i just want to say one thing . . .

that's me, after seeing antichrist. just kidding. kind of.

in case you are thinking of seeing it, i will do what i can to keep overt spoilers to a minimum, but i feel obligated to warn you that antichrist is pretty awful. i want to be clear and honest about that. it's the blair witch project with slightly higher production values and an overenunciated moral, neither of which improves it. well, no, it is not really the blair witch project, because the blair witch project is quite good. ironically, even though blair witch had no true script, it is the better-written movie of the two. in fact, it is more than a little unfair for me to use the blair witch project for comparison, as it is in another, superior league entirely. it knows that it is a ghost story, it doesn't try to be anything else, and it succeeds beautifully. antichrist is lame both as the horror its director insists it be and as the psychological-philosophical-theological prod to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex he seems to want it to be. when it isn't making you sick, it isn't doing much of anything at all. its turning points are clunky and ham-fisted, it lacks momentum, the characters are stereotypes, the dialogue is flat. it does, sadly, have an ominous soundtrack refrain that kicks in whenever something SPOOKY is happening, just in case you weren't picking up on it. some people seem to think there is some innovative camerawork and art direction, but i must have been blinking or rolling my eyes or burying my face in my hands during those sequences, as i found none of it visually captivating. it left me feeling . . . well, damaged, and in no mood to defend lars von trier against any sort of attack, personal or professional, despite the beauty of some of his earlier films. but i do hate me some injustice, and i have to say that i think that reviewers of this movie who are up in arms over von trier's perceived misogyny are sort of missing the point. i shall defend my thesis forthwith, and in doing so i shall have to pull things from all over the work, including toward the end. just some fair warning there. *ahem*

briefest possible background synopsis: charlotte gainsbourg and willem dafoe are married and have no names. they have a son, a toddler, who does have a name. his name is nic. nic dies while his parents are gettin' it on. hilarity involving poorly animated woodland creatures and what may or may not be dream sequences ensues.

so. gainsbourg's character is a woman who has immersed herself in critical study of the centuries-long tendency to view sexual, unrepressed, free-thinking and -spirited women as wicked, in order to write a dissertation combating said view. but submerge yourself in mud and it's tough not to get dirty. when her own sexuality gets tangled up with a tragic loss, she blames herself and becomes a bit haunted by all those notions of women's innate evil, and she goes a little mad--with grief, with regret, with self-loathing, what have you. she believes the part of her nature that allows her to revel in wild sex is the same part that essentially killed her baby, and this tying-together, which underlies all of the witch hunting from this movie back to the dawn of civilization, makes her feel, you know, witchy. but we aren't meant to agree with her, or to assume her views are von trier's. the tragedy is that her husband, a cognitive-behavioral therapist who at least in his own mind is a paradigm of logic and understanding and clinical knowledge about human grief and madness, does start to think she might be on to something, and follows her right down that path to crazytown. granted, what she puts him through would bring anyone to the brink--and i'm sure that if you've heard anything about this movie, this putting-through is the bit you've heard about--but it's a METAPHOR. they represent the often losing war that civilized intellect wages against primitive nature. i'm not just tossing out pretentious yet baseless analysis here; there is a conversation sequence in the movie that all but reaches out of the screen and slaps you in the face with this point. dafoe, who is too confident in his scholarly understanding of gainsbourg's girly fragility and her mental state and processes to admit that he might not be the best person to treat his own wife (read: arrogant as all get-out and the textbook domineering patriarchal misogynist), allows her to retreat farther and farther into her own mania without ever waking up to what's happening. this makes him the villain, does it not? i think it does. a grieving woman can be, or become, a crazy woman, and a crazy woman will probably get even crazier if you drag her out into the middle of the woods and make her listen to acorns falling on a tin roof day in and day out, but odds are she isn't the devil. the devil doesn't have to be in the vicinity in order for you to catch that woman's crazy if you are also grieving and subject to incessant acorn plink-plink-plinks. if you are a trained mental health professional, you should know this, and if you decide to pretend that you don't know this, you are responsible for any resulting bloodshed. i think you are responsible even if you just forget, as it's your job to remember. it is easy to blame the devil, and probably the devil doesn't mind the finger-pointing, but i bet we all know what's really going down. and von trier knows it, too. the movie, i think, is warning us, in what i felt was a pretty obvious fashion, not to be so facile and primal and stupid, even though at our best we are basically just a gloppy mound of those traits with a schmear of secondary-schooled frosting. who's the REAL antichrist, oooOOOOooooo. or something.

whatever. the movie is dreck, no question, but when von trier says it is not woman-hating dreck, i am inclined to believe him. i wish i could recommend that you see it and decide for yourself, but . . . i can't. i just can't.

dreams, nightmares, and the irresistible middle ground

warning: this post is unrepentently verbose. you may think of it as an attempt to make up for lost time, but really i just didn't care to stop myself. read some of it, read none of it, read the whole thing twice; i ask only that you, as i always do, follow your bliss.



when i was not quite four, my parents surprised me with my first real bed, a floral-print twin mattress and boxspring. up until then i had been sleeping happily, insistently, and, as a tall-for-her-age not-quite-four-year-old, rather snugly in the crib i had started out in as an infant, and the new bed was not a welcome surprise. i loved my crib; it was high and enclosed and safe, like a cotton-lined aerie. i did not want a big-girl bed. i wanted my bed, where i had cooed and dreamt and preened like a downy wee bird, but my parents, like, i understand now, all good parents must, were tumbling me out of it. i found it all inexplicably and unnecessarily cruel, and so began one of the first arguments i had ever had with my parents.

the new bed was, in truth, less a gift or rite of passage than a necessity: my mother was pregnant with my sister, and the new baby was going to need a place to sleep. so they persisted, and after much cajoling and some outright pleading they convinced me to lie down, just once, just to see. i did, and immediately began to cry. the bed was HUGE! it was mammoth, endless, i felt as if i were floating in the middle of the ocean. i was terrified, and the terror itself was terrifying, because i had never really been afraid before. making matters worse was the fact that i was extremely aware that my parents were not only failing to save me from this horror but were, in a way, inflicting it. it was a brutal disillusionment; my trust in my parents was shattered, and in that moment, as i wailed and struggled to sit up and they held me back against the pillow, smiling and sweet-talking and—were they? they couldn't be, but, yes, they were; how could they?—now and then laughing, insisting that i give it one more minute, i hated them.

but it was to be the bed, things being the way they were and me so small and powerless and not yet prone to disobedience. it was a difficult transition, though, and i began, for the first time, to have nightmares. i would run into my parents room, wide-eyed and shuddering, and they would steer me back toward my own room, bleary-eyed and muttering, and after enough nights of this routine in a row bedtime became a dreaded punishment that began weighing on everyone's hearts the moment the sun started to set. then they started in with the pep talks.

the gist of the motivational speech was that i was going to be a Big Sister, and Big Sisters have to look out for their little sisters, and that meant i had to be Brave, because sometimes taking care of someone means protecting that person from things that are Scary, even things that we're afraid of ourselves. my sister and i were going to share a room eventually; what if she had a bad dream and woke up scared? how could i tell her that everything was o.k. if i was scared too? didn't i want to be a Good Big Sister?

had my parents realized how solemnly and seriously i would don my new role as Fearless Protector of Innocents, they might have foregone the speech and simply purchased a nighlight or two. but they had no way of knowing; as the eldest children in their respective families, it's likely they heard similar speeches themselves, and no lasting damage was done. but i was not them, and the events leading up to the situation converged in my peculiar child's mind in a very, very strange way.

here is what i knew: my parents, who i had been certain would rescue me from any and all dangers, had turned on me and chosen to force me into a known and massive danger night after night. they could not be trusted or counted on, not in the least, and therefore my baby sister was going to need all the help she could get. i, according to all reports, had been designated her guardian, and i was not about to leave her stranded in this unpredictable place. i began training.

