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(Some spoilers)

We finally got to see this critically acclaimed domestic dramedy tonight. In most ways, it was great. The acting was fantastic, especially Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. The directing was good too. I liked how the director portrayed one character's shock when she makes a certain discovery and then has to go and join a dinner party. Everyone else is chatting amiably, but the camera has close-ups of her face, showing every wrinkle and downturned lip corner, making her look old and vulnerable. And the sound of the conversation around the table is muted, like it can't penetrate the buzz in her head. Also, when the kids first meet the Mark Ruffalo character, Paul, he is shot in a way that makes him look very handsome and appealing. Later in the movie, when the kids are discovering his imperfections, the camera shots tend to be from just below chin level, so that you're looking up at Ruffalo's face in a way that makes him look older and jowly.

But I had a hard time with the philosophical bent of the movie. Annette Benning's character, Nic, was unpleasant. She's an intense and prescriptive overachiever, and she's  beat her partner down (psychologically) over the years for being feckless and without focus. And the members of her family (Julianne Moore as her partner Jules and their two kids) respond to Paul because he has something genuine to offer them---a more forgiving assessment of themselves, a forthright appreciation that allows them to flower. But in the end Paul is thrown to the wolves by the screenwriter. He's "punished," in a plot sense, while Nic gets away scot free. She's almost abusive in her negative intensity, and yet Jules's character is the one apologizing at the end.

I also have a hard time with the "marriage is tough" message that rounds out the movie. Yes, marriage can be tough. But it should be more joyful than tough, and couples should be more and more understanding, more in harmony, as the years go by. A relationship that is stuck acting out the same conflicts and dynamics after twenty years isn't admirable. Paul provides the means for these characters to grow and learn, in a very valid way. But he's dismissed at the end as an interloper and loser, not a source of wisdom but a shiny illusion. It's okay to show him as flawed and limited, but it's not okay to repudiate the value that he's presented as bringing to these characters.

Still, a good movie, especially whenever Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo are on screen. Funny too.

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From Entertainment Weekly's feature (by Karen Valby) on the upcoming movie Eat Pray Love, the story of a woman's travels through the world following her divorce:

"When women rally around something in pop culture, it isn't long before the objects of their affection are loudly trivialized or dismissed. In the case of Eat Pray Love [. . .] the sneering and yawning reached a fever pitch when the paperback hit No. 1 in the spring of 2007. [. . .] 'If women like it,' Gilbert says today, with calmness and good humor, 'it must be stupid.'"

We say no.

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Please, please, get rid of your lengthy answering machine greetings.

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Sez Kay Redfield Jamison, manic-depressive and author of Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament: "I write when I'm manic and edit when I'm depressed."

(Quote from Peter Kramer's book Against Depression.)
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Eland:

 

 Epee:

 

Esai (Morales): 

 

Zori: 

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Just started reading this one, which I've been looking forward to for some time. Kramer says that the opposite of depression is not happiness, but resilience---one of my favorite statements ever about the condition. He also discusses several studies that strongly suggest a biological basis for depression. Reading on . . .

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Right here:

Frankies Corn Salad

4 ears of corn
1 pint cherry/grape tomatoes, halved
2 Tbsp mint leaves, torn
1/2 red onion, sliced
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 lemon, juiced
Salt, pepper, red pepper flakes to taste

This recipe is from The Frankies Spuntino Kitchen Companion and was reprinted in InStyle magazine. Here's how I prepared it:

1. Microwave corn (shuck first), 2 minutes per cob.
2. I used yellow onion, diced it, and microwaved it in olive oil for 4 minutes.
3. I used lime instead of lemon, and no red pepper flakes.
4. Pulled the mint from our herb garden--yay!

Combine all. This was the best thing I've eaten all summer!

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Author Gavin de Becker reminds us that it is serious when a person won't listen to the word "no." But he's not talking about a date or a guy; he's talking about you yourself. An abusive boyfriend asks to talk to you one last time, a man wants to be let in to your store just at closing time, someone asks to step inside your house or offers yet another drink. If you're saying no to yourself, heed it.

