Disconnecting The Dots: 2009

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Inappropriate Sample of the Moment #1

Commercial for htc cellphones:

Nina Simone's 10 minute ode to the apocalypse:

AeoA

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Review: (500) Days of Summer

A few weeks back, I went to see a movie. I liked the movie—a lot. My friend, who came with me, liked it too. I talked to other friends; they liked it too. The problem: nobody could say whether it was any good or not. The movie has a ton of stuff I like: a great soundtrack (which deserves a little essay of its own), great sets (the apartments in the movie approach Woody Allen-ish levels of real estate porn), great clothes, discussions of good urban design, and Zooey Deschanel (whom I’ve been fond of since All the Real Girls). So while I enjoyed the movie, I can’t tell if this was anything more than a superficial aesthetic reaction.

If you haven’t seen the movie, here’s a plot summary (The movie is told non-chronologically, so its almost impossible to spoil): Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a twenty-something bachelor in Los Angeles meets a woman, Summer (Zooey Deschanel), and immediately falls for her. They date for awhile, but she, perhaps noticing that he’s far more smitten with her than she is with him, breaks it off. Tom is left to come to terms with the break-up, and to figure out how to move on with his life. As I mentioned earlier, the movie is told non-chronologically, so the story of how Summer and Tom get together is interspersed with his attempts to get over her.

Now I don’t intend to even dip my toes into the philosophy of what makes a movie good or not over and above one’s disposition to like it. Nevertheless, I’ve been doing some thinking, and having talked it over with a couple of good friends, here’s how I think I might be able to solve my dilemma.

1) I think the first thing to do is to just bite the bullet on the aesthetic question. The movie is just plain enjoyable for me, and for people who share my tastes, even if it isn't anything more that that. In a way it’s a throwback to old-style romantic comedies of the 50s and 60s (I'm thinking of the old Rock Hudson/Doris Day dealies). What you have are two really good-looking people, dressed in really good-looking clothes, interacting in really good-looking environments. The end result may be slight, but it’s still completely enjoyable.

2) There’s a bit of narration at the beginning of the movie that the filmmakers seem to think is very important. It showed up in the trailer, and it forms part of the first track of the soundtrack. For this reason its worth quoting in full:

This is a story of boy meets girl. The boy, Tom Hansen of Margate, New Jersey, grew up believing that he'd never truly be happy until the day he met the one. This belief stemmed from early exposure to sad British pop music and a total mis-reading of the movie 'The Graduate'. The girl, Summer Finn of Shinnecock, Michigan, did not share this belief. Since the disintegration of her parent's marriage she'd only love two things. The first was her long dark hair. The second was how easily she could cut it off and not feel a thing. Tom meets Summer on January 8th. He knows almost immediately she is who he has been searching for. This is a story of boy meets girl, but you should know upfront, this is not a love story.

Now, I think this is deceptive in at least two important ways. Firstly, the narrator gives equal weight to Tom and Summer's respective views on love, but the movie never really leaves Tom's head. Summer’s exact motivations are never really revealed, and she is almost always seen through Tom’s eyes. This seeming underdevelopment of her character has formed the basis of at least one negative review of the movie. Secondly, I don’t really think the movie is really about the conflict of two different views of love. Rather, I think we gain more insight by taking the movie to be an account of two particular people, who ultimately have divergent views of their particular relationship, as well as an account of how one of these people manages to come to terms with its end. I’d argue that thinking of the movie in this way, helps us get past the Summer-as-boogeywoman criticism that was the centerpiece of the negative review mentioned earlier.

3) Although the movie cemented my attraction to and admiration for Deschanel, the real revelation for me in the movie was Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance. I’d always thought of him as the kid from 3^rd Rock from the Sun. But here he makes for a rather good leading man. This is apparently not the only time they’ve paired off on screen, and I’d like to see them do something else together—maybe a thriller or a noir detective story (Gordon-Levitt has already tread some of that territory in the aforementioned Brick).

So is (500) Days of Summer a good movie? Well yes and no. It’s certainly well made; its directed with flair, its well-acted, and (for the most part) its well written. But unlike the best movies of the genre (Annie Hall (which shares its plot), High Fidelity, or even All the Real Girls) I’m not sure there’s anything going on below the surface. As such, if you don’t happen to share my tastes, and God knows most people don’t, then there isn’t a lot in the movie to recommend it. But as for me, I think I think its time to give up the game of justification and say “I just like it. Ok?”