every night, after my parents had performed the prescribed bedtime rituals, turned out my light, and left me to the shadows, i would scan the room for an eye-catching shape—a bathrobe hanging from the back of the rocking chair in the far corner, say, or a mound of toys spilling out from behind the closet door. the shape didn't have to be threatening outright, only potentially threatening; it had to suggest, at least obliquely, some other shape that would inspire dread. i would fix on the chosen object and stare, and stare and stare and stare, until the suggestion became the reality—the bathrobe was suddenly a hunched witch in a black cloak, eyeing me in salivatory anticipation, the jumble of playthings by the closet a skulking troll. once these monsters appeared i would seize on them, expand the ghoulish details of them until my heart was racing and my little jaws clenched tight against a shriek, and then i would close my eyes and will myself to fall asleep. when the inevitable nightmare woke me sweating and gasping, i resisted the desire to run to my parents, my heartless, treacherous parents, and instead rolled over to face my bête noire. the witch, by now, had rolling yellow eyes and toadlike skin, and her long, ragged fingernails rasped against one another as she lurched toward me, cackling under her breath. i stared at her, stared and stared and stared, shaking and panting and fighting tears, and whispered,

"you can't eat me. you're a bathrobe."

and so she was. slowly and not always so surely, i walked myself back from the brink of hysteria, reminding myself that the world was the world, and maybe it was packed to the gills with trolls and hags and hideous things, but this was my room, and that was my chair; all of these monsters, at least, were things that i knew and could explain to myself. i named them, one by one, night after night, and by the time my sister was born i was afraid of nothing. i was proud of my accomplishment, but also alone within it. i felt like a superhero, invincible and isolated, my great strength a secret i could never fully share.

i think that, in a way, this process is similar to the one christian bale undertakes when selecting and playing a role. having, to put it tactfully, studied (*ahem*) bale as he's inhabited various personas over the past fifteen or so years, and after watching some of his films enough times to commit entire scenes to memory verbatim, i feel qualified to argue that the connecting thread between almost all of his characters and certainly all of the recent ones, the thing that draws him to them, is terror—of the character, of the character's situation, and of the knowledge that, with some relatively minor shifts in circumstance, he, or any of us, could find himself in that terrifying place. undoubtedly this allows him to stretch and perfect and prove himself as an actor, but that can be accomplished, for most, via all kinds of characters. bale consistently opts to embody harrowed, haunted, desperate men, and specifically those whose desperation stems from an awareness that they are plummeting toward a state of being something not quite human, something callously, unrepentently animalistic, and knowing that they don't want it, and having no means of stopping it. talk about inviting a nightmare. did his early work in empire of the sun have a damaging psychological effect? or was he drawn to the work even then, as a twelve-year-old boy? could it be innate and inescapable? after all, his name is christian bale, a not-uplifting moniker better suited to a james joyce novel than modern hollywood. whatever the cause, the trend is undeniable.

bale's latest foray into tortured misery is rescue dawn, directed by the mad and exalted werner herzog, whose film sets are historically nightmarish regardless of plot. the story is based on true events and builds on an earlier work by herzog, little dieter needs to fly, released in 1997. in the current film, bale plays dieter dengler, a u.s. navy flyboy about to embark on his first official mission: the secret bombing of guerilla targets in laos in 1965, when the american involvement in vietnam and the far east was just beginning to reveal itself as engagement in war. dengler's plane is shot down early on in the mission, and, after successfully outrunning them at first, he is taken prisoner by a band of militiamen, some viet cong, some local tagalong thugs. presumably, for bale, since he hurls himself toward it time and again with such unflagging, all-in commitment, this is where the real fun begins. naturally, by "real fun" i mean endless days and sleepless nights of starvation, gruesome physical abuse, and sadistic psychological torture. and this is before he reaches the p.o.w. camp. you see where this is going.

oh, christian, how i fear and fear for you and your unemotional, single-minded, seemingly joyless devotion to these romps. as for the machinist, bale dropped close to sixty pounds over the course of the shoot—about thirty more than he'd initially planned to lose—whittling himself down to a shaggy, rag-clad scarecrow; in a later scene, bale wades into a river and his pant leg lifts up as he hoists his knobby knee over a rock, revealing a taut calf the circumference of the average teenage girl's forearm and a shark-finned ankle bone you could lose an eye on. yet i am hopeful that bale may finally have put himself through this enough times to have exorcised whatever demon was at the root of the compulsion: unlike his other wraiths, who plod and seethe through their sentences like enraged automatons, not wanting to go on but unable to stop, dengler is an optimist who believes he is the maker of his own fate and whose faith in his ability to propel himself to salvation never winks out. he is perhaps the most embraceable of bale's characters so far: a suffering man surrounded by evil and the muffled voices of the defeated, yet insistent upon the ultimate triumph of the human mind and heart. in the camp, he says that he is still hoping his fiancée will wait for him. he bolsters his fellow-prisoners, distracting them from the hopelessness of their surroundings and comforting them in their lowest moments. he is the kind of friend everyone wants to face death by disease and/or starvation and/or random, unprovoked execution alongside. there comes a moment, of course, where dengler finds himself up against something even he can't stare down, and in the aftermath of it it is clear how perilously close he is to losing, if not actively discarding, the humanity he has fought so consistently to retain. but up until then he is generally upbeat; remarkably stable; and, when he is not eating live insects, the warmest, most endearing character bale has portrayed since newsies. this, of course, makes the break all the more devastating, but i have convinced myself that it suggests that bale is ready to submerge himself in some slightly less icy and turbid waters. of course, he has said that he wanted this role largely because he was crazy about the idea of working in the jungle with herzog, so only time will tell.

to be fair, herzog suffers through most everything his cast and crew suffer through, and as traumatic as those goings-through may be, no one could accuse him of not knowing what he's doing. rescue dawn is visually flawless, filmed in a color range and with a hint of graininess suggestive of 1970s nature documentaries. the work is hypnotically devastating from its opening scenes, a protracted montage of warheads being dropped in pairs on bamboo huts in a rice field, the shells blossoming in slow motion into smoldering anemones that dissolve into gaping rosettes of orange flame. and it doesn't let up: nearly every shot is framed to evoke not only the mood of the central character or characters but also the ambient mood of the surrounding environment, and, if such a thing can be captured on film, the environment's feelings toward the characters—typically indifference at best and active, immolating resentment at worst. the latter is ever present in the second half of the film, but most strikingly so when dengler, after hacking through dense shrubs and tangled, snarling undergrowth for days, comes across a clearing containing the remnants of a small village. the huts have been almost completely reclaimed by the jungle: from a distance, their shapes are barely discernible, their exteriors a seamless, faintly contoured mat of interwoven vines. it is an image capable of inspiring either comfort or panic, depending on the perspective of the viewer: the earth, in the end, will always win out, try as we might to force ourselves on it, and all the work we undertake with the belief that it is of such great importance will be swallowed and digested in instants by that earth if we aren't there to stand guard over it. only we believe in ourselves; the rest of the world is scratching at us like a rash, waiting for the blasted infection to heal.

earlier on, though, herzog presents the relationship more gently, with the jungle regarding its human trespassers as merely nonentities rather than enemies. dengler, in an attempt to signal an overhead plane, climbs a hill and then scales a rock outcropping rising above the drop-off. standard hollywood form would be to shoot tight and close on dengler as he fights his way up the rock, his boots slipping against the crags, his fingers stirring up dust and sprays of pebbles as they scrabble for a grip, the sweat beading up on his creased brow and tracing clear swaths in the caked dirt on his grimacing face. *yawn* but herzog, because he is better than this and because he believes that we, the audience, are better than this, widens the shot to take in the entire rock, the hillside, the stony cliff beyond it, and the jungle unfurling endless and claustrophobically thick below. the camera is pulled back so that dengler is a speck on the skin of all this immensity. the sound is natural and unamplified; we hear dengler's small grunts of effort from a distance, and the clattering of gravel pushed over the edge of the rock by his foot is piffling and devoid of moment, like the tapping of chalk on a sidewalk heard from inside a building. this is, of course, the accurate, in-the-instant relationship. dengler is not the center of anything on an honest, real-world scale; he is just one man, tiny, without allies, standing on a rock, holding an inches-wide flat of mirrored glass up toward the infinite sky, too minuscule to attract anything's notice. the plane flies by and doesn't circle back.

