Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Oh Jeez

I obviously haven't updated this in forever. For anyone interested, this is what I've been busy doing. The good news is that I'm almost done and then maybe I can get on this.

There's been a slight uptick in visitors here, who knows why, but those of you who are passing by, don't hesitate to say hi and tell me why you would ever come here.

And hopefully I'll be back soon with actual stuff, who knows?

Friday, May 25, 2012

Completist Blogs I Want to Make

Since I'm nearing the end of my Criterion journey, I thought I'd jot down some ideas for other completist blogs. Obviously a lot of good ones have already been done, like Julie & Julia and Lawrence & Julie & Julia, so I'm kind of looking at the bottom of the barrel. But here goes anyway:

1. America's McDonald's - this is where I eat at every McDonald's in America and rank them from 1 to 12,804. Since McDonald's makes the shittiest food ever, I will be grading based on how good the soda is and the cleanliness of their bathrooms.

2. Spice Girls Revisited - this is where I masturbate to each Spice Girl and live blog it. Considering the nature of the internet, however, this has probably not only already been done, but there's a whole community of people doing it. Actually, I believe Fifty Shades of Grey was originally Spice Girls fan fiction.

3. The Internet Review - this is where I visit every page on the internet and then review it. Not sure if I am going to do this alphabetically or chronologically. Also, I will probably be arrested at some point.

4. Are You Ready for Some Football? - this is where I will rewatch every season of the NFL and blog about it as if I do not know what is going to happen. It will kind of be like ESPN Classic, except I will eventually kill myself from the crushing boredom.

5. Everything I Don't Own - this is where I turn the minimalist trend of listing your possessions on its head and list all of the things in the world that I don't currently have in my possession. I'll probably start with things I definitely won't ever own, since that way I won't write posts that I didn't need.

That's all I have for now, but I'm definitely going to keep thinking about this. Please let me know if you have any good ideas and I'll get right on starting them, getting a huge book deal/movie deal/private island deal, and generally becoming unbelievably wealthy.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

When IMDb Makes You Sad

With the unwanted arrival of Men in Black 3 this summer, Barry Sonnenfeld has been in the news - at least relative to the last five years or so. I decided to look back at his career on IMDb today, and as so often happens was gravely disappointed in what I found. When I was a teenager, I loved this guy - mainly because he was the Coen brothers first DP and worked on Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and the supremely beautiful Miller's Crossing, but also because he made the excellent Get Shorty, the best early 90s old-TV-show movie adaptation in The Addams Family, and the brisk and enjoyable first installment of Men in Black. Recently, he was a key player in the tragically canceled Pushing Daisies.

But look at his whole career and holy shit, this guy is a hack. Even ignoring the film that put him into exile - the epically shitty RV starring the epically shitty Robin Williams - this guy's career has morphed into a horrifying descent into Hollywood garbage: Wild, Wild West, Big Trouble, the totally unwatchable Men in Black II (which Will Smith fans loyally forgot completely after its release). Ignoring for a moment the great Pushing Daisies, he's spent the last few years making a middling sitcom and TV movies. Even as a producer he's made crap the last ten years like the only bad Coen brothers movie (The Ladykillers) and motherfucking Space Chimps.

This is depressing, because Barry Sonnenfeld (while no Roger Deakins) was a great DP, and started off with a quirky yet crowd-pleasing career. I don't fault him for going where the money takes him - and I suspect that a few missteps like Wild, Wild West and Men in Black II put him into a corner that limited his career options - but, damn, that's some sad shit right there. Maybe he still has an awesome movie in him (note: this will almost certainly not be Men in Black 3) but for now, this is just another depressing visit to IMDb where you realize someone cool is not so great after all.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Five: Movies

I like lists. So I decided I am going to make a list of the top five most important [fill in the blank] for me every so often. These aren't the best or maybe even my favorite. Just the ones that mean the most to me that I think everyone should know. Here's one now.


Trouble in Paradise


(Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Trouble in Paradise was not the first romantic comedy I fell in love with - that would probably be His Girl Friday, which to this day remains the pinnacle of Hollywood sophistication for me. And I have a special place in my heart for some more recent stellar entries in the genre, most notably Groundhog Day and The American President. But the first time I saw Trouble in Paradise I knew there was never going to be a romantic comedy that surpassed it for me. The dialog sparkles like it does in no other film, the characters are wicked but lovely, sophisticated and dirty. Lubitsch was at his best from the opening scene of a garbage man in Venice to the final reveal in the cab shuffling off to Happily Ever After. Perfection.

