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The Descendants (Spoilers)

At the time, I found Sideways somewhat unapproachable. I wasn’t really sure why. Now I’m thinking I didn’t have the vocabulary, and I think it was a privilege problem. Alexander Payne made this great movie about the sad life problems of a pair of well-off guys. Yeah, Paul Giamatti is presented as a failure, and English teachers don’t make much money, but he can afford to take his pal on a week-long wine tour? That’s not realistic.

This is also the problem at the heart of The Descendants. George Clooney’s problems are more believable than Paul Giamatti’s. He’s not pretending to be more of a failure than he is. They’re still rich man problems, though. Adultery, family crisis, death — that could be anyone. However, much of the meat of Clooney’s woes are predicated on his status as one of the most important men in Hawaii. To emphasize with him, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of a guy who is about to make a $500,000,000 decision. Clooney’s a great actor, and he brings everything he has to bear in this, so it works. Still, despite his disclaimer about how Hawaii isn’t really paradise? He’s in pretty good shape.

His marital problems may also come from his money. He’s proud of the fact that he doesn’t spend the capital he’s inherited; he works every day (as a lawyer), and he spends only the interest. So he’s got a high-paying job, plus he has significant money coming from a trust. He can send his kid to boarding school and he doesn’t need to worry about health care costs. But he won’t buy his wife a boat, and there’s a strong implication that he lost her love due to his workaholic nature. It’s hard to be well-off; it’s hard when the less fortunate critique you for not spending money.

Some of his extended family have blown their money and are supposedly broke. We don’t ever see them, though. Cousin Hugh, in a very good Beau Bridges performance, is Clooney’s foil. He wants to sell the land to a local, though, so he’s a good guy. Dresses like a beach bum, drinks early in the afternoon, but he’s got a bunch of rental properties and it’s pretty clearly not going to ruin him financially if the sale doesn’t go through. He’s willing to pass up the higher sale value in order to keep the land in Hawaiian hands.

So. I don’t think Alexander Payne really has a handle on realism, as much as he likes to talk about it. Clooney made the right decision to keep the land, but Payne could and should have shown us the downside. It’s not just Cousin Hugh being pissed off, it’s someone who doesn’t have health insurance or a job and won’t get an influx of money when they badly need it. Payne’s world is a glossy one, untouched by mundane concerns. In the opening, Clooney tells us how much Hawaii isn’t a paradise. That’s the only time we see any signs that it isn’t. Show, don’t tell.

Simultaneously, he’s quite aware of race issues. The climatic speech, where Clooney acknowledges that his family — descended from Hawaiian royalty as they are — are “haole as shit.” But then he turns around and claims a connection to the land. I don’t know enough about Hawaiian issues to really judge this, so I’ll leave all that there.

All that said? It’s a spectacular movie. Clooney’s immensely good. I thought he was awesome in his supporting role in Ides of March, in the way he slowly let us see the complexities of the character. He’s better in this. I touched on it earlier: how do you create empathy for yourself when you’re as handsome and charismatic as Clooney? By being fearless about showing the character’s faults. There’s a very, very thin layer between his pain and the screen, and most of the time it dissolves. Kudos to Payne, too, because he’s good at hitting those notes.

Alas, Jaw

Very sadly, A Dangerous Method wound up being the weakest Cronenberg in a long time. The material was more or less perfect, but Keira Knightley let down the side. It’s not that she’s a bad actress, it’s that Cronenberg has never been the kind of director who draws forth the exceptional from his actors. And Knightley doesn’t know how to give her role weight. So instead of getting a damaged genius/patient, she’s playing another edition of the plucky young woman who stands up to the world. This time with more jaw tics.

Meat

Dinner tonight: Stiles Switch BBQ, which is conveniently half a mile from our house. The place just opened; the pit master used to be the pit boss at Louie Mueller’s up in Taylor. I am no barbecue expert but I hear Louie Mueller’s is very good, and Stiles Switch made me very happy. And it’s just a few minutes away.

Tattoo You

Briefly: Fincher’s directing and Rooney Mara’s acting make it painfully clear that Lisbeth Salander doesn’t make any sense next to Mikael Blomkvist. There are two potentially awesome thrillers in both the book and the movies: one stars Blomkvist, and it’s a story about an awesome journalist who’s pretty much an auctorial stand in. The other is a somewhat more interesting story about Swedish traditional culture and the horrible things it does to women, as personified by both Harriet Vanger and Lisbeth Salander. When you mash them together, however, you get a wish-fulfillment piece in which the awesome journalist is just another man using a woman. Blomkvist and Salander should never have met.

I don’t think Steig Larsson realized this. David Fincher might. (Edit: Fincher has mentioned Blomkvist’s misogyny.) Either way, the clarity of Fincher’s directing strips away all the awkwardness of the English translation, and it’s hard to pretend that Salander belongs with Blomkvist at all. You can’t hide the incongruity by making up your own images when they’re right up there on the screen. The parallel tracks of the two central female characters become really obvious. Consider disguises — I wonder, in fact, if that’s part of why Fincher kept the extensive coda. Larsson thought his hero was a different class of father figure, but Fincher lets the darkness through.

Worth seeing. Tremendously disturbing.