these are nightmare outtakes, the scenes and sensations that send us shooting up in bed drenched in sweat, that bring on panic attacks in crowded trains and elevators or in wide-open parks. all at once we realize that we are one of many in so much space, points in a field that extends forever, and we know nothing of that space, because that is what we are. we are human in the way that we conceive of being human because we insist upon it; no law makes it so, and if our discipline wavers, nothing will save us. the life we trust, in the order we trust it to keep to, can—is probably trying to—unravel. and are you strong enough to force it to cohere? if your plane went down, would you stand up and follow the river?

the scene cuts, production closes, the lights come up, you wake in a familiar place and inhale, the dream falls away. you can let go of the question then, if you need to, if the darkness at the edge of the room is too dark, if the world is too large, if you can decide there's nothing worth confronting today. but some people need an answer; fortunately for them, there is no shortage of nightmares with which to test their mettle. but for bale's sake, i hope that it is equally true that on some night each of them wakes up assuredly in control and tells the bathrobe to shut the hell up, it's just a bathrobe, and falls into a far more peaceful sleep, and that the knowledge that this can be done is enough.

spider-man countdown blogging

count: ninety-six days, eight hours, nineteen minutes
analysis of timeline: that is way too fucking long
status: tense and fidgety; difficulty concentrating on things that do not involve webbing

i don't know how many of you are aware of this--i'm certain nobody was aware of it at the time--but my very first post was about the amazing spider-man and my enduring and immensely geeky love of peter parker and the peter-parkeresque. it is also about kirsten dunst's ability to inspire the exact opposite sentiment, but i've changed my mind somewhat about her appropriateness for this particular screen role; in a way, her single, unappealing dimension makes her a perfect mary jane. mj was always flighty and simplistic. when she spoke she did so in trite slang, and she expressed little to no intelligence or introspection for the first decade of her existence as a regular spider-man character. she toyed with peter relentlessly, even while dating other people, and sometimes by dating other people. some say it was all a desperate act she put on in order to keep peter from realizing she was aware of his superhero identity, but you have to wonder if even her creators took her seriously (witness her go-go-dancer phase), and she was every bit as pouty and helpless and irritating after she confessed her knowledge. one way or the other, i never liked her, and if someone else were playing her i might, so i retract the statement i made all those years ago. retroactive kudos to francine maisler, and infinite kudos, obviously, to sam raimi, for this and everything else he's done to better my world and yours.

so, this movie: it's gonna be big. in fact, i'm wondering if maybe the bite they've taken this time around isn't too big. first, you've got the symbiote/venom plot, which is definitely more than a movie unto itself (and which i absolutely forgive the writers for tweaking the origin of); if we're going to have a chance to really explore the psychological battle peter has to wage with himself once the symbiote starts to exert its influence--and that's, like, all the trailers are about--brock will have to be just plain brock until almost the very end of the film, and that means there won't be time to get into the deep, dark, messy dynamic that emerges between those two characters, which is maybe the most fascinating hero-villain rivalry in marvel history. an open door leading to a future film? i can't allow myself to speculate, as i'm having a hard enough time catching my breath as it is. but the idea that brock is just an egomaniacal journalist for the first three-fourths of the movie would explain why raimi felt compelled to incorporate another villain, and while i might not have chosen the sandman, he's bound to make for some bad-ass graphics. but the addition of harry's evil, windsurfing goblin incarnation on top of the sandman makes me think they're tying up loose ends; wouldn't one or the other have been enough when coupled with the good spidey/bad spidey drama? did they have to stuff everything into this sequel? maybe harry won't come around and they'll keep him as a way to bring in the chameleon in a fourth installment (OH MY GOD THAT WOULD BE SO RAD), but i can't imagine spidey fighting the chameleon and venom; that would be madness. how can they cover as much ground as they seem to be attempting to cover in under three hours? will the radioactive aspect of the sandman's origin be retained? will spidey reform him? will venom incapacitate him? it's too much! it's tooooo muuuuuuch!!!!!

aw, hell. no it's not. it could never be enough.

juniper pearl adores foreign film unlikely to dominate u.s. box office; nation rocked

watch pan's labyrinth. then watch it again. then watch it again. when you're done, watch pan's labyrinth. after that, watch it again. once it's over, watch pan's labyrinth. at that point you should be ready to begin sculpting a tiny idol shaped like guillermo del toro, which you will want to build a small but elaborate and tasteful shrine to in your yard or garden—some place where it will be cradled in soil and the sound of growing things. you might also want to fashion a second one, slightly smaller, that you can wear as a charm to remind you that the phrase "a fairy tale for grown-ups" is nonsensical and redundant. fairy tales are written by grown-ups, they're told and retold and embraced and remembered and passed on by grown-ups; they're only heard by children, and they aren't really important to them then. they become important later, when those children become adults and the color starts to bleed out of their lives, and they realize how essential that magic was, what all of those grown-ups were trying to accomplish with those stories. we tell our children fairy tales because we are grown-ups, and our days are so rarely beautiful or capable of inspiring hope or faith or neatly tied off in happy endings. children already believe that the world is full of brave, pure hearts and hidden miracles; we're the ones who can't keep sight of such things, in or outside of ourselves.

but we can read a story and remember, and we can watch this movie and be grateful that someone has been kind enough to remind us. and if you're afraid you'll forget that the next story starts with you, that you have to believe in and live that beauty before it can exist elsewhere, you can watch it again. and i think you should watch it again.

oh me of little faith . . .

my twenty-seventh year, which, if you'll recall, i feared and half believed would be my last, has wound to a tidy and shockingly satisfactory close. it brought me a boffo job that exceeded all my craziest, most fevered, most tequila-soaked hopes; it brought me a new and improved home that i don't have to share with anyone or anyone's evil parrot; it even brought me a smaller dress size and an unsuspected gift for making excellent vegan desserts, two things i would never have expected to receive simultaneously. and now i'm twenty-eight, and nothing's ever perfect, but some things are a lot better than you think they'll be.

earlier this month i passive-aggressively scolded my very best beloved secret boyfriend malcolm gladwell for forgetting my birthday, partly out of hurt and partly because it seemed so unlike him to do such a thing—and, of course, it would have been unlike him, if it had happened. but it was all me jumping to conclusions, which is only a little bit unlike me and usually works out o.k. in the end.

i am, as ever, about three and a half months behind on the new yorker. the blasted things just keep coming and coming, and i keep picking them up out of the mail pile and stashing them at the bottom of the magazine pile because i'm determined to fight my way through the whole wretched mess without cheating or skimping or missing anything, and because my mother pays to renew that subscription every october and four months' worth of issues is equal to close to half of a year's renewal fee and i'm sure as hell not tossing my mother's hard-earned money out with the recycling without at least leafing through it on a sunday morning . . . and so i didn't notice that malcolm had written a perfectly lovely article for the media issue, which just happened to come out the week of my birthday. shame on me. and even though malcolm would have been well within his rights to point out that he hadn't received any special packages from me back in the beginning of september, he took the high, phlegmatic road and instead brought the article up—very gently—on his blog.

i don't know if it's me becoming increasingly smitten or an objective editorial observation, and odds are there's no way for me to be sure, but malcolm's writing, from a purely stylistic standpoint, seems to have improved exponentially over the past few years. (i still lose my breath over "parlor pinks," but that's neither here nor there.) he's much better about not talking to us as though he isn't sure we'll understand him, and while his reporting has always been straight, his wrap-ups have become tighter and cleaner—unreporterly enough to make you sure of where he stands, but not so swayed that you feel as if he's trying to convince you of something. his emotional saturation has found the just-right spot typically reserved for the third bowl of porridge. and he makes jokes now, and they're good, subtle, quirky jokes . . . the work's gone all sparkly, and i'm just over the moon about the whole situation. and then, of course, there are the things he actually chooses to write about, which are all fat and yummy and made so sad by the fact that he isn't pitching them to me from my sofa.

but he is sending them to me for my birthday, and my present went like this: some men have come up with an algorithm that allows them to predict, far more accurately than anyone else has ever been able to predict, which screenplays are likely to be made into hugely successful movies and which can expect to grow up into movies that will meet with moderate to meager, to zero, success. here's the comment i made at his blog prior to reading the article:

i suppose once i read the piece i'll have a better understanding of how the network monitors public opinion in order to assess a movie's likely turnout. i have a feeling, though, that it would be similar to . . . looking at movies that have been box-office hits and seeking similar aspects. how long could a system like that really be successful at pitching films to a single generation?

