Blue Valentine

To be honest, this movie wasn’t as good as I thought it’d be. Yes, the performances are amazing, and the pairing of the early and final stages of the relationship is effective and well done (even if it’s been done many times before). But I left the movie feeling somewhat unsatisfied, like something was missing. I think that something is a sense of why the relationship is falling apart in the first place. The movie is a skillful portrayal of what it looks like when a relationship is ending, but it’s all surface, with hints of things stirring beneath.

What’s intriguing about this, to me, is that reviewers of the film seem so eager to praise the film that they rush to fill in the blanks. The problem, they all seem to agree, is Ryan Gosling’s character, a “man-child” whose lack of ambition and contentedness in various dead-end jobs has caused his wife to fall out of love with him*. My reaction to the film was totally different. What I find intriguing about this disjunct is that I think that in real life, that probably is what a compelling explanation for why a relationship might end. But I think that in this movie, that's not what causes it. In fact, I think the movie tells you what the problem is early on, when it has Gosling's character remark that men are more romantic than women, they marry for love, whereas women marry when they find a suitable guy who will be a good provider. To me, the problem in this movie seemed to be Michelle Williams' character, who was an emotionally troubled, unhappy sort of woman who was incapable of communicating with others. Here we add that her family life was obviously nightmarish, and the only other relationship of hers that we see wasn't all that great either. She leaves her previous boyfriend with no explanation, no willingness to talk things over, just dumps him flat when he does something that upsets her. Granted, he seems to be a jerk anyhow, for the most part, but still, she isn't exactly being reasonable either. Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling's character is verging on saintliness. Yes, he lacks ambition, and is content to work crappy jobs and basically be a husband and dad (which he in fact explicitly says). And he's willing to do that because he is head-over-heels for his wife, and their family life is his number one priority. Yes, he drinks in the morning, but the movie is careful not to portray him as a drunken mess, or a jerk. This, I think, is a mis-step - like I said, in real life, I think he would have been a lot more difficult to live with, and that would be a problem. But I think the movie emphatically refuses to make him that. There is one scene where he shows up drunk and unreasonable and is generally a nightmare, but your sympathy clearly lies with him even at that moment, because his wife is completely impossible to talk to, and this is his desperate last ditch effort to save their relationship. She gives him no chance at all, drives him to that awful scene, and then uses it as justification to leave him. Or at least, that's how it seemed to me.

So I guess this is less a review of the movie overall than a response to what I think is a total misinterpretation of the film. I kind of hated Michelle Williams' character. And it bugs me that even in reviews, she gets to be the good guy. She is not the good guy. She's a seriously messed up woman who, I think, is basically incapable of having an adult relationship. SO THERE.

*I’m quoting an imagined aggregate of reviews here, so I may be misrepresenting them, or the ones I read may not be representative of all the reviews out there.

Lottery Ticket

I'm not entirely sure why I had such high hopes for this movie. But I did. I really thought it would be pretty good overall. Funny dialogue, enjoyable story, an affable sort of film with moments of hilarity. And you know what? I was disappointed.

Let me begin by saying there are some hilarious moments in the movie. T-Pain is surprisingly phenomenal - he's probably the best thing in the entire film*. There are some really funny lines, and general laugh-out-loud moments. And after all, that's what you're watching the movie for.

Unfortunately, the movie is also really slow and kind of incoherent. Bow Wow wins the lottery, and that's great, but then he can't collect for the next three days, so he has to deal with the world and guard the ticket until he can get the money. Fair enough. The plot goes through some awfully convoluted twists and turns just to keep things alive - a vicious thug type (played by Chris from The Wire, who is surprisingly terrible) who had wanted to kill Bow Wow and now wants to kill him AND take his lottery ticket, a creepy mob boss type guy, a crazy shut-in who lives in his basement - they're all a bit random and not especially well done. Meanwhile, there are also the stock lottery movie plot points: a gold digger who suddenly takes interest! a cherished female friend who gets pushed aside for aforementioned gold digger! creeping paranoia evinced by two best friends having an argument (gasp! the money is coming between them!), and of course, a scene with money being thrown in the air. This last is what necessitates the mob guy plot point, because we have to have the money scene, but given that he doesn't have the money yet, he has to get it somehow: enter mob guy. Actually, the movie does a pretty good job motivating this aspect and integrating him into the overall plot. It's when he stands alone that he gets cliche - the old "if you don't have my money I'll saw off your legs and feed them to dogs" bit. Incidentally, there is something really fascinating about that whole maffia subplot, namely, that the movie refuses to make them heroic. They seem really tough, but they are repeatedly unmasked as wimps, or guys who only have one good hit in them. It's really kind of strange, but goes back to what I find kind of intriguing about the film, namely...

