Monday, November 30, 2009

The Latest Demographic to Fall to the Power of Twilight

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Septuagenarian Texas oil men.

(Thanks to my sister's enthusiastic flogging)
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Top Movies of the 2000s

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I'm just starting to think about this, though my list will be light on 2009 releases. This has been my worst year for movie attendance ever, and there are a lot of good releases this fall: the new Almodovar, Sherlock Holmes, An Education, A Serious Man. I hope others are putting together their lists and will be willing to share them.
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Saturday, November 28, 2009

Mission Accomplished

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Jay is not the most demonstrative of people, but there is a narrow band of things that will make him cry. I'm actually quite adept at identifying these things. I scored a bullseye when I showed him this Youtube video the other day.

Be sure to turn up the volume high enough to hear the guitar.

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Friday, November 27, 2009

The Awesome Factory That Is Rob Pattinson Just Keeps On Delivering

Exhibit the Zillionth:





N.B.: "Awesome Factory" is not a factory that is awesome but a factory that produces awesomeness.
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Tuesday, November 24, 2009

And Another Thing . . .

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Can anyone tell me why Edward's head is so big in this poster?


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Monday, November 23, 2009

New Moon Review

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Needless to say: spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.

Chris Weitz directed New Moon, the second installment of the Twilight saga. The first was directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who has long been one of my favorite directors. She directed Thirteen, The Lords of Dogtown, and The Nativity Story. The first two of these are two of my favorite films of all time; Thirteen is the best film ever made about teenagers. The Nativity Story is not as good, but even it has the trademark Hardwicke touches that make a so-so movie by her more rewarding to watch than an accomplished film by many others: a naturalistic approach to characters and setting, plus a great visual style. Both The Nativity Story and Twilight tell the story of a supernatural occurrence happening in the real world. Mary feels like a real fourteen-year-old girl in a Palestinian village two thousand years ago.

I've only seen two other movies by Chris Weitz: About a Boy, which is a good movie, and The Golden Compass, which was a disappointing movie for me. The Golden Compass has all the parts right: great cinematography, the right actors, an engaging story. And yet it falls flat somehow. The whole is less than the sum of its parts. A couple of things about the New Moon trailers had me worried that the same thing would happen with New Moon.

The good news is that there are two things about New Moon that can't be ruined: Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson. Rob has less of an emotional range in this one (perforce), but he conveys a terrible sadness and sense of doom while still bringing some interesting line readings. I like how he will, in an emotional scene, say a line and then kind of open his mouth like he's about to say something more but then not say it---or not know what to say. I'm sure this isn't in the script ("Say line, and then pretend like you're going to say something else"). It's an original acting choice but totally natural, not like he's trying to come up with a conspicuous technique to show off or be actorly. It reminds me of one of my favorite moments in Pride & Prejudice (the Keira Knightley version) in which Darcy tells her at the end that he loves her; Matthew Macfayden starts to say the line and then the words get caught in his throat, the emotion overtaking him: "I love, I love, I love you." This kind of thing, it's what I love most in acting. It's not in the script, it's not in the direction, it's in the imagination of the actor who pulls these things out of his own resources.

These are the acting accomplishments of Rob, but the other half of the equation is the movie star side of him, which is like a supernova. The way he carries himself, the way he looks in clothes, the way he moves around Kristen---wow. He comes on screen and he is just riveting.





Kristen is just a genius. She is natural and gorgeous and so, so affecting. People still talk about her role in Into the Wild as the lonely teenager pulsing with desire for Emile Hirsch. Like Rob, she's not afraid to take her time with a line or a scene. She was maybe too gorgeous here . . . I'm not sure where they are going to take her in Breaking Dawn when she's supposed to be so beautiful that she's almost unrecognizable to her own father.

There are a couple of other actors who have supersized value-added to the series: Billy Burke as Bella's dad, Peter Facinelli as Carlisle, Taylor Lautner as Jacob, and Anna Kendrick as Bella's school friend continued to be great.

The things I didn't like about New Moon are all related to the direction. It's not a bad movie; it's a good movie. But it's not what it could have been. Here are the things I most disliked:

* The costumes and styling of the Cullens: Rob looked good, but the rest of them looked kind of . . . sad, actually. The hair was darker, the hair styles were sometimes downright bizarre, and the clothing was flat-out unattractive. Rosalie looked old, when she's supposed to look like a dewy-faced knockout. Jaspar had the strangest hairstyle I've ever seen on an actor outside of Javier Bardem's Chigurh nightmare.





