappropriate times, like during funerals or while witnessing horrific accidents, right before the men in the white coats come and take you to a safer place. Damn it. I was in a really good mood today, too.

the rusty rocket gets some love

Jack's pet project appears today in the cool bike blog Bike EXIF. It's even prettier in real life, and it goes! Good work, fellas!

where there's smoke

Hell for Leather covers the One Motorcycle Show - you have to subscribe to read the whole thing, but I think you can get a day pass for cheap.

sometimes it's like that

Oh. My. God. Cutest thing I've seen all week, and I spent sixteen hours surrounded by motorcycle dudes, for cryin' out loud.

the one show

It's today!

something old

I've been sifting through half-finished pieces of writing in search of something to read at the One Motorcycle Show storytelling thing tomorrow night. Still not sure what I'll bring, but I did find this, which seems relevant even two years later, despite a few altered details (my apartment is kind of huge now, for example, and my couch is from IKEA - gross). It's kinda wordy and ponderous. And it has the feel of an argument I'm trying really hard to convince myself to buy; I'm not at all sure anymore that it's so dangerous to own things.

But still.

Well, anyway - have at it.

In Defense of Immaturity

I've lived in the same tiny studio apartment for years. In the kitchen there is a single spoon, one knife, one fork. The first time my mother came to visit, I told her she had to bring her own set of utensils. She also had to provide her own towel, washcloth, pillow and blanket. "I never want to own more than what I can fit in my car," I explained to her, as we sat cross-legged on my floor drinking wine out of rinsed-out jam jars. (She never complained.) Years later I sold the car, and my rigid aesthetics instantly softened. Without a physical limit on their number, possessions creep up on you. They fill the space allotted.

Most of the things I have - a coffee-stained Pier 1 loveseat made of foam, a creaky chest of drawers, two chairs, a few lamps - were thrust upon me by a family friend who was cleaning out her basement. I didn't ask for them. But the weight of ownership can be seductive. Before long, the chairs needed a desk, the lamps called for end tables, the couch demanded an ottoman.

An ottoman! Ten years ago I didn't even know what that word meant. It sounded exotic (presumably Turkish?), like some variation on the humidor - a decadent contraption safely confined to the adult world. At the time I was 27, arguably in the adult world myself. But I was committed to the principle of immaturity, all stubborn and pure in my insistence on childish things.

I'm still committed, but these days it's more complicated. Immaturity now strikes me less as a character trait than a position staked out. I'm not alone in defending it; most of my social circle cultivates a studied immaturity. In the '60s, people dropped out of the grown-up world; these days, we opt out. We don't like the rules, so we refuse to play the game. By this age, one should have made certain adjustments to one's lifestyle: acquired a mortgage, a mate, some manners, possibly even a regular job. I, on the other hand, live in a garret furnished with castoffs. I date boys in their twenties, and never for long. I don't know how to walk in heels or wear lipstick. Formal dinners terrify me. I don't have a retirement account; most of the time I barely have a checking account. My work entails whole days of reading comic books or watching movies and writing about them. I also write travel guides, which allows me to leave the country for several weeks every few months - a handy way to escape unwanted social entanglements.

What this sounds like, even to me, is a blatant shirking of responsibility, a cowardly refusal to grow up and do one's share. But the kind of immaturity I'm talking about is both more difficult and less silly than it seems on the surface. I know this because I'm constantly on the verge of losing it. The firm conviction I held at age 27 is, ten years later, more like an inclination, fragile and under assault. What immaturity really means is resistance. (Resistance to what, exactly? To the anaesthetized trudge of most of the world, to resignation, to just getting through the day.) And resistance is the one thing people get worse at the more they practice it. The world pushes in on you, on all of us; there's a tremendous pressure to take part, grow up, behave. It was easy to ignore this pressure when you were still the age at which everyone expects you to rebel. It gets exponentially more difficult as you get older, as the number of your allies shrinks and the awful machinery of commerce roars in your ears and the spectre of unrelieved struggle lurks ahead. Resistance tires people out. Sometimes you just want something soft, some easy luxury; you can't help it, you want some small margin of comfort in which to rest and put your feet up.