Here's what I wrote for my Criterion blog about my favorite romantic comedy of all time.


Vertigo

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)


It's nice to have a stock answer to a handful of questions in life, and one of those is "What's your favorite movie?" It's a bit arbitrary, but right now and for the last ten years or so my answer has been Vertigo. There are a lot of reasons for this - both personal and analytical - but two stick out. The first is that I have an intensely vivid memory of first seeing the film in its restored re-release in West LA in 1996 (I was lucky enough to see it again later that year at the Castro theater in San Francisco where it belongs - I've seen it four more times in theaters and try to go whenever I can). The experience of watching Vertigo for the first time is everything I look for in the movies. Hitchcock opens with a quick out-of-context chase before slowly building up the main story of the film. When the rug pull happens halfway through the movie, it's hard if not impossible to imagine where the film will go. The viewer had assumed the movie was about Stewart's attempts to save Novak from the clutch of fate, the never ending cycle of violence and injustice, but soon it becomes clear that we were all horribly wrong, and the second half of the movie is perhaps one of the most disturbing and yet invigorating acts in all of cinema. Which leads to my second reason for loving Vertigo so much: the undeniable truths of creating film contained within its terrifying central theme of obsession. Like all the best movies ever made, Vertigo is about itself as much as it is about its protagonist.

Dr. Strangelove

(Stanley Kubrick, 1964)


Little shit that I was, I wrote my college essay about my love for Dr. Strangelove. I'm not sure why I thought that would ingratiate me to anyone looking for young minds to shape, but I guess I figured I didn't want to go anywhere where people still had even a little bit of hope for humanity. Dr. Strangelove isn't Kubrick's darkest movie (that would be Eyes Wide Shut) or even his best (that would be Paths of Glory, which just as easily could have made this list), but it is his funniest, and the best representation of Peter Sellers's genius. Kubrick earns extra points from me for being able to make a movie that is almost entirely irrelevant now in terms of specifics and yet far too relevant in terms of politics and human nature in general. I also own an original copy of this poster, and it's pretty cool.



Manhattan

(Woody Allen, 1979)


Manhattan was the first movie I ever watched that I immediately rewound (remember that?) and watched all over again. I grew up in a pro-Woody household, so I was raised going to see his films every year. It wasn't until I was in my teens that I saw Manhattan, however, and it marked the moment my love for his work was my own and - maybe even more intensely - I fell for the fantasy of New York City, which here looks more beautiful than Brigette Bardot or Rita Hayworth could ever muster. This movie is probably why I went to school in New York, but it's also one of the key movies in my development as a film fan, because Allen was so effortlessly able to create a genuine work out of the cinema and surroundings that inspired him. The film often strikes the modern viewer as awkward considering Allen's later scandals, but ignore everything but Gordon Willis's cinematography, iconically paired with George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," and fall in love with the greatest city in the world.

The Vanishing

(George Sluzier, 1988)

Obviously, this is the least famous title on this list - in fact, no one associated with this movie did anything else especially notable in their careers. Most notoriously, Sluzier himself went on to remake the film in America starring Kiefer Sutherland, Jeff Bridges, and a young Sandra Bullock, creating one of the worst remakes of all time despite the fact that he had directed the original. But let's not think of bad things, and instead concentrate on what makes The Vanishing so damn good. Is it the beautifully constructed plotting? The heart-wrenching final moments? The creation of one of the greatest movie villains of all time? There are other movies that could have made this list, but The Vanishing is here because I've never seen any other movie that is able to straddle the line between low and high cinema so beautifully, that is terrifying one minute and philosophically challenging the next. The Vanishing asks its viewer to stare into the depths of their greatest fears and not blink, all for the sake of an insatiable curiosity. Isn't that what film is all about?

Friday, May 11, 2012

a world of to-do lists

Anyone who has ever made a to-do list knows that the real pleasure of working your way through one isn't doing each thing, but getting to check it off the list. But in today's world, everyone gets to have that feeling.

