Green Zone

I watched Matt Damon’s newest movie the other day and was expectedly disappointed. The movie attempts to fulfill two roles. 1. Be an action/thriller entertainment piece 2. Condemn the military industrial complex and the bush administration. These goals seem to fight against each other instead of providing a powerful mass media message. The argument is undermined by the fictional aspects of the movie and the incredibly heavy headed dialogue. Not the least of which was the continuous use of WMD as a plural which absolutely no one uses and smacks of pretentiousness. The movie also tries to use a wall street journalist to fill two roles. One is to have her be responsible for spreading the idea that there were WMDs in Iraq to the general populace (negative) while also casting her as the hard hitting investigative type who is trying to figure out why there aren’t any WMDs (positive). It also fails in the action regard as it is completely undermined by the whiney high and mightiness / vigilante anti military actions of Matt Damon. His motivations also seem murky as he ends up being personally responsible for the death of many american soldiers and doesn’t care at all because he is trying to save the life of an iraqi general who can blow the lid on the fake WMD situation.

The message is pushed way too hard and in such a manner that is counter productive. There are some good action sequences but you have to sit through a lot of “Matt Damon is the only righteous person in the military” and the CIA is better than the Army and “no I won’t reveal my source. ok I will but only for you” to get to it.

F for failure.

Serge Gainsbourg

Considering that about a thousand of my visitors have come from http://playlist.com I am both hesitant to post more music and simultaneously feel obligated to appeal to the majority of my audience. The obvious, albeit unpleasant solution is to no longer post mp3s so forgive me if you prefer that.

I had never listened to Serge Gainsbourg before this week. Despite being a pretentious aesthete I initially found Mr. Gainsbourg’s music unappealing. However, the more I listened the more I discovered that by the very virtue of quantity over quality he accidentally made a few good songs here and there. I would like to share with you the songs that I find to be least bad.

Je suis venu te dire que Je m’en vais

Couleur Cafe

Initials B.B.

High Noon

I had the opportunity to see the classic (read: black and white) movie High Noon yesterday evening and I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it. The film stars Gary Cooper as the small town marshall and Grace Kelly as his new wife. The movie opens to two men lounging by their horses on a rocky outcropping in a field, waiting for their third companion to arrive. There are no words spoken at this point only a great score by Dimitri Tiomkin. Once their third companion arrives the three men ride into town and over to the train station. As they ride through we see them from the perspective of the townspeople in their homes and business. The townspeople start whispering and getting scared as they clearly know our antagonists and don’t want to be noticed. The swagger and simplicity of such a scene is demonstrative of something lost in today’s film. There is no back story to these characters, after 30 minutes we learn their names but their characters are so well defined simply by their actions and the response of the townspeople that it is the epitome of the english teacher’s motto “Show don’t tell.”

Grace Kelly plays a quaker who marries the town sheriff on the day he is to turn in his badge as the new sheriff arrives the next day. Unfortunately her character doesn’t do much other than look pretty and provide and argument for why the sheriff should leave and not face the return of a man he condemned to death. A far more interesting role was that of a former love-affair and powerful single woman Helen Ramirez played by Katy Jurado. I will leave you to find out the rest of the plot yourself in the hope that you will actually watch it. The movie touches on the ideals of honor, ethics, manliness, humanism, politics, and law. What I enjoyed most was the simplicity of the entire movie. While I am sure that the time is distorted in it, the movie takes place over the course of about an hour and a half and is itself only an hour and a half. There are no flashbacks or cuts to other scenes. It is a story that can be completely understood and convey its message without any tricks or special effects. I would love to see a movie today that can have the same impact with the same simplicity.

I only found out after the fact that the movie is a metaphor for McCarthyism and the fight that each individual must make against it. This is primarily due to the director being blacklisted and appearing before HUAC. John Wayne apparently was super into blacklisting people and ruining their lives so he really hated the movie and ironically accepted the Academy Award in Gary Cooper’s honor as he was away at the time.

A+

The Big Short

Michael Lewis’ newest book covers the causes of the current economic crisis from the perspectives of the few people who saw it coming, and just so happened to make quite a bit of money doing it. Like any Michael Lewis book it tries to accomplish two things-To tell an interesting story, and To educate the reader as to why the story is so cool. In The Blind Side this resulted in following Michael Oher while at the same time explaining the evolution of football in the past thirty years. In Liars Poker it was to explain the stock market while following the interesting characters that were a part of Wall Street. In The New New Thing it was to explain the tech bubble and silicon valley while demonstrating how important Jim Clark is/was. However, in The Big Short this technical aspect seems to be a bit more ambitious as it tries to explain the shorting of Synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligations on underlying assets consisting of Mezzanine Tranche Mortgage Backed Securities. The story is undoubtedly as interesting as I was lead to believe in a spectacular vanity fair article but there are chapters that are very hard to wade through without getting a headache. All in all, reading this book will make you feel smarter and stir a sense of how easily you could have avoided losing a vast amount of money. It’s okay but not great.

