The Hurt Locker review

In its opening moments, The Hurt Locker immediately ingratiated itself to me with two key elements. The first was the opening epigraph, one of the key quotes from Chris Hedges's fantastic book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, which states, bluntly,"War is a drug." The second is the immediate cut to a scene featuring the criminally underused Guy Pearce, who does typically great work in a part that (mild spoiler) amounts to little more than a cameo. From that point onward, The Hurt Locker had me pretty much riveted.

I'd like to call The Hurt Locker the best movie yet made about the second Iraq war, but the fact of the matter is that it's pretty much the only one I've actually seen (except for the Samuel L. Jackson/Jessica Biel/50 Cent PTSD drama Home of the Brave, which I don't think really counts). What I can say is that it's the only one that I've felt compelled to watch. I don't think that the well-documented popular indifference to films set in or dealing with the invasion and occupation of Iraq is difficult to understand in the slightest; not only is the war extremely politicized, it's been such a well-discussed staple of American civic life that the thought of spending entertainment dollars to receive the fictionalized two cents of various filmmakers seems like an invitation to exhaustion. I personally expect to be avoiding Iraq/Global War on Terror themed films such as Lions for Lambs for years to come. (By contrast, aficionados of the political opinions of John Cusack are presently in the throes of a veritable Golden Age).

However, The Hurt Locker distinguishes itself by steadfastly and nigh-miraculously avoiding any mention of politics, diplomacy, or strategy. Rather than attempt to encapsulate the Iraq war at every Byzantine level, the film homes in on the experiences of three soldiers who compose an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Baghdad; SSgt. William James, Sgt. J.T. Sanborn, and Spc. Owen Eldridge. One of the main keys to The Hurt Locker's effectiveness is that these men are essentially the only characters in the movie. It's an order of magnitude more focused than any American movie I've seen recently, and is hyper-minimalist in comparison to the standards of the bombastic war genre.

The plot of The Hurt Locker follows the unit through their last six weeks in rotation, and deals primarily with the conflicts that arise when James joins Sanborn and Eldridge's unit as their new team leader. James is a swaggering adrenaline junkie who disdains established safety protocols and teamwork, and his risky approach to defusing IEDs particularly sets Sanborn on edge. One of the most inspired elements of the first act of the movie is that James's character traits are a close approximation of those often lionized in the main characters of war movies; however, using Sanborn as a proxy for the audience, The Hurt Locker conveys how dangerous and stupid his behavior is to his team. There's a great sequence immediately following a tense defusing scene in which James essentially cuts Sanborn and Eldridge out of the loop as they're trying to provide him with cover in which a colonel approaches James enthusiastically to praise him for being a "wild man." Over the course of the movie, the three men's relationships to one another evolve substantially, and all three are deep, well-realized characters - particularly James, who is far more complex than the action movie stereotype he initially appears to be.

I'd again be overstepping the limits of my knowledge in asserting that The Hurt Locker is "realistic" (I've never been in combat, so for all I know, Predator may well be the most accurate war movie ever made), although it compares well with the depiction offered by The War Tapes, a first person documentary shot by three soldiers during their Iraq tours. However, it feels realistic - the unit goes out to defuse IEDs again and again, like you'd expect, and in between, engages in conversations about their experiences and their lives. A list of what isn't in the plot of The Hurt Locker is probably more informative than a description of what is, so without further ado, here's what you won't be getting from the film:

• Canned exposition about what the unit does and the lingo the men use
• Neat, encapsulated summaries of the main characters' backgrounds and personalities presented by superior officers who are never again seen
• A circumscribed villain to provide a consistent external source of conflict (e.g. the "find the bomber" plot in The Kingdom
  
• Any sort of shoehorned attempt to explain or rationalize the motives of the insurgents setting the bombs
• Drawn-out battlefield death monologues
• Showy action-movie set pieces and cinematography of the type that I just praised yesterday
• A dialogue exchange in which the words "hurt locker" are spoken aloud and explained (the meaning of the phrase is instead subtly alluded to in a scene that features prominently in the theatrical trailer)
  

The subtle and naturalistic approach taken by The Hurt Locker fits the subject matter like a glove. I honestly never thought I'd see a modern movie set in a real military conflict avoid preachiness so completely (Inglourious Basterds doesn't count), and the performances are exceptional, especially Jeremy Renner as SSgt. James. This is one of the best films of the year and well worth catching up with on DVD if you can't see it in the theaters.

