A bit late

Bring Back Braids

Cutting off your braids has ever been a rite of passage and a sign of rebellion.

Which was why I was fascinated to see the starring role played by Mattie Ross’s braids in Joel and Ethan Coen’s True Grit. (The Coens appear on NPR’s Fresh Air today; also see the show’s excellent Tumblr.) Lustrous, practical, they summed up the character precisely. A bob would have been cute, the Dorothy Hamill haircut sported by the 1969 version’s Kim Darby dated, long hair absurd. The braids say: “I happen to be a girl, but that is no matter. I am here to do business.” Mattie may change into her father’s pants to ride into Choctaw territory, but she’s never pretending to be a boy, and no one mistakes her for one.

More on women, hair and the Coen brothers here.

Also see the wonderful costumes from True Grit on fymoviecostumes (the Tumblr of a 17-year old). I encourage her/him to read this biography of the great Edith Head, if s/he hasn’t already.

This is a Terrible Poster

I saw the poster for the Facebook movie, The Social Network, at the Bergen Street station yesterday. And all I could think was, This is a terrible poster. Now I can’t find the subway version online (camera phone FAIL), but mentally replace the text above with the three words Punk, Billionaire, Genius. And take away the cute Facebook sidebar.

Crypto-Kruger typography, with lightweight Futura in a justified block.

“Punk”? Who called Mark Zuckerberg a punk?

Who’s afraid of sweet Jesse Eisenberg?

I understand I am supposed to be wowed by the contrast between his downy face and the words Punk Billionaire Genius but what non-modelesque young man gets a billboard of his face nowadays who isn’t an upstart genius online billionaire? And maybe it’s my glasses, but I found it impossible to focus on the face and the type at the same time. I could only see either a very boring typographic treatment (a red block would have helped graphically) or a very dark portrait of a young man.

I see they were going for subtle, with the name of the film only in the Facebook font (Klavika) down in the corner. The online version, seen above, is set up like an iPad screen. But I think they should have gone for the full Facebook treatment, fake Zuckerberg doing wrong amidst a fake cast of thousands.

My guess is David Fincher was so afraid of his movie looking like another teen movie (hoodie alert) he went too graphic. But this is no Seven. I realize I’m not the target demographic. The poster and the trailer are getting lots of design love here and here (where you can make your own version). But I think it’s “klassy”: good taste, no sale.

The Language of “Kids Are All Right”

Finally escaped my house of an evening Saturday night and saw The Kids Are All Right. Which I loved. The dinner table conversations were right on. The acting was great. I loved seeing Julianne Moore’s freckles and Annette Bening’s wrinkles. And the language—of therapy, of cool-kid professions, even of landscape design—was a 2010 time capsule. The decor was nice too.

I squirmed every time Nic (Bening) or Jules (Moore) talked to their children about “taking time to process” an experience, or to each other about “reconnecting” or an emotion “not yet having reached the level of consciousness.” Clearly they have been to couples therapy. I have the same reaction when members of my family who have gone to couples therapy use the same vocabulary. I agree with the sentiment, but I can’t stand the way it’s expressed. Can we have emotional clarity without jargon? The movie first indicates no, then yes.

I also squirmed when they talked about composting, as I’ve also mentioned it to my husband before sleep, a nagging eco-item on my to-do list I’d like to pawn off on someone else. In Laurel Canyon, Lisa Cholodenko’s last film and one of my all time favorites, the cool kids were in the music industry. The hot spot was Chateau Marmont. This time around Paul (Mark Ruffalo) owns an organic restaurant and adjacent farm (seen above, those galvanized chairs are too perfect). Nic pretentiously refers to his career as being in the “food service industry” but we in the audience at the Cobble Hill Cinema understand it to be so much more. Doctors like Nic are the past of status. Paul is the future.

Nic also doesn’t understand that landscape design—Jules’s latest career idea—could have cachet. We see Jules xeriscaping the hell out of Paul’s back yard, and we approve. Nic doesn’t get the language of lavender and succulents… but she does get Joni Mitchell.

My husband rightly pointed out to me that the reason we liked The Kids Are All Right so much is that it is Laurel Canyon, remixed. Frances McDormand could have played either Nic or Jules, though her character, in the earlier film is really a version of Jules: an adult who is still acting like a child, and falls for one. Mark Ruffalo could have played her younger lover Ian as well as Alessandro Nivola did, minus the British accent. Paul is Ian without the slinkiness, a seducer unwilling to admit his complicity.

Nic and her daugher Joni (Mia Waskikowska) are both versions of Christian Bale’s tightly wound psychiatrist, sympathetic to his patients, hard on everyone else. Cholodenko seems to be arguing that doctors and future doctors (Joni is a National Merit Scholarship winner in science) need locavores and rock stars in their lives. To emerge into adulthood as a well-rounded person, it helps to have one be one, but not both, of your moms.

