The folks at Greencine posted an interview with Michael Stulhbarg, the star of the new Coen Brothers movie A Serious Man.

In the interview, Greencine and Stulbarg gab about how the movie is being labeled as a ’starless’ film, Stulbarg’s strange 9-month auditioning process, the Coen’s process on set, and other interesting cinema tidbits. Check it out.

My family was recently out of town for a five days, leaving me home alone with over 800 pages (no exaggeration) of student work to read and comment upon. My reward for getting through a day of writing about free indirect style and character arcs was to watch a lot of movies, both in the theater and at home, cranked up loud on the home system and with a fuckin’ beer in my hand. Here’s how those five days went.

Saturday:
Inglourious Basterds. By now you’ve probably read lots of commentary on Tarantino’s latest. My two cents is that I could listen to those characters talk all night. It felt like a 5-hour movie in a 2 1/2 hour movie’s body and I wanted it to go on and on. A few weeks ago I happened upon a Sirius/XM radio broadcast in which Tarantino guest-deejayed. He played songs that he’d listened to while making Basterds. Here’s the complete set list.

Wu Tang Clan, “The Rulez”
KT Tunstall, “Hold On”
Bob Dylan, “Political World”
Barbra Streisand, “Stony End”
Robin McNamara, “Lay A Little Lovin’ On Me”
Sir Douglas Quintet, “Mendocino”
David Bowie, “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” – from Bowie’s Greatest Hits (not Cat People Sdtrk)
Jay Z, “S. Carter”
Roy Orbison, “There Won’t Be Many Coming Home”
Jason Mraz, “I’m Yours (Acoustic)”
Maroon 5, “Wake Up Call”
Steve Poltz, “Waterfalls”
Britney Spears, “My Prerogative”

I happened to tune in at the end of the Roy Orbison tune. I can respect people who like Roy Orbison, though to me he was always little more than an immobile wax dummy who occasionally purred. Wow, rock and roll, man. As someone who lived off the Pulp Fiction soundtrack for years, I am, like a lot of people I suppose, inclined to give Quentin Tarantino the benefit of the doubt when it comes to music. But there’s really no other way to say what I felt except that I thought his playlist sucked. That “Waterfalls” song is an acoustic cover of the TLC hit from the mid-nineties. I’m going to stop writing about this now because it’s starting to make me upset.

Sunday:

Waltz with Bashir. Animation is a great medium in which to explore the elasticity of memory. And even though both Basterds and Bashir are both about war, I think it’s fair to say that only the former one is a cartoon. Waltz with Bashir was a sobering plunge into repressed memories of war, and of the strange juxtapositions of cultures in wartime. Amid animated sequences of bombings and ambushes, the voice of John Lydon suddenly erupted on the soundtrack, singing “This Is Not a Love Song” from his PiL days.

Paprika. Another animated feature, this one from director Satoshi Kon, based on a story by–I didn’t realize this upon renting it–Yasutaka Tsutsui, whose story collection Salmonella Men on Planet Porno I picked up not long ago. While Bashir uses animation to illustrate untrustworthy memories, Paprika seeks to do the same with dreams. There’s so much crammed into the frame with this film, my favorite sequences being a procession of animals and objects marching along through various characters’ subconscious minds.

Monday:
The Holy Mountain, by Alejandro Jodorowsky. I’ve blogged about this film before, and about Jodorowsky in general. For my second viewing of this film I invited my old friend Nate over. We drank Corona and tequila and kept an armchair commentary going through the Chilean auteur’s steady unveiling of wonders. I was impressed again by how ballsy the film is. In my head I’ve been attempting to reverse engineer the directions Jodorowsky must have given his crew. Like, “I want the amputees dressed like Roman soldiers to assemble in the Jesus factory.” Or, “Let’s make sure each toad has a firecracker under it.” Or, “Let’s get some climbing gear for the prostitute and her chimpanzee.”

Tuesday: Death Proof, by Quentin Tarantino. This was the only Tarantino film I hadn’t seen. So I watched it. It was cool, whatever. Great car chase at the end, one of the best I think I’ve ever seen. The bonus features are worth checking out, particularly the featurettes on the stunts and those who performed them.

Wednesday: A Scanner Darkly. My animation streak continued with Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s paranoid drug novel. I think this movie helped me figure out what the problem is with Keanu Reeves. In any movie in which he’s required to get all fired up he ends up looking ridiculous. He is not an actor made for big, hysterical speeches. That actor would be John Malkovich. What Keanu does best is simmer and lope through a movie. I’m thinking of his great performance as Scott Fortune in My Own Private Idaho, which he’s never matched in my book.