Next weekend: I'll attempt to see a mediocre or bad movie, so as to prevent this blog from becoming a perpetual rim-job to current theatrical releases. The Time Traveler's Wife is still playing around here...

On Further Viewing... The Matrix

With the end of the decade rapidly approaching, I've been thinking more and more about how the last ten years have affected my outlook and taste. Since I've amassed a pretty decent collection of DVDs dating from the early 2000s, I've decided that it would be fun to revisit the movies that I liked back around the beginning of the decade to get a critical look at how well they've held up. This is the first of the series.

The movie: Does it really need any introduction? Released way back in 1999, The Matrix not only made a shit-ton of money at the box office, but it enjoyed a surprisingly positive critical reception and became one of the first mega-selling DVD releases. A fair number of people were convinced at the time that the inevitable Matrix franchise would dominate the 2000s blockbuster scene.

My reaction at the time: Pretty much the same as everyone else's. I was floored by The Matrix in the theaters and probably saw it four or five times on DVD (also, once on VHS). I wasn't necessarily a full-fledged member of the Matrix semi-cult that existed for a brief time before being unceremoniously disbanded by 2003's The Matrix Reloaded.

On further viewing...: Ten years on, The Matrix actually holds up pretty well. Although the critical focus tend to heavily involve the philosophical themes of the movie, it's important to recall that The Matrix primarily set itself apart from its action-movie contemporaries in the late 90s in more aesthetic ways. In my mind, the real innovation of The Matrix was the manner in which the Wachowski brothers wedded the choreography of Hong Kong action flicks to noir-inspired cinematography and production design. Since the mid to late 90s produced relatively few persevering action movies, it's easy to forget today just how badly shot and staged most action set pieces were in those days; the typical gun or fist fight was a mishmash of medium-close shots and cutaways that completely sabotaged the kinetic and dramatic intentions of the scene. By contrast, the action sequences in The Matrix consist almost exclusively of medium-long or long shots, so you can actually see what's going on, and make judicious use of slow motion for dramatic effect and to accentuate just how well-composed most of the shots are (The Matrix's cinematographer, Bill Pope, is brilliant at shooting action sequences in anamorphic widescreen, see also - seriously - Team America: World Police).

The Matrix also gets points for proper use of Keanu Reeves as the My-First-Anagram-named lead character, Neo. Lots of film fans like to beat up on Keanu because of the fact that he has no range, but he's actually very effective in roles that play to his strengths. One of the big flaws of action movie leads is that they're too commonly take-charge ultimate badass types from the outset of the film, which sort of precludes any meaningful character development over the course of the plot. Keanu's bullheaded-but-naive-and-slightly-dim stock character is a natural fit for a movie that plays up the lead's initial ignorance of the central conflict.

He also ingratiates himself by literally playing the only major character that doesn't spontaneously break out into a portentous monologue whenever their mouth is open. I'd forgotten what a talky movie The Matrix is (I hadn't forgotten that fact about the sequels, though). The worst offender is, of course, Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus, but most of the rest of the cast get their chance to spout off, including minor villain Joe Patoliano, who engages in one of the more egregious examples of "monologuing" in recent movie history. Some of the cast actually adapt to this fairly well: Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith character gets away with it because of his idiosyncratic vocal cadence, and Gloria Foster brings the perfect tone of matronly warmth to her scene as the Oracle. Despite that, I wish there were fewer spoken meditations on the nature of belief and reality and so forth.