LOST Spoilers

SPOILERS SPOILERS

I had to watch an entire e! online video for these but I think it was probably worth it.

Man in Black’s name was Samuel in the script.

Man in Black was the one who said “Help me” and who’s eye was in the cabin.

Jin was “Kwon” from the candidate list. Sun was x-ed off for being a mother, just like Kate.

The number 108 in lighthouse was no one, it didn’t matter.

Man in Black and Jacob can effect the weather.

This E! Lady had one particularly interesting thought with regards to the numbers. Her idea was that perhaps the numbers in the real world were indicative of what would happen were the man in black to escape the island. i.e. death destruction sadness etc. However, this is maybe discredited by the who light in the island light in all of us idea. Unless the light is indicative of just our goodness. Perhaps man in black can put out people’s inner light (ala claire or sayid) and that’s what would happen to people.

hmmmmm

Lost – some thoughts on season 6

I was let down by the sixth season of LOST. This is in large part due to the knowledge that the show would end with this season. The number of ongoing questions and unresolved plot holes was an asset to LOST as it provided motivation to continue watching. People hoped that whatever they cared about most would be answered in this season. To me, this season was supposed to wrap up everything presented in the past five seasons. I had this expectation because I knew it was the last season.

The season did accomplish this to some extent and provided a few spectacular episodes (specifically Ab Aeterno and Across the Sea) however, as a whole I felt let down by it. As the season progressed I was fed up with the alternative time line. The writer’s condemned calling it an alternative time line as they saw it to be of equal importance, however, with the season concluded I think it is perfectly fair to address it as such. The reason I never cared about the alt time was that there was no point. I had no interest in watching what life could have been like. Any show can do that. I wouldn’t watch a Friends spin off in which none of the characters knew each other but still were neighbors. The alt timeline provided one thing as far as I can see and that is to be able to resolve a long (1 season) running issue at the end of the show. To be able to present something we didn’t see coming and had almost no hints to at the very end is keeping with LOST’s paradigm and provides some closure. However, this closure did not leave me saying, “Ah, what a nice resolution, I never thought of it that way!” Instead is played off an argument long running throughout the show, which is the question as to whether or not everyone was dead. Even that is too much credit though; they simply concluded a plot device that I didn’t like in the first place. I feel some satisfaction as they have allowed me to be justified in not liking the alt time line yet at the same time I am let down because I wanted it to be so important.

If the alt time line had taken up two episodes or maybe even three, it would have been justified to me. Instead they focused less effort on a more central issue, the light. The “heart of the island” a plot device seemingly the most central to the entire show was given three episodes instead of season.

That being said there are some things that I thought were done spectacularly. The conflict between Man in Black and Jacob was spectacular. I was pleasantly reminded by some research on Lostpedia that MIB appeared in the very first episode of the show as the smoke monster. His story arc is indicative of what I wanted from this entire season. Jacob is first mentioned in season 2 and becomes a central character and thus seeing his back story is something that we have had to wait for longer than almost any other character. Richard Alpert first appears in season three and also plays a key role in the show. These three characters are the longest lasting characters on the island and as such provide not only character based conflict and interest but also are the instigators of the vast majority of the mythology regarding the island. Thus I was so happy and ready to enjoy flashback episodes regarding each of them. They were well told, emotional, and provided answers to long running questions-thus establishing a basis with which to book end all the story lines we previously encountered.
We learned about the candidacy of each of our main protagonists, the light on the island, the lighthouse. We got wonderful character development or at least pleasant inclusion for Desmond, Widmore, Ben, Jack, Hurley, and probably some other people I am forgetting. Sadly, for me, this was not enough to temper the alternate time line which to me provided only an opportunity for Sawyer and Juliette to get back together and for Desmond to run around being cool.

Despite this, I am prompted to give thought towards our alternate time line. It is purgatory. An amusing inclusion or self referencing fan indulgence keeping with the “we are all dead” train of thought, as many people speculated that this is what the island was all along. It is a place for everyone who dies (or maybe only island related people) to exist until they are ready to “leave,” presumably to heaven, as we definitely didn’t see mister man in black there. A key factor in my interpretation as such is the encounter between Desmond and Eloise at the concert. Eloise tells Desmond that she told him to stop all this and Desmond says he knows but was doing it anyway. To this Eloise asks “are you going to take my son” and Desmond replies “not with me” or something to that extent. So while Eloise’s son (Daniel Widmore/Faraday) has been dead longer than Eloise or almost any other character on the show, he is not yet ready to pass on to the after life presumably because he hasn’t yet realized his necessary connection to Charlotte or something. This conclusion does not really resolve the issue of why Eloise seems to be aware that this land is purgatory but yet she does not pass on. My own resolution is that maybe this purgatory and the island purgatory (Where Michael is/the voices) are magically/religiously connected and she is someone who can’t pass on for some reason, like murdering her son.