Man on Wire: My five-day movie binge came to an end with this documentary about Phillipe Petit, that French dude who crossed the chasm between the World Trade Center towers on a tight rope. Completely riveting and unexpectedly emotional, and the perfect note with which to end five days of student fiction and movies.

by Elizabeth Kadetsky

When I was in high school I, like many teens, believed myself to be a misfit, the only alienated person in the room. I found respite in Frank McCourt’s English classes at Stuyvesant High. …more

When you grow up being called a faggot by farm boys because you like to read books, Woody Allen can appear as something of a savior. That’s my story, anyway. Allen’s early films with their broad appeal mean that even small town video rental stores are obliged to carry his work, shelving Interiors beside Bananas in the comedy section.

Woody Allen

The other night I finally slipped in a months-old Netflix copy of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the story of two American beauties abroad. Within the first twenty minutes I resisted the film, thinking I am not in the mood to watch a movie about people who don’t have to worry about paying bills. Perhaps it’s my persistent shame at being relatively untraveled, but I wasn’t all that compelled to follow the romantic intrigues of people who float through Europe on the wings of their charmed life. The characters who do have jobs in these film are shallow, khaki-wearing business schmucks, men ever cognizant of one another’s golf handicaps and bewildered by abstract art. Javier Bardem appears as a chunk of confident sexuality, an artist–of course–whose seduction of Scarlett Johansson’s and Rebecca Hall’s title characters cuts right to the subtext of romantic comedies in general. We just want the characters to get it on.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona rubbed me the wrong way, I guess. I wasn’t in the frame of mind to accept escapist entertainment on its own terms, which is unusual for me. After all, recently I’ve been perfectly willing to accept the snappy breeziness of Preston Sturges.

I suppose I expect a lot from Woody Allen, while recognizing it’s his prerogative to make a light, enjoyable comedy. It was Allen’s films that suggested to me that the life of the mind might be something a kid like me could aspire to, and Allen’s bespectacled and frizzy-haired presence at the center of those early comedies was a balm to my adolescent anxieties. The post-coital chatter of those films was titilating in a way that a sex scene never could be, implying that by sheer force of wit and intelligence a physically inadequate guy could get a woman to fall in love with him. That’s heady stuff when you’re 14 years old and have never made a basket in a basketball game.

Even in the films in which Allen’s presence isn’t in front of the camera, he tends to make an appearance anyway, as with Kenneth Branagh’s channeling of Allen’s neurotic tics in 1998’s Celebrity can attest. My guess is, based on Match Point and now Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen just isn’t interested in directing proxies of himself right now. (I have yet to see the new film with what’s-his-name from that one show, uh, Larry David, who looks like a Woody proxy if there ever was one.) Which is wonderful and opens up a whole new period for his genius. I wonder, though, if the result of this approach is that these films feel more like a product of Allen’s head than his heart.

Sometimes I just want an actor to take a movie by the fuckin’ balls. I’m thinking of Benicio del Toro in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Add to that rogue’s gallery of scenery chewers Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood. Just look at this shit:

Apologies for the piracy-o-vision, but still, damn.

I just watched the DVD of this film for which Daniel Day Lewis (I can’t bring myself to just refer to him as “Lewis”) earned a Best Actor Oscar. The disc comes with no commentary, but there’s a period documentary about the oil business in California for all you petroleum history nerds.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, watch this clip of Daniel Day Lewis in 1985’s My Beautiful Laundrette, his first film, in which he provides Vanilla Ice with his future look.

by Terese Svoboda

Nurse Ratched faced us—okay, let her remain nameless, this American CARE official with the power to educate the quarter million Somalian refugees trapped in Dadaab, the largest and oldest camp in the world. …more

These movies pass through our lives, take up two hours of our time, and go along their merry way. Recently I enjoyed Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, Orson Welles’s masterful Touch of Evil, and a collection of Pixar shorts. I watched E.T. with my son and was surprised at how dark that movie was. And at the very moment when the scary astronaut guys apply the defib paddles to E.T.’s lumpy animatronic chest, Miles vomited on the floor. I’m still trying to figure out whether he had the stomach flu or was making his first foray into film criticism.
While watching these films, one question kept intruding into my thoughts: Should I blog about this? I thought about blogging about Sturges’s romantic comedy and my fledgling theory about how all romantic comedies are about the conflict between honesty and intimacy. I considered commenting on how Pixar, from the very beginning, has wed ancient storytelling skills with technological advances. And I had a whole riff in my head about how the most unconvincing Mexican in all of cinema was played by Charlton Heston. But none of these films lingered in my consciousness for days after like Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York.