Of course, the metaphysical angle of The Matrix is a big part of what hooked its more avid fans. Even though the philosophical subtext of the movie isn't subtle, it's broad enough that a wide range of pet interpretations are possible. Religious commentators pointed to the array of Christian, Buddhist, and Gnostic themes woven into the plot. Undergraduate Naomi Klein disciples read it as a metaphor for the false consciousness created by American capitalism. Philosophy professors showed clips from the movie to explain Plato's Republic. And so on, and so forth.

The beauty is that all of these readings are probably equally valid; The Matrix films are on the whole far more interested in philosophical masturbation than making a consistent thematic point. This probably explains a large amount of the indifference with which the two sequels were met. I think that extent of the fanboy backlash to The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions is a bit overstated (especially in the case of the third film), but it's undeniable that the sequels have at least one bad idea to match every good one. The Matrix, on the other hand, continues to retain its popular appeal; it sits at #26 on imdb's user-voted list of the top 250 films of all time, below Sunset Blvd and ahead of Dr. Strangelove.

Still worth seeing?: Sure. Even disregarding the rest of the strengths of The Matrix, the high-rise invasion rescue shootout alone put it up there as one of the best action movies of all time.

This fall in blatantly derivative entertainment

One inescapable fact of movie attendance in the late 2000s is that if you show up 5-10 minutes before the film starts, you'll be treated to a substantial pre-show, featuring "exclusive" looks at the marketing campaigns for upcoming stuff. It used to be that most of the advertisements were for theatrical releases, and took the form of longer trailers and/or star interviews swiped from the EPK. However, as the major TV networks have increasingly begun to feel the icy hand of Bittorrent at their throats, there's been a corresponding upswing in the amount of pre-movie advertising for upcoming sitcoms and dramas. (Irrelevant aside: the movie theater in Kirksville, MO, where I went to undergrad, actually didn't have any of this; rather, the pre-show consisted of a looped slide show that was usually one ad for a local furniture company and three poorly-conceived movie trivia questions).

Anyhow, since I don't watch much television (I'm far too busy with more intellectual pursuits, like playing Gears of War 2), movie pre-shows are about the only exposure I get to what's going on in the world of television, until I catch up with a sampling of the more culturally ubiquitous shows 2 years after the fact on DVD. So I'm glad that I got to see the awesomeness that is the sneak peek at NBC's upcoming show Trauma, which probably would have been more aptly titled ER 2: The Retardening.

The version I saw in the theaters was probably about half the length of the video above, and it left out the part where it introduces the characters with onscreen titles summarizing their respective cliches, which I think makes for a better promo. What I like about this promo isn't just that it's ridiculously over-the-top, but the way that you can just envision the meeting that led to this show's creation:

NBC Executive 1: We need Axe Body Spray to buy $50 million worth of ads this fall, or else we'll go bankrupt. How the hell do we make a show about paramedics appeal to the 18-34 year old male demographic?

NBC Executive 2: Add helicopters?

NBC Executive 3: Add explosions?

NBC Executive 1: Get the producers of Trauma on the phone and tell them that there better be an explosion or a helicopter for every thirty seconds of their show!

NBC Executive 2: Also, each episode should have a bare minimum of one exploding helicopter!

Lest the ad for Trauma lead you to believe that American cinema is going to pick up the creative slack of the television networks, I also was privileged enough to see (twice) the trailer for the new Gerard Butler movie. I think this movie was an attempt to prove that the fatal flaw of prior entries in the revenge movie genre (e.g. Death Wish, Taken, The Brave One, Death Sentence, Double Jeopardy, Eye for an Eye, etc.) is that they were too intelligent and not reactionary enough. Behold, the upcoming Law Abiding Citizen (yes, that's apparently the real title of the movie).