You want the ottoman. But you must not have it. You can't give in. Because it's not just an ottoman, of course; it's an instinct made manifest, and it's a bad instinct. Buying the ottoman means giving in to an urge toward domesticity, toward settling down, toward putting your energy into physical things - things that you will then own and worry about losing. Domesticity isn't inherently destructive, nor is it merely a chance to be lazy; but when it's adopted as a means for escaping the hard work of rebellion, or as a big fluffy bed into which the exhausted former adolescent wishes to collapse, it's a mistake. That kind of domesticity shifts one's energy from action to object, and it narrows the focus of fear until the most pressing threat is the loss of those objects.

The danger isn't simply personal. It can seduce whole movements. When the New York intellectuals of the 1930s settled down and started taking jobs as college professors, their radical spirits flagged. Russell Jacoby in The Last Intellectuals says this happened because, having achieved a measure of acceptance and a sense of security, they were suddenly afraid of losing it. Their alliances shifted subtly but irrevocably toward security, away from risk. Public life began to deteriorate; in Jacoby's view it has never recovered. By 1957, Norman Podhoretz was counseling the former bohemian radicals of Greenwich Village to "stop carping at life like a petulant adolescent" and "get down to the business of adult living."

But living isn't a business, or it shouldn't be. The goal of a business is to expand its worth, as measured in dollars; that's a warped goal for a human life. Besides, it doesn't work: we now know how easily all those things we're supposed to have achieved in the business of life - the house, the job, the retirement fund - can vanish just like any other object. Security is not acquired through possessions; it's a feeling. And although I sometimes forget this paradox, I feel the most secure when I'm the most completely immature.

slouching toward mediocrity

Thanks to the super-awesome Mike Russell, and the equally awesome Cort & Fatboy, I did this yesterday, and I did not throw up or cry or get stabbed.

As usual, my teeny little infant-muppet voice can barely be heard, perhaps because I was not breathing, or maybe because we abandoned our original plan of getting me drunk on the show.

Also, I didn't talk about movies AT ALL, despite Mike's many kind attempts to draw me in. The one movie-related thing I said was really about boys. Hmm.

So anyway, I'm a borderline-embarrassingly adoring Cort & Fatboy fan - I sleep in a C&F t-shirt, the one where they're being impaled by a unicorn, which Mike drew - so I was a little starstruck being right there in the room with them. (They are very handsome.) This was compounded by the fact that a poster of Byron Beck in his little wrestling singlet was beaming at me from a foot away, even as Cort's new wall-mounted stabbing knife poked singlet-Byron in the butt. Plus with the not breathing. So I was nervous, but they were really sweet. Karl says it sounds like I'm being cross-examined for the first five minutes but then it gets better (I think mainly because I stop talking). Anyhow, these guys are awesome, and you should subscribe to their podcast on iTunes immediately.

Some notes and corrections about stuff I mumbled:

1) To clarify, the motorcycle show belongs to my friend Thor Drake and his company SeeSee - the SFRC is just helping him put it on. Here's the link to it: http://theonemotorcycleshow.com/

2) Turns out I'm still ditzy with calendar-type stuff: the One Motorcycle show is on Saturday, whereas the Cort & Fatboy Midnight Movie, Dirty Dancing, is on Friday, so I might be able to go see it after all. Yeay!

3) I should clarify that Byron didn't actually say he set me up with a friend; what he said was that I went on a date with a friend of his. So it really could be anyone - but I'll never tell.

4) Kitty Pryde! Did you hear him say that? I definitely heard him say that. If it sounds like I spent the next hour fainting, that's because I did. (Wooderson is good, too, though. I'll take that. I've earned it.)

5) In real life, I love Lonely Planet, too. There may have been a bit of post-deadline grouching.

6) There's a point about 14 minutes in where Karl emailed me to say, "I really hope Mom doesn't speak Latin."

7) I forgot to mention that I had a Johnny Castle poster when I was a teen. On my bedroom ceiling. Oh yes.

8) Update from Mom: "How come you didn't know that Jennifer Gray won Dancing with the Stars?" So there you go: what she's been up to lately.

