I spent a bunch of the weekend rewatching Wes Anderson movies, in part for a piece I was working on for The Atlantic, in part because watching The Royal Tenenbaums tends to make me want to watch Rushmore, and then to rewatch The Life Aquatic in the hopes that it will be slightly better than I remember. It’s been a while since I’ve watched any of those three movies in full, and one thing that stood out to me was the conversational pacing. The rise of both the Frat Pack and SNL alums like Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin in our comedy has, I think accustomed us to a lot of very fast-paced improvisational conversation, a world in which everyone is naturally more witty, possessed of a permanently faster riposte reaction than we are. But Anderson’s conversations are often awkwardly slow in a way that seems manners by comparison but are, I think, actually how many of us would sound in similar situations.

Take the scene from Rushmore when Max is telling Herman’s wife that her husband is having an affair. He’s wants to do more than blurt it out, so he’s set up this weird little hospitality spread on the roof of the building where they’re meeting, and she tries to play along, but can only hold it together for so long:

I think that attempt at normalcy, on both sides, makes an odd amount of sense, both in the context of the movie, and in our own world (in Anderson’s movies, you can’t take for granted that they overlap, mostly to charming effect).

The same awkwardness is often present around Margot in The Royal Tenenbaums because she’s so often lying, or affectless in a way that means the people around her don’t know how to deal with her:

When she’s saying she doesn’t smoke, she’s composing herself for the lie. When she’s stopping to consider how long she’s smoked in response to her mother’s question, she fact-checking herself. When her father takes her out for ice cream in an attempt to replicate moments they should have had decades ago, they’re feeling for conversational rhythms and reactions that ought to have been familiar but instead are cliches they’re trying to adopt.

The Life Aquatic is a vastly less good movie than either of the prior two, and it has, in much of its conversations, that fast, glib quality. But unlike the pauses, speeding up Anderson’s dialogue actually sounds vastly more mannered:

When the characters in prior movies are struggling to sound clever, it’s possible to have some kind of sympathy for what they come up with. When they just toss around complaints about a nemesis or make elaborate pronunciations of revenge, it’s kind of exhausting. These are not real humans with real concerns about how they’re portrayed and what weight their words have. They’re too-perfect creations, designed to elicit emotional reactions from us. It’s impossible to get close to them.

There’s a new Lady Gaga video! And I think there’s a lot for sci-fi fans, and people interested in how aware Gaga is of her own pretenses, to like.

I don’t have much to say about them other than that I love Melissa Leo. I love that her naked hunger for this award didn’t prevent her from getting it. I love that she wore a dress she thinks the real woman her character was based on would have liked. I loved her meltdown. I love her Jane-Austen-goes-profane explanation, upon uttering the first instance of “fuck” in Oscar broadcast history that “There is a great deal of the English language in my vernacular.” I also love that she’s been this remarkable for almost twenty years, and that she now gets everything she’s always deserved and she got there not by a huge break but by acting her way to it. It’s been a gift watching Homicide for the first time; I don’t know that I could have seen how astonishing it was, and she is, without the gift of time and the lens of The Wire:

I mean, there was no question I was going to see Thor, but I’m glad to see Kenneth Branagh’s sense of humor is coming through in this movie. Coffee is totally awesome, and I’m glad to know that it has transdimensional appeal:

Also, how did I not know that Kat Dennings was in this? The business of being a superhero is kind of inherently silly. Sometimes, the only way to deal with the revelation of power that messes up your conception of how the universe works is to laugh.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Real Housewives franchise lately, and it so it was fortunate that Andy Cohen and the good people at Bravo gave me yet another entry in the series on Tuesday night to obsess over. Both the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and the Real Housewives of Miami seem to signal a shift to me, a collapsing barrier between real celebrity and reality-television generated celebrity.

There have always been real famous people on the periphery of the Real Housewives universe. Usually, their appearances are a little manufactured. Someone else is at an event, someone’s interviewing celebrities as part of a job, someone dated someone famous once upon a time. But with Beverly Hills, the calculation changed. Kelsey Grammar may not be at the height of his career, but he is a bona fide Seriously Famous Person, and he went on this show, and behaved just as badly as anyone else, even if all of his bad behavior didn’t happen on-screen. Now, Sylvester Stallone’s wife is considering joining the cast. And Scottie Pippen may not be playing a huge role on Miami, but there he is in the first episode, gamely doing goofy-lookin’ yoga on screen while his wife talks about what a full-time job it is taking care of him and their kids.

