Hot Trailer: Cosmopolis

I have but one thing to say: David Cronenberg directing a novel by Don Delillo. I know, right? I haven't actually read Cosmopolis, but unlike most of his work, it sounds like there's nary a baseball to be seen:

It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end. The booming times of market optimism -- when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments -- are poised to crash. Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. Today he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral, and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors -- experts on security, technology, currency, finance, and a few sexual partners -- as the limo sputters toward an increasingly uncertain future. (via Goodreads)

So not even a little topical, then.

I've often thought that Delillo's as un-filmable as David Foster Wallace, but I'm not against people trying. And if anyone can put a fresh (and weird) spin on the (already weird)novel, it's Cronenberg. Then again, it's got R-Patz in it, who's mostly proved to be box office poison outside of a pair of YA series. But it's also got Samantha Morton, Juliette Binoche and Paul Giamatti?

Enjoy the trailer, at any rate!

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Hot Trailer: Hemingway and Gelhorn

If you can get past the existential oddness of Clive Owen as Big Papa, (and I'm pretty sure I can, though Clive Owen looks more like the manifestation of Captain Haddock than Hemingway), this movie has a 72% chance of my loving it.

Martha Gelhorn was always one of my favorite women of the Lost Generation (essentially consigned to history as one of Hemingway's long-suffering wives, she's a spectacular writer in her own right).

The trailer doesn't tell us to much about the film, but you can definitely color me intrigued. There's a suggestion that the tale is told from Gelhorn's perspective, which would make it far more interesting than if it were told from Ernest's voice.

Will this be a return to form for Nicole Kidman? One can only hope.

 

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The Good Wife In Review: "Gloves Come Off", or, Diane Lockhart Wins At Everything

This episode featured the most important thing to happen in this year of The Good Wife: the restoration of my beloved Alicia/Kalinda. But not without a red herring, of course. Kalinda poured her heart into that bottle of beer, and Alicia smashed it onto the floor, along with my heart and soul.

Alicia's searching for a home, but at last, she finds Kalinda instead. (Which may or may not have resulted in my jumping feverishly upon the couch like a small child).

THE BALLAD OF ALICIA AND DIANE

I can but hope this puts an end to a storyline I'd describe loosely as "Alicia's head is spinning out of control", and she's allowed to return to some level of confidence.

It's become apparent that many of the headwinds in Alicia's life have been caused by a lack of choice; she couldn't choose the direction of her marriage, she couldn't choose her friendships in a way that suited her, she couldn't choose to continue a torrid affair that brought her some amount of pleasure.

Having financial freedom will, at a base level, allow her some level of choice. The freedom to choose where you live is freedom indeed. And that freedom, that restoration of a certain amount of control, allows Alicia to make another choice (the best choice): letting Kalinda back into her life.

Contrast with Diane, who's nothing but the amalgamation of choices well-made. Importantly, they're not the right choices for some false ideal of womanhood, but the right choices for her. When she pulls out her little black iPhone for a booty call, we cheer, for she deserves real lovin' from real men.

Even so, it's becoming so tense, watching these two very different women stand in the same room as each other, recognizing each other as both equals and opposites. When Diane tells Alicia off, you have to know that on some level she's proud of Alicia, that Alicia's finally gotten tough and taken control of her life.

And because Diane's not a hater, she recognizes Alicia as her equal, and gives her the damned raise. Well done, Alicia. Harvard Business Review would be proud (and so, I assume, is Canning).

OTHER THINGS

-As always, brief interactions between Cary and Alicia set the heart aflutter. A weirder, truer friendship has never been seen on television.

-Oh, Canning, and his fictional chauffeurs.

-I for one hope that Diane doesn't make a choice between Kurt and Jack. She deserves all the ruggedly hot men she can get her hands on.

-Tammy...still sucks. Though she seems to be the catalyst that brought Alicia back to Kalinda, so I can't hate her too much. Add to the fact that she uttered the following sentence aloud: "Will never not responds." So much grammatical hate. Also she says "It wasn't over between Will and I." So much more hate. Alicia, throw a book at that woman. Preferably a guide to grammatical English.

-Whoever staged the direction of this scene is my absolute hero:

The Last Supper symbolism isn't lost on me. Does this mean that David Lee is Mary Magdalene?

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Pretty Abandoned Things: Buzludzha in Bulgaria

An intrepid photographer named Timothy Allen recently ventured into the abandoned remains of Buzludzha in Bulgaria, an enormous building designed to be a glorious monument to the success of communism. Like Communism, this too did pass. You should read his full account of his discovery here (and all images are credited to him, and there are MANY many more).