9) Johnny To's Vengeance really is great. It's filled with crazy, gorgeous fight scenes and tender hitman bonding and totally sideways takes on the standard gangster/revenge flick. And anyone who has pissed me off should not be allowed to watch it. Grr.

Movies 2010

Everyone says it's been a crappy year for movies, but I saw a bunch that I really dug. Here's the lowdown. At the end you'll find a link to the extra-special expanded episode of KBOO on which DK Holm and I talked about our picks.

10 I Liked Best

1. Winter's Bone

directed by Debra Granik, who also co-wrote the screenplay (based on Daniel Woodrell's novel)

(Daniel Woodrell is awesome!)

Jennifer Lawrence stars as 17-year-old Ree Dolly, and John Hawkes is Teardrop, her scary but ultimately honorable uncle, in a brutally sparse, Southern gothic story about meth-cookers in the Ozarks. One of several movies this year in which an adolescent girl turns out to be the strongest person in the world.

2. True Grit

by the Coen Brothers

with Hailee Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin

The first movie the Coens have made in ages (since Lebowski?) that didn't strike me as being kind of sarcastic. See above re adolescent girl.

3. The Fighter

directed by David O. Russell (who made two movies I violently hated, I Heart Huckabees and Flirting with Disaster, but also Spanking the Monkey which I thought was pretty great)

with Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams

Set in the '80s in Lowell, Mass., it's the story of boxer Micky Ward (Wahlberg) and his wacked-out brother (Bale), who trains Micky after crack addiction kills his own once-promising career. All the performances are tops; Christian Bale somehow makes his total wreck of a ruined-genius character seem charming, aggravating, heartbreaking and admirable all at once. There's a terrifying/hilarious gaggle of harpies in truly outlandish getups and hairstyles that reminded me of Pueblo (long live the claw!). Besides, any movie that features a slow-motion face-punching scene with flying sweat droplets is a good movie in my book.

4. Valhalla Rising

dir Nicolas Winding Refn (who also did Bronson and the Pusher trilogy)

with Mads Mikkelsen as One Eye

Definitely the weirdest movie I saw this year. Gorgeous, brutal, almost silent. Tarkovsky meets samurai warrior epic via sideways Bergman? Or something like that. (Daniel Menche was at the screening I went to!)

5. Scott Pilgrim vs The World

directed & co-written by Edgar Wright (of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz)

Michael Cera, Allison Pill, Kieran Culkin, Ellen Wong (as Knives), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Ramona Flowers)

Awesome integration of story and style. Easily as tricksy and visually inventive as Inception, but with added fun, and hipster-punching. Michael Cera is a walking bag of ennui who is forced out of suspended animation by surprise battles with his new girl's seven evil exes. Vanquished foes explode into coins, guitarists battle to the death, etc. Best of all is the movie's skewering of weak-ass Portland-style breakups and weaselly pursuit/avoidance of rad chicks by unworthy dorks.

6. Fish Tank

written/directed by Andrea Arnold (Red Road)

with Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender

15-year-old Mia lives in a cruddy Essex apartment with her mom and little sister, cares about nothing but dancing until she meets Mom's new boyfriend (Fassbender, who is amazing and also has perfect teeth). The ending's a little off-the-rails in a disappointing way, but it's devastating up until then. Awesome performance by Katie Jarvis.

7. Greenberg

directed by Noah Baumbach, co-written by Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh

with Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig

New York neurotic goes to his brother's house in LA to sort his life out, aka to "do nothing" for a while, and latches onto his brother's assistant, Florence. Excruciatingly horrible makeout scenes ensue. Has a fair amount in common with The Social Network, character-wise.

8. Inception

directed by Christopher Nolan

with Leonardo Di Caprio, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

I like movies that do things you can't do in other media; why not take advantage of the form? A few scenes in this movie were so awesome that they more than made up for its flaws. I don't need the story to be profound when the telling involves so many neat tricks. (Also: man, doesn't Joseph Gordon-Levitt look good in a suit.) There's a kinda clever Blade Runner homage; I don't think the story ends up being as head-trippy as that movie, in either version, but it's still a lot of fun, and smartly put together, and well worth a good couple of viewings.

