June 2009
18 posts
4 tags
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
We already have a no Spielberg policy in our house. It was the one-two punch of Minority Report and A.I., the former nonsensical, the latter queasily sentimental, both about 45 minutes too long, that caused the ban to come into effect. I think that I now need to effect my own Rom Com ban. Many funny women have noted how unfunny, how misogynistic, and how lazy romantic comedy has become. I noted it...
4 tags
Spoilsport
Lured by the prospect of getting sucked in to another TV series (to anticipate the next episode with characters you love is so much better than fearing another disappointing feature film), I added the first season of Skins to our queue. This is the hot hot hot BBC teen series, set in Bristol, and starring the boy of About a Boy, all grown up and a stud, and the slumdog of Slumdog Millionaire,...
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Perfect Pairs
Our admiration for Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy led us to Netflix her first film, Old Joy. There are many purposeful parallels between the films, which might almost have been taking place in different parts of Portland on the same day, the most obvious being the combination of a pair, a car and a rather bleak urban landscape shot in flat ribbons. Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (cult musician...
3 tags
People in New Houses...
After our unsatisfying evening with Castle Howard and British snobs (see Aloysius Is Missed), the next night Mark and I decided to wallow in the mindlessness of actual American television. We are really not as big snobs as that sounds, but it is the summer, and we are eagerly awaiting the August starts of Mad Men and Project Runway, so there never seems to be anything on. And what was on Thursday...
4 tags
The Beauty of a Park
Read my review of the High Line in New York City here:
http://designobserver.com/archives/entry.html?id=39807
5 tags
Aloysius is Missed
I knew it would be bad, because (as with the BBC Pride & Prejudice) what two-hour film could compare to a multi-hour, multi-part original. But I was shocked by how bad, how insidiously bad, last year’s remake of Brideshead Revisited was. The only good thing about it was the sumptuous architectural photography: new, often silvery views of Castle Howard, the Yorkshire estate designed by Sir...
3 tags
Home Front
I don’t usually read the short stories in The New Yorker because I don’t really like short stories except those of Jhumpa Lahiri, Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro. Even writers I do like can be cloying in short story form, and I often have the sense that I have just ruined my reading of their next novel by previewing it in the magazine. So I always receive the Summer Fiction Issue with a certain...
5 tags
Textile Psychology
Just as I was thinking, It is almost too easy to fetishize the sari, with its deep, rich or bright colors, gold embroidery, and simultaneously revealing and concealing drapery in a Western setting, a tourist steps into the frame on Brick Lane and snaps a photo of Nazneen, the protagonist, hurrying down the London street and looking very small and very soft against the gray cobblestones. It’s a...
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Why Plant Your Own?
My stepmother always asks if we are going to get a climbing structure for our Brooklyn backyard. And the answer is, Over my husband’s dead body. He designed the backyard, which has a raised bed of grass, a strip of out-of-control sensitive ferns, and a rectangular goldfish pond and fountain. Little Tikes would not go with our attempt at Japanese gardening. But even without the aesthetic hurdle...
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Lost Loves
I first noticed this phenomenon with Sex and the City. The first time through, on DVD, I loved Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and all that she stood for—the fashion, the musings, the free spirit. But when I began watching it again in TBS reruns (every night at 11, and edited for commercials to such a length as to be the literal equivalent of eating a bon bon) she began to grate. What the hell was...
8 tags
Dickens is Funny
In my earlier BBC costume drama posts (and there will be more), I failed to mention their best adaptation of the last five years, Bleak House, starring Gillian Anderson in a performance that should wipe Agent Scully permanently from the public mind. She is chilling in an entirely natural way as the wonderfully named Lady Dedlock. Sometimes Dickens goes too far with names, but this is not one of...
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Auto Pilot
Following the line of selection from Wendy and Lucy, I remembered Chop Shop, written and directed by Ramin Bahrani, whose latest movie, Goodbye Solo, got very good reviews last year. Chop Shop is set in what is properly known as Willets Point, better known as the Iron Triangle: a largely unpaved and unpoliced section of Queens, hard by Shea Stadium, LaGuardia Airport and the site of the USTA...
5 tags
Romance Is Dead
There are some movies so bad I can’t bear to put them in my Netflix queue. Somehow sharing with the world (or at least with Mark) that I can’t resist a movie with terrible reviews, terrible actors, and terrible writing that I know will just make me mad, is too much to bear. That’s why Time Warner invented Channel 1000, where you can pay more (but instantly and anonymously) for your bad taste....
2 tags
Dog Days
And along comes a movie to make my last point better than I could possibly express: Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy. It may be the feel-bad movie of the year—I knew it would be sad, and I often shy away from such films in favour of entertainment—but it was beautiful, terrifying and real. Wendy (Michelle Williams) spends the whole film close to disaster, financial, physical, emotional, but...
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Worst Case Scenario
Before I had the baby, we used to go to the movies every Friday night. Rare was an Oscar season in which we hadn’t seen all the films well in advance. And I always managed to stay up for the whole show. How times have changed… But in fact it has not been that bad. This year, most of the Best Picture nominees came out on DVD moments after the telecast ended, if not before, and I find I just...
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Evil Ms
A fair number of journalists have mentioned the odd parallelism of the fall of the House of Merdle in Little Dorrit, shown on Masterpiece Theatre in April, and the real-life fall of the House of Bernard Madoff. In both cases, a man from the lower classes worked his way up by making money, year after year, for other people. His Midas touch allowed him to appear to be selective about who he allowed...
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Doom
We have been bingeing on BBC miniseries here. Once you get in to watching series on DVD, it is hard to be satisfied with stand-alone movies. You just want more, more characters, more plot, more things both familiar and new. Watching all seven seasons of The West Wing in a row (as we did earlier this spring) was the ultimate, though not as spine-tingling as the four seasons of The Wire. With The...
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Why this blog?
Because in March my mother came for a visit, and very kindly treated my husband and I to tickets to the theatre. We chose The Cherry Orchard at BAM, since it is nearby and she had never been. Directed by Sam Mendes, starring Simon Russell Beale, Ethan Hawke, etc. We decided to overlook the fact that it was also starring our most hated actress, Rebecca Hall, whose drony voice and awkward body...