I think further commentary on that trailer is pretty redundant; if trying to be intense and serious and succeeding only in looking completely goddamn ridiculous were an Olympic sport, Law Abiding Citizen would have been crowned its Michael Phelps based solely on the two-and-a-half minute span presented above. I have only two real questions:

1. Whatever Gerard Butler's super-secret Black Ops work for the government was, it must have had a lot to do with blowing up cars, because there's approximately twelve car bombings in this trailer.

2. Why is it that the lenience and inadequacy of the justice system is such a prevalent artistic theme in a culture which leads the entire world by a stunning margin in both incarceration rate and absolute number of imprisoned citizens?

coincidentally enough...

No sooner did I write a post about movies in development based on video games than it's announced that Gore Verbinski's being replaced as director of BioShock by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who's probably best known stateside for the pretty-good 28 Weeks Later. I'm sort of intrigued by this, mainly because Fresnadillo's 2001 Spanish movie Intacto is a very, very good film. I doubt he'll be getting anywhere near the budget that Verbinski would have planned, which may be a problem because lavish set design would be an absolute must for a BioShock film. I suppose that's more a matter of how smartly the money's spent than how much of it there is, though. Anyhow, this could be a sign that BioShock is more likely to get made than I originally thought (and may actually be halfway decent!)

Inglourious Basterds, reviewed

Between District 9 and Inglourious Basterds, this may have been the best weekend I've had at the movies, ever. Inglourious Basterds is, of course, the long-promised World War II movie from Quentin Tarantino, who's been on a genre-film kick for the entire decade with the martial-arts/spaghetti-Western mash up Kill Bill movies and the car-chase/slasher film mash up Death Proof. In my mind, the thing that Inglourious Basterds has in common with the abovementioned movies is the way in which it knowingly flouts your preconceived expectations of it; Kill Bill was sold as a showpiece for gory martial arts action and delivered a climax in which the villain fixed the hero a sandwich and chatted her up for about twenty minutes prior to a battle that resolved in under 5 seconds, and although Death Proof delivered big-time on its promise of killer car-chase action, it spent most of the running time of the film serving up lengthy conversations and generally meandering leisurely toward the central conflict.

Now, Inglourious Basterds is being marketed as Tarantino's answer to The Dirty Dozen, a mega-violent ensemble piece in which a band of American guerrillas change the course of the war by rampaging through Nazi-occupied France. This movie isn't hard to imagine: set up the backstory of the individual members of the squad, bring them together, have them suffer some inital setbacks and successes, set up the big climactic action set-piece, and let it play itself out with a bang.

This is not the movie that Inglourious Basterds actually is. I think that most people who see this movie will be surprised at how little screen time Brad Pitt and his team actually get in the film; I'd say that they're only in maybe a third of the scenes, and even that might be an overestimation. There are a lot of threads and subplots in the alternate history that Basterds sets up, and Tarantino doesn't privilege the story of the titular 'Basterds' over any of the others. In fact, Brad Pitt, the name over the title on the posters, barely even appears onscreen in one of the longest segments involving the squad midway through the movie.

Also, Inglourious Basterds isn't nearly as violent as the marketing would lead you to believe. It certainly has its fair share of gore (you'll see plenty of scalpings and Eli Roth does indeed beat a German soldier to death with a baseball bat on camera), but until the climax, the plot doesn't really hinge on action sequences at all. Rather than brutal violence, the true hallmark of Inglourious Basterds is lengthy cat-and-mouse conversations between various protagonists and various suspicious antagonists. Coming in at a close second are the near-constant explicit and implicit references to film and filmmaking culture that permeate each thread of the plot. Inglourious Basterds is even talkier and more movie-obsessed than Death Proof, which I would have hardly thought possible before seeing it for myself.

