Girl: Speaking of meeting directors, have you heard of Alfonso Cuaron?
Me: !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Girl: Yeah. I met his son once.
Me: Oh.
Cinematical: Do you feel differently about Mark as a character now, as a husband and father, than you would have a few years ago? When you were 25, could you have made this movie?
Jason Reitman: No, I definitely have a different perspective now. And I think there’s something to be said about that, about when people should make certain films and the life experience you need to tell certain stories. I empathize with Mark, but I also empathize with Vanessa – the idea that you’re not a whole person until you have a child. And I empathize with Juno, the fears she had about bringing a child into our world. Simply the idea of going through a pregnancy. It would have been nowhere as honest, nowhere as emotional, back then.
“Peetz-ariah.”
ALSO: I’d bet she’s some kind of superstar compared to the other four available channels’ hosts. And that she likes being tied up and loves eskimo pie.
This is Sarah Palin, born fifty years earlier.
Also, I think Bettie Page has ruined a whole genre of black-and-white-videos-with-ladies-in-them for us. When she says “nippy cheese” I feel all sorts of crazy.
I’ve never pasted a celeb’s photo in my locker or on a vanity mirror or the inside of a binder even, but these two look so good that I just wish I’d the cajones to post it (this photo) on my bedroom wall.
I really admire people who carry their looks and their selves with like honesty. (And not precisely honesty, more like —acceptance— or —humility—.) It’s really easy for anyone (of any age or career bent) to like pretend or transform themselves into something that’s not technically or personality-wise accurate.
These two directors aren’t just real brilliant at what they do — they’ve done it within the dreaded Hollywood Machine and have been successful, viz. last year’s best pics.
The fact that they can sit there (probably waiting to receive some prizes & cashes) and be happy and confident and seem real is the kind of thing I get all warmed up about and fuzzy on the inside. Yes, they’re obviously millionaires and wildly successful, but that’s not what I see when I look here.
A bunch of directors that I love (Hitchcock, Truffaut, Wes Anderson) look kind of dingbatty and get-thee-to-a-Salvation-Army in any photo they’re in. Here, obviously not posing but just chilling out at a press conference (?) or somethin, these two give me the feeling that they fit their own skin.
Like they know they’re flawed and they know they’re successful but neither factor changes their gait or mien or demeanour. You and I both know this is A LOT to read into just some lame press event pic, but it sets off this little rumba inside me that takes glee from such direct existing, like these two do.
(The reality, of course, is probably way more twisted and less inspiring, but that’s just how I see it. Today.)
Amen. I’d like to add that Kathryn Bigelow is fucking gorgeous in this picture; I could just be imagining it but it looks like she has elfish ears sticking out of the cascades of sunny hair, and I love the contrast of how she’s holding her arms with the wide open expression on her face.
Another fun example of a director re: the above is Jason Reitman, who looks a little bit like an overgrown teenager and maybe for this reason seems to have a devilish streak to him: I imagine clueless reporters fawning over him and him giving somewhat facetious answers with a totally straight face - he’s like an imp in the Hollywood system, messin’ with ya.
The Sunset Tree by the Mountain Goats is an album that demands and holds your attention. I’ve listened to it twice so far and both times I tried to multitask, as I always do, Google Reader and various blogs open simultaneously. But my eyes kept unfocusing, I kept losing my train of thought, I was compelled to only listen. This doesn’t happen often.
In some ways, The Sunset Tree is the ultimate refutation, if there ever needed to be one, that pop music can’t work on the level as some of the great works in the classical music literature. Of course the two shouldn’t be compared, they work differently, but as someone weaned on the Beethoven quartets and Bach partitas I’ve always wondered: is it possible for a pop album to hold together as well as a cohesive symphony, like Beethoven’s 9th? Is it possible for a pop album to become more than a collection of great songs, no matter how great the songs are?
A favourite pop album of mine is Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which I love endlessly. Yet it doesn’t quite make its way past being a collection. There are threads that run through it, yes, there are some tenuous connections from beginning to end, but it’s no op. 131, certainly.