And this on a man who looks quite dashing in real life:








Eclectic, pixie-like Alice seemed to be wearing some sort of a caftan in the climactic Volturi scene. (As does Edward, come to think of it.)






I kind of liked their warm coloring, and the golden eyes were arresting. But perhaps they looked too different from the last movie. It's a weird line to walk with a series, I guess. Each director has their own vision, but also has to provide continuity.

* The traditional cinematic feel of the movie: Chris Weitz said straight out that he was a different director from Catherine Hardwicke---that while she's modern and edgy, he's romantic and traditional. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but he went wayyyy too far for my taste. An easy example of this is the scene in the clocktower plaza in Italy. Bella runs into the plaza during the Festival of San Marcos, and everyone in the plaza, supposedly the townspeople, is wearing the exact same red cape. Every single one. Exactly identical. No one just wandered down to the plaza in their jeans. No one had a red cape that they bought any place other than the Big Red San Marcos Cape Emporium. My friend Debbie said it perfectly: When Bella enters the plaza, you feel like she's stumbled upon a movie set. It's visually impressive, but you feel like you're watching a movie. This sensation is a common one when one actually IS watching a movie. But that's what makes Catherine Hardwicke exceptional. Chris Weitz is just much more Victor Fleming than Catherine Hardwicke.

* Pacing and tone: These are the backbones of storytelling. You can have a great story, compelling characters, a beautiful setting; but the process of storytelling determines what kind of product emerges from these raw materials. Chris Weitz rushed things. He had a lot to get through, but the way he solved this problem was to just kind of touch on each thing that happened, so that the viewer is checking off "dumped by Edward," "looks depressed," "laughs with Jacob in garage." I never really felt the deep sense of despair after Edward left that I should have. Maybe this was a weakness on Kristen's part too. She portrays her devastation through numbness, but there's a limit to how well a zombie blankness can communicate pain. I wanted a real wail from the heart, a face distorted by grief. Likewise, when she is brought out of her grief by the sun of Jacob's love and companionship, it's just not dramatic enough. And then, boom, he's gone, utterly changed into someone unrecognizable, and all we get is a voice-over: "Alice, things are bad again. I never see Jacob." I think these sections needed to be handled differently, or at least be longer.

Other choices bugged me too. For example, at the end there's a short standoff between Jacob and Edward. Bella jumps between them and exclaims, "Can't you see that you can't hurt one another without hurting me??" Aargh. Couldn't she jump between them and say "Stop it! Both of you!" Or anything other than this trite little line. Finally she says something serious to Jacob, and he bounds off, breaking up the stand-off. But can she just watch him go? No, she has to yell, "Jacob!" as he leaves. These are small directorial or editing choices, but they built up.

Twilight did have an easier structure to work with. You start with a mystery, than comes to a climax with the revelation that Edward is a vampire. You are in stasis as Bella and Edward enjoy their companionship without complications, and then the second narrative arc takes off when the nomadic vampires arrive. New Moon's plot is a little more "wobbly": Edward leaves, and Bella's depression is a major arc. It's broken when she rekindles her friendship with Jacob. There's the mystery of his disappearing friends, the realization that she can evoke Edward's presence by acting recklessly, then the loss of Jacob's friendship, then the threat from Laurent and Victoria, etc., etc. It was a challenge that Chris Weitz didn't fully surmount.

* The Volturi: I disliked the Volturi. I've never been a big fan of them, even in the books. They are more Harry Potter/fantasy than the rest of Twilight. And Chris Weitz rendered them in the most cliched and campy way possible.






No one except Dakota Fanning was interesting looking, and no one was scary. It was just cliche after cliche. As in other scenes (like the one with Laurent in the meadow), the attacker has to have his hands in the air ready to strike the victim before someone shouts "Wait!!" (or in the case of Laurent, the wolves show up). It's this insistence on waiting till the last possible second that is so textbook, so paint-by-numbers. Laurent wouldn't even move like that. It's someone's tired old idea of what is dramatic, but it's just old and fake.