This is the next step, people who are warmed in retirement by the glow of their fame on the edge of the screen. But I think, if Bravo keeps this up, that we’ll start getting those people as the stars. And eventually, we’ll see people going on these shows before they hit the downward curve of their fame. The boundaries between the kinds of celebrity will collapse.

Help me out here, commenters and co-guest-bloggers. I am a bit puzzled.

Via Ann Friedman’s Lady Journos! tumblr (which come to think of it is also how I found my way to Molly Lambert), I just read Sady Doyle’s Birth of the Uncool.

Sady argues that Tori Amos was mocked for the powerful feminine qualities of her music. I get the argument. I love the Helene Cixous shout-out: “The gender binary also tended to perpetuate itself in other divisions, such as ‘Head/Heart,’ ‘Intelligible/Palpable,’ and ‘Logos/Pathos.’ The music of Tori Amos asks its fans to stand on the wrong side, the female side, of all those dichotomies.” Makes perfect sense to me.

Here’s the thing, though — I don’t remember ever feeling uncool for liking Tori Amos. I played the hell out of Little Earthquakes at my all-male school, to no resistance. I can still get through most of “Leather” on the piano. I loved her take on “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (it was before everybody did that). I never saw her play live and I didn’t stick around for the rest of her career, but she was in heavy rotation when I was a young man.

“But it’s hard to underestimate the role that homophobia and gender policing have played in the assessment of her fans.” Really? I get why that might have happened. I just never noticed it. Tori took me from senior year of high school into college, and I never noticed any policing around here. And it’s not as if I didn’t pass under the gaze of music snobs. Trust me, I knew better than to admit how deep a groove I wore into my CD of “Pocketful of Kryptonite.”

Maybe it’s because my time with Tori was at the dawn of the Internet, before correct positions could be circulated with vicious speed. But I really didn’t sense that the invisible hand of masculine cosmopolitanism had consigned Tori to the yonic kitschyard. Did you?

x-posted at Joshua Malbin

I am falling bloghead over blogheels in love with Molly Lambert and her website (blog? magazine?) This Recording. She’s sly and epigrammatic and has a mix of irony and sympathy that feels contemporary but elevated. The stuff that is rough at Gawker and refined in The Awl gets even better as you go towards her.

Her tribute to Latina Rap has an assertion which is extremely contemporary:

There are no more “I listen to everything but rap and country” people left, because the mp3 economy and widely free access to all kinds of music has rendered that stance and all similar genre-excluding stances irrelevant.

This is true in the manner that “God is dead” (speaking of epigrams) is true. It’s an emerging subject position with an impressive cultural influence, but tell it to Osama Bin Laden. (That incorrigible rockist.)

Scratch an eclecticist, find an “I listen to everything but rap and country” person. My MP3 collection includes songs by each of the Highwaymen, and an eclectic-appropriate smattering of last year’s and 90′s hip-hop, but its bones are pretty easy to identify.

I enjoy leading pronouncements and the-future-is-here declarations. But I also want to know how everyone else is receiving the now now. (It’s one of the things I find Alyssa’s writing attuned to.)

x-posted at Joshua Malbin

The io9 editors are very upset about the delayed Bioshock film.  But why do we feel the need to make video games into movies?  Review the previous VG2Ms.  Then tell me that one of those was any good, other than Max Payne, which was beautifully shot but pretty tragically acted.  Also, Uwe Boll.

The connection between a gamer and hir player-character in a deep game is almost always more intimate than any connection between a viewer and an actor on a screen.  We feel so strongly and have such vivid memories about living in the PC’s world that we want to see it writ large on the big screen, but a movie, due to formal limitations, could never live up to those memories and breadth of experience.  Thus, dozens of attempted VG2Ms and an equal number of failures.

Until a Great director comes along who really Gets a certain video game and makes it into a Film, I think we’ll be stuck in the same pattern–fan excitement drives massive disappointment and adequate ticket sales to ensure more video-game movies.

Thanks for your patience, guys. I’ll be ramping back up to a full schedule this week.

For the first time in months, I tuned in to an episode of Glee last night. The episode was reasonably cute—I thought the actors who played the kids did a nice job of embodying teenage drunken silliness, and some of the numbers were good, though I’m a bit concerned with where the turn to original music is going to lead. But I think the episode illustrated Glee‘s largest problem:

The show doesn’t seem to have any idea what it thinks about anything. Does bisexuality exist? Or is it a fraud? Can drinking be reasonable fun in moderation? Or does it always lead to disaster? Can exes be friends? Or will they necessarily be sloppily involved? Is an involved dad a homophobe because he doesn’t want his son sleeping over with a boy he’s clearly interested in? Or is his son creepy for wanting sex tips from his father? Ambiguity’s often a good thing because it forces an audience to do moral work. But being perspectiveless is just irritating.