So, instead of movie-star Brad Pitt and his rough and tumble men giving the audience 2+ hours of gratuitous violence, we get a large ensemble cast having a bunch of conversations. However, Inglourious Basterds takes this conceit and absolutely knocks it out of the park, which is no small feat. Credit is due to the dialogue, which meets and occasionally surpasses Tarantino's typical high standards. It's notable and refreshing that the typical Hollywood way of casting American actors in foreign roles and having all the dialogue be in English doesn't hold here; most of the actors are the same nationality as the characters they portray, and a big chunk of the spoken dialogue is in German or French with subtitles. And the performances are very strong, particularly the leads, which completely fulfill the vision of iconic genre characterization that Tarantino seems to have been reaching for with this film. Brad Pitt's Lt. Aldo Raine takes the exaggerated Southern cadences of George Clooney's character from O Brother, Where Art Thou? and turns them down just a tad in intensity, with the result being a great comic portray of a swaggering American. Melanie Laurent has a rich part as a theatre owner plotting her own revenge against the Nazis, and her expressive, intelligent performance grounds the movie and gives it its emotional center. However, Cristoph Waltz absolutely steals the movie out from underneath everyone with his portrayal of SS Col. Hans Landa. Simply put, Landa is one of the greatest villains in movie history, and Waltz's accomplishment in bringing him to life is extraordinary. Taken alone, the first twenty minutes of Inglourious Basterds, in which Landa glad hands his way through the interrogation of a French dairy farmer suspected of harboring Jewish fugitives, would probably be worth the price of admission. I doubt there's going to be a better performance this year, and if there is, I can't wait to see it.

It should go without saying that Quentin Tarantino isn't remotely interested in historical accuracy with Inglourious Basterds; without spoiling too much, the fifth "chapter" of the movie portrays events that manifestly did not happen during the war itself. The climax of Inglourious Basterds is more than worthy of all the buildup involved in getting to it, and it certainly didn't leave me feeling unfulfilled at the end. The final scenes have a sort of manic, cathartic quality to them that sort of reminded me of the end of There Will Be Blood, minus the strange shift in tone. There's already been a fair amount of debate online and in print as to whether Inglourious Basterds crosses a line in its manifest irreverence toward the facts of history, and the final scenes appear to be the most divisive. While it's pretty well indisputable that Tarantino's movie isn't about World War II, human suffering, or the Holocaust as much as it is about the power of cinema to create and revise our realities, I don't think that's necessarily a bad or even a disrespectful thing. Regardless, Inglourious Basterds is a well-crafted piece of work that's several cuts above anything else I've seen this summer (with the possible exception of District 9) and it absolutely deserves to be seen.

A brief review of District 9; also, will there ever be a good movie based on a video game?

I found out today that the movie theater near my apartment in Tucson (it's one of those gigaplex deals that's attached to a mall) has a deal where you can get in for 5 bucks if you see the first matinee of the day, which is a pretty sweet deal. I'm going back tomorrow to see Inglorious Basterds at 11:00, and I just might fuck around and see a movie every weekend if it's going to be that cheap.

Paying 5 bucks to see District 9, it turns out, is an absolute steal. I don't really want to go into too much detail about the plot, because it's better if you go see it knowing as little as possible about what happens. Suffice it to say that District 9 is damn near a classic, and almost certainly the best sci-fi film since Children of Men. Everything about this movie just works; the grit and realism of the setting, the convincing performances (mostly by unknown and/or non-professional actors), the handheld-style cinematography, and particularly the special effects (which one-up Cloverfield in seamlessly and convincingly integrating the creature-effects into pseudo-documentary camerawork). Like most classic science fiction, District 9's story juxtaposes the fantastical elements with allegorical aspects touching on contemporary themes; in this case, state-sponsored racial apartheid, but it never lets those elements overwhelm the plot or the action. District 9 takes its time building up, but when it lets loose in the second and third acts, it pumps out some of the most incredibly visceral action sequences in recent memory. If you think you might want to see District 9, trust me, you do. And if you don't think you want to see it, go see it anyway - it's that good.