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"Life is a process of discovering yourself, your purpose, and what really matters. Nobody can do it for you---you can't do it for anybody else."  ---Amy Grant

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By ALBERT AJI and ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY, 

Associated Press Writers  

 

DAMASCUS, Syria – Syria has forbidden the country's students and teachers from wearing the niqab — the full Islamic veil that reveals only a woman's eyes — taking aim at a garment many see as political.

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Is right here:

http://vimeo.com/13085676


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I thought this blog entry by EW's Owen Gleiberman was one of the more insightful pieces on the Twilight saga.



'Eclipse': Shrewdly retro or just backward? You decide!


by Owen Gleiberman


Lots of things in life, including movies, are love-it-or-hate-it. But when you listen to the two clashing camps of opinion trying to shout each other down over the Twilight books and movies — let’s call them Team Rapture and Team I Can’t Stand This Garbage — you really get the feeling that its members are standing not just on opposite shores but in opposite worlds, on distant planets in enemy solar systems. You get the feeling that they’ve had, and are talking about, two entirely distinct, utterly non-overlapping experiences. It’s no wonder that the twain shall never meet, or even pretend to be civil.

To recap: Either you’re a hater or you’re a Twihard. Either you identify with Bella Swan as a fresh and noble ordinary girl who has a small touch of the extraordinary about her — a lovely wallflower who blooms under the gaze of her courtly vampire beau — or you think that she’s a drippy, passive doormat in thrall to the kind of male-centric romanticism that should have died out around the time of Gone With the Wind. Either you think that the stories are tepid, meandering, and wishy-washy repetitive, or you think that they coast along on wistful currents of yearning, loneliness, and desire. Then, of course, there’s the Great Edward Debate, which got played out here last year in the fury of responses to my New Moon post. Is he a swooningly idealized James Dean/Heathcliff/Brad Pitt figure, an amorous obsessive with just the right touch of otherworldly danger? Or is he a blood-guzzling “stalker,” an erotic harasser who will break into your house and stare at you while you’re asleep because he’s the kind of guy whom any sane girl would avoid at all costs?

What fascinates me, listening to the noisy battle of Team Rapture and Team I Can’t Stand This Garbage, is that the war of opinion over the Twilight saga isn’t just a disagreement about books and movies. It touches something deeper, something that pop culture has always touched and even defined: key questions of what love and sex and romance should look like and feel like, of what they should be. A movie like Eclipse may be a far cry from art, but it’s increasingly clear, at least to me, that the movie hits a nerve, even in people who say they hate it, because it embodies a paradigm shift: a swooning re-embrace of traditional, damsel-meets-caveman values by a new generation of young women who are hearkening back, quite consciously, to the romantic-erotic myths of the past. The Bella Swan view of the world may, on the surface, be the opposite of “rebellious,” but the reason her story sets so many hearts aflame is that it is, in a way, a rebellion — against the authority represented by a generation of women’s-studies classes. Bella’s story is, by nature, a meditative, even meandering one because it’s the story of how she wants to be acted upon, to be loved, desired, coveted, fought over, protected. A movie like Eclipse represents nothing less than a new and unambiguous embrace, by women, of the male gaze.

In many ways, the debate over these movies reminds me of the kinds of arguments that first coalesced 20 years ago around the Susan Faludi book Backlash, in which the author argued that a widespread retreat from many of the mores of traditional feminism was, in effect, a kind of cultural conspiracy, one that reached from corporate boardrooms to the cosmetics industry. I think it’s become clearer in hindsight that what Faludi regarded as a coercive step backward to the dark ages was a lot more complicated than that — that what she viewed as a back-lash was, in reality, a back-swing of the pendulum. With the Twilight saga, that pendulum swing may finally be complete — and some women, let’s be honest, are horrified at that.

A grand paradox in all this is that a great many professed Twilight haters are young men who, though they may not acknowledge it, are threatened by this pop cultural juggernaut. Otherwise, they wouldn’t need to hate it; it represents a notching down of their clout. (That Eclipse broke the single-day Wednesday record set by Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen may well be an iconic box office statistic; it’s a case of woozy, florid, pinup romanticism beating out action toys. Talk about a backlash!) That said, if Bella and her vast sisterhood of fans represent a newly powerful young female demographic, do they also, as some would claim, represent a retreat from personal power? They might indeed if Bella Swan’s behavior were looked at literally, as if she were merely a role model. Yet the Twilight saga, let’s remind ourselves, is a vampire story, a pure fantasy. It should be watched as a kind of retro dream, a vision not of life as it is but of internal emotions made thrillingly external.