I watched Synecdoche in the theater on my birthday last November, catching a 10 PM showing. Stumbling into midnight after that movie was one of those rare, disorienting experiences in which the world outside the movie seems to have been subtly changed, like the time I went to Costco right after watching David Lynch’s Lost Highway and felt like I’d landed on the fucking moon. Or my first Kaufman encounter, walking into a Kenneth Cole after seeing Being John Malkovich and being physically unable to remove the grin on my face for at least half an hour.

I knew Synecdoche was the kind of movie one has a lasting relationship with. So I’m happy to say my second date with the film was better than the first. I bought the DVD, watched the film, the awkward on-stage interview with Kaufman (awkward because the interviewer asked lame questions), the interview with Philip Seymour Hoffman, and a blogger’s roundtable discussion filmed in someone’s book-lined apartment.

One of the bloggers in the featurette–can’t remember who–made an interesting point that upon repeat viewings of this film, he/she tends to focus on one scene. For me, the scene I mulled over the most was the one in which Caden Cotard (Hoffman) and his adult daughter Olive (Robin Weigert) attempt to resolve their estrangement at her deathbed. Olive has been living in Germany, where she became famous as a 10-year-old with a full body tattoo, an attribute she later used to her advantage as an exotic dancer. She demands that they speak to each other through headset translators, with her speaking in German while Caden responds in English. She reveals that her much-older lover Maria and her mother Adele told her that Caden left her so that he could have anal sex with his lover Eric. The charge is patently ridiculous, but it’s the explanation that Olive holds on to. She demands that Caden ask for her forgiveness. Caden, at first denying the accusation, changes his mind and asks her to forgive something he never even did. Olive then refuses, and the refusal causes both of them to weep bitterly. Olive dies, and a petal of one of her tattoo roses withers and falls off her arm.

What the fuck is going on here? Consider another film in which Hoffman made an appearance, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, which came out in 1999, the same year as Being John Malkovich. In Magnolia Hoffman plays a more or less well-adjusted character, a hospice nurse tasked with caring for an old man played by Jason Robards, in his final role. Tom Cruise, in his best role (which some might say isn’t saying much) plays Robard’s character’s estranged son. At the deathbed there are tears, there are recriminations, there are open wounds. We pass through that scene knowing what is being felt and how we’re supposed to feel. We’re being instructed on how to feel as we’re feeling it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, feeling much better now, thank you.

But in the Synecdoche death bed scene, our emotional frame of reference is shifting under our feet. At one moment we snicker at the accusation that Hoffman was off having anal sex with his fictitous lover Eric, at another moment we yearn that these characters will re-establish their love, but then brutally we are denied. This father and daughter are beyond reconciliation. Even though Olive wants to forgive, she doesn’t have the capacity to do so, perhaps due to the fact Caden wasn’t around to teach her how.

Is that it? Maybe? I am still confused by the scene. And I’m sure that the next time I watch it, Synecdoche will yield another puzzle.

The movie has lost money in the box office and is likely considered a failure by the people at Sony Pictures Classics whose job it is to count beans. A creative writing student of mine who is a movie producer once said that the only reason good movies get made is that there are still people in Hollywood who have both money and good taste. I can only hope that Kaufman has the backing he needs to keep giving us these generous, hard-won gifts that we’ll be watching  a hundred years from now.

angrylittlepotatoes.com

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Dear Sugar,

I apologize in advance because I’m going to give you a lot of history and concerns before I get to my questions. A very Catholic girlfriend of mine was dating a very Catholic guy. Both of them were virgins and wanted to wait until marriage before having sex. Whenever things got too passionate, he would tell her that she was “evil” for “tempting him.” Consequently, this made her feel guilty and sinful.

After he broke up with her she found comfort in the arms of a transgendering female to male partner. My friend believes she is in a heterosexual relationship because the person she is with is a man on the inside. She has sexual relations now and she believes that the love they share is beautiful, not sinful. She argues that she is not a lesbian because she is not attracted to women and she does not touch her partner like a woman. Whether or not her partner is a man on the inside, he still has a vagina and breasts (though he does have a deeper voice and facial hair due to testosterone therapy). Physically, isn’t the sex they have the same as the sex two lesbians have?