THE MESSAGE. This is something I find really fascinating - almost every African American movie you see has a MESSAGE. There are long pauses where the film basically lectures you about being a good person. Even a seemingly just-for-fun movie like House Party has these weird clunky moments where characters ostentatiously say no to drugs or alcohol or insist on using condoms. There's a sense of moral responsibility palpably felt by the makers of the film in these movies that I find kind of incredible. Ice Cube feels it more so than others, I think. In this case though, it's especially interesting, because one of the central dynamics of the film is whether or not Bow Wow is gonna use his winnings to help out the 'hood (I'll give you three guesses what he decides). So a part of you kind of has to wonder, how many 'hoods are Bow Wow and his co-stars helping? You know?

Anyway, to return to the plot. It's clunky and occasionally just too much. The tone of the film veers between irreverent humor and sap thicker than maple syrup. And just straight up boredom. Ice Cube's character manages to be totally preposterous and gratingly cliche all at once. A lot of the plot feels tacked on or mechanical. The best example of this is the fight between the two friends - it happens completely out of nowhere, with no real motivation, and is resolved a few scenes later, making it clear that the sole purpose of it is to have a scene where the money threatens to come between two friends. And it's not even a good scene.

Basically, it's a highly uneven, often dull film with flashes of entertainment. Alas.

*People who say that Mike Epps (playing the reverend) is the best part are wrong. The whole preacher-who's-actually-greedy-and-lascivious thing has been done a bazillion times, and there's nothing particularly great about this rendition. For a better version, see: David Alan Grier, Season 1 of Martin. Actually, the best part of the Mike Epps scene is the deacon sitting off to the side - he's kind of great. Also, while we're at it, Charlie Murphy (CHARLIE MURPHY!) isn't all that great either.

Consider the Lobster And Other Essays, by David Foster Wallace

I didn't read the entire thing - I skipped Authority and American Usage (which I probably would've enjoyed, actually, but by the time I realized that I was just glad to be done with the book), Host, and Up, Simba, and only skimmed How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart (though I did enjoy my skimming thereof - just read the last three pages, starting with the paragraph "Maybe what keeps us buying in the face of constant disappointment" - it's a nice few paragraphs). If one of the things you find difficult in David Foster Wallace's writing is the occasional unbelievably awful scene that leaves you shaken and somewhat traumatized, skip the first essay, Big Red Son, which is about the porn industry. Other than that, I don't have any particular comments. I'm not really going to get into the specifics of the remainder, because I don't think I am a fair judge of it.

So I will say this instead: I respect David Foster Wallace. I recognize that he is an extremely intelligent person with some genuinely fascinating observations about the world. I think he's a good writer, for the most part, and an interesting one, though there are aspects of his style that I find grating. I also recognize that he is a deeply moral human being, with an unwavering engagement with the question of how to do the right thing.

But at the end of the day, I really, REALLY don't like him. I just don't. Not just because I find his worldview devastating - though that's a huge part of it - I don't like him the way I don't like some people. Because I just don't. I recognize those people may not be Bad people, and that spending time with them is enjoyable for other people that I like. But to me, it is trying, even if I have to admit that the day was largely pleasant.

The Gastronomical Me, by MFK Fisher

I'd heard that Fisher was one of the all-time greats of food writing, so I was really excited to receive this book from Santa (and my parents). I had extremely high hopes for it, and I wasn't let down - the book was every bit as wonderful as I'd expected. Fisher's prose reminded me somewhat of August Kleinzahler's (Cutty, One Rock is still one of my favorite books) - there's this lyrical, simple beuty to her writing that is just so wonderful. Here's a bit from the foreword, for example:

People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?

(...)

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mingled and mixed and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it... and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied... and it is all one.

I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.

I am stopping myself, because otherwise I'd just type out the rest of the foreword, and maybe the rest of the book too. It's such a wonderful, beautiful work. There is such passion in it, but also a sense of privacy and restraint, where you don't get every sordid detail, but a really elegant contouring of the world. The descriptions of food are not especially flowery, but they're tremendously evocative ("The solid honesty" of a borscht, for instance - can't you just taste it?), and there's such feeling in the book, a kind of intensity that hums through the pages, with a touch of wistfulness as well. I can't wait to read more of her books.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

I only got through half of this book. I'd been switching back and forth between wanting to read it and thinking it might be kind of terrible. Sometimes you're in the mood for zombies and sometimes you're really not. And I really love Jane Austen, so I was worried that my response would mostly be a kind of peevishness over any modifications to the original. But I was also kind of curious to see what happened when you combined Austen and zombies. So I finally launched into it, and was actually quite amused at first.