So what does all this have to do with video game movies? District 9 is the first feature directed by Neill Blomkamp, a South African special effects whiz. but his debut was originally supposed to be a mega-budget adaptation of Halo. That project was put on hold almost three years ago, when the studio financing deal fell through, and it's probably never going to happen. Which is a shame, because essentially every aspect that would be needed to pull of a successful Halo movie are on full display in District 9. A sampling:

• Truly convincing and believable effects, for alien creatures, huge spaceships, and sci-fi weaponry
• Well-orchestrated and shot action scenes that manage to be visually coherent while still conveying a palpable sense of chaos
  
• The incorporation of David Cronenberg-style body-horror effects, which would be particularly effective in portraying Halo's Flood creatures
• Effectively establishing a rich backstory with a minimum of forced exposition

And so on and so forth. I was always skeptical as to whether Halo could be made into a movie; Seeing District 9 has convinced me that it could be done and that Neill Blomkamp really is the person for the job. Unfortunately, he's now publicly stated that he probably won't be going back to it. The Halo fiction actually has a intriguing and well-thought out backstory (which is mostly only hinted at in the games themselves) and an Aliens-meets-H.P Lovecraft aesthetic that could make compelling blockbuster source material. In fact, the same could be said for any number of video games, and yet, there's hasn't been a single game-based movie that's amassed even a decent reputation for quality, although many have been financially profitable (particularly the Resident Evil series of films, none of which I've seen).

Taking a look at i09's list of video game movies in development doesn't reveal anything that looks likely to reverse this trend. Of the listed projects, Gore Verbinski's BioShock adaptation probably has the best combination of filmmaker and source game pedigree, but I'm skeptical that it'll ever get made. Brilliant and fun as it was, I always thought it was remarkable enough that BioShock's trippy melange of art-deco, steampunk, and Objectivist philosophy was a hit as a video game. I really doubt a Hollywood studio is going to sink 100 million-plus into making a blockbuster movie with those left-field themes, and there's probably no way to do it justice on the cheap. There's also Len Wiseman's planned Gears of War adaptation, which is more likely to get made, but probably less likely to be good. Although I was a fan of Wiseman's Live Free or Die Hard, I think he'll probably bring a more traditional action-blockbuster aesthetic to Gears, which won't capture the intensity that makes the game so great. (If I had my way, anyone who wanted to direct a movie based on Gears of War would be forced to watch on a loop the jaw-dropping single-take tracking shot at the climax of Children of Men where Clive Owen sneaks his way into the besieged refugee camp building. I'd put a big sign underneath the screen that said "THIS IS WHAT YOUR MOVIE NEEDS TO LOOK LIKE.")

The rest of the list is the typical retarded pap, save maybe Sam Raimi's World of Warcraft, which I can't get excited about because I've never played WoW and I did see Spider-Man 3. The fact that there are planned adaptations of Asteroids and The Sims speaks volumes about the extent to which Hollywood is flailing at straws artistically when it comes to game adaptations. I'm halfway hoping that the fact that District 9 is a both a critical and box office hit might convince some studio execs to pull Halo out of mothballs and throw tons of money at Neill Blomkamp to get it made, but I think the more likely scenario is a bigger budget District 10 in a couple years time. Which I'm OK with, seeing as that would probably be the superior film in any case, but it's certainly interesting to consider what a missed opportunity Blomkamp's aborted Halo seems to be.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist Liveblog, with bonus added commentary

I posted these status updates on my Facebook while I was watching this movie, in lieu of doing anything productive last night, and thought I'd repost them here because I found the process pretty enjoyable. Which, I might add, is more than I can say about the movie.

4 min: Started watching Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. 4 minutes in and it seems like cringingly poorly written hipster tripe. Can I survive all 89 minutes? Will my opinion improve?

7 min: You can tell Norah's 'alt' because she's always wearing headphones, even with her friends, and you can tell that Nick's 'sensitive' because he's always looking at the floor.

10 min: I wonder if any actual hipsters like this movie. I'm betting no. Maybe hipster girls. Who are still in high school.