The Sunset Tree may not have as many great songs as Blue, but there is something compelling that runs through them. They breathe together. No song feels “added” to the mix. They are all highly narrative. When you get to “Pale Green Things” at the end, you feel like you have come a long way … and also that you can put on “You or Your Memory” again and start all over.
This isn’t a review, because I don’t know the album nearly well enough yet. I need to study the lyrics and listen several dozen more times. Not that pop music needs to be like classical music, but here is another way The Sunset Tree acts like great classical music - it resists meaning, it yields its secrets slowly, it requires a relationship with you rather than a one-listen stand.
Ah, hard-edged sass - my favourite kind.
Monday should be a curse. Go monday yourself. This monday computer froze again. Or simply, monday everything. That doesn’t sound original, so someone has probably said the exact same thing somewhere.
I’m working on a story for a new anthology. It might be based on tumblr exhibitionists (hotgaynerds, Q&S). After hgn left tumblr, I wrote a random list of overdramatic reasons why they might have done that. I found their exhibitionism interesting. It’s a great addiction for some, to let thousands of people validate you on a daily basis. There had to have been a reason they left so abruptly. Let’s use the magic of fiction to imagine. No, I probably won’t submit this, it’s dumb. I have that line from Two Days in Paris stuck in my head where Julie Delpy’s character says she hates her boyfriend taking pictures of her all the time because taking pictures takes you out of the moment and turns you into an observer. I wonder what that’d feel like for your entire relationship, including cumshots.
Just so you know, “Monday” is already (purportedly) used as a curse word in some populations in southern America, as a slight against blacks. This is apparently because “nobody likes Mondays.” So I am told.
I found this while searching for chicken recipes. Milos Forman once said that directing animals was the hardest thing he ever had to do. If so, then whoever shot this should get a fucking Oscar.
There is so much to praise, not least the way the chickens walk away at the end in sync, somewhat warily, as if to say, “Allllright, but don’t you rabbits be startin’ something else now, ya heah?”
Somehow this is even funnier in German. Iss den Pudding!
(via wolfsham)
Now the next step is to write your name in big letters in the top right corner and then underline it.
(via isawitonthetelevision)
Thanks for sharing this. Do you remember a while back when I thought I might be addicted to the internet? I found this quiz online, and was almost disappointed to discover that I fell into (but just barely) the normal range. I don’t know now what I’m supposed to think after reading this article - maybe that everything we experience in the West, no matter how tragic we think it is, is somehow always worse in some other places in the world.
For some reason I feel that way about children dying too, even though it’s obviously as bad as bad can be, no matter where and to whom it happens. But for some reason the idea of Asian parents who have lost their one child fills me with a kind of dull horror that is far more despairing than when I hear similar news from other countries. There is this mentality in China, this kind of everything-on-the-line mentality that drives much of how the people and the government work, from the insane need to control something as uncontrollable as the internet to the university admission tests that basically determine your life, and your parents’ lives. In the west, our prevailing media example is of people who are resilient, who recover after loss, who divorce and remarry, who find meaning and beauty in small things, who are mostly OK with the lives they’ve built. In China they are scared and proud, and scared some more.
I feel for my peeps, I really do, but they’ve got so much drama going on!!
In Vicky Christina Barcelona, when Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz have their explosive fights in Spanish. I was turned on in a strange and wonderful way.
A friend at the art school lent me this movie to watch. She said I had to watch it. “It will change your life. It changed mine.” I’ve heard of it and have resisted watching it for a while. I’m halfway right now, not really paying much attention anymore. I don’t really want to say anything because I have all these friends who love this movie and swear by it. The wikipedia article says it’s Passion of the Christ for hippies.
This religion in a science pill kind of scares me. It’s weird how it’s threaded quantum physics, superposition, objective collapse theory with ontology in a way that shouldn’t really connect because we’re on a different scale from quantum-sized particles. The deaf lady in the mom jeans is cool though.
Is this What the Bleep Do We Know? Or (shudder) a sequel?
One of my favourite teachers in university spent half a class raving about this movie, when it came to a small privately owned theatre in London Ontario. She said much of the same of what you’ve heard, and so a little troupe of us traipsed down and bought our tickets. To this day, it is still the only movie I have ever walked out on.
The term “otherworldly beauty” should only ever be used in reference to this woman.