Now that her first sexual experience is not with someone born in a man’s physical body I’m concerned that unconsciously she will always view sex between a penis and vagina as sinful and wrong (because of her first relationship) and has begun to program her body/mind to respond to sexual desires towards someone of the same physical gender as herself. This might be trivial but she claims she is no longer a virgin. I didn’t ask her for the details, but I’m guessing she didn’t lose her virginity by rubbing vaginas together. I could be wrong, but I would assume she lost her virginity to a vibrator. I guess I’m worried that if she ever does have sex with a penis it will feel like a broken vibrator or something. I know your advice will probably be something like “be happy for your friend if she’s happy” but I’m genuinely concerned with how this untraditional sexual experience will affect her sex life in the future. I just wish she had penis sex first so that she could have some kind of reference, you know?

I guess my main question is, is my friend a lesbian if she is attracted to and enjoys sex with someone of the same gender (taking into account that they both believe he is a man on the inside)? I know part of your charm is to be brutally honest, but could you show a little sweetness in your response Sugar?

Thanks,
Concerned Friend
Dear Concerned,

Omigod, you are SO crazy. And your friend is crazy, too. It’s like your crazy met her crazy and had a little crazy baby.

I fucking love it!

I want to invite you guys over to my place to party. And bring the hairy lesbian/transgender dude, too. Why not? It seems like you guys have lots to talk about, what with the Mystery of the Lost Virginity and the Penis Sex First Anxieties. And all this Hot Catholic Energy, too. Man, Catholics are such sexy freaks.

But mostly I want to assure you that your friend (while crazy) is doing fine. She’s finding her way. It’s an unusual way, but I’m pretty sure your anxieties say more about you than her. Don’t mean this in a mean way – I’m trying to be sweet – but the question get answered her is why her sexual life matters to you.

Remember: I can help with this! But it’s going to require that you guys head over here and drink too excess with me. Until further notice, I’m baking cookies in the nude.

Ask Sugar a question. Sugar@therumpus.net

Dear Sugar,

Should I quit my job? Seriously, I’m going to do whatever you advise… no pressure though. A little background? Usual story: boss is a jerk, pay sucks, feeling the drain of the same schedule every day, wishing the coffee machine wasn’t broken, etc.

What do you think?
Leaving It Up to (Sugary) Fate
Dear Leaving,

You sound like a young boy with strong forearms. Am I close? If so, then I have some terrific news: I need an intern. I realize I’m taking a chance, given that your note suggests a less than ideal employee. But what the hell. Your only responsibilities will be fetching me cookies and licking my calves.

Now that I’m your new boss, I have a few quick questions.

First, how do you feel about nut play? (I’m crazy for it.)
Second, how do you plan to earn money?
Third, why didn’t you think about that before?
Fourth, why are we arguing already?

God, I hate it when this happens. One minute I’m gurgling your intimates and the next the EEOC is involved. Just remember what you were when Sugar found you.

Ask Sugar a question. Sugar@therumpus.net

angrylittlepotatoes.com

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I recently read on some blog somewhere in the bloggy blog blogosphere a reference to certain movies as “wallpaper.” …more

This happens sometimes. I got murder on the brain this morning. …more

Did you hear about Jack Kerouac’s fantasy baseball habit? Even if you don’t care much for the Beats, it’s still pretty amazing to read about how Kerouac invented his own fantasy baseball league, illustrated his own made-up rosters, and actually played imaginary baseball games with himself well into adulthood …more

I am in love! Obviously, it’s lust really. Infatuation. Isn’t it always at this stage in the game? Love comes lately if the bastard ever shows at all – even on a promise.

But never mind semantics now. I’m beyond that. Just look!

Oh it’s craziness incarnate. Did you ever see a more incompatible pairing as that pattern and me? It’s never going to work. I don’t have the time. I don’t have the skill. That, that *thing* is going to be my undoing. My unravelling. I don’t mind a bit of colourwork. Remember my houndstooth check? The pattern I eventually convinced myself didn’t look too alarmingly like a tessellation of swastikas? Well, that, you see, that, that was tricky, a little attention required, but eventually it assimilated into my brain. It’s just a four row repeat, see. Two rows with mainly the background colour, two with mainly the contrast colour. Knit it for an inch and you’re not really thinking anymore. Okay, so I did louse it up on a hot train diverted one afternoon from London Bridge via Elephant and Castle and had to spend an evening ripping the wrong part back while trying to like Dollshouse (Whedon not Ibsen – which probably serves as a three word review).