Alternate title: “Queue Can’t Always Get What You Want”

I waste enormous amounts of time flipping through blogs and Facebook, but I don’t actually watch that much YouTube. That’s because when I’m skimming text, I feel as though I’m controlling my use of my own time, but once I hit play on a video, it unfolds at an unchangeable rate. I can’t skim it, so I genuinely feel as though I’m wasting time. This is not a sound time management strategy, but it’s the nature of my particular beast. I’m sure there’s a psychological term for it. Maybe at Lifehacker?

Which is why I’m so thrilled about the new YouTube “Queue” feature. A video comes up on FB or in my RSS feed. I want to watch it, but I’ll feel like I’m procrastinating if I press play immediately. I happily save it for later. Even better, the feature is utterly non-functional, so I never actually have to watch anything, but feel much better about skipping it.

x-posted at Joshua Malbin

I’m tickled by the news that Baz Luhrmann is preparing to shoot The Great Gatsby in 3-D. It made a great video game, so why not?

I liked Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are, but I also wished at the time that it hadn’t been the definitive take — even that they’d have let a couple of other writers and directors use the costumes and sets to film their own takes on the material.

The industrial strength of a film adaptation has a way of establishing itself as the canonical vision of a printed work. It’s healthy for a print work, especially a classic, to be allowed more than one crack. Imagine how great it would be if, some years down the line a Watchmen adaptation came out that was as different from Zach Snyder’s take as Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight was from Danny Elfman’s?

Given the giddy pasticheworks of Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge, and given the prima facie senselessness of telling a muted work like Gatsby in 3-D, I can’t help but be optimistic about this. Maybe, perversely, it will even have a touch of Hemingway’s apocryphal rebuttal in it.

x-posted at Joshua Malbin.

…because Steve Stoute took out a full-page ad in the New York Times asking “Who is Arcade Fire????”

Who Is Arcade Fire Tumblr

Steve Stoute’s Ad Text at HuffPo

(Yes, I read the Sunday New York Times dead-tree edition. And yes, I read Sunday Styles. After the front page, before Week In Review.)

x-posted at Joshua Malbin.

The upturned edges of the eagle’s wings actually make the SSA logo look like a proper handlebar mustache. However handlebar aficionados in their classicism seem loath to grow the accompanying thick soul patch that would match the logo exactly.

Sixth in a series at Joshua Malbin.

I need Nene Leakes to have a seat.

Each of the ladies on Real Housewives of Atlanta has her own…um…peculiarities, but Nene seems to want to top everyone, at everything. The new cast members–attorney Phaedra and model Cynthia–have given the show a different dynamic. And, perhaps as she wanted, part of that dynamic has to do with their interactions with Nene. She had beef with nearly everyone at some point during the season, and even her genuine issues with her husband and son weren’t enough to make her a sympathetic character (it’s a reality show, but each of these women, like rappers, have created characters for themselves for the show). It’s like she needed to be on camera all the damn time.

Part one of the RHOA reunion special was no exception. This woman has become the most delusional woman on the show. And that’s saying something.

Andy Cohen, as always, is less host and more matchbook, starting fires between cast members whenever he can. The guy is good, and it’s easy to see just how much he loves the show himself. But Nene doesn’t need encouragement; from the start, she did her best to make herself the center of attention. And when she finally gets her chance to go in on Kim directly instead of taking shots at her randomly, Nene puts in work (with what’s actually a legitimate issue, the way Kim treats her assistant, a black woman named Sweetie):

Part two airs Sunday, and it looks like Nene goes at pregnant Kim again; this time, it gets even more juvenile. She’s making it harder to accept her as a serious person when she insists on picking fights with anyone whose voice reaches the same volume as hers.

Blue Valentine makes its bed in the grim end of the marriage. The joy of the relationship is long gone in the present-day scenes, which unfold in Aristotelian compactness in a very bad 24-hour period that include a badly fumbled attempt at sexual connection (in the wake of a dog’s death!) and a raving, violent blow-up. But the “happy” early days, spread over a long courtship, already crack under the weight of foreshadowed misery. Even at his most charming — for example, persuading Michelle Williams’ Cindy to dance to a Tin Pan Alley tune on the ukulele — Ryan Gosling’s Dean is obviously a bad bet.