The line in my review of Eclipse that provoked the most anger is the one in which I described the books as “Stephenie Meyer’s girl-power-meets-retro-Harlequin-fantasy series.” On the comment board, people railed: How dare I use the words “girl power” to describe Bella Swan? Who could be less powerful than Bella? Yet power, especially in human relationships, is a funny thing. Bella is, of course, a girl who longs to be swept up in Edward’s power, yet what renders her powerful as well is the way that she refuses to shrink from her fear of his attraction. She seeks out, and embraces, the most dangerous love in the room. And that’s a kind of power, too — a very old kind of power that is also, in the Twilight saga, a startlingly new kind of power. It’s not just power but a force. And it is with her.

So we already know that lots of you love Twilight, and that lots of you hate it. But here’s what I want to know: Who relates to it, and doesn’t, as a vision of romance? And does it represent a retreat from feminism — or, in fact, the embrace of a new kind of feminism?

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(you fill in the blank)


First there was food porn:

Then there was shoe porn:

Then there was abstinence porn:

And now I've discovered makeup porn:

http://www.sweetglowbeauty.blogspot.com/

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Happy 50th Birthday to one of my favorite people in the world, my big brother.

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The most hyped book of the summer deserves every bit of it!

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My father-in-law sent this quote to Jay:

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity."

  -- Albert Einstein

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I'm on the warpath again, flogging this book to everyone I know. An investigation into why the idea of passionate love is considered antifeminist, it illuminates everything from why Bella was made to perform a Girl Power PSA at the end of the movie version of Eclipse to why readers are as upset that Lisbeth Salander fell in love with Mikael Blomquist as they are that she got breast implants.

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This is what I propose:

"Lohan"
"Kardashian"
"Jersey"
"Gosselin"
"Housewives"
"Rose"
"Ceremony"

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Vanity Fair did a poll of architects regarding the best buildings of the last 30 years. Some of the winners are below. See VF.com  for the whole list of beauties.

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breeds creativity.

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The special theory of relativity reconciles Galileo’s principle of relativity—the observation that the speed at which an object appears to be moving depends on the relative velocity of the observer—with evidence obtained in the late 19th Century that the speed of light is the same whether measured while moving toward a stationary light source or away from it.

In order for both of these seemingly contradictory facts to be true, Einstein deduced, the time required for an object to move from one point to another (e.g., an airplane traveling from New York to Paris) must vary depending on the relative motion of the observer (e.g., a passenger on board the plane versus a friend on the ground). This difference is too slight to be detectable for most human activities, but it becomes pronounced at extreme speeds.

Once one accepts the idea that time itself is mutable, the mathematics of special relativity are fairly straightforward and can be demonstrated using basic trigonometry. The same cannot be said for general relativity, which marries special relativity and Newton’s law of universal gravitation (the principle that objects are attracted to one another by a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them).

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And he managed to make Rob Pattinson look uninteresting. How do you even do that?

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About six months ago, I saw the first still from Eclipse, the third installment of the Twilight Saga, this one being directed by Hard Candy director David Slade. It was then that I felt my first twinge of worry about the movie. The photo was of Bella and Edward sitting in a meadow of purple flowers. Edward was in light blue, and Bella wore a purple plaid shirt. The hair looked good. Edward looked good. Bella looked right. But there were an awful lot of purple flowers. And didn’t we have a big meadow scene already, back in the first movie?

Between then and this morning, when I went with my friend Kim to see the 9:45 am showing of Eclipse, I saw David Slade’s earlier film, Hard Candy. Brilliant. Loved it. Edgy, smart, gave me shivers. Slade talked about how he wanted to make Eclipse more of an action movie, bring the guys in, revitalize the Cullens, and make Edward scary again. I started to get excited. And as the premiere drew near, critics seemed to be giving it good reviews, often with the phrase “the best Twilight film yet.”