Modern Houses and Doomed P.M.s

We watched The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski’s recent thriller starring Ewan McGregor in the in-over-his-head male ingenue role. I loved the first hour—making the rude ballet of getting on and off a car ferry into a scene of menace was genius—but when it became clear the bad guys were part of (and this is no spoiler) A VAST INTERNATIONAL CONSPIRACY I lost interest. Two things kept me amused.

First, Ewan (whose character’s name is never mentioned; Pierce Brosnan as the too-cute-for-politics version of Tony Blair just calls him “man”) plays a ghost writer on a tight deadline. He has a month to fix the politician’s memoirs. But we never see him writing. He keeps saying he has to get to work, but then scotch and amateur sleuthing get in the way. I can’t begin to tell you how nervous this made me. He might miss his deadline? Had he made an outline? Just start writing! My professional neurosis (I don’t think I have ever turned anything in late) prickled my skin to a far greater degree than Polanski’s gray-on-gray palette.

Second, the lost-in-translation quality of the house on Martha’s Vineyard in which Pierce was staying. The outside and the inside were clearly two different houses, the exterior shingles a nod to our American tastes, the stacked basalt walls within a pure northern European idea of luxury. It all looked so German, with those big flat windows on the water, and in fact the beaches are on the island of Sylt, the exterior near Poland, the interior a soundstage (review from the house’s perspective here). But more than that, no American or European politician would ever rent such a house. Look at what the Clintons bought in Chappaqua, white clapboard, welcoming porch. Even out of office  heads of state have to maintain the fiction that their tastes are just like the rest of ours, and that leaves modernism, and contemporary architecture to an even greater degree, out. A man who calls his wife about whether or not to grin would never allow himself to be photographed in a house without a yard, without a bush.

On DO: ‘Please Give’ and Design People

When I first saw the house that is now my home, it was hardly in an appealing state. Every window was obscured layers of screens, shutters and (amateur) stained glass. The bathroom was encrusted in pink-orange Mexican tiles, with trim to match. The living room walls looked like they were covered in moldy cork, actually wallpaper. I saw a man walk in, blanch, and walk out the front door of the open house. Maybe it is only natural that, from the moment I entered, I wanted the furniture more than I wanted the house…

With this as background, you can imagine my glee at the second scene in Please Give, Nicole Holofcener’s new film, starring Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt as the owners of a vintage modern furniture shop. The son of the deceased is showing Kate (Keener) around a cluttered apartment, apologizing for the smell. We get a minute to see the room through her eyes: the clean lines of the beige sofa, the ladderback chairs around a dark oval table, the funky ceramic lamps. She asks a polite question about how old he thinks the furniture is. “You know, old,” he says. “That’s wood,” he adds, pointing pointlessly at the table. Kate begins to glide around, making small talk and small gestures. Raps on the coffee table. Lifts a cushion on the couch. Slides a hand along the dining table and, I thought, tries to peek underneath without obvious stooping. The man, who says he is not keeping his mother’s apartment, he prefers the suburbs, holds up a pretty/ugly vase covered in bright flowers, and mutters nervously: “I don’t want to throw away something priceless.”

Read the rest at Design Observer.

Anthony Lane Fugs Too

On The Clash of the Titans:

… while [Liam] Neeson, as team leader, comes wrapped in so much aluminum foil that, if I were an attendant mortal, I wouldn’t quite know whether to worship him or take him out every hour and baste him.

It goes on from there. What’s better than a pan with an imaginary British accent?

Coloring Book

In the opening moments of Bright Star we see the hands of Fanny Brawe (Abbie Cornish) capably sewing something very complex and very beige. The texture of the cloth, the push of the needle through the fabric, the effort of making so many fine stitches is made perfectly clear, even as we simultaneously admire the less workmanlike aspects of the shot—the light on the cloth, the balletic movements of hands. The last film I remember dramatizing craft so well, and in the first shot too, was Coraline. What is it about sewing and enchantment and girls? The two films couldn’t be less alike, and yet, it is sewing that gets girls both in and out of trouble. Fanny is trying to sew herself into something, that thrust of the needle is a creative force, but at first succeeds better in attracting attention than respect.

I loved Jane Campion’s film, despite my feeling that it might not be true, and it must surely be anachronistic. What’s better than doomed love, particularly when  he is so much more fragile than she? In truth, I could have had less poetry and more sewing.

Bright Star’s legacy for lovers of costume drama like me is to make the costumes part of the drama. From the first view of Fanny and her family progressing through the field, everyone else in muslin, Fanny in pink, it is as if all those tuckers in Jane Austen have finally and violently been colored in. What is fussy backdrop at the BBC (only relevant to the action in that one chilling scene in P&P, when Lizzie’s petticoat is quite six inches deep in mud) becomes a character. We get over the unflattering nature of the fashions of 1817. We see how a creative person might work within the limits of skirt length and puffed sleeves to not look like every other maiden. We see how a creative person might have to do so, given no other canvas. We almost envy her the yards of fabric to work with, so impoverished are we in our skinny jeans and t-shirts. I felt as if I hadn’t ever seen rose in that way.