But what future me and this thing? This new/shiny? This distraction-havoc wreaked on my brain by the seductive power of Vogue Knitting? Oh the strange lands you encounter if you let Ravelry be your guide. Ravelry is like facebook but with the addition of knitting – and the subtraction of anything that isn’t knitting. (Well there is crochet but, obviously, no one cares.)

See this pattern? See it. I cannot follow a pattern chart like that while watching Lost (three word review: Marry me, Sayid. Yes, not really a review, but I swear that’s all I think of when I’m watching. But if I was knitting this dress I wouldn’t be able to let my brain cloud over with only that lustful thought, which, in truth, isn’t really about marriage so much as how surely, *surely* no one character would get tied up quite that much in a TV show unless the actor had gotten it specifically written into his contract. (And if Sayid married me I think we would have a similar kind of contract.)) But, anyway, that pattern chart will make me cry and rip back over and over and make my fingers bleed (or at least hurt (at least a bit.))

So what am I going to have to do to get this dress, this potential hours of work, while I probably listen to all the classic-books-on-CD I have left (Crime and Punishment is one of them, which I have been studiously not getting my hopes up about seeing as how I do actually know it is not as filthy as the title would suggest to a sick puppy like me, but I am way more entranced my the idea of since reading about Dostoyevsky being faux executed – which I won’t go into here as I am way off topic (shut up, there so is a topic – anyway that’s what brackets are for) but you can google it.)

But, yes, that pattern chart of headachey-magnitude is just the start. This pattern is beginning to look as hopelessly appealing as that guy at the party who turned up late and drunk from another party and is not chatting me up, even, so much as explaining about how there is this other woman he’s quite seriously involved with but they’re split up right now so it’s okay and I’m not even listening because he is so staggeringly pretty (or I am so staggeringly drunk) that it has made me deaf to anything that is a perfectly sensible no-type reason. ‘Cause, you know, I accept you’re probably not going to read this pattern in much detail unless you knit and have also been over come by dress-lust, but what cracked up shit is this? Shaping done by changing the needle size rather than increasing the number of stiches. That is surely some kind of insane moon-knitting. What-what?

But I mean, for serious, four different needles sizes? But I hate to knit sample swatches. And isn’t that just what I am going to have to do right here. And not even starting on the fact that I hate it when I have to go buy another pair of needles (sometimes I pick out a pattern just because I have that size needles) but this damn *thing* here is going to involve masses of prep work. (Ew! Prep work! Not want!) Knitting sample swatches in the different needle gauges and measuring and calculating (because I trust that L/XL size absolutely not at all – especially if that model is wearing just one size below and her body and my body couldn’t be more dissimilar objects than they are and still exist in the same universe.

But despite all this: I still want. I’m protesting here like Canute, just to prove to you that I couldn’t turn back this tide if I wanted to. Me, you know, I might know long words but underneath all the polysybality I am single-sybbed id-girl. Following my Pie-id Piper to the ends of the earth.

Oh look, though, I’ve bought some wool in satisfyingly retro colours. Maybe I’ll make a sample swatch whilst watching Crank (three word review: Memento for Dummies).

angrylittlepotatoes.com

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by Joshua Mohr

Lately people have been asking me why I decided to publish my novel, Some Things that Meant the World to Me, with a small press. Instinctively, my gut wants to lie, stammer some kind of self-justification: “Well, uh, I felt that a boutique house (note that I didn’t say “small press”) would give me more attention (i.e. answer my emails) and nurture the book in a way true to my artistic vision (i.e. not perform fellatio on the marketing department)

…more

angrylittlepotatoes.com

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Remember when The Illusionist and The Prestige both vied to be the winter 2007 movie about magicians? No? Anyway, transport yourself back to those fabled days of January and February 2007. I know what you’re thinking. You were too busy obsessing over the surprising resignation of Kazakhstan’s Prime Minister Daniyal Akhmetov and Japan’s incineration of over 10,000 chickens to battle the bird flu to concern yourself with a magician movie-off. And oh how we trembled at the inevitable Giuliani presidency!

