a set of sharp and cogent notes
Dec 31, 2009 3
It’s the unwillingness to explain that makes Avatar so successful. It realizes that the plot relies on relatively common archetypes that any audience can understand. Instead of trying to make everything plausible, Avatar piles on the spectacle.
Christopher Hitchens is dead.
Several members of the NYPD are under investigation for racist Facebook messages pertaining to working the city's West Indian American Day Parade in over Labor Day. Great job, guys!
Glenn Kenny on Edward Yang's amazing, just-now-getting-a-proper-release 1991 epic A Brighter Summer Day and the critical compulsion to stump for the underseen.
Like something out of Breaking Bad, a math professor in Boston has been arrested for running a meth lab with her son. Hopefully she doesn't also own a car wash.
With OWS wearily dwindling and the American administration unable to so much as slow the immolation of the middle class, Malcolm Harris and Ezra Klein offer assessments of the waning power of social democracy and the illusory promise of change a second time around.
Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, and Richard Linklater are working on a third movie in their series that includes Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Given the strength of the first two, this news qualifies as something of a blockbuster for fans of small movies with little more than two people conversing the whole time.
Noel Murray thinks there should be a TCM for TV. He is extremely correct.
David Gordon Green is returning to dramas with the new film Q, which also happens to be the title of a long-gestating project by Terence Malick. Apparently DGG's going to force those Malick comparisons that met his first few films, no matter what it takes.
Rather than end things, has Michael Bloomberg's disgusting, shameful, and police-state decision to evict Occupy Wall Street in the middle of the night actually given the movement a second and more effective life?
"When," asks Randy Lewis, "was the last time you saw an act of charity on TV? In the strictly for-profit world of corporate media that dominates our nightly viewing, caring for strangers has lost out to macho indifference, consumerist narcissism, and paranoid stranger-danger. Except in rare circumstances, we are not permitted to witness ongoing suffering nor those who tend to it. This omission is one of the defining facts of our contemporary mediascape."
Occupy Wall Street has been a surprising success. But Hendrik Hertzberg thinks it's time for the occupation to transition to something new and no less creative.
The vastly underrated series Treme will end after two more seasons. Which frankly seems like as good a plan as any for a show that's at it best when it doesn't even have much in the way of plot.
Axe Body Spray decided to market aggressively to guys who needed the most help getting girls. Then it worked too well, and their brand suffered because of it.
Independent film icon Hal Hartley has started a Kickstarter drive to raise the money to finish his new movie. We are truly in a new world when it comes to funding for creative projects.
Lynne Ramsay, the always-interesting director of Morvern Callar and the forthcoming We Need to Talk About Kevin, is planning a sci-fi adaptation of Moby-Dick. This news is exciting primarily because Ramsay is one of the few filmmakers who may choose to adapt the entire novel, not just the first and last 100 pages.
Nitsuh Abebe explains the modern state of adult contemporary music, in which genuine artists like Wilco and Feist put out songs that are just good enough but lacking an extra kick of inspiration.
"No writer owned the arena of toilet reading more than Henry Miller. He read truly great books on the lavatory, and maintained that some, Ulysses for instance, could not be fully appreciated elsewhere." But is it safe and sanitary? Probably.
"But really, to me," George Saunders tells The New Yorker's Deborah Treisman, "the writer’s main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared—she’s right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves."
"In a dispiriting time," writes Todd Gitlin, Occupy Wall Street has "put some new facts on the ground. This is no small thing, especially when initiatives come so substantially from the right. It’s a huge thing, in fact, in a twisted political system busy debating the shape of the earth."
"Rather than the constant state of hyper-vigilance that comes from the Tea Party’s psychology of exclusion, OWS inclusion carries with it a sadness that no repair is ever perfect, that even the most exceptional America possible will still and always fall short of our aspirational ideals," writes Todd Essig for Forbes.
There used to be a thing called a public intellectual, Lewis Beale reminds us, and Paul Goodman, a queer leftist polymath who died in 1972, "was practically its template." Miller-McCune reports on a new film by Jonathan Lee that aims to revive him.
David Milch and Stephen Bochco are working together again for the first time since NYPD Blue. Looks like NBC will have at least one pilot worth checking out next fall.