Here are some things I have become dangerously close to doing merely to check them off some list:
  • Clear my inbox.
  • Watch movies on Netflix.
  • Listen to and delete my voicemail messages.
  • Read articles on Instapaper.
  • Read RSS feeds on Reader.
  • Catch up on Twitter.
  • Make cocktails on Kindred.
  • Listen to albums I download.
  • Read books from the pile on my nightstand.
  • My entire Criterion project.
I actually like doing all of these things (except listening to voicemail - please, dear god, stop leaving me voicemail) but because I have a list of each one that I want to work my way through, an unnecessary level of stress has entered into my process with each one. In some cases, the stress is good: I would probably be living in a ditch somewhere right now if not for my unjustified constant desire to have a clear gmail inbox, since this is the only way I convince myself to pay any bills. But in others, it's totally bizarre and pointless: who cares how many articles I haven't read that I plan on reading? Why would I possibly need to try every drink I want to try?

I know other people feel the same way about clearing their plate of things to do. So my question is what is wrong with us? Why do we want our lives to be uncomplicated and devoid of pressure, only to place unnecessary levels of pressure on ourselves? Why don't I just stop clicking "Read Later"?

Last month, I took a hatchet to my Netflix queue. Gone were the obscure Russian dramas I had read about in some article in 2006; I was no longer oppressed by the dumb superhero movies that I figured I should catch but weren't even supposed to be that good; the latest romantic comedy was finally free of having to jump over 60 movies that had been languishing in the 6-65 spots as more pressing fare passed them by. When I began the purge, I was horrified. What if I want to see that Louis Malle documentary about India in five years? How will I find it? But as I cut and cut and cut some more, a calm spread through me that can only be described as attaining a higher form of consciousness. Now a zen master in the art of technology maintenance, I pushed aside my fears with ease as my queue went from 90 to 45 to a slim 28. "If I am meant to watch a movie," I thought to myself, "it will find me."

Which reminded me of an article on meditation I had been meaning to add to my Instapaper account.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Why I'm going to try this (and why I hate myself for it)

This is going to be a personal blog. Not personal in that it will be about my life, but personal in that it will not focused on one thing or covering news or history about something. It will be my thoughts and feelings, I guess, but it will also be a space in which I can explore areas of writing I'm not able to explore in other places.

I hate blogs like this. I mean, I don't really because I read a fair number of them. But if everyone had a blog, life would be pretty shitty. Actually, that's kind of what Facebook is, and it's why I'm not on Facebook. Personal blogs (and Facebook/Twitter, albeit in shorter format) do two things simultaneously:
  1. They make you out to be a total narcissist because you think your thoughts are so great that you have to share them with the world.
  2. They sacrifice your own privacy by letting everyone in the world know what you think about whatever you choose to post about.
Of course, if you don't care about the first, you probably don't care about the second, since who cares who knows what you think since it's so important? In fact, most models of success on the internet demand that you put both of these problems out of your mind, since self-promotion is vital to getting the word out about your work and maintaining a high profile. My success with Fuck You, Penguin was able to avoid this because the novelty of the concept allowed the site to take on a life of its own. Once the book came out, though, the novelty had worn down. Combined with my lack of desire to maintain the blog, my disinterest in continuing to promote the site (or really to even begin in the first place) led to a slowing interest in the site (it still gets a lot of hits, but few comments and is rarely mentioned online anymore). This can be compared with any number of hit blogs that have continued to be updated and continue to release sequels to their initial books.

My point here is that self-promotion (or at least self-driven exposure) is a mandatory element of having an internet presence. With so much of the publishing world being driven by the internet at the moment, this means self-promotion is a mandatory element of being a writer. So even a lot of people who are extremely reluctant to be online nevertheless have Facebook pages, twitter accounts, and blogs at whatevertheirnameis.com. Unsurprisingly, these accounts see upticks in activity from their owners right around when their new book comes out.

Of course, it's not all crappy market sense - blogs are awesome. They give you complete creative freedom, allow you to talk about things in a short format that you couldn't otherwise talk about, and interact with readers on a real-time basis. They also allow ideas to grab hold in a democratic fashion. Penguin is a great example of this: had I pitched that as a book without the blog and good buzz/a large number of followers behind me, they most likely would have laughed in my face (not in the good way).

So, I'm going to now be the obnoxious person who thinks what they have to say is so important, the annoying guy who shares too much and rambles on while no one pays attention, and the dilettante writer who posts his top 5 sandwiches next to an ode to Nicolas Cage. I hope there are a handful of people reading this who stick around, but mostly I hope I stick around, as the internet is littered with my half-started blogs I never continued (and a few I spent way too much time on). Enjoy.