While I enjoy the self referencing one liners –Ben: “I have answers” Locke: “What is the black smoke” or Richard: “I’ve known something for a long time, we’re all dead, this place is death” or Flocke: “Don’t you seem like the obvious choice” to Jack; this entire story arc felt like a self referencing creation that the writer’s decided to make up after realizing what a good idea the fans had to have the entire show be in purgatory.

I can forgive all the things that the show didn’t address, as surely there are far too many of them. I can kind of forgive their creations just for this season (the temple) as they mostly served a purpose (such as explaining the light and dark in all of us/how smokey possesses people etc.) I find it harder to forgive them for using such precious little time to create a plot device that allows them to just do whatever they want because it’s all fake.

While I hate on the season as a whole a bit, I did enjoy this final episode and have put more time into this show than most endeavors in my life. I am happy to have been a part of such a significant pop-culture event and have enjoyed every minute of discussing, thinking about, and watching this show.

Party Down (Season 2)

You may recall Party Down from the blog post I wrote way back in 2009. I was infatuated with the show’s dry and situational humor. It was an office for people too cool to watch the office. This year, where the office has all but given up trying for quality, Party Down has only gotten better.

The most immediate difference between seasons is that Jane Lynch has abandoned the show to pursue Glee and Megan Mullally (Will & Grace) has taken her place. Casey is back after her jaunt on a cruise ship, not to mention True Blood, and the show quickly glosses over the careers transitions of our beloved characters. After leaving to start a Super Crackers sp* Ron Donald is back but as a lowly employee and not Mr. Manager or whatever he called himself and turns to drugs as retribution. The protagonist, Henry, has given up his dream of acting and taken Ron’s place as team leader. The rest of the characters are the same as ever.

The career changes allow an interesting character dynamic while not changing the format that each episode invariably follows. There is awkwardness and inappropriate behavior and wildly ridiculous characters. I would describe it more but I think it speaks for itself. Please give this show a shot if you haven’t seen it yet. Conveniently, you can watch it legally for free here.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

The film by and about Banksy promised instant insider legitimacy in the continuously burgeoning street art movement but provided an introspective message criticizing the very people that are going to watch it. The premise is that a very idiosyncratic man who films his entire life becomes ingratiated and eventually obsessed with the street art movement via his relative who pioneered the space invaders tag. As time went on this character devoted more of his life to the pursuit of fitting into this cool crowd with which he actually shared little in common. Taping all the while, this character uses the excuse of filming for a documentary about street art and as such is trusted more and more with what was percieved as worthy if not neccesary documentation of the artists’ lofty intentions.

Upon seeing this “documentary” Banksy realizes it is terrible and urges the vigilant videographer to create some art of his own while Banksy uses his tapes to make a better movie. The main protagonist then goes on to mass produce street art and put on the largest show ever conceived in order to recoup all the money he squandered on the endeavor. Banksy realizes that this man is a far more interesting character than himself and makes the documentary about him.

Many people question the existence of this ludicrous character and posit that he is a tool for Banksy to get his message across. That message as far as I can tell is to use Mr. Brainwash, the pseudonym for our lead, as a mirror to our own perceptions and commercialization of street art. We all want to be a part of this meaningful movement even though we know nothing about what it means. It is accesible art that personifies the hipster ideal of duplicitous non-conformity making it accesible to the masses and confusing enough not to be questioned.

The lasting question that I took away from the movie is what are the motivations for street artists. Are they trying to brainwash the masses or warn of the governments attempts to do so? Is it simply a form of self expression or a political stand? Banksy seems to use his art to show us the aspects of our lives that we turn a blind eye to, and as such his film fits seamlessly into his collection.

Candide Kamera

4 days until a nice vacation of skiing!

Entertaining music

I tend to make a distinction between “good” and “entertaining” when it comes to movies. Unfortunately I make this same distinction with music. I say unfortunately, because it is mostly a crutch for me to justify media that I am ashamed to like. Here is a glimpse of music that I consider to be highly (lolz) entertaining. So turn your speakers to 11 and your bass to 12 and take a gander at the wonderful world of techlectropop. You may notice that one of these is not like the others and if you don’t like it well then you can just deal.

Robin S – Show Me Love (Redlight remix)

Dance Area – AA 24/7 (Diplo remix)

Major Lazer – Keep it Going Louder feat. Nina Sky (Diplo remix)

Dizzee Rascal – Dance Wiv Me feat. Calvin Harris

Miley Cyrus/Notorious B.I.G. – Party in the USA