on a more selfish note, my personal movie preferences are different enough from most people's that i might dread a tool like this being put into widespread use. i understand that most movies are already, and always will be, made based on the likelihood of a substantial return; but if production studios start selecting screenplays based on algorithms, won't that only increase the odds of films that may not appeal to the sensibilities of the vast majority but that are still quite good and deserve to be made, well, not getting made? the blockbusters are rarely the works that stand the test of time. a system like this would probably benefit the executives, it's true, but the rest of us might miss out on a lot of strong works of art.

i felt fine saying that, because malcolm and i have that kind of open, trusting, imaginary relationship where we can disagree with each other without fear of excessive defensiveness or retaliation. it's a very warm feeling. besides, he knows i live on the fringes. and he also knew that i would race right home and read my present start to finish and form a far more balanced and informed opinion, because that's the kind of girl i am. and that's exactly what i've done.

here are the ten top-grossing movies of 2006 (thus far):

1. pirates of the caribbean: dead man's chest

2. cars

3. x-men: the last stand

4. the da vinci code

5. superman returns

6. ice age: the meltdown

7. over the hedge

8. talladega nights: the ballad of ricky bobby

9. click

10. mission: impossible III (or miiii, as i shall refer to it until the end of days)

here are the movies out of those ten that i saw:









i did want to see x-men, because i am weak for all things comic-booky (and am FREAKING OUT about the new spider-man, oh, hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!), but none of the others, and i'm pretty sure i've never even heard of click. am i a movie snob? perhaps, but i don't believe so. what i am, according to "mr. brown," a primary source for the article and one of the neural network's developers, is an intelligent niche viewer drawn to movies that are more european in style than american. not snobby, my darlings, just misplaced, and i've known that for ages. my favorite movies are typically french, lynchian, or just plain odd, and while some people seem to think that i feel that makes me better than them, the only thing i do feel it makes me is isolated. i have to scroll down to number 41 on that list just to find a movie i actually went all the way to a theater to see, and i had to see it alone. do i think the epagogix—the neural network under discussion—would have deemed little miss sunshine worthy of production? well, there is a female in occasional distress, and that female is a young child who encourages the adults around her to break free of society's chains and find joy in their lives, and there were some drugs and the faintest whiff of pornographic material, and there was some comedy, and some bonding and redemption—but the redemption was intensely personal and required mass public humiliation, and the comedy was dark and involved a family member's corpse, and the porn and drugs were nowhere near explicit, and nothing exploded, and while i'm pretty sure someone wore a hat, it was hardly a memorable hat.

no algorithm would have fully endorsed this screenplay, or that of the princess and the warrior, which has, by this point in my endless chain of viewings, practically taught me german. i doubt epagogix would have great things to say about rushmore or the purple rose of cairo or the big kahuna or farewell, my concubine, or any other movie on my shelf. but i love these movies and feel i owe them a great debt. i would like to buy all of the actors and writers and directors and editors involved in the making of these movies fuzzy blankets and delicious treats. and honestly, does anyone want another da vinci code? ever?

so i became rather glum, listening to malcolm tell me in his straight, reporterly fashion how no studio would ever have to make another movie that would gross under $50 million because math is fantastic, and listening to mr. brown and mr. pink tell me that my european attitudes are ill suited to my parochial american environs, and listening to the snide ghosts of moviegoers coast to coast telling me that car chases and costly effects and weak women will always triumph over understated dialogue and carefully lit stills and flawed characters who struggle and strive and sometimes still fail. i mean, brokeback mountain came in 22nd in 2005, and everyone was talking about that movie. it came in four behind fun with dick and jane. who saw fun with dick and jane? who the hell saw that movie? why did any of you go to see that movie?

all right, maybe i'm a teensy bit, just the ittiest bit, of a movie snob. but i won't apologize for loving beautiful stories and impressive craftsmanship—i won't apologize for demanding art, instead of settling for distraction, even engaging distraction. and i became glummer and glummer, thinking maybe i was right to argue off the bat, and maybe i wouldn't be able to go back at the end and say, i'm sorry, muffin, i really should have read that article before i did that thing i do with the jumping and the assuming and whatnot,

and then i came to the conclusion:

the neural network had one master, the market, and anwered one question: how do you get to bigger box-office? but once a movie had made you vulnerable—once you couldn't even retell the damn story without getting emotional—you couldn't be content with just one master anymore.

that was the thing about the formula: it didn't make the task of filmmaking easier. it made it harder. . . . the epagogix team . . . were technicians with tools: computer programs and analytical systems and proprietary software that calculated mathematical relationships among a laundry list of structural variables. . . . a kamesian had only to read lord kames to appreciate the distinction. the most arrogant man in the world was a terrible writer: clunky, dense, prolix. he knew the rules of art. but that didn't make him an artist.

mr. brown spoke last. "i don't think it needs to be a big-budget picture," he said. "i think we do what we can with the original script to make it a strong story, with an ending that is memorable, and then do a slow release. a low-budget picture. one that builds through word of mouth—something like that."

well, what do you know. everyone was on my side the whole time. and that way of being wrong, my lovelies, is always the best gift ever—always; but malcolm sent it with a "prolix," and while it was a grand and profoundly moving gesture, i have no idea how he expects to top it next year. as i've seen, though, as i'm sure we've all seen at one time or another, a year can knock the socks right off you. so whatever presents are coming my way, i'll take them.




postscript, 12/3/06: the plain fact is, the world will never need epagogix--because it has jerry.

juniper pearl's rockin' month in rock review

so, the move, as you may by now have surmised, was a success. i'm unpacked and furnished and equipped with nearly all* the necessary utilities and amenities (including internet service; thank you for your concern), and i'd like to share a little something with all of you:

living alone rocks.

it rocks hard. it rocks like your first pair of combat boots. it rocks like dethklok. it rocks like you and your air guitar/drums always knew you were rocking. it does not rock like this:

and all this rocking has pumped me full of more enthusiasm than a sublingual meth injection. i've become an honest-to-goodness doer, and while it's taken me some time to shake off the mania of it all and achieve some balance between doing and thinking (which i've been a lifelong fan of and, quite frankly, have begun to miss), i'm at a point now where i can begin to allow a little of the outside world into my four-room nest, and maybe a little more of me into your nests, if you'll still have me. while i'm taking some deep breaths, for those of you who are interested, here's a run-down of some of the things i've been so ardently immersed in the doing of over the past few weeks.

1. the somerville theatre, within walking distance of my new happy hideaway, is a stellar place to catch fairly new movies and some great, if frequently lesser-known, musical acts. every thursday in september the theater screened four eyed monsters, a charming, astonishingly honest, no-budget movie created and being self-distributed by susan brice and arin crumley, who are also the film's stars and who have financed the entire endeavor on their credit cards. the movie is largely autobiographical and chronicles the couple's meeting, subsequent disbanding, and ultimate inability to resist each other's pervasive, beautiful oddness.** they shot the movie on some sort of fancy digital camera which arin explained the workings of very succinctly during the q & a following the september 14 screening, but that was weeks ago, and i don't even own a regular camera, so if you want details you'll have to ask him yourself. (don't be shy, i think he'd be happy to tell you all about it.) there's also a lot of animation cut in, courtesy of susan. the overarching theme is communication and how the hell anyone figures out how to engage in it successfully. arin and susan chose to try not speaking, and it worked so well on their first date that they kept it up--for four months. anyone who knows me knows how much i love not speaking, and while not everyone has been willing to humor me about it, a stoic few have been incredibly indulgent. i love them best, and i'll be buying each of them a copy of this film the second it's released. the piece is apparently in constant production--the version we saw was different from the one that was first released, and the dvd version will be different from both of those--but i imagine each incarnation is a little bit better than the last.