20 min: Survived first twenty minutes, with horribly contrived rock club scene. Now Nick and Norah are in the car. Michael Cera literally just said "I don't really subscribe to any label."

27 min: People keep mistaking Michael Cera's charmingly crappy car for a taxi, which it of course looks nothing like. How whimsical!

35 min: Mathematical equation for this movie: 'Before Sunrise' minus decent writing, plus late 2000s Great Hipster Cash-In, plus several unnecessary subplots. Also, the National's 'All The Wine' is on the soundtrack now and the guy th...at played Commissioner Burrell on 'The Wire' has a small role as a ticket taker. Mixed feelings about that.

41 min: Hey, it's guy who plays Harold in Harold and Kumar. I wonder if he feels inadequate because the guy that plays Kumar has a job at the White House convincing Indian teenagers to vote Democratic and he's stuck with walk-ons in movies like this. Plus, the gawky young dude from Tropic Thunder plays Norah's annoying ex-boyfriend!

43 min: Wacky Korean shopkeeper alert!

55 min: Norah feels like an outsider because she's the daughter of someone rich. Also because she's never had an orgasm. And she's only got one day left to decide whether or not she wants to go to Brown for college. Deep. As mixed as my feelings are about Juno, that movie is about a million times better than this one.

59 min: Thirty minutes left! Will there be a twist ending revealing that Nick's ex-girlfriend is, in fact, a cannibalistic serial killer? Because I think they're foreshadowing that.

67 min: Can't believe it took over an hour for Modest Mouse to make an appearance on the soundtrack.

70 min: I can't believe Michael Cera followed Superbad with this and Year One. I'd be worried, but Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a mortal lock to be awesome.

78 min: The past two scenes have featured Norah a.) drowning her sorrows in food and b.) being a terrible driver. Non-stereotypical female characterization FAIL. Also, the song on the soundtrack right now was also on the soundtrack of Burnout Revenge.

81 min: Spoiler alert: they bone in a recording studio at the end. Although they were fully clothed, so maybe he just fingered her.

89 min: And there's a Vampire Weekend B-side over the credits. I'm not going to front, I probably would have enjoyed this movie in high school. Still, I hope that everyone who comes away from this liking it has a chance to see Before Sunrise at some point in their lives and realize what an inferior rip-off this is (see also: Garden State and The Graduate)


Bonus Commentary: Having had a while to think on Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, I've come to the realization that while it's pretty much just a harmlessly mediocre movie, there's one aspect in which it could actually be pretty dangerous. I didn't mention it in my liveblog, but it's mentioned early on that Norah's attracted to Nick before she actually meets him, because she's heard the mix-CDs that he made for his improbably evil ex-girlfriend (who didn't appreciate them, natch).

Now, the danger here is that every male music fan under 30 already secretly or not-so-secretly believes that the right combination of songs on a mix CD functions as a sort of Rosetta Stone for getting chicks to fuck him. I myself have made more mix CDs with that very goal in mind than I care to recount, and as much sense as it's always made at the time, now it sort of seems unlikely to me that a decent mix CD would really be the tipping point between going balls-deep in some indie chick and suffering the cruel lash of rejection. I'm going out on a limb here; for all I know, mix competency could be the main criteria for sexual selection in the Pitchfork era, but if I'm right, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist isn't going to help matters.

In the end, of course, the mix-CD as a mating ritual isn't so much about the music per se as it is a method of attempting to demonstrate that one is a man with a developed and modern aesthetic. It's essentially today's equivalent of reciting a romantic sonnet or soliloquy, which may also have not really made that much of a difference in the ultimate outcome re: fucking or lack thereof. However, it at least required the dude to read something, rather than just iTunes click-dragging an assortment of album tracks from Elliott Smith and The Cure along with an 'ironic' song from Britney Spears or the Black Eyed Peas. Don't be surprised if a bunch of Michael Cera wannabes start making mix CDs for potential conquests with songs by the National on the backs of this movie. I'll have them know that I was already doing that way back in 2007. Fucking kids.