Dean is slippery and defensive, using apparent vulnerability as a shield and a weapon to always maintain an advantage. Another Peter Pan figure, his playfulness captivates Cindy, but even at the start there’s an edge: he starts off with a classic neg, “In my experience the prettier a girl is, the more nuts she is. Which makes you insane.” She sees right through it, saying “I like how you can compliment and insult someone at the same time. In equal measure,” but he’s in.

His manipulations don’t let up. In a present-day scene, set over breakfast, Cindy tries to summon him back to his better self. “Why don’t you do something?” she asks, a little insensitively. He pounces. “What does that mean? Why don’t I do something?” As she imagines genuinely fulfilling pursuits for him, he rejects her initial assumptions:

Listen I didn’t wanna be somebody’s husband and I didn’t wanna be somebody’s dad. That wasn’t my goal in life. For some guys it is… Wasn’t mine. But somehow, I’ve found what I wanted. I didn’t know that and now it’s all I wanna do… I don’t want to do anything else, it’s what I want to do. I work so I can do that.

Cindy asks if he doesn’t feel he’s squandering his potential, and Dean twists “potential” into an accusation that every pursuit must be monetized. It’s Dean at his worst — he presents himself as a kind of open-minded “new man” while he’s really arguing in bad faith to avoid uncomfortable emotional connection.

This scene also brings out one of the least discussed aspects of the movie, which is both microscopically intimate and impressively social. However, the critics I’ve read have avoided the social parts of it. Dean’s stew of self-loathing has a base of uncertain masculinity. There’s something honorable in his rejection of masculine expectation, but without a model to replace it, he’s an asshole.

In a long interview in Salon after the publication of Indecision in 2005, Rebecca Traister and Benjamin Kunkel riffed on the very situation Dean finds himself in, investigating a “broader sense of male apathy” that “has to do with the difficulty of finding something that seems meaningful to do in the world.” Kunkel sees men foundering in the gains of feminism:

I suppose because the fact that nearly the whole universe of jobs is open to women is a tremendous gain in possibility for them. For men, there’s been no corresponding gain. In fact, we live in this world that for reasons that are kind of hard to explain, [though] I think Hannah Arendt has gone some distance in explaining them, it seems that meaningful action is harder to take than it has been in previous historical times. I think this is the sense even of people who have no historical sense. It’s something that they feel.

and Traister wonders about

a crisis of masculinity in our generation, a generation in which opportunities were truly available to at least middle-class women. We weren’t just told we could do anything; we were expected to do everything. But we were always told how difficult that would be, that we would confront challenges and pay high prices for our satisfactions. I don’t know that men of our generation were sent the same message. So when things get tough, women don’t enjoy it any more than men, but they are not surprised. Whereas men — at least some of the ones I’ve known — have been paralyzed by life’s hardships.

Kunkel:

To really aggrandize these generalizations we’ve been making, you could claim that a great historical crossover has occurred, that a sense of tragic, dignified realism has become the [mark] of femininity while men have become head-in-the-clouds dreamers who want things to be ideal if they’re to be at all.

This is precisely what’s going on here. Critics have raised eyebrows at Dean’s ukulele playing, a fashionably hipster choice pasted on a character who’s supposed to be genuinely working-class. Blue Valentine explains it reasonably well — Dean’s father was a janitor who loved music. It’s not hard to imagine this father as a paragon of an earlier, stoic manliness, a union member with health benefits who could support a family in a blue-collar, menial job and add music to his head-of-household duties to fashion a self. But Dean can’t.

Cindy knows it. In the movie’s climax. Dean confronts her at her workplace, and she lays right into his manliness in the harshest terms possible. “Fuck you, fuck you! I’m more man than you are, you fucking cunt.” Dean responds by admitting how lost he is — “What is it with this shit and being a man? What is that? What does it even mean?!” and whipsawing into a vulgar, brutish masculinity, wrecking the office and punching Cindy’s boss.

Blue Valentine shows a couple lost in the swirl of unstable gender roles. Dean struggles to tailor manliness to his own needs with a patchwork of semi-responsible stay-at-home fatherhood, intermittent employment, vague artistic gesturing, and violent aggression. It’s a bad fit.

Cross-posted with longer, cool-looking screenplay excerpts at Joshua Malbin

This may be my current favorite song:

I tend to think that in fiction and art, father-son narratives are broadly about combat, and father-daughter relationships are about unexpected tenderness. Maybe it’s both easier to see yourself in the parent of your own gender and harder to accept the similarities that exist between you, while there’s some strangeness and wonder in finding yourself in a parent or child that is inherently physically different from you. It’s why I love those crooked narratives about women and their fathers that combine violence and great love, whether it’s Hit-Girl outliving Big Daddy or Brad Wolgast, gone and monstrous though he might be, returning for Amy in The Passage. This is one of the few mother-son examples that has that tenderness and fierceness.