When Elizabeth stood, she saw Mrs. Long struggling to free herself as two female dreadfuls bit into her head, cracking her skull like a walnut and sending a shower of dark blood spouting as high as the chandeliers.

You kind of find yourself giggling over moments of extreme gore in Austen's generally well-manicured world. And you sort of suspect that Austen herself might have gotten a kick out of it. But as the book wears on, you get sort of inured to it, and it becomes a lot less entertaining. Austen's sparse descriptive style doesn't really let you get too detailed on zombie attacks without clearly deviating from the overall tone of the original, but zombie attacks are really pretty bland if not described in detail.

Meanwhile, the constant, droning reiteration of how important combat is to Elizabeth, how she was trained by the Shaolin, bla bla bla... oh man, does that get annoying. I GET IT ALREADY. Her violent fantasies of beheading the Bingley girls seems like a clanging hyperbole of her willful character, making her seem more like a petulant child than a high spirited young woman. She's unbelievably contemptuous of everyone, and really smug about her fighting abilities, and it makes her really annoying - which basically destroys your sympathy for her as a character, and makes the book completely ineffective.

So I plowed halfway through the book, and then gave up - not worth my time.

Shower

This is kind of a simple film, in a way - it's about a guy who goes home to visit his father and retarded brother, who run a bathhouse together. The main character is a businessman, so there's the somewhat predictable contrast of his high-powered way of life and the more placid everyday workings of the bathhouse. Which is fine, but the movie really isn't about narrative at all. It's more in the characters themselves. I think there must be some kind of name for this sub-genre of films, generally foreign, that are like vignettes about various characters and their woes. There's a kind of anecdotal quality to it - so-and-so is having marriage problems, so-and-so has self-esteem issues, and the central space/character of the film is usually a kind of therapeutic figure who helps all these people in clever ways. You know what I mean? Shower is definitely in that category.

But it's also, I thought, just a beautiful film. There are a couple scenes that, I dunno, just got to me. Though I guess anyone singing O Sole Mio, even (and maybe especially) badly kind of gets me. The guy who plays the retarded brother emanates a kind of warmth and joy that resonates with me on some deeper level. And I think, in terms of portraying characters with disabilities, the movie does a pretty good job? Though perhaps someone could disagree with me, and I'm be curious what they had to say.

Anyhow, overall - a lovely film. Definitely worth watching.

Lipstick Jihad, by Azadeh Moaveni

I got this book from a free box*, purely because it looked kind of interesting. I was a little skeptical, expecting a book tailor-made for a Western audience eager to hear about the "realities" of Iran, ie, how much better the US is. What a pleasant surprise this book was. The author is an Iranian-American woman who is raised in California, then moves to Iran. She writes about her bi-cultural upbringing with surprising subtlety and insight, acknowledging, for instance, how skewed her image of Iran has been, and how she continues to feel a sense of insecurity about her Iranian-ness. She's surprisingly open to self-criticism, and willing to admit somewhat unflattering things about herself. And she's a good writer, whose prose is enjoyable, if slightly self-indulgent/melodramatic at times.

Overall, there's this weird double bind to reading books like this one - on the one hand, I think people should know about different parts of the world and what life is like there. I especially think Americans should know about life in places they're at war with. And I think they should be confronted with why people don't like them (there's a really impressive moment where Moaveni talks about being shocked by her friends in Iran who were indifferent to 9/11. It's a bit diplomatic on her part, because it allows her to be outraged - not to say that she wasn't - while also presenting their rather seething critique, namely, that Americans have led to the death of thousands in the Middle East and not cared, so why should people in the Middle East care when lots of Americans die?). So anyways, yes, on the one hand, this book is a refreshingly bracing perspective on life in other places, with a bi-cultural narrator who can sort of present both sides of the equation, and I think that's great. On the other hand though, I am slightly uncomfortable with the presentation of the "exotic" Middle East as feel-good reading for a western audience. There's really nothing to be done about this dilemma, and I should add that Moaveni is, in a way, a book you can feel good about precisely because she IS on both sides of the coin, and is very self-aware of what that implies. And she seems careful to avoid the exoticizing tendency or the overly simplistic emotional draws (the kind that make Reading Lolita in Tehran feel so... gross). Overall - a very interesting book. Definitely worth reading.

*Ok, ok, ok. It wasn't a free box. It was a box collecting books for underprivileged children. I've been feeling so guilty about this that I feel compelled to announce my crime to all who will listen. If it helps at all, the only things I took were this and Bernard Williams' Shame and Necessity, and I attempted to compensate for it by giving the children a big bag of books in return. One of them was an A.A. Milne book I've owned since childhood - that was the real penance.