This brilliant and disturbing documentary takes you deep into the shallows of Kim Jong Il’s hermit kingdom. Somehow, Vice Magazine’s Shane Smith (founder of VBS, Vice’s video division and star of their Guide to Travel series) and a clandestine-camera-wielding companion secure passage into North Korea from China -- pretending to be tourists, of course, because journalists go to jail. For an hour Smith explores the thin, saccharine veneer of majesty and might that the dictatorship uses to obscure the truth about the desperately impoverished and broken country. He mingles with eerily upbeat hosts, waitresses and tour guides, all hand-picked to chaperone him 24/7 during his stay (the pretense of which is to view and report on the Arirang Mass Games, a spectacular orgy of propaganda and gymnastics too baffling for words). Complete with a heartbreakingly awkward karaoke rendition of the Sex Pistol’s "Anarchy in the U.K.," this documentary is a must-see: a visceral primer for anyone interested in understanding the uniquely other-worldly yet backwards North Korea. -- Adam Schaefer
Music, math, the interactive: these are three things that I really like, and Marco Fusinato's art includes them all. Mass Black Implosion is probably my favorite of his projects -- it reimagines musical scores, sometimes by overlaying them with scribbles of varying thickness (maps to some imagined territory), in architecturally-precise lines (an explosion into three dimensions), or as some kind of gloriously strange infographic for the world to come. Aetheric Plexus, in sharp contrast, turns audiovisual detail into interactive assault. It's difficult to get a sense of the scope of some of these works, but it's evident that Fusinato's gallery showings include a vast collaborative and musical component -- I'd love a chance to see some of this stuff live -- and I'm quite taken with his curatorial series You Don't Have to Call it Music, which tasks visual artists to create music. -- Lauren Caldwell
Dianne Wiest first struck me as the standout of Hannah and Her Sisters; then as the Law & Order DA who tells Sam Waterston what to do and how to think. She aged between these roles and now is even older, the offbeat beauty of her youth having morphed into a mature visage of both astonishing expressiveness and grandmotherly inscrutability — a crucial element of her facile and felicitous performance as psychotherapist Gina Toll on HBO's In Treatment. Psychotherapy is a delicate, hyper-pressurized encounter in which change rests on an enduringly empathetic therapist (who is also capable of being perceived as such) imbuing contingent actions and words with novel meanings and potentialities. Gina's patient Paul, a former protégé who returns for guidance after a decade of estrangement that began when Gina denied him a promotion, is ever probing Gina's face for nefariousness. A sleepy spider lying in wait, is what Paul calls her: What secret motives lie covertly in the fragile folds of her jowls, in the puffy bags beneath her eyes, etched on her weblike cheeks? Her enigmatic expressions initially offend Paul, whose history with Gina predisposes him to read any ambiguity in her mien as perfunctorily negative. Not sharing this pervading bias, we enjoy the virtuosic, Emmy-winning face of this gorgeous old lady whose allure and gravitas make me want to ask her to run for president. -- Kevin Hilke
Nov 29, 2008 0
Two of the following three legal actions were actually taken in the recent past; the third occurs in William Gaddis’s masterful 1994 satire of the American legal system, A Frolic of His Own.
1. A Pennsylvanian filed a lawsuit against Satan.
2. A Californian filed an amicus brief on behalf of God.
3. A Nebraskan filed a lawsuit against God.
Which is the fiction?
Nov 26, 2008 0
Lest we dismiss the effects of dogged right-wing psychosis on the issue of climate change as innocuous, now come reports that The Politico reporter Erika Lovley, instead of researching her stories dealing with climate change, has been parroting long discredited right-wing talking points lifted from Congressional Republicans’ press releases. Lovley’s negligence here has nothing to do with her climate-change expertise or lack thereof, though some expertise couldn’t have hurt. Her negligence, like that of so many others in the media and certain wings of the social sciences, consists in never having been persistently trained in the art of rigorous thinking.
Nov 25, 2008 0
In December 1833, while hard at work on his history of the Ukraine, Nikolai Gogol wrote to his friend M.P. Pogodin: “My history of Little Russia is extremely unrestrained, and how should it be otherwise? I am criticized…that it is unhistorically fiery and vivid; but what sort of history is it if it is boring?” V.S. Naipaul’s illuminations of nonwestern darkness may be too vivid for some, but they are anything but boring. Naipaul’s intricate light is blistering, but it is also indiscriminate—the nonwestern, the west, and Naipaul himself are all left scorched.
Nov 25, 2008 0
Sarah Palin is a succubus for American liberals. We could deal with a pro-life, pro-oil, pro-war, pro-God wack-stupid Governor when he was from a rich political dynasty, but when it’s a she and she comes from Middle-earth and is insatiably proud of her own faults, she’s like the no-bullshit dream girl of our Woody Allen fantasies. Everyone compares her to Tina Fey; the better comparison is to Diane Keaton. Palin is turning the middle American dumbasserazzi on to the hotly nerdish girl, thirty years later; and, in the process, she’s getting liberal America wet and hard.
Nov 24, 2008 0
My dad and I talk exactly the same way about two very different things.
