So uh… they’re making a new Rocky movie and it’s called Rocky Balboa and uh…

there’s no punchline. (does that qualify as a double-entendre?)

they’re serious. It doesn’t even star Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. And no, Rocky doesn’t come back to coach some rising star. He gets back in the ring. And not for some nursing home benefit. Some kind of title fight.

ouch?

(though it’s against my usual principles, this is one time i’ll gladly play my part in viral marketing. You can see the trailer here)

I’ll be starting classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute tomorrow. I’m proud of this fact, not for having been accepted -they pretty much take anyone who can pay, is willing to attend, and can write the 200 word essay they require- but because i first decided i wanted to go there during my third year of law school, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Caesar decided to cross the Rubicon and da Vinci painted the Monal Lisa, sometime in 1999.

And seven years later here i am.

It’s a strange feeling to be doing exactly what you want. Like being told that your homework is to play video-games or your job is to play guitar, fulltime. I feel unjustifiably guilty. Crazy how conditioned we are. “If it’s not unpleasant it can’t be good for you / isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing” kind of thing. But i also feel incredibly elated. I’m afraid they might think i’m high because of the stupid glee i’m constantly emitting. It’s a novel experience feeling authorized to be excited about something. Sort of makes you wonder why you didn’t have the cojones to do something you felt genuinely excited about sooner. But i have no regrets. Whatever the convoluted paths i followed to get here, there, or wherever, it’s the trip that counts. And here i am.

brokeback mountain has left a beautiful sadness, like a thick cover draped over my heart, weighing it down.

Believe it or not i’ve only just seen the Graduate.

Yes, it’s great, and i love Mike Nichols, and, etc…

But two remarks immediately spring to mind.

1. Amongst other groundbreaking aspects of the film, was this the first “running desperately to stop a wedding in the nick of time” movie, or is that actually something that’s been ingrained in the human psyche and storytelling since the dawn of time?

2. How many seminal late sixties movies did Dustin Hoffman end at the back of a bus? Seriously! Two in as many years sounds like more than coincidence. Some obscure inner joke perhaps?

That being said, might i direct you all (yes, all three of you, there in the back) to the station titled “DI.fm Modern Jazz”. It’s listed in your iTunes radio stations and somehow plays only really good jazz that makes me intensely happy. It could make you happy too.

going to the movies is the same as looking for seashells on the shore. you need to pick up hundreds and turn them over before finding the few you want to keep.

(SPOILER ALERT)
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Funny, and perhaps wrong, that your appreciation of a movie is at least partially shaped by the knowledge you have of the circumstances of its creation.

Take Woody’s latest. For all its flaws, it’s a) one movie in abody of work spanning close to four decades and b) one man’s writing and vision.

So you take from it what you can and go easy on the potshots. No need for the absolutist “loved it”/”hated it” judgment you would reserve for a marketed product that promises certain results , a certain type of cinematic experience.

That being said, if living in New York is anything like the first Melinda story, i think i will rapidly abandon all delusions of grandeur and slink back to a sedated sedentary life in Geneva, with a side-job as a goatherd in the neighbouring Alps.

i’m in a rush so telegraphically:

second half better than first.

weird sense of watching the news and not a movie in the bus scene.

nicole kidman is pinocchio. i don’t know who’s pulling her strings but she is definitely made of wood.

sean penn.

the finale is taken almost shot for shot from the Manchurian Candidate (old and new).

sean penn.

ciao.

addendum: my above remark about kidman may sound a little harsh. I originally was a big fan of her’s. But then she won an oscar for a prosthetic nose and wading fully clothed into a river, and in every role since, you can see her sense of self preventig her from any form of immediacy. You can see in her eyes that she can’t stop the little voice whispering “you’re nicole kidman…you’re nicole kidman…you’re nicole kidman…”. So it’s not that i deny her talents as an actress but rather that i’m annoyed by what a media frenzy has done to her ability to forget herself.

finally got around to watching 21 grams. It’s been sitting on the shelf next to my tv for at least six months and i never had the courage to sit down and watch it. i’m having difficulty of late voluntarily submitting myself to anything more emotionnaly demanding than, say, the Sound of Music or Gigi (not bennifer, maurice chevallier).

taken out of context, the film goes as follows (SPOILER WARNING):

a guy’s dying because his heart’s no good (sean penn). serge gainsbourg’s daughter is his girlfriend (i’m not suggesting this is the cause of his failing heart). naomi watts was depressive and took drugs by way of the nose until she had kids. now she makes cookies in a crisply lit comfortable kitchen while her colin firth look-alike husband is at work. meanwhile, benicio is an ex-con (petty theft, b&e, nothing major) ex-alcoholic who has two kids and a wife and found jesus in a major way and is now saved. then he takes the car for a drive, hits and kills naomi watt’s daughters and husband. sean penn gets the husband’s heart, seeks out naomi watts, they fall in love, she convinces him to kill benicio (who is so guilt-ridden that he has cut his hair and works in new mexico living out of a motel). hmmm… sounds like an episode of the Bold & the Beautiful.

But such is the magic of cinema that by simply taking all the scenes, cutting them up and then telling the story in no particular chronological order, we get 21 grams. (having sean penn, naomi watts and benicio del toro helps.)

one thing you can say about sean penn is that he makes watching painful movies worthwhile.

one thing you can say about naomi watts is that when she screams she really screams. not just the al pacino standard 5 minute rant that implies raising your voice really really loud and telling someone the TRUTH.