Former NWA member and “Are We There Yet?” star Ice Cube is set to appear in a film remake of 21 Jump Street with Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. The idea of a rapper from a late eighties doing an adaptation of a show from the late eighties seems a little stale, but Cube had been doing movies for almost as long as he’s been a rapper, and he’s something of a box office draw. It’s been interesting to watch Cube go from jheri-curled militant to Hollywood hustler–he’s done some silly family films, but he’s also kept an eye on culture, producing race-centered reality show “Black. White.” and still putting out albums (for better or worse).

Well, someone’s finally gone and made a movie out of Atlas Shrugged–or at least half a movie.  At last, we are at a point in American culture where a critical mass of people can ignore the fact that 1) Ayn Rand probably would loathe them and 2) she died on welfare, evidently a parasite of the sort that she so loathed.  This despite the fact that her Number One Fanboi basically admitted that his and her ideas about market regulation were wrong.  Ideas die hard.

But that’s enough of me renouncing the fact that I’ve read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead twice, in my younger days, and editorializing about reality.  What can we tell from this trailer?  For one, the John Galt line is going to be a CGI high-speed passenger train, presumably since a new freight line in modern days (the apparent setting) wouldn’t go anywhere.  For another, the movie is sumptuously shot.  They are doing a lot right with the tailoring and colors in the menswear, and these lavish party scenes are gorgeous.  But while I can’t recall specific lines from the book, based on how flat and unrealistic the dialog in the trailer is, the screenwriters used a lot of Rand’s own lines.

But do you know what I’m getting tired of?  Casting overweight people as characters with moral failings.  It’s a cheap shortcut, and these filmmakers are using it in spades.  Dagny and Hank and Midas and the heroes are all gaunt and angular.  Skinny people, along with miracle inventions that solve intractable engineering problems, make the world go round.

In closing: I hope Johnny Depp plays Ragnar Danneskjold.  And I hope he does it in his Jack Sparrow costume.

It may be too much to ask of n+1 that it maintain consistent positions with regard to hipsterdom, but it would be nice to see its investigations at least reference one another. Christopher Glazek’s Hasids versus Hipsters is an entertaining account of a struggle over urban space between “hipster” bicyclists and the Satmar Hasidim of South Williamsburg. The hipsters come off as politically engaged but not fluent; even at its most confrontational, such as when they guerilla-re-paint a bike lane that the city has removed, their activism has a twee, ingratiating quality. That may be enough to earn it the dreaded h-epithet, but it’s also a high-stakes, committed bid for control over public resources.

However, in Mark Greif’s sweeping, scourging survey/eulogy, What Was The Hipster?, hipsterism is resolutely anti-political. “[H]ipsters have mixed with particular elements of anarchist, free, vegan, environmentalist, punk, and even anti-capitalist communities,” bike messengers among them, but the hipster “aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.”

Greif’s essay could be simply discounted as an exercise in No True Scotsman-ing. No True Hipster practices politics; Glazek’s bicycle hipsters practice politics. Therefore, they are not real hipsters. Maybe they are the “particular elements” that help open the “poisonous conduit.” I happen to think Greif’s sour take is an excellent starting point, but it would benefit from a less pre-constrained investigation of how politics plays out among hipsters as examined. (Start by adding Shepard Fairey to Greif’s hipster canon of Dave Eggers and Wes Anderson.) In the meantime, Dorothy at Cat and Girl still has the stronger take.

Cross-posted at Joshua Malbin

I think it’s very smart for Charlaine Harris to wrap up her Sookie Stackhouse books, and to know she needs to wrap them up. I’ve written often, and at some length, about how I think TV series in particular need to know what the conclusion of their story arcs are, and that more shows would benefit from announcing a set number of seasons or episodes and sticking to them. Of course, that’s true with books as well, and especially show for multi-platform blockbusters, where there are huge incentives, entirely independent of artistic integrity, for keeping stories going as long as possible.

For Harris, I imagine all of this is particularly true. She said to Hero Complex in the story I linked to above that Alan Ball’s show sometimes actualizes things she only hints at in a way that makes her slightly uncomfortable as a viewer. And I think the show hasn’t quite captured what makes Sookie appealing, rather than a hot piece of redneck ass, particularly her emphasis on self-education and economic self-determination. But because HBO owns all the development rights to Sookie-related material, Harris doesn’t have a lot of leverage to hope someone will get it better, or HBO will be forced to do it better. I can see why it might be time for her to move on.