In better days, Buzludzha resembled something created by aliens rather than man:

And now, this is all that remains, the perfect evil lair for a Bond film:

Even indoors, the whole experience seems more evocative of the intergalactic than the earthly communistic:

Time did its work, however, changing this:

Into this:

(I do love it, it's all my time travel fantasies come true, the sort that feature in all my favorite classic Doctor Who episodes. But I digress).

Buzludzha remains abandoned due to ideological issues. The Bulgarian Socialist Party have taken control of the building, but haven't found a use for it (there's little point in pretending that a sidelined party has the right (or the money) to make such an extravagant statement as restoring the building).

And so it stands, derelict, a concrete reminder of a very peculiar point in human history, when a sort of madness overtook central Europe for the better part of a century. What will future generations think of such a useless monument, built to an enormous scale despite a total lack of proximity to human beings?

Go forth to Timothy Allen's original post, and make sure and read through the comments thread.

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Hot Trailer: On the Road

Well, folks, they've made On the Road into a movie, and it looks pretty fabulous (what an insane cast! All the young 'uns and Viggo Mortenson too! And Amy Adams, and Kirsten Dunst, apart from the pretty folks in the picture above).

The whole thing could turn out to be a disaster, but I'm hopeful since it's got the same creative team as The Motorcycle Diaries, director Walter Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera.

Check it out for yourself (treat yo' self!):

On the road - Official trailer - (HD 1080p) by MK2diffusion

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A Few Thoughts On the Kony Viral Whatever, or, Changing Your Facebook Status Catches Dictators!

They say a picture (such as the one above) is worth a thousand words. And yet, few things are as well said as 140 characters of Teju Cole. "The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm."

And hipster white dudes! We must all celebrate the entrenchment of heinous stereotypes because, hey, we didn't know there were child soldiers in Africa. And not just any country in Africa, by the way, but obviously the conditions are exactly the same throughout the whole dark continent.

Creating a false narrative (and therefore a false consciousness) will create lasting barriers to effective action from other individuals and organizations.

And by the way, guys, as Visible Children points out, Invisible Children's finances are public:

Last year, the organization spent $8,676,614. Only 32% went to direct services (page 6), with much of the rest going to staff salaries, travel and transport, and film production.

Even Foreign Affairs takes umbrage with IC's myopia, stating that it:

“manipulates facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil.”

In other words, it's racist.

I leave you with Cole's rather provocative (and infinitely less sarcastic) 7 thoughts on the banality of sentimentality.

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Hope, Unease and Disappointment in Forgotten Brooklyn: She's Gotta Have It

This post was intended to resurrect my long dormant Filling the Gaps series, but as sometimes (often) happens, a film moves me to consider more than its parts, or even the sum of its parts.

In She's Gotta Have It, Spike Lee provides us with a time capsule of a time when independent African-American film burst into the mainstream, providing hope for a whole new type of cinematic experience, only to surrender to racial stereotyping, insidious in the works of Tyler Perry, and backward in the case of The Help.

Spike Lee cannot have predicted the consequences of this film. In creating an almost Woody Allen-esque psychological portrait or urbane, educated, professional African-Americans in Brooklyn, he exposed Brooklyn to the masses. Now guess who can't afford to live in Brooklyn Heights anymore? Middle-class African-Americans. He set out to show America that there's a place in where blacks aren't gangbangers or drug dealers, but poets, artists, dancers and philosophers. It worked.

For someone who's living smack in the middle of the one-mile radius in which Lee filmed, his loving panoramas of Fort Greene, the Brooklyn Bridge and Jay Street provide a view into what now seems like a parallel universe. There are no white people on the streets of She's Gotta Have It. There are few black people in DUMBO today.

So in between all the grand moments of "hey, that's my street!" and "hey, that's my office!", and "hey, the waterfront doesn't have boats anymore!", watching this film also created a pyschological unease. That was 1986. This is 2012. In just over 25 years, Brooklyn has seen one of the most dramatic demographic shifts of anywhere in the country.

But since Lee could never have known what would follow, it leaves us to look at the movie itself, which is as brilliant, moving, and as ahead of its time as so many have stated. He claims he didn't set out to create a feminist film, and yet that's what we're left with. Nola and her many lovers, never disguising her lifestyle to any of them, unwilling to apologize for taking pleasure in her sexuality.

Each lover approaches Nola's lifestyle as a "disease," a mental ailment that she needs to cured of, for a woman that doesn't want to settle down must surely be unnatural. Of course, this is a comedy, so each man's approach to curing her is markedly different. The one who seems most sympathetic throughout the movie does punish her most brutally in the film, in a manner that I'm not convinced fits into the movie.

If you haven't seen She's Gotta Have It, make sure you do. It's a wonderful film for many reasons, not least it's gender and racial politics. It's also incredibly funny.

 

 

 

 

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