So it was with moderate hope that I went to the multiplex this morning. The previews ended, and I hardly realized that Eclipse had started. It took me a minute to realize that this scene of a young man walking through a rainy alley was actually the beginning of the movie because it was so . . . banal. Each of the earlier movies started with a bang: Twilight with a lone deer in a forest, hearing a sound, taking off, and then being chased by beings you can’t quite catch in your vision, and a low pounding music underscoring the chase; New Moon with a vision of Bella rushing through a crowd in dramatic red capes in slow motion. Both of these beginnings were thematic: a little intro to the conflicts ahead, not simply a start to the movie. The beginning of Eclipse was just straightforward, beginning at the beginning, no atmosphere, no foreboding.

Most of you know the story: The vampire Victoria is building an army of new vampires in order to attack the Cullens and kill Bella. The werewolves join the Cullens’ fight, Bella starts to learn the backstories of various characters, and Jacob continues his all-out campaign to win Bella for himself. With the illuminating backstories, psychological interest, and dramatic fight scenes at the end, Eclipse could have been brilliant.

But oh how it wasn’t. This was by far my least favorite movie, and here’s why:

1. Where’s the Edge, Slade? I was expecting David Slade to bring back the kind of edge that Catherine Hardwicke brought to the first movie. But this one was by far the most cliched. When they kissed, the strings started. When Jacob got angry, the electric guitars pounded. And, yes, there were a LOT of purple flowers in that meadow. Where the movie ended. With a kiss. Remember how the first movie looked to be ending with a kiss between Edward and Bella in the romantic pavilion, and then Hardwicke pulled the camera back, back, back to reveal the scheming Victoria with an evil smile on her face and Radiohead’s music? This one stops at the kiss.

2. Will Someone Please Hire Me as a Stylist? Because I swear to the heavens above I could do a better job styling the Cullens than these people did. Skin, too pale. Eyes, too yellow. Clothing, ranging from forgettable to geeky. Only Rosalie fulfilled the book’s indication that these people all looked like supermodels.

3. Foghorn Leghorn Syndrome. Remember Foghorn Leghorn, the Looney Tunes character who would repeat “I say I say I say . . .” We have been listening to the same protestations from Bella, vows of protection from Edward, and bickering from Jacob for two entire movies now. And the kind of quiet delivery that was innovative from Rob Pattinson early on has become universal. Jacob talks like that, Bella talks like that, and Edward talks like that, all the time. There’s no joy, no smiling, no banter. Just looks of pain and struggle, unceasingly ponderous. I could accept this in New Moon because it’s is a very sad book. But Eclipse needed a new tone, energy, verve. Something different.

4. Bryce Dallas Howard Sucked.

5. Slade, You Coward. The movie ends with Bella declaring that she’s not becoming a vampire just for Edward, just for love. No, she’s always felt like she didn’t fit in; she feels she belongs in the vampire world itself, not just with Edward. Really? Because that’s not what the book says. The book says that life would have been happy and easy with Jacob. The book says that love is powerful and is the best justification for any course of action. But they just had to slip in a little Girl Power PSA, didn’t they, to placate the critics.

6. It Has All the Magic of a Palmolive Commercial. This is hard to define, but the movie is just . . . plain. The first movie had the van scene, the bedroom scene, the fight scene with James, “you better hold on tight, spider monkey.” The second movie had the encounter with Laurent, the chase through the forest, Edward stepping out into the sun in Italy. These scenes were memorable. Eclipse had next to nothing. Even the pivotal scenes up in the mountains with Jacob in the tent, and with Edward’s final battle with Victoria . . . they were drained of emotional impact and visual interest. And the CGI in the mountain scene was the worst I’ve seen. The second that it showed I thought “green screen.” Not because I knew it had to be but because it looked like it. It was like those fake, out-of-focus forest backdrops that photographers use with middle school pictures.

7. No Magic, No Heart. Eclipse the book gets at the heart of Bella’s decision: everything that she will give up and everything that she will gain by becoming a vampire to be with Edward. Slade doesn’t have time for the backstories, the fight scenes, and he sure doesn’t have time for this emotional journey.

I will say this: Maybe I’m just tired of these characters and this storyline. But I don’t think so. There’s so much richness in Eclipse’s story, and I was looking forward to seeing them realized. The missing element was a director with the right vision. David Slade seemed like an innovative choice when he was hired, but he turned out to be a square peg trying haplessly to manage a round hole.

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David Slade . . .

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You fail.

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