Wise Blood

This horrifying movie about small town America's obsession and saturation with religion is based on Flannery O'Connor's novel of the same name. With a ridiculous original score it seems perhaps a dark comedy about the illness which so fully plagues the South in the name of Jesus. A young man returns from a stint in the army to find his childhood home abandoned and a new interstate dumping country folks into the city. The protagonist soon ends up in the city himself, and in the midst of a spiritual crisis he is flung from the arms of a godless prostitute to a preacher con artist father/daughter pair. It seems that this world is a mean, lonely place with God or not. The young man's life goes downhill as he kills a man, loses his car, and becomes both blind and more insane. I suppose this slow, confined story could have its place in cautionary tales about America but perhaps its message lacks clarity and concision. Worth watching if you have an interest in American literary history, but boring at times and maybe a little too true to the novel to make a compelling film.

Um?
2 out of 5
Buy this film: Wise Blood

Plot: 2
Imagery: 2
Originality: 2
Soundtrack: 1
Overall: 2

Velvet Goldmine

This is a glittery, sequined, spandex-filled tale of glam rock, its idols, followers, and the scene in which they thrive. Christian Bale (Batman) plays a reporter who, given an assignment to cover the 10-year anniversary of a Bowie-esque glam rock star's career-ending faked public assassination, finds himself in the midst of countless suppressed memories. While investigating the disappearance of this fallen hero Bale is reminded of a self he has stifled for years - tight, revealing outfits; drug use; the shame of his parents; a love affair with a famous Iggy Pop-ish American glam rocker (Ewan McGregor); a lifestyle of shallow relationships; sexual confusion; freedom; and very few consequences. Has Bale's character lost his true self by taking a responsible job? Threaded throughout with both allusion and direct references to Oscar Wilde - was he gay/bi? Maybe I learned something from this film and, told in the Citizen Kane this-has-happened-now-go-back-and-report-on-it-tell-the-story format, Velvet Goldmine is occasionally entertaining, though sections of the film were overdone, held too long or seemingly irrelevant.

Um?
2.5 out of 5
Buy this film: Velvet Goldmine

Plot: 2
Imagery: 3
Originality: 2
Soundtrack: 4 Buy the Soundtrack or download it
Overall: 2.5

Smart People

This movie is awful. Having watched it recently, the plot is already almost forgotten - something about a curmudgeonly (but not very old) widower and professor; his prudish, pedantic, annoying daughter; a nurse; and a lazy bum of a brother. While such a combination of characters seems like a fail-proof concoction for fun and exciting scenarios, somehow it completely misses. There may be one or two amusing quips, but for the most part the dialogue is flat. A dry, offbeat feel is striven for but not obtained, and overall it seems to have been a poor attempt at mimicking the more entertaining film The Squid and the Whale.

BOOOOOOOO!
1 out of 5
Buy this film: Smart People

Plot: 1
Imagery: 1
Originality: 1
Soundtrack: 1
Overall: 1

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King of California

What a horrible little slice of Americana! A teenager, abandoned by her mother and with a father on a funny farm, works full time at McDonald's instead of going to school. The daughter's routine is disrupted by her father's release. He has become obsessed by the idea that there is a Spanish explorer's long lost treasure buried somewhere near their suburban Californian home. The daughter's initial skepticism fades to enthusiasm for her father's crazy quest as he researches and spends his time roaming with a mental detector. Eventually they decide they'll find it under Costco. The daughter secures a job there, gets her hands on some keys, and in the middle of the night they drill their way into a disaster. This trashy glimpse of dream crazed America, in its shallow plot, unconvincing and depressing pretext left us with a feeling of having wasted our time more than wariness of the future. Not convincing but at least a little creative with a decent original soundtrack.