On the positive side, overall the movie was good and individual scenes were fantastic:

* The scene where Edward leaves
* The scene were Jacob phases in front of Bella after she slaps Paul
* The cliff-diving scene
* The Jacob-in-the-garage montage (I liked the camera-work)
* How Weitz conveyed the passage of time in Bella's depression (and the garage scenes again)
* Anything with Victoria; the movie made me mad all over again that Rachelle LeFevre was replaced in Eclipse
* Edward stepping into the plaza sunlight
* The opening image of a full bright moon that slowly phases black, revealing the movie title behind it
* The last seconds of the movie---genius

I Tivoed the episode of "At the Movies" where they reviewed New Moon and watched it with trepidation. But Michael Phillips and A. O. Scott gave it a very good review, and A. O. Scott was so insightful. He said, "If you don't fight this movie, you'll find a very engaging world and story." Nice. All in all, though, I'm glad that Eclipse has a different director. I hope that the studio's rush to get it out by June doesn't result in an inferior movie. I really wish they had just let Catherine Hardwicke direct them all, so that we could have four masterpieces instead of just one.
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New Moon Friday

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As planned, a caravan of coworkers hit the first showing of New Moon on Friday afternoon. It was a great show to be at: Everyone screamed and clapped the first time any major character came on screen. Full review to come.


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Saturday, November 21, 2009

My Sandwich

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Jay found my mustard-application method to be amusing:


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Friday, November 20, 2009

Sandi Reading Twilight

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I love this photo of my friend Sandi reading Twilight because it so captures the quiet pleasure of reading.


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Thursday, November 19, 2009

Backyard This Morning

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Sunday, November 15, 2009

Sunday Miscellany

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We've had a busy couple of weeks, between doctors' appointments and other dates. Last night we went to see the new home of Jay's dad and his girlfriend, an absolutely gorgeous home on the water. Today was book club, though we didn't spend that much time on the book. It was a nonfiction book called Predictably Irrational, about human decisionmaking---an interesting book, much like those of Malcolm Gladwell. Jay went to a friend's poetry reading while book club was here. He's also making good use of our gym membership, which makes one of us. Tonight I'm going to settle in with the new Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar, along with the (believe it or not) American Girl catalogue. If I had all the money in the world, I'd be all those American Girl dolls with all their accessories. I love their little cookware sets and pet llamas and little ski outfits.
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Thursday, November 12, 2009

New Moon Pre-Season, Part Trois

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In honor of the rapidly approaching release of New Moon, I bring you this quite hilarious bit of EW interview with Rob Pattinson, in which he discusses the difficulty of working with one of his "costars":

I swear to you I’ve never experienced anything like this. It’s every single day,” says New Moon star Robert Pattinson of the constant on-set fuss surrounding his character Edward’s signature mane. During a break from shooting Eclipse, the next film to be adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels, Pattinson — sitting alongside costars Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner — recounts the continuing saga. “In Twilight, they wanted me to have extensions down to my hips.” (“He’s a liar,” Stewart interjects playfully. “He doesn’t remember. He’s remembering how they made him feel, but they were just, like, down to here [pointing to her shoulders].”) Pattinson continues. “So I told them ‘Look, that’s just not going to happen.’ I said, ‘It looks like this already, I’ll come to set like this.’”

“I sound so stupid, but in a lot of ways the hair is 75 percent of my performance,” the 23-year-old actor admits, his locks now comfortably hidden under a Yankee’s cap. “So in the second one I said, ‘Listen, I need to tone down the hair. Let’s make it a little more real, a little bit more…Method,’” he says with a laugh. “And then in the third one, I’m doing fight scenes and there’s a strand going down my forehead and they’re like, ‘We need to do it again because no one will recognize you! No one will know who it is!’ I have to look like the poster at all times. Just in case they want to use any clip for the trailer. Any clip at all! There were about five people in different departments who, because of my forelock, ended up in tears.”
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Saturday, November 7, 2009

Autumn Landscape

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My neighborhood was reminiscent of a Bruegel painting this morning. In the foreground was one neighbor, raking. Midground, another used his leaf blower. In the distance and to the right, another hauled a bag of leaves over his shoulder. Jay quipped, "And we're Bruegel" (because we were sitting on our butts observing).
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Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Love and Art

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I keep trying to find big chunks of time to work on the book I'm trying to write. But my dad comes to stay, my sister visits . . . I was planning on dedicating all of Thanksgiving weekend to writing, but now Mamie and the nephews are coming for the weekend. And I think to myself, If only I were estranged from my family, I could really get some work done. (Alas, I love them.)

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Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Weekend Recap

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We had a lovely, productive weekend. My eldest sister, Mamie, drove up from Charlotte to help me paint our bedroom. She's a pro. And she, like my other sister, Sally, has entirely too much energy. She kept wanting to do touch-ups, put down primer, and overall just, I don't know, do things right. Annoying, since she's eight years older but twice as energetic as me.
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