Forgive this brief digression, but can you name one movie over the last ten years that hasn’t had al pacino at some point raise-his-voice-really-really-loud-so-the-whole-world-knows-he’s-al-pacino? i’m not saying i don’t like him. he is al pacino. he is the al pacino. we all know how intense he can be. but since scent of a woman, in every single movie: any given sunday, devil’s advocate, angels in america (did you see angels in america? i think i seriously couldn’t stop gaping in awe for the whole five hours and 40 minutes), insomnia, simone, etc…

All this to say that naomi watts doesn’t scream to impress. she screams in an attempt to tear her vocal cords out. and it is a very believable and touching process to witness. although i hope she doesn’t get typecast as the best crier of her generation. because when you think about it, she burst onto the scene in mulholland drive, blew everyone away with how believably she could just turn on the faucet, and now she plays in movies where she screams and/or cries.

enough useless insight. have a nice weekend.

Why?

Why Colin Farrell?

Why dye his hair blond like Depeche Mode circa 1983?

Why the irish accent? Why make everyone else act with an irish accent?!!

Except Olympias/Angelina Jolie, who’s accent is much closer to a female version of Gary Oldman’s Carpathian bloodsucker. Why?

Why spend the whole movie suggesting in a not-even-vaguely-subtle-its-so-explicit way that Alexander was gay? Who cares? Why not a sex scene with jared leto in the first five minutes and get it out of the way? instead of spending the whole movie “suggesting” that the two were so in love they didn’t marry or have kids; instead of every three scenes having Alexander and Hephaistion stare longingly into each other’s eyes, while Unchained melody is playing in the background, and then HUG in a chaste “i’m so glad that spear didn’t pierce your abdomen” kind of way. Why?

Why hire Vangelis for the soundtrack?

Gd knows i love Oliver Stone movies. really. But the “circling eagle as destiny leading you onwards” recurring motif really works better in desert movies like the Doors and U-turn.

And did i mention Colin Farell looks like a hedgehog with a bad wig? Or one of the guys from The Full Monty accidentally stumbling onto the set for Gladiator?

note for future reference: don’t use virile short irish men with beady eyes and a Madonna haircut to play legendary hellenic conquerors.

Michael Winterbottom. Tim Robbins. Samantha Morton.

Think Gattaca in a euro-global multi-lingual setting. Beautiful cinematography. Light on dialogue, heavy on implied drama/trauma/internal crises. Complete with a totally unresolved french indie ending.

I liked it, but didn’t love it. I don’t mind suspended endings. I do however mind feeling that the movie is about to start, after a slow but aesthetically captivating 1h30 introduction, and then the screen fades to black, and they don’t bring up the titles immediately so you have the time to go “ungh…please no…not already…oh well…”.

But aside from the fact that it’s only 2/3 of a story, it’s Lost in Translation in 2040 meets 1984. Which is good.

Has anyone seen Secretary (Maggie Gyllenhaal, James Spader)?

The following bit of monologue is from the movie Network (1976). Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is a news anchor having a really bad day. This is his meltdown rant, live and on the air :

“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buy’s a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, “Please at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone”. Well I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest, I don’t want you to riot - I don’t want you to write your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being, goddamn it! My life has value!” So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”"

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

What is it about Tokyo that inspires the juxtaposition of gray on gray 39th floor panoramas and analog synthesizer music?

Has anyone seen the Radiohead documentary Meeting people is easy, or am i the only one to notice the similarities with Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation?

I’d love to ask her if she was inspired by the documentary for the musical and visual ambiance of her own film.

If she wasn’t, then Tokyo is apparently emitting some kind of subliminal dreamy elevator music for robots.

(which doesn’t mean i didn’t think the film was beautiful, and didn’t remind me of every single kiss i should have stolen, of every time an awkward silence meant exactly what we knew it meant and we stood, or sat or lay there, immobile. And i like dreamy electronic elevator music. So there. So much for reading too much into things.)

Either you believe that History is an ongoing unstoppable force, only viewable on a macrocosmic level ­- change any number of small incidents and it will not register in the general course of things - or you believe that every single detail counts.

Though it seems obvious that the first hypothesis is only a means of exculpating oneself from any form of responsibility in the greater scheme of things, an acceptance of either determinism or predestination, it is still shocking and terrifying to even contemplate the second.

Take Max, for instance, a film that - for better or worse - deals with Hitler’s decision to pursue politics instead of art. Basically, the idea is that on the night H. is going to meet up with Max Rothman, a Jewish art dealer who is going to show his work, said art dealer is killed before the meeting, by a gang that has just left one of Hitler’s early “pep-talks”. And Hitler’s decision to abandon art for politics is a direct result of being stood up by Rothman (who is too busy dying in the snow to show up). O, the irony. The first Jew killed (though indirectly) by Hitler is the very one that could have stopped him. Full of rage and hate, Hitler irrevocably sets himself upon the path leading him into History. Etc. Basically, the movie pulls on some pretty big strings, more for shock value than anything else (methinks).

What troubles me however is the following question (that has, i’m sure, already been addressed in numerous books, essays, doctoral thesis, etc.):

Does History not have a certain momentum of its own?

And if not, when does evil become Evil, the effacement of any semblance of humanity, a mindless vocation to harm?

(For more on Max and an echo of my annoyance at the twist at its end, there’s this.)