2. the middle east is not within walking distance, but i could ride a bicycle there in practically no time, if i could ride a bicycle. instead i take the train, and that suits me just fine. more or less all of the club's shows are $12, no matter how phenomenal the bands are (and they're usually pretty spectacular). the interior is just the right size and perfectly climate controlled; there's even an elevated area off to the side where i can lean on the banister and read a book between acts, allowing me to avoid any unnecessary, nonrocking social interaction. most recently (september 16) i went to see say hi to your mom and craig wedren, who were opening for the wrens. i had never heard of the wrens, but the two openers were more than worth the $12 for me, and after say hi to your mom played "blah blah blah" and "let's talk about spaceships" and craig wedren played about two-thirds of pony express record, possibly the best album by his former band, shudder to think, and a collection of songs that i spent many, many, many dimly lit teenage evenings writing heinous poetry in my bedroom to, i would have felt fine about walking out the second the wrens hit the stage. i did no such thing, though, because THE WRENS ARE ROCK GODS. here's me as the wrens took the stage:


and here's me fifteen seconds into their first song:

look! the wrens have decreased my age by 50%!

my radiant expression of tufted glee didn't fade for an instant throughout the rest of the set, and it broke my heart to have to walk out during the (hopefully) last song of the encor to catch the final train back home. i will say this once and never again, but know that i am repeating it to myself day in and day out like the world's least centering mantra: boston's public transportation system is lame as a penguin with a peg leg. it shuts down far too early, and i am teeming with resentment over it. stopping the runs before 1 AM makes the city almost useless to anyone but the students who live in dorms built on top of clubs and bars and people with enough disposable income to be able to afford both a night out and the obscene cab fare and/or parking fees that accompany the drive to the chosen venue. granted, these expenses might not be so off-putting to someone who didn't travel in such persistent solitude, but still. we can't run the trains until 1:30? seriously? that's bunk.

enough of that, though. the wrens: embrace them. and as for other people and things you know nothing about, well, i'd maintain a safe distance, but also an open and inquisitive mind.

3. mcintyre and moore is a killer used book store whose inventory covers almost every imaginable topic. they're open until 11 PM every night and have lots of quiet corners for you to hide in while you read one of the dozen books you decided you couldn't let yourself buy that day, like a less austere library. they also host a monthly philosophy cafe, which i've yet to attend. a thing like that could be wonderful or brutal, but i'll never know unless i try, i guess. i'll probably check it out this month, and odds are you'll get a vivid report either way. this bookstore is now second in my heart only to the shire, the musty, floor-to-ceiling-shelved eden of my youth, whose proprietor still remembers both my face and my name. she's a special, special woman, whose business i would not at all mind inheriting one day.*** sadly, i haven't been able to find an unwritten-in copy of the katherine woods translation of the little prince at either place. a former roommate had a copy that i loved near unto death, and when i asked recently if i could maybe borrow it for a little while, he said he had "gotten rid of it." in my shiny imaginary world no one ever throws books away, especially not this one, but, well, i think he probably threw it away. needless to say, no one i know will be leaving their magical book palace to him any time soon.

4. the paradise, ever so aptly named, is far and away my favorite venue on the planet. not only does it have a second-floor balcony that wraps around the entire club, it has seats and sofas right up against portions of said balcony, so when i'm reading my book in between bands i can relax without ceding my vantage point. there's always a free place to park, even, so i never have to walk away with those "i know the second i hit the sidewalk they started playing the one song i've been dying to hear them play for the past ten years" blues. the paradise lounge, in the front of the building, is teensy-tiny and generally filled with a lot of people who aren't necessarily interested in the musical performance, and sometimes the security guards will try to hit on you, but the coziness of the room is unbeatable when it comes to acoustic acts, like evan dando when he's sans band or jay clifford, (former?) swoon-inducing vocalist of jump, little children (newly beloved of zach braff and oldly beloved of me) and rosebud and lovely, lovely, lovely man who once held a bathroom door for me at the iron horse in northampton, ma, and who played the lounge on september 24. he walked on stage and immediately asked the audience members what they wanted to hear, which was so precious and chill, and then he played every song we'd asked for, which was just fucking shocking. he was quite impressed with our knowledge of his back catalog, and he played us some new things, and the early sunday show ended in time for me to get home and watch metalocalypse, and i fell asleep thoroughly rocked and immensely contented.

5. september 27 was john hodgman at the b. b., and i'm sure you've had just about enough of that, so i won't say any more. i have decided, though, to lob a third pitch at the booksmith and see if it can at least foul its way onto a plate--tonight i'm going to do everything i can to both see and hear david rakoff, author of don't get too comfortable and fraud. my bar is now painfully low, so maybe i won't leave in tears. we'll see.

6. the last september event was yo la tengo at avalon, but i think i'm going to give that a room of its own. you'll have it in your trembling, sweaty hands before i get around to summarizing the jon stewart experience i'm looking forward to this friday, but that may not mean much in terms of expedience. i am doing all i can, kids, and even when what i'm doing has zero to do with this blog, you are never far from my thoughts. much love, people, much love.

over and out.










* there are still no curtains in the front room. please don't peep.
** i've succumbed to it as well and would beg them to take me in as their pet--if i didn't know how hard living alone rocks.
*** HINT

delicious anticipation

i went to see wordplay today, and i enjoyed it quite a bit, being nerdy and enthralled with others who are nerdy. if you like crossword puzzles, i recommend it. if you don't, odds are it'll bore you. i can't see the point in saying any more about it than that. but i do want to make sure you all know about the new michel gondry film i saw a trailer for while waiting for wordplay: the science of sleep. it looks beautiful and odd and incredibly sweet, and like exactly the sort of perfect-in-its-imperfection love story that i'm about due for. i very much liked my results on the dream quiz the site offers, too; they made me sound entirely like the girl i've been so busy trying to be, and that's always life-affirming. the movie opens in the states in september, i believe on the 15th, and i am SOOOO excited. go check it out and let me know what you think. or don't, it's your weekend. i just wanted to tell someone about it. happiness is a good thing to share.

p.s. as i'm in a happiness-sharing mood. . . i got the key to my new apartment this morning and am even more excited about moving into it now than i was when i signed my lease. the kitchen has wood paneling and brick face, and a chandelier made out of the wheel of either a wagon or a ship. i hadn't absorbed any of this on my initial trips through, and i'm thoroughly twitterpated.

spelling counts!

from the "neatest trick" department:

a 2-year-old girl's stolen prosthetic legs apparently have been found. a maintenance worker at a new haven apartment building discovered the derby girl's legs yesterday—two days after a car they had been in was stolen in milford—and turned them into police.

. . . who then arrested the car thieves, in a brilliant turn of magical-realist poetic justice. this blurb was spotted in the 6/23 weekend edition of the boston metro, from which i expect nothing but a crossword puzzle i can solve in under fifteen minutes, but still . . . in a perfect world, i'm not the only person who's paying attention. hence the melting ice caps, eh?

speaking of crossword puzzles, though, here's something lovely: patrick creadon's wordplay, a movie about crossword puzzles and the americans who obsess over them, particularly the ny times' crossword editor will shortz, features a charming (as if it could be otherwise) bit with jon stewart. that's two of my favorite things in a combination i would never have come up with on my own, and i'm positively giddy over it. it's like the make-a-wish foundation has had me on twenty-four-hour surveillance for the past half a decade and one day decided i'd been a good enough (and perhaps sick enough) girl after all. the metro ran an ad for this movie in the same edition, so the error is atoned for in my eyes, but i think it still has some apologizing to do to the rest of its readers—even the ones who didn't notice or care, who likely amount to a hefty sum.

sunday best-of blogging

best album to hem a dress to: penthouse, luna. i met this band in providence, ri, when i was 18 and made them sign the poster i stole off of the door to the club they were playing at, and it was dorky and pathetic, and we all knew it, and i didn't care. i love you, dean wareham. thank you for not laughing at me to my face. if it matters, i bet you'd like the dress.

artist most frighteningly devoted to his craft:



here's christian bale the way most of us know and love him, ripped like jesus and relieving my lungs of their troublesome burden of air more swiftly than a cannonball to the solar plexus. while i know mostly nothing about him as an individual and can't speak to his character, i can say with a great deal of certainty that this is the body i would program into my vanilla sky lucid dream. it's perfect, people. perfect. i crave it in a way that makes me blush even when i'm all alone in a dark, silent room. and here's christian making me want to die in a much less fun way in the machinist, which i got for christmas from my mom and watched for the first time on thursday:




