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 11, 2009 1
There’s a risk of expecting too much from the fourth season — there are so many possibilities that whatever path Weiner ends up taking will be disappointing. I’ll leave the specific possibilities for later in the discussion. Right now, I just want to commend Matthew Weiner for taking the leap and recognizing that this show was in danger of becoming too static for its own good.
Nov 10, 2009 6
How has a teenager in America never heard a Jay-Z song? No one will ever mistake Miley Cyrus’s bizarre concoction of country, pop, and Spears-style pre-legal come-ons for hip-hop, but her music occupies the same cultural sphere as Jay-Z. These are songs that people know. If she were a normal girl, she’d be going to Jay-Z concerts with her friends.
Nov 3, 2009 0
It’s been said that the Kennedy assassination grinded the season’s plot to a halt, which seems like a logical statement when you consider that the penultimate episode is usually a season’s climax. But what exactly was supposed to happen in this episode that didn’t happen? Don and Betty’s situation progressed, with Betty essentially deciding she hates Don. We saw more of Peggy’s gross affair with Duck. Roger Sterling’s life continued to devolve into a morass of booze and pining after Joan. Pete became further disenchanted with his job.
Oct 13, 2009 0
Don’s unhappy at work and typically uninterested by everything happening on Bullet Park Rd. We all know what that means: time to have an affair! At this point, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Don wants to cheat or that he’d be attracted to a hot, independent brunette interested in things other than puppy dogs and ice cream. It’s also tough to say it’s about the thrill of the chase, because he doesn’t seduce Miss Farrell so much as bed her by sheer force of will. There’s no logic — it’s all about satisfaction, the one thing that he can’t get at work.
Oct 10, 2009 0
Those who deride this honor as an award of aspiration are missing the point. It’s not about what Obama hopes or intends to do; it’s about the hope and intention he inspires in others. It’s about changing the way people see the world and what the world can be and what the world can produce. There’s nothing wrong with honoring someone whose eloquence and prominence brought about a November night filled with mass gatherings of happy tears, shouts of glee, and hugs for strangers in the streets of Chicago, Kenyan villages, Indonesian hamlets, and towns across the world that see Barack Obama as a little bit of their own.