9. 127 Hours

directed by Danny Boyle, with James Franco

Based on the memoir: Aron Ralston goes canyoning in Utah, gets his arm pinned between a boulder and the canyon wall. High jinks ensue. Franco is incredible, and the impromptu surgery is beyond gross; I've never been so emotionally moved by hideous gore.

10. Mother

director/writer Bong Joon-ho (The Host)

South Korean take on a classic whodunit, but with an intensely expressive lead performance, a strangely tranquil mood, tonal variations that are typical of Bong Joon-ho, and flat-out gorgeous visual style. Your footing keeps crumbling under you, to the point that you end up feeling completely alienated from pretty much the entire human race. Haunting.

10 Worst

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Tron: Legacy

Jonah Hex

The American

The Wolfman

Hot Tub Time Machine

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Robin Hood

Letters to Juliet

Twilight: Eclipse

Most Frustrating:

Somewhere

written/directed by Sofia Coppola

starring Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning

I'll write more about this one later.

Simultaneously Best/Worst:

Hausu - initially screened by WW's BAM fest in February. Nothing else like it.

Gone with the Pope, Boxer's Omen - both screened by Dan Halstead at Grindhouse Film Fest.

Also Seen & Liked:

(in no particular order)

Micmacs: French junk-shop circus romp/revenge tale/pacifist lovenote. Adorable.

Red: Helen Mirren is smoking hot, and I still think Bruce Willis is great. The flirting is tops, and the bullet's-eye view of a bullet-strewn lawn won me over right away.

Bluebeard: Crazy.

The Good, the Bad, the Weird: AWESOME and hilarious. Almost made my top ten list and probably should have.

The Social Network: Jesse Eisenberg is insanely good. I'm sick of hearing about how smart the opening scene is; it's sad that clever dialogue is so rare it inspires paroxysms of critical adulation.

Ghost Writer: Polanski is pretty good at making movies.

Black Swan: Doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, but very effective at the time; silly and scary and pretty and squirm-inducing. Fun!

Get Low: Old dudes are the best dudes.

Centurion: Over-the-top ridiculous, with no holding back on anything, especially not the ax-chopping, sword-squishing, limb-chopping or decapitation scenes. Zoom in on that shit! Yeah!

Machete: A total blast. Not a good movie, but hilarious, with many moments of total awesomeness.

Never Let Me Go: Some people found it slow, but I thought it did a really good job of adapting a book I also really liked. Definitely wanted to punch Keira Knightley in the face.

I Am Love: Wacky and sad and beautiful.

The King's Speech: Describing this movie on the radio gave me a stammer, so I won't get into it here except to say Colin Firth is perfect, and Helena Bonham-Carter is still my girlfriend.

Cropsey: Scary and depressing. People are horrible.

Knight and Day: Can't really believe I liked this, but it was a lot of fun, and Tom Cruise finally seems to understand exactly how he's funny.

Unstoppable: A really tight, super-entertaining race-the-clock train movie, and I will always happily spend two hours watching Denzel Washington.

Vincere: Mussolini opera madness.

Lebanon: Get me out of this tank! I have to pee!

Shutter Island: Totally overwrought, and a disappointment in the context of Scorsese, but Mark Ruffalo was great and it looked and sounded fantastic. Irritating ending.

Green Zone: Matt Damon. Righteousness.

Exploding Girl: Should've been boring, but it didn't bore me.

Get Him to the Greek: Unexpectedly non-sucky.

The A-Team: Very good at what it does.

Salt: It was funny.

The Warrior's Way: aka Laundry Warrior. Exploding ferris wheels! Ninjas vs cowboys in the desert! Come on!