MOTHER OF GOD. i've loved me some skinny men, but christian's body was so luridly grotesque in this film that it made me physically uncomfortable; i had a hard time sitting still in my chair while i was looking at it, and not at all in the happy, goose-bumpy way i've come to expect from past times with mr. bale. i was honestly uneasy. now, i know the movie came out a while ago and the sixty-plus pounds he dropped for the role are sort of old news, but they were old news to me, too, and i still got queasy watching him haul his jangly skeleton around for an hour and a half. a lot of that was the movie itself, though, which i think was great, although i probably need to watch it again to be sure. it was definitely troubling. christian plays a (drumroll, please) machinist who hasn't slept in a year, for no readily knowable reason, and he's a little edgy. the entire film is shot in overcast, brushed-metal tones and moves like a snowball rolling down a mountain, gaining density until what started out as a four-inch ball of packed powder ends up razing entire villages in the viewer's muddled, flinching head. at first i was annoyed by its orchestral score, sort of a cross between a scaled-down "peter and the wolf" and the instrumental background of every cheesed-out 1950s sci-fi debacle, but by the time the whole story finally came together i was so tense and distraught that i felt a tiny bit insane myself, so i guess it worked better than i expected it to. let me put it this way: the sixth sense didn't surprise me, and this movie made me pull my hair and talk back to the screen. (lest anyone be overly concerned for his health, christian finished the machinist and immediately transmogrified back into his hale and beautiful self in order to film batman begins.) congratulations, cast and crew, and thank you, christian bale, for being the only boy on the planet talented enough to make me sweat and/or recoil in horror at your command. you so crazy. oh, and just to be self-indulgent, let's take a moment to remember christian the way he was when he first caught my dewy little junior-high eye:



heh. dork. but heaven knows i'm soft for 'em. swing heil, indeed.

most poignant exchange from grey gardens:

big edie: that cat's going to the bathroom over there, right behind my portrait.
little edie: oh, that's terrible. isn't it terrible? it's just terrible.
big edie: i think it's wonderful. it's wonderful that someone here is doing exactly what they want to do.

now, maybe you know about grey gardens and maybe you don't, but the fact is, big edie is absolutely right—the cats peeing in the corners, and i guess the raccoons getting fat on wonder bread in the attic, are the only ones in the house who aren't endlessly mourning, or at least constantly reliving, the choices they didn't make, the chances they didn't take, the lives they're still sure they were meant to have but never will. when the camera zooms in on the face of the terrible/wonderful cat, its expression is one of utter calm and contentment; while big edie, at 79, has the bearing and attitude of a lot of older folks who are well past caring what the hell any of the rest of us think of them, it's still an expression i have a hard time imagining on either woman's face. i don't know if i want to recommend this movie, exactly, but i do believe a dedicated viewing will encourage you to think a bit differently about what course of action in any given circumstance is truly the least regrettable. i love my mom, and i've shot myself in the foot a few times trying to take care of her, because at the time it seemed like The Right Thing To Do, but there's no way i'd let us end up like this.

best e-mail alert: i have an extensive list of puerile sound clips that i rotate through as my mood shifts, but this one is my favorite right now. i'm on the hunt for some classic ren & stimpy quotes, so stay tuned. as if you could help it.

tag has always been my worst athletic event . . .

. . . as i'm a poor distance runner and relatively unenthusiastic about any sport that doesn't involve hitting things rather hard. (in my experience, while tag can potentially involve a decent amount of force, most people would prefer it didn't. sallies.) so i started off at a disadvantage, and when you add to that the fact that i was practically asleep when the rest of the players started darting around you'll understand how unfairly fish-in-a-barrel things were. anyhow, i've been snagged by phila and drawn into one of these never-ending web webs of getting-to-know-you goodness, and while i'm touched that he would choose me, especially since he's one of my favorite faceless friends, i don't exactly live for the spotlight. but he asked nicely, and i didn't have too much better to do, so i'll suck it up and talk all about me for a minute or two.

seven things to do before i die

1. have a job i love every aspect of
2. scuba dive with sharks—maybe in a cage, maybe not
3. finish the life-sucking story i've been trying to write for the past six years, and feel good about it when i'm done
4. remember and acknowledge the birthdays of every person i care about for an entire year
5. move to some place where i won't feel guilty about having a big, goofy, boisterous labrador retriever, and then get three of them
6. convince one person that homeostasis is inevitably more important than self-gratification, no matter what the situation
7. find out where my recycling actually goes

seven things i can not do

1. ride a bicycle
2. play the piano with both hands
3. think about milk without making a face
4. not gasp (at best) or shriek (at worst) at the sight of a centipede or millipede, even when they're only cartoons
5. envision the amount of trash produced worldwide in a single day
6. stop wanting to wallop bush, cheney, santorum, stevens, etc. with orange-filled socks (see, phila, i'm not so even-tempered as you thought)
7. abide hypocrisy

seven things that attract me to . . . chester

1. his musical talent
2. his deep thoughts about solitude
3. his absolute freedom from self-consciousness
4. the snail costume he wears to his job at the pet store, where he cleans the fish tanks from the inside with his great suction
5. his boundless, ecstatic enthusiasm
6. his disarming lack of any and all ulterior motives
7. the cereal in his pocket

seven things i say most often

1. "hello, babies!"—spoken every time i walk into the nuclear medicine cat ward at work, and every time i come home to the psychiatric cat ward in my bedroom
2. "fucking w."
3. "who watches this crap?"
4. "who eats this crap?"
5. "no, no, don't! don't wake up with the king! he'll eat your soul!"
6. "juniper! you're my enemy."
7. "coffee . . ."

seven books that i love

1. the little prince – antoine de saint-exupéry
2. the sound and the fury – william faulkner
3. everything is illuminated – jonathan safran foer
4. the world of pooh – a. a. milne
5. fillerbunny – jhonen vasquez
6. alice's adventures in wonderland – lewis carroll
7. jesus saves – darcey steinke, and because i'm a sucky cheater i can't not include lolita. there.

seven movies that i watch over and over again

1. i *heart* huckabees
2. swimming to cambodia
3. the purple rose of cairo
4. the princess and the warrior
5. happiness
6. bloodsucking freaks
7. ponette

seven people i want to join in, too

are you kidding me? i don't think i even know seven people. here, i'll tell you what: i'll leave this one open, and anyone who wants to play can go ahead and do so. i know we're not all big on the games.

it's good! it's good!

i have very shamelessly stolen this capote still from rotten tomatoes, and they can punish me however they'd like; i stole it, and i'd steal it again, because i am so enamored of philip seymour hoffman at this moment that it is chewing a ragged and soon-to-be septic hole in my swirly girly guts.

he. is. AMAZING. there's nothing he can't do. i think if a role required that he spin straw into gold while breathing underwater through gills he'd engineered the genetic mutation for himself using nothing but a plasma lightning ball, an easy-bake oven and a can of tuna fish, if he liked the character enough, he'd just fucking find a way, because he's that hardcore. the first time he really knocked me on my ass was when i saw todd solondz's happiness, and he's never given me any reason to try to get back up. i'd pay ten dollars to spend two hours watching him drool in his sleep.

everyone in this movie is good, but it's called capote for a reason; the other characters only exist as surfaces for him to bounce himself off of or gaze at his reflection in, and this effectively brings home the idea that that's exactly how the actual capote felt about the people in his life. manipulative, narcissistic, calculatingly ambitious--these are the adjectives the viewer will most strongly attach to him, and there won't be many positive ones to balance them out. so what? i already knew everything i needed to know about the man; i went to see a movie, and there's nothing better in a movie than an accurate and unapologetic portrayal of a questionable human being. hoffman loves these flawed individuals, he rolls them all around his mouth until he's found every earthy undertone and hint of citrus, and man, when he's got it, he's got it.

i'm at the point where i'm likely to start echoing my previous gushes in similarly worded circles, so i'm going to stop here by giving it both thumbs and all of my toes way up. if you see it, tell me what you think, and if you see philip seymour, tell him to call me.

i love it when i'm right.

so, i just got back from mirrormask, and it was all of the dreamily abstract things i'd hoped it would be. it is geared towards the young ones a bit, so don't go if you're apt to be disappointed by a lack of challenging subtext, but if you can shush your insistently adult and analytical mind for about an hour and a half you'll be enchanted. the things neil gaiman and dave mckean absently ponder while they're brushing their teeth must make my most outrageous hallucinatory escapades look like 1950s hygiene films. lucky bastards. don't read any further if you'd rather not know more about the movie than you already do, but for the rest of you, here are the three moments that most made me tap my toes on the floor and grin big as a five-year-old faced with a wading pool full of gumdrops:

1. helena, the main character, spends most of the movie in an angular, rust-colored cityscape whose streets are crawling with sphinxes in the place of stray cats. the sphinxes are very much like cats, temperament-wise, but have lurid paper-mask man-faces and rainbowy wings, and speak with classy london accents. at one point a group of them gathers at her feet and demands cake. they look up at her, all cat even with their flat people eyes, and very calmly say exactly what any cat, and certainly my cat, would say in this situation: "hungry." half the audience died laughing, presumably the half who have shared their homes with cats.