Made it, Ma! Top of the world!

So, about a week ago, I moved to sunny Tucson, AZ, with my cat. I've got a really cool place, which is now mostly furnished, and the Internet's hooked up, so it's pretty much coming together. Rather than bore you with a travelogue, here's a bullet point summary of relevant info:

• Did I mention my place was really cool? I've got a one-bedroom apartment with a full bath, walk-in closet and pantry, dishwasher, and balcony in a quiet neighborhood that's near plenty of shopping, restaurants, banking, and the like for $535, including covered parking (sun's an issue down here) two pools, a hot tub, and sauna on the grounds, plus available gym passes for free. Compare to the $275 I was paying until a little over a year ago for a shithole shotgun apartment in the county between Carbondale and Murphysboro, and I feel pretty good about the deal. Here's the view from my balcony:

• And here's part of my living room, namely the TV I bought and the coffee table I took from a curb (OK, it was next to a dumpster - still, free)
• 
• My cat travels really, really well. She was out of her cage in the backseat of the car pretty much the whole 23 odd hours of the trip, and we barely heard a peep out of her. Mind you, this was without medication. She did seem a little glum when we got to the apartment and didn't have any furniture, but she cheered up once I got a bed that she could hide out under:

• I'm way more impressed by being able to eat at Inn-N-Out Burger and having three different Targets within a ten minute drive than I probably should be.
  

• I saw a coyote hanging out on the grounds of the VA today when I was walking over to the employment office to hand in some paperwork. It looked hungry. I didn't know if I should be worried or what. Fortunately (for me) it didn't do anything.

• As a federal employee, I have the option of signing up for one of a number of health plans within the next 60 days. I presently have no idea how to go about making this decision, even after watching a 20 minute video in the training today in which actors playing federal employees had detailed conversations about federal benefits while ostensibly performing their regular duties.

• It's nearly 8:45 in the evening here, and it's still 100 degrees outside. But it's a dry heat, which, no bullshit, actually makes a difference.
  

• I took a trip to Phoenix last night to drop off Alicia with some friends. Despite having some decent Chinese food there, my experience didn't do too much to dispel my impression of the area as an overdeveloped Republican doppelganger of L.A. Also, I got on the wrong part of some city loop on my way back to Tucson and wound up driving around for an extra forty minutes. In conclusion, fuck Phoenix.
  

Score another one for Web 2.0

The top user-submitted tags on Amazon for Rod Blagojevich's upcoming memoir include "moron," "delusional," "historical fiction," and "hairbrush." Additionally, the promo description is a minor masterpiece of the form and well worth clicking through to read for yourself - apparently, Hot Rod's cash-in book is, among other things, "a treatise on the proper place of government in the everyday lives of its people" and "a mandate for healthcare reform." I'm sure that the blessing of Rod Blagojevich is exactly what's needed to push popular support for reforming healthcare to a critical mass.

Governor Rod Blagojevich's Illinois Blowout Sale - watch more funny videos

Probably not the future of psychotherapy...

British shrinks want to treat addiction to World of Warcraft. OK, fine. I've never played WoW or any other online RPG, but I understand that people get sucked into it pretty hard and cognitive-behavior therapy can be helpful for changing compulsive behaviors. Where they lose me is the part where they want to do it inside the game itself. Also, they want free accounts to do it with.

Look, I'm certainly not an addiction specialist, but I know that when you're treating someone, you probably don't want to use a method that requires them to be in continued or increased contact with the thing they're addicted to. And you definitely don't want to use a method that requires you to model the addictive behavior itself while performing the treatment. Assuming that Blizzard is willing to front free accounts to a group of people who are comparing their cash cow to crack cocaine (or the cheap bastards pony up for their own accounts), this "therapy" is the equivalent of choosing to treat alcoholics in a bar, while you yourself are knocking back shot after shot of Jim Beam.