Really wish I'd seen before writing this, & will see soon:

Sweetgrass (documentary about some of the last American cowboys, herding their sheep through Montana mountains to summer pasture)

Red Riding trilogy (a British TV adaptation of David Peace's books about serial murderers, including the Yorkshire Ripper - everyone I know loved it)

The Strange Case of Angelica (Dreamy fable of longing from 102-year-old Manoel de Oliveira)

Wild Grass (A romance by Alain Resnais, with the awesome Mathieu Amalric)

Four Lions (Fumbled terrorism + British satire and the blackest humor)

Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy documentariness)

Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe is never boring)

Carlos (Carlos the Jackal - everyone I know loved this, too)

White Material (Claire Denis, with Isabelle Huppert, also never boring)

Restrepo (Sebastian Junger & co in the thick of the Afghanistan war; allegedly holds its own with the best Vietnam docs)

Blue Valentine (Looks to be a corkscrew to the heart, but you know me, I like that)

Anyone who wants to hear me stumble and stutter my way through this list out loud, with frequent rescues by DK Holm, should check out the year-end Movie Talk show on KBOO here. Apologies in advance.

top 10 movies, take 1 (sort of)

It begins: the Great Listmaking of Two Thousand and Ten. I'm not even close to putting mine together yet, so instead, here are a few from Dennis Lim. He doesn't even mention The A-Team! Weird. In fact, I'm ashamed to admit, I've seen exactly zero of the films on his 10-best list. I need to get crackin'. See you cats in mid-January!

(p.s. Although I am very dedicated, I probably won't be able to make myself watch Trash Humpers. Just so's you know...I'd hate to get everybody's hopes up.)

the best thing about Sweden

...since I'm on the subject...might be saffron ice cream, or it might be Strindberg or Bergman or Torgny Lindgren. But most of the time I think it's John Bauer. He pretty much taught me what to look for in a prince...not to mention how to avoid becoming enslaved by trolls. Handy!

MH blog

Just found:

http://www.drawger.com/marcellus/

Look at the images of his to-do lists. He showed me some of these when I interviewed him a couple years ago...pretty cool stuff. Also, check out the letters he writes to his little nieces and nephews. I think I need to up my game!

announcement

I love Ed Park.

(Not exactly news.)

I actually know these dudes

They are tough!

http://www.siegecraftnw.com/N10-P1.htm

(#92 is Patrick, 88 is The Steve, and 105 is T Bag)

picture time!

I finally put a bunch of photos from Sweden online -- you can see them here. Wish I were a better photographer, or had one with me on this trip. I lack the skill and patience to do Sweden justice -- it was prettier than this, believe me.

(And apologies to any purists out there for having fooled around with some of these...I got bored, started pushing buttons, one thing led to another...you know how it is. Voila, iridescent lawns!)

it's about that time

When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a goddamn banshee. There's no avoiding it... So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were — the writer. Hunter S. Thompson

Of course, what he's not mentioning is that awkward period between the time you quit the El Adobe and the time you start the actual writing of the thing you're writing, a necessary period of flexible duration filled with awful, tormented, pointless, unproductive writhing and lots and lots of idle consumption of decades-old music videos online that you missed when you were a teen because you lived in the sticks and only got one channel, which was not MTV, thus making this idiotic absorption justifiable on the grounds that a cultural critic ought to have a passing familiarity with the culture, etc. Catching up, you see, on the '90s, more or less, when you were a square and didn't know any better. And then there's all the forgetting of the vague entanglements and attachments you may or may not currently have, and which may or may not float across your vision while you're trying to work, creating a state of sweet desolation that can only be sidestepped by watching precisely the right music videos online at precisely the right time and in the right order, at the risk of catatonic gloom if you get it wrong. The bar is not the only enemy, you see.

On the other hand, though: look how cute Hunter was! Dang. I bet they missed him down there at the El Adobe.

comix

I reviewed a handful of comix for Bookpage right before going to Sweden -- not my usual doom-and-gloom-with-explosions, but not bad for what they are. (Plus I still get a little kick out of being able to say, "Today I will read comic books all day, for my job." I am a child.)

smart!

Thor knows a little something about the subject of speed...this line from his flattrack race report struck me as brilliant, and worth trying to remember next time I get out there and start hyperventilating: "Racing isn't about being fast, it's more about slowing everything else down."

Yep Again

Another perfect summing-up, found via Leif Pettersen:

http://bit.ly/arkTaQ