Shivery Timbers

Quick note, because I know some of you like Squirrel Nut Zippers a whole bunch: if you liked Squirrel Nut Zippers a whole bunch, you ought to check out White Ghost Shivers. immlass turned me onto these guys, and we took some time to see ’em playing this last weekend, and they were awesome: seven piece band doing 20s jazz, with a fairly punky modern attitude. The sound is way rooted in the 20s, but they aren’t afraid to sing about mullets and white trash. They’ve been playing together for more or less a decade, and are as sharp as you’d hope given that much experience together. Also the piano player played with Squirrel Nut Zippers some.

Everyone’s Got ‘Em is the first album after Cella Blue joined, and having a female vocalist available helped the music a bunch. Nobody Loves You Like We Do just came out this week and is also good. Audio follows.

Food on the Run

After getting my tire fixed this morning, I swung by Snarky’s Moo Bawk Oink for a sandwich. They’re trying to get a food trailer park off the ground in North Austin, around a mile from our place, so that’s a thing to support. Unfortunately I was a bit disappointed. I had the Jamaican chicken jerk sandwich on a pita, which is supposed to be traditional Jamaican flavors with some pineapple slaw and jerk sauce. The jerk sauce was more harsh fire than flavorful, though, and I didn’t get anything terribly Caribbean from it. Also there was not much pineapple slaw at all.

I’ll try it again because hey, they’re close, and maybe the cubano is good. Also the guy manning the truck was nice. I think maybe he should be taking applications and getting more trailers there right now, rather than trying to form the perfect mix and asking people to hold off. It’s gonna be tricky getting traffic there with five trailers, and one solitary one will have a hard row to hoe. Fingers crossed.

Austin: Week Four or So

Our new neighborhood, Brentwood, has a neighborhood mailing list. It’s awesome. Very friendly, lots of informal freecycling, requests for notaries, that kind of thing. Discussions of suspicious activity. It’s the back of the fence stuff you used to see all over the U.S., just on Yahoo groups.

For the last week or so, there’d been this ongoing duck saga. “Duck sighted in our front yard.” “Duck seen waddling down Woodrow.” “Oh, thank you so much! That’s our daughter’s duck!” “Duck crossing Justin.” So on.

On Thanksgiving, Susan and I went out for a walk down Woodrow up to Anderson, which is a pleasant mile or so there and the same back. When we were almost there, we passed… a teenager looking somewhat glumly at a duck. The duck looked like it was ready to run. “Hey,” I said, “It’s the duck!”

She looked at us with the sad eyes of a teenager who’s going to be That Kid With The Duck for a good while. “Yeah. It’s our duck, we finally found it. Mom got another duck to try and lure it back, but that didn’t work, but she’s on her way over.” So we moseyed onward, and when we passed her on the way home her mom was there with a duck cage. The end of the duck story. There wasn’t a post about it, perhaps because she convinced her mom to pass on further duck-related anecdotes.

Susan pointed out that while Somerville’s got a nice neighborhood feel to it, it’s unlikely that the duck would have lasted a week. I mean, it’s Thanksgiving. Someone would have eaten it. “Whattya want? It’s a duck in the street, it’s nobody’s duck… c’mon, it’s Thanksgivin’, we’re hungry. Duck’s tasty.” Probably true.

Austin’s still cool. It’s a good area for walking, so we’re walking more. The food is still insanely tasty. (Noble Pig: yum. Elevation Burger: quite good.) We should get our bookshelves next week. All is well.

Upcoming Shows

Noted for my own reference:

11/20: Big Bad Voodoo Daddy at One World Theater
12/9: Dave Alvin at the Continental Club
2/4: Los Lobos at One World Theater (opposite OwlCon, hm)
2/29: Dropkick Murphys, Frank Turner at Emo’s East (on sale 11/18)
3/2: Solas at UT Performing Arts Center

Austin: Week One

We have been in Austin a week and a half. In that time I have started my new job, we’ve found a house to rent, we opened a bank account, saw two movies, caught De Danann (or at least Frankie Gavin and a band, there’s some dispute there), and I’ve eaten more Mexican food than I have in the last five years. So that’s all good.

This is a neat city. The brown is not bothering me; I had years to get used to brown nature in the Bay Area. It’s a bit browner here, drought and all, but that’s life. I had forgotten a lot of little differences that come with living in the middle of the country. There’s more elbow room for the houses, and the spaces between neighborhoods. The city has room to breathe, which I like a lot.

On Saturday, I was reminded of some important tricks that come with living in a serious college football town. Namely, why are you going near downtown and trying to eat on a Saturday during football season, you idiot? Right.

The local indie bookstore is pretty good. On the grand scheme of things, it’s not quite Kepler’s or Tattered Cover, but it’s good. Little less literary than the Harvard Book Store, but better as a generalist store. I liked it. Dragon’s Lair is a superb gaming store. Plenty of places to still check out, too.

The food is great and we’ve barely dipped into it. We picked up a couple of local food guides at BookPeople. Nom nom nom. We’ve also barely touched the music; got to get more serious about that. I suppose we’ve been pretty busy, you know, finding banks and houses and all that fun stuff. The real estate market is as frenetic as we’d heard; the place we wound up in went on the market the day before we saw it, we put in an offer immediately, we were the second people to look at it, and it had two backup offers if ours hadn’t gone through.

My job rocks. Good people, tough challenges, but that’s what satisfies me. I’m quite happy there.

Happy times.