The Illusionist is well worth checking out if you missed it, if only for the comfort food presence of Paul Giamatti. Watching Giamatti is like going to a fancy restaurant and ordering the macaroni and cheese. You know it’s just mac and cheese, but damn what do they put in this stuff to make it taste so good? I declared Giamatti my favorite contemporary actor not after Sideways or American Splendor or even Fred Claus but after his starring role in John Adams. The guy can act, and by act I mean he can yell, indignantly and with eyes popping out. And then there’s the aw-shucks Giamatti moment, the I am having a dawning realization facial slackness that makes you notice the pair of cheeks this guy has, and you just want to grab onto those cheeks and say, “Who’s my favorite actor? Who? Who?”

In The Illusionist Giamatti gets to play a chief inspector tasked with maintaining the aristocratic order of things in Victorian-era Vienna. Seems there’s this love triange a-brewing among an illusionist named Eisenheim (Edward Norton), his once-childhood sweetheart now duchess Sophie (Jessica Biel), and a Disney-level asshole of a Crown Prince played from behind a mustache by Rufus Sewell. Immediately we want Eisenheim and Sophie to fulfill the promise of their love, the Crown Prince to receive his comeuppance, and the chief inspector to frustratedly bark something at the other characters. This movie does not disappoint in this regard.

The film takes as its subject the various ways Eisenheim fools his audience’s perceptions and refuses to reveal the secrets of his tricks. This subject matter is mirrored in the gradual delivery of the film’s dramatic elements. We’re led to believe one thing, but by the end all is revealed as an elaborate ruse, and Paul Giamatti once again gets to jerk his head and smile in that incredibly impressed, well-wouldn’t-you-know-it kind of way he does so well. In the last minutes of the movie we’re shown the “trick” that was played on us, the audience, and how not everything was what it seemed.

Usually, this kind of thing really pisses me off. The more I think about the George Clooney Ocean movies, the more I hate them. They’re really meta-movies more than anything. Ask anyone exiting the theater after one of those Ocean movies what Matt Damon’s character’s name was. Or Brad Pitt’s. See? You don’t even know and you’ve seen all three of those celebrity fests. You can easily describe the plot as, “George Clooney and Brad Pitt plot to steal a lot of money from a casino” and no one will be taken aback. No one will challenge you by saying, “Surely Brad Pitt and George Clooney don’t play themselves.”

But what grates more than the starfuck machinery of those movies is how in the last few minutes, we’re finally privy to all sorts of stuff that was happening off-camera while we were otherwise chuckling at the irascibility of the ever-swelling cast. Oh, so they found a way to dress up as a SWAT team to infiltrate the casino. Oh, so there was all this other shit going down that we weren’t in on.

I think of this as the Scooby Doo method of storytelling, where the audience isn’t privy to the actual plot until the very end and it’s revealed the werewolf was the amusement park caretaker the whole time. I nail my creative writing MFA students on this kind of thing, this holding back of important information out of the mistaken belief that not knowing will pull an audience along.

For a counter-example, look no further than Jules Dassin’s 1956 noir Rififi. At the heart of this jewel caper is a 30-minute sequence of zero dialogue in which the thieves carry out their heist. We get to see the planning and execution of the crime in intimate detail, and the effect is riveting. Rather than “spoil” the mystery, such procedural minutiae makes us, the audience, participants in it. Dassin didn’t underestimate our intelligence, but Soderbergh sure seems to.

Which makes Neil Burger’s The Ilusionist all the more complicated, because the movie is about information that is left out, unrevealed. I am willing to excuse the last-reel Scooby Doo revelations of this 2007 sleeper for that reason. Sometimes it is fun to get tricked.

Hey Eyeballers. I haven’t had the patience to watch anything over an hour long recently. I take that back. I watched Babe with my son a couple weekends ago and as always got choked up at the end. I am a total sucker for talking swine who defy expectations.

All my indie cred just went right out the fuckin’ window.

The filmed entertainment I’ve been thinking about most is a short piece, some would call it a “music video” by the band Matt & Kim. It’s them getting naked in Times Square, with all their controversial bits blurred out. It’s not really their nudity that makes this video so compelling so much as their expressions once they’ve disrobed and are staring up in awe at the lights and jumbotrons. These could be the expressions of our homo erectus ancestors had they ever invented a time machine to transport themselves to 21st century New York City. Plus, I like the song.

Another little movie I stumbled across today was this little gem. Also starring a couple, also featuring a 360 camera shot, but fully clothed.

Stop Motion | The Long Haul from DUMAIS on Vimeo.

angrylittlepotatoes.com

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