2. helena (for reasons i probably shouldn't disclose, in case you're thinking of taking my very good advice and going to see it for yourself) finds herself in a room filled with hexagonal clock-topped boxes. these things

pop out of them and proceed to sing the most brilliantly, chillingly gorgeous version of the carpenters' "close to you" that one could ever hope to hear. i already miss it, in fact, and will probably end up buying the soundtrack just for its sake. the scene reminded me of the bit in legend where the shadow-girl dances lily into that fabulous black dress. i didn't want to go to my prom, and when my friends tried to coax me into it i told them that i would go if and only if they found a way for me to do it wearing that dress. so, i spent a fulfilling spring evening watching a friday the 13th marathon on usa and trying (in vain) to make s'mores in my living room with hershey miniatures and a yankee candle. neither here nor there.

3. this one's special on a just-for-me level, but i can tell you, because it's okay for us to have secrets: helena falls through a hole in the floor and lands in the middle of a circle of creatures of indeterminate anthropoid origin. she tells them her name, and they respond just enough for her to understand that there are about a dozen bobs... and one malcolm. when the shadows come for her, someone flies her to safer ground—and it ain't bob.

why do birds suddenly appear?

good night, my darlings. because you're good babies, and because you like me too, dream something you didn't know you could dream.

mirrormask

mirrormask is opening nationwide any second now, and it's already playing in a lot of independent theaters, so get off your butt and buy some tickets already. hell, you probably don't even have to get off your butt until you actually leave for the theater, and you can sit back down on it the second you get there, so you've got absolutely no excuse not to see this movie. neil gaiman, dave mckean, jim henson studios--how could you go wrong? you couldn't, that's how, so watch the trailer, thank me profusely for the tip, and, for the love of all that is holy, stay away from that evil fake butter.

pleeeeeease?

come to america, david firth! i'll make my home a palace! you won't have to pay rent or fold your own laundry, i'll cook all your meals, so long as you give me lots and lots of these.

buy this book:

boycott this movie:

governator: the early years, and other wonders

"and here's some rue for
you, and some for me." that's all
the shakespeare i know*.



regret is a singularly human sensation. other animals experience things like guilt and shame and anxiety, and i'm certain sorrow (although plenty of eminent scientists and behaviorists would probably debate that one with me), but regret is unique, and uniquely ours. whether it's because only humans are capable of it or because only humans commit the sorts of misdeeds that warrant it, i can't say. it's likely that most animals lack the cognitive skills necessary to trace an outcome back through the series of events leading up to that outcome; when your jack russell terrier eats a nail and has to undergo abdominal exploratory surgery, he doesn't wake up from his anesthesia thinking, "man, if only i hadn't eaten that nail," he wakes up thinking, "pain. i'm in quite a lot of pain." he will associate that pain with the place he's in, not with the thing he did that led him to that place, and so your dog exonerates himself and the nail is forgotten. it's a remarkably zen existence, but not one offering a shot at any functional enlightenment. he'll probably eat another sharp metallic object in no time. you, at that point, will regret your decision to adopt a jack russell terrier, but he will only be distressed because you have brought him back to the palace of pain. i don't think it means you're smarter than him that you feel regret. not eating nails means you're smarter, but regretting your pet selection because your pet is determined to die of an intestinal perforation means you're rational (if a bit self-interested). you'd think, being so rational, we'd figure out which things we were and weren't likely to regret and thereby diminish the frequency of the sensation as we matured. but we don't.

two nights ago i saw the found footage festival at the coolidge corner theatre in brookline. the impeccably ironic turn for our civilization would be for these video clips to survive when everything else has perished, and two thousand years from now some other civilization would judge us according to their content. the verdict? late-twentieth-century americans were base, deranged, and fucking hilarious. if you go to the website you can see a collection of abbreviated clips, but some of the highlights not available for preview are:

• a bizarre intersplicing of footage of a mrs. minnesota pageant, a pimp filleting a live catfish, and a full-frontal tutorial on how to use your newly installed penis pump

• "memorial day 2000," a beer-flooded weekend with a herd of a hundred or so white townie youths, replete with couch-burnings, raw sewage, the chug-vomit-chug-vomit cycle of rebirth, and the introduction of my new favorite compliment, "you're the fucking whipshit of all fucking shitter bongers"

• a short educational film for mcdonald's custodians featuring the vaguely dirty phrase, "i think you're going to see McC!"

i would happily discuss every clip that was shown, as they were dazzling from beginning to end, but i'm going to wrap it up here with the one that really made the evening (actually, the very early morning) for me--carnival with arnold schwarzenegger. this video was made by the brazilian tourism bureau when arnold was still mr. universe, and it proves that none of his egotism or misogyny is secondary to his success in motion pictures. in at most three minutes, everyone's favorite governor gropes at least three women (plainly against their will) after telling a nameless blonde that he loves america but feels more at home in brazil because, while americans focus on tits, the brazilians, like him, understand that the best part of any woman's body is her ass. later he sits down to what begins as an innocent brunch with a pretty young brunette. arnold proceeds to beat the innocence to death with its own shoe by grunting the portuguese word for poon-tang three times in rapid succession and forcing the girl to fellate a carrot stick.

were someone to project this video on a wall while mr. schwarzenegger and his wife were at a restaurant celebrating their wedding anniversary, he might feel embarrassed or anxious, or even ashamed. but i doubt he'd feel regret. i doubt he'd think to himself, "if only i hadn't ground my crotch against that strange girl's hip while she struggled to disentangle my hands from her g-string." there would be, in his mind, a sense of alarm and the desire to remove himself from an unpleasant place. he would want the name of the person who had played the video, and he would want to never go back to that restaurant.

to regret is to understand and accept culpability. that's what we get. that's the power that was supposed to keep everything in check. the problem seems to be that the majority of us don't regret the things we've done wrong, only the things we've been caught doing wrong, and so we haven't properly honed that power. hindsight's great for what it's worth, but it's worth more than we're taking advantage of it for.

anyhow. the found footage festival is touring the country, and you'd better do whatever it takes to catch it if it comes your way. i promise you won't regret it for a second.





* it's not, really, i've memorized a shocking quantity of iambic pentameter over the years. what do you want from me? haiku is hard. it was wrong of me to lie, though, and i shall repent anon.

"www.killandiemacdowell.com" is still up for grabs

if i couldn't act
and my face was all squinchy,
would i be famous?


has andie macdowell ever not been absolutely terrible in any movie? has she ever not completely sucked the air out of a role, if not an entire film? her nature, to quote the shins, bears a vacuum, into which all color and emotion is inevitably drawn. and yet she continues to be cast, and not just in puff pieces and rubbish but in what might otherwise be truly excellent works. i have no idea how or why it happens, only that it does, over and over and over. let's run through a few of them.

1. four weddings and a funeral. brilliant! gorgeous! right up until the very end, that is, when andie, who has been ruining everything for everyone for the past two hours, not only keeps charles from realizing that he should just give in and fall deeply in love with fiona but also fails to die horribly in a plane/car/train wreck. after not dying she punishes us with one of the flattest, cheesiest, most poorly delivered lines in all of movie history: "is it still raining? i hadn't noticed." AAAAUUUUGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! how did this scene make the final cut? what the hell were they thinking?