AeoA

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Modern Noir Casefiles #1

Casefile: Brick (2005)

Call it modern dress Shakespeare, but nix the Shakespeare. Take a story straight out of Dashiell Hammett and set it, say, at a high school in late 90s California. Bingo—it’s a great match. After all, ain’t a school like a city? You get all the usual types: the hustler, the tough guy, the loser, the dopehead. The teachers are the cops. The weird, smart loner is the detective. Nix the fedoras and the coats, and bring on the cell phones. All the pieces fit. Only it don’t wash. Why are some of these kids acting and talking like 1920s gangsters? The flick doesn’t really tell us anything about high school or hard boiled crime. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it ain't fun; it just ain’t much more than that.

Monday, August 31, 2009

Guest Photographer: Ami Harbin

Shot-a-Day #66

Brunswick Street-- Halifax, NS-- July 27, 2009, originally uploaded by midexies.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Shot-a-Day #65

Barrington Street-- Halifax, NS-- July 25, 2009, originally uploaded by midexies.

Shot-a-Day #64

Grad House-- Dalhousie University-- July 22, 2009, originally uploaded by midexies.

Shot-a-Day #63

Public Gardens-- Halifax, NS-- July 20, 2009, originally uploaded by midexies.

Shot-a-Day #62

Camp Hill Cemetery-- Halifax, NS--June 23, 2009, originally uploaded by midexies.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Shot-a-Day #61

Blue Mountain Resort--Collingwood, ON-- May 9, 2009, originally uploaded by midexies.

Shot-a-Day #60

Younge Street--Toronto, On-- May 8, 2009, originally uploaded by midexies.

Shot-a-Day #59

North Street Church-- May 2, 2009, originally uploaded by midexies.

Shot-a-Day #58

Dalhousie Arts Centre-- March 26, 2009, originally uploaded by midexies.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Ticket Stub of the Moment #2

Set 1

Who's He? (Iverson)

Mint (Iverson)

Anthem for the Earnest (King)

Everybody Wants to Rule the World (Tears for Fears)

My Friend Meditron (King)

Fém (György Ligeti)

Dirty Blonde (Anderson)

Set 2

Semi Simple Variations (Milton Babbitt)

Big Eater (Anderson)

Bill Hickman at Home (Iverson)

1972 Bronze Medalist (King)

Song X (Ornette Coleman)

Giant (Anderson)

Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana)

Encore

Flim (Aphex Twin)

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Being Caden Cotard

There’s a scene near the end of Being John Malkovich in which the eponymous character (played by the eponymous actor) crawls through the passageway that has allowed the other main characters in the movie access to his consciousness. The result is a strange sequence in which he (and we) perceives a crowded restaurant in which a number of men and women eat and talk while a singer sings softly in the background. The thing is, all the people in the room have Malkovich’s face, and while they appear to speak (and sing) normally, the only word they can say is ‘Malkovich’ The sequence is a great illustration of solipsism: the philosophical doctrine whereby all that one can know is one's own mind. Indeed, the world (including all its inhabitants) may well only be the product of one’s own mind.

Charlie Kaufman wrote BJM, and his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York (SNY), is that sequence at feature length. Caden Cotard, a depressed, constantly ill, theatre director in upstate New York, wins a prestigious ‘genius grant’ and sets about producing an unfathomably ambitious theatre project, on a vast stage (a full reproduction of New York City in a huge warehouse) and a cast of thousands. The enterprise estranges him from his friends, family, and collaborators, and while Cotard spends the rest of his life continually rehearsing and reconceiving his play, it is never actually performed for an audience.

That’s one story in the film. There are tons of others, constantly overlapping and getting in the way of each other. None of them really get the upper hand. As such, SNY may be any number of things: A comedy, a drama, farce and tragedy. In other words it’s a big mess of a movie.

But to the extent that SNY is any one thing, I’d argue that it’s a dream play—Caden Cotard’s dream of himself. Solipsism may seem to be an esoteric philosophical concept, but we’re confronted with it every time we dream. Our dreams are all about us—our obsessions, our fears, the images and random bits of information we pick up over the course of our daily lives. Our dreams are created by us. And they are, by and large, about us. And one of the things you notice about the movie is Cotard’s ubiquity. He shows up (in animated form) in his daughter’s favorite television show. He’s in all the advertisements we see in the movie. Most importantly, Cotard’s play, which is supposed to be about all the real dramas at play in a city of several million people, seems to end up being all about him. He casts someone (a man who has been following him since the beginning of the movie) as himself, then casts another actor to play the role of the first. Ultimately, despite the vast scale of the play, despite all of his plans to make ‘something real, something true’, the whole thing (and indeed the movie itself) ends up being about himself alone

But this is only one possible story of what’s going on. There are, as I said before, others. This is not entirely a good thing. Kaufman’s earlier scripts were nothing if not ambitious, but there was at least some overarching story that helped pull you through. If those movies were interesting stories about interesting ideas interestingly told, SNY ends up just being a whole bunch of interesting things mashed together. It may be great fun, but it is ultimately a rather cold (albeit cool) way in which to spend a couple of hours.