Sherman Cafe, in Union Square, has free wireless. The coffee is pretty good, too. Good place to hang out on a Sunday afternoon.
Category: Culture
You either like Charlie Kaufman movies or you don’t, and if you do, you’re already going to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, so no big review here. It’s in the top half of Kaufman films for me.
OK, OK. Better than Human Nature and Adaptation, and on a par with Being John Malkovich. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind I sort of put off on the side because it’s a different beast.
I thought it was completely comprehensible. The narrative wasn’t particularly chronological on one level, but on another level it was mostly linear, albeit with one big giant flashback in the middle. It’s all well and good to talk about how messed up a narrative is, but you’d think some people had never read any time travel stories…
Oh, right.
Also I liked the hard core of truth at the middle. There were moments when I worried about a saccharine ending, but not at all. One icicle in particular is perfectly chilling and painful. Kaufman and Gondry have a pretty good understanding of all the ways love can result in people hurting other people.
This happens to be that movie Jim Carrey’s been trying to make where you can forget that he’s Jim Carrey for a little while, by the by. That’s nice too. And Elijah Wood is good, and Kirsten Dunst is good, and so on. But you either like movies written by Kaufman or you don’t.
The Celestial Pictures DVD restoration of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is maybe the clearest print of a Hong Kong movie I’ve ever seen. It’s beautifully vivid. The only thing that’d beat it would be Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and I’m not sure I can count that.
OK, look, it’s this pretty:
Look at those reds and blues. They pop. In fact, my only complaint may be that it’s a little too vivid, but I’m not sure that’s not just my modern eyes watching a 70s Technicolor epic.
The first fight scene is pretty decent too, albeit a little slow for someone weaned on John Woo and Tsui Hark. But I still liked it.
[That was odd. Sorry about that.]
I rarely have many objections to Mamet, or for that matter to Val Kilmer. Keep that in mind. Still and all, Spartan measured up. Twice I saw the wires on which the god was lowered from the machine, but the tense taut moments more than carried me through. And who knew Mamet could direct an action movie? It is an action movie. It’s also a spy movie.
Hollywood doesn’t make that many spy movies. It should, if they’re going to be this good.
I just read the last issue of Cerebus. That’s it; ain’t any more.
For an insane guy, Dave Sim sure draws a pretty comic. It never stopped being gorgeous. I wish I could say kinder things about it; I am staggered by the weight of it. Thousands upon thousands of pages. There have been few such extended achievements.
When both he and Gerhard are dead, Cerebus will enter the public domain. He has arranged for the negatives to remain with trustworthy custodians, and they will be available to those who wish to reprint any portion of it. The attentive will notice that those two statements are not entirely congruent. Who knows?
I’m going to spoil the end now.
Celestial Pictures is restoring and rereleasing 75% of the Shaw Brothers library on DVD. Alas, they’re all region 3 DVDs. If only I’d just purchased a region-free DVD player…
Oh, wait. I did.
Who doesn’t need more books? Lorem Ipsum, the hot new used bookstore in Inman Square, is throwing a grand opening party this Friday at 7 PM. My brother made their bookshelves. They have a blog. They’re cool. See you there.
Hey, look — liberal talk radio.
That actually fits the pattern. The news media is slanting increasingly conservative, but the entertainment media is darned liberal.
Moriarty reviewed The Passion over on AICN; unlike most of the Passion reviews on AICN, his was fairly negative. I note his review not because of that directly, but because of some of the replies to the review:
“Most movies that are made in Hollywood are anti-white? Hollywood is controlled by jews. Most Hollywood movies have British and German villains. Blacks are overrepresented on TV. They’re either seen as the “victim” or superior to Whites. Blacks are NEVER portrayed negatviely, whereas whites are always the villains. Clearly this is anti-white racism at the hands of Hollywood jews.”
And:
“Jesus was condemned by Pontius Pilate and betrayed by the Jewish people… Sorry to say but thats basically what you get when you look at the different books of the Bible. The Romans may have done the crucifying, but the Jewish people ultimately turned their backs on Him. Oh and as for Moriarty talking about how Pilate was softened because of when the books were written so as to not anger the Roman occupiers… well yeah I saw that History Channel documentary too about 4 weeks ago….. Just because its on television deosn’t make it true, that was a small group of historians conjecture about the crucifixion. Bottom line, if you’re Christain you already know this story, and are just glad that someone made a high-quality version of it to help explain one small bit of our faith to others. If the details are hard to swallow, well history is a bitch sometimes….”
Those are only two replies out of quite a few. Most of them are thoughtful, interesting, and not racist or anti-Semitic. But it’s the two guys out of a hundred who will take the movie as affirmation of their racism that I worry about.
William Cork is keeping a very good blog on The Passion. I pretty much concur with his thoughts on the movie, which are summarized here.
I still think Mel Gibson is a well-meaning individual, but until he takes a deep breath and acknowledges that his father is a lunatic and that his movie is going to inspire hatred, it really doesn’t matter what his motivations are. Take a look at some Hutton Gibson quotes from the link above (via Orcinus):
“I don’t know what their [the Jews’] agenda is except that it’s all about control. They’re after one world religion and one world government. That’s why they’ve attacked the Catholic Church so strongly, to ultimately take control over it by their doctrine and make one world religion and one world government.”
And:
“To a Jew a Christian commits idolatry every time he looks at a crucifix and says a prayer. You know they’re in control and they’re going to get in control the way things are going. Because they get all of our people…They killed several generations of us Americans [referring to WWI and WWII] … The Jews weren’t in the army much in WWI that because they were fomenting a revolt in Russia. America had no right to fight in foreign wars.”
This is purely and utterly sick. Expect to see more of it. The white supremacists are coming out of the woodwork on this one; the silver lining to all this is that it’ll get some of them out from under their rocks.