2. short cuts. this movie is more or less about how at least half of every couple is the devil; i saw it because tom waits is in it and my roommate is in love with tom waits. andie's character is, as one would expect, utterly without personality and therefore impossible to pity or sympathize with, even when her only child dies of a head injury after being hit by a car. he most likely would not have died if she had taken him to a hospital instead of letting him fall asleep, and so her suffering should be immense, should take up entire acres of space: no. nothing, not even in what should be her character's emotional climax, when she confronts . . . well, it's a long story, blah blah blah, but she gets right up in lyle lovett's face and shouts/whines, "my son is dead! he is dead!" i thought i'd kill myself laughing, it was so ridiculously limp.

3. groundhog day. bill murray is way too good for her. i shouldn't have to justify this.

and there's green card, and the object of beauty, and i'm sure a million things that i haven't suffered through. the point i'm making is, it's time for someone to stand up and tell her that she is quite pretty, but she is devoid of talent, and she is hereby banned for life from all theatrical or motion picture productions. i'll do it myself if the rest of you will have my back.

i guess that's all i had to say today. about three feet of snow have fallen here in the past twenty-four hours, and i've got a touch of the cabin fever. stay warm, folks, and don't be afraid to embrace your rage.

i heart z-man. and farms. z-man and farms!

the first few days of
fall are the breaths between sleep
and waking; draw deep.




russ meyer died this weekend, and toadie and i were quite sad. we bravely pulled ourselves out of our sadness with the thought that john la zar might come out of hiding to speak to the press, but, of course, that didn't happen, so we're still a little bummed. good night, sweet prince. we shall forever carry your heart inside our hearts. on a more chipper note, all the kangaroos at the store down the street from me are $29, if anyone wants to place an order. they only have four colors, but they're bright, pretty colors.

i'm pretty sure zach braff is canoodling with cary brothers. he boasts about him constantly, he brings him on t.v. shows, no doubt he's sneaking his name into interviews... it's like kurt and courtney all over again. i think you know what that means. watch your back, braff. if memory serves, that courtney character was a bit of a bad seed, and by bad seed i mean bipolar junkie murderess, so, seriously. the second he starts talking about kids, change the locks.

i wish i lived in a sweet tiny town where there was some sort of annual festival that involved crowning a local girl the Vidalia Onion Queen or the Turnip Princess, something hokey and darling and no one's but ours. the town i grew up in had the potential for it, size-wise, but everyone was too snooty and episcopalian to get it together. they did have a "Day in the Park" every fall; some high school class always set up a game that involved throwing ping pong balls into plastic cups in order to win goldfish out of a wading pool, and some kid always won a dozen goldfish and then ate them on a dare under the baseball bleachers. every girl under the age of twelve secretly had a crush on that boy for the next three weeks. there was more to it, but nothing else seems worth mentioning. it's a tradition, i suppose, but not one to rally a community around. i want a community, and i want that community's sense of self and pride to be centered in something singularly geeky. i guess i might not feel that way if i had grown up in onion country, but i can't say for sure. i think i don't miss my home town because it didn't offer me anything special enough to miss. we were blindingly vanilla. we lacked a suitable mascot. well, there was screwy louie, a drunk who dressed like a lumberjack except for his shoes, a stunning assortment of women's pumps that he was careful not to dribble on as he urinated in the middle of the street. but we weren't really supposed to talk about him.

i want to move away. i don't care where to. i'm ravenous for suggestions.

anyone?

notes from the most recent meeting of NAGPLA

i never liked the
air conditioning, thin tinned
synthetic comfort




zach braff seems like a good kid. it's just, i wonder, i mean, if he hadn't been in the movie, like, would you all still adore him for having written it? it's always bothered me that writers and directors don't get the same sort of admiration as the more visible participants. i know i couldn't pick tom tykwer out of an otherwise empty room, but if he called me up and told me to meet him in munich for scrabble and pretzels tomorrow i'd throw on some shoes and knock over old ladies on my way to the airport. i'm not, you know, i'll plug the guy until i'm blue in the face, but everyone's all excited about his thoughts on kites and toothbrushes, and i'm probably one of the worst because i might never have seen garden state if there hadn't been that line on scrubs about the suckiness of any movie featuring andie macdowell, which i doubt he even had anything to do with, so it's all good. i think i'm saying . . . nothing. i think i'm saying nothing. as usual.

i am so surpassingly smitten with the moldy peaches. indie boys are neurotic, but hey, i'm starting to feel okay . . .

wasn't that chick from scrubs on roseanne at some point? it was her, wasn't it, the girl who took over for the original becky? i hated her then because i'm so rigidly opposed to change, but she's all right, really.

chester, the hand puppet (i think he's a dish glove) from sifl and olly, is my number one crush lately. i'd love to insert a picture of him here, but i can't because i'm an utter technological failure. instead i'm going to offer you my favorite quote, guaranteed to fill me, someone just like me, and possibly you with squishy bubbly (interspecies?) love. prepare for your stolen holiday:

i'm chester, and i'll take you roller skating, and i'll push dudes down to let them know where i stand. i'll scar 'em up.

squishy bubbly! mmmmmmmmmm. but if you don't have a picture of his floppy doofus face in your head none of this is worth two clucks in a henhouse, so i'll let it go. and . . . it's gone. but know that you, too, are cut out to be a real winner.

repeats of the daily show spank the collective behind of all those up-to-date "legitimate" news shows. remember to always vote for the candidate who lies the least. i really want to tell you to pay close attention to their views and plans and all that rot, but that only works if you can simultaneously apply that first piece of advice, so, i don't know. know your facts, go with your gut, do the best you can, politically and otherwise. karma shall smile on your well-intentioned head.

'night, kids.

two thumbs up to the cast, but...

body of a bird
in the road. i stepped around
it, apologized.






i'm the only person i know who doesn't like "the breakfast club." i've never even been able to sit through the entire movie. the public's reliable shock and dismay over this fact has driven me to try harder to sit through the movie than i've ever tried to do anything else in my life, and after all my most sincere attempts i've managed to change my dislike into full-blown loathing. i despise "the breakfast club." there, i've said it. bring on the torch-wielding mobs.

it doesn't matter, you know. i hate a lot of things that don't deserve it. my natural hair color, birch beer, reggae, almost all cooked vegetables... for all i know it isn't even about the movie, it's some repressed tie-in to an intestinal spasm i had the first time i saw it when i was eight or something. i don't know what you'd like me to do about it. i don't ask you to lie about things that you don't like. stop persecuting me, damn it. i'm doing the best i can. *sniff*

new t.v. show! eatusnbc is proud to present "Yup...That's How That Is." this program airs for twelve minutes once a month, because any more than that would be excruciating for me and other people who know its star. i'm not telling you her name because it just isn't relevant, but she's OH FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST so unbelievably irritating. imagine the voice of a midwestern chain-smoking mickey mouse encased in the akward body of an insecure middle-aged librarian. now imagine that voice commenting quietly to itself on EVERYTHING EVERYBODY DOES. oh, you don't understand, you could never understand. here, stay with me anyhow. i'm putting that woman in a chair in any high-traffic area, a street corner, a convenience store, a supermarket produce section... let's use that for now. she's just sitting there, no one's even looking at her, she's wearing a microphone and you hear this:


"i'm sitting next to the grapes. i like grapes. like me some grapes. especially when they're cold. some people like fruit better when it's room temperature, but i like it cold. these grapes aren't very cold. i'd like them better if they were cold. maybe someone could put them in the refrigerator. i bet there's a refrigerator in the supermarket. lots of things that you find in the supermarket need to be kept in the refrigerator. maybe someone will put these grapes in the refrigerator. that woman's buying some apples. she's buying some peppers, too. but she doesn't have any grapes. i wonder if she doesn't like grapes. maybe she just likes apples better. i wonder if she would have wanted the grapes if they were colder. i'd like the grapes more if they were colder. and i like grapes. that's funny, i like grapes, and here i wound up sitting right next to them."

did it take you a minute to read that? maybe less? could you imagine twelve minutes? i work with her for nine hours every day. she's not handicapped, she's not on drugs, she's just the most annoying woman who ever freaking lived. and i'm going to make her famous, because i've got nothing better to do.

if you hate it, that's okay. i appreciate that sometimes there's just no way around it.

buy my hookers, suckers.