Um?
2 out of 5
Buy this Film: King of California
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Plot: 2
Imagery: 1
Originality: 2
Soundtrack: 3 Buy the: soundtrack Download the: soundtrack
Overall: 2

Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut

"Read this, it's garbage!" the back cover may as well state of this fictional autobiography. "I am old and sick of this crap but you greedy readers keep pulling for more, so here it is. Here is my garbage. Have a good look. I have not disguised it but know you will read it anyway. Enjoy!" Vonnegut may as well write in his customary note of introduction. And thus begins one of the most redundant novels ever written. An aging and wealthy Armenian painter, Rabo, lives in a large lonely mansion in the Hamptons. The house used to belong to the Taft family, a family Rabo married into by luck. Now it is also occupied by an especially pushy widow/successful pop culture novelist who shoves her tacky ambitions into Rabo's home and life. In the first 30 pages or so Vonnegut - oops, Rabo - tells us the entire story. He also mentions there is a mysterious something in the potato barn. Rabo's friends and perhaps his readers are horribly curious about that mystery. Curious enough to listen to an old man ramble off his life story, repeating an event five times before it happens, describing the moment in detail, and repeating it again five times after the fact. Rabo is particularly fixated on his first sexual experience, an encounter with an older woman. It is made clear that this was his only moment of real love in life, probably due to the fact he's clung to it alone all these decades.

It's like Vonnegut was determined to test the loyalty of his readers: be patient and maybe, when I am finished, I'll swing open the door of my potato barn to reveal a morsel of undiscovered wisdom/wit. There is a lot about abstract art, war, soul and meat.

This book is written in first person and separated into tiny readable sections for even those readers with virtually no attention span. The characters are at once pretentious, sentimental, and absurd; as alive as a dead fly on the windowsill. This is not Vonnegut at his best. I kept waiting for snappy little explanations which never came and instead left sections unrelated and random. Maybe his earlier works (e.g. Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, and The Sirens of Titan to name a few) set expectations too high. Worth reading for fools and other die hard Vonnegut fans.

Um?
2 out of 5
Buy this Book: Bluebeard: A Novel

Romance of the Western Chamber

A silent Chinese film with jerking eastern theatrical acting, ridiculous head gear and awesome clips of swords clashing. This 45-minute love story is probably one most people could happily skip. Here is the entire film in case your interest is piqued: A scholar randomly stops at a monastery to study. There is a girl living there with her family. The scholar falls in love. Bandits come for the girl. "Whoever saves my daughter can have her hand in marriage" says the mother. The scholar thinks hard. An idea! He sends a brave monk with a letter to a powerful general who comes and defeats the bandits. The scholar is happy and worn out. Crazy dream sequence. "Go pass your exams and my daughter is yours," says the mother. How do you think it ends?
This would probably make a great gift for an Asian-American friend who has lost touch with their Asianness.

Um?
2 out of 5
Buy this movie: Romance of the Western Chamber

Plot: 1
Imagery: 3
Originality: 1
Soundtrack: 2
Overall: 2

The Ice Storm - Rick Moody

This book focuses heavily on masturbation, secrecy, and suburban depravity. The characters are almost all - no, entirely - depressed, depressing, hedonistic people of privilege who, so oppressed by their own sacred boundaries of upper-class-dom, are driven to strange means of pleasure and excitement. The story is centered around the obvious symbolism of a brutal ice storm that freezes the holiday nonsense of New Canaan and maroons the residents in their respective places of deviancy. The adults are drunk and loose and because of that so are the children. Written in quick, confident pop prose, it is almost possible to ignore the hollow plot and glaring metaphors and just enjoy the ride. Perhaps I just don't find the emptiness of American suburbia very interesting, funny, or disturbing, but once again this seems like a good example of over-hyped popular literature (see reviews: Oracle Bones, The Inheritance of Loss).

BOOOOOOOO!
1.5 out of 5
Buy this book: The Ice Storm

Last Tango in Paris

As the title suggests, Bertolucci's famous film is a story of two people engaged in a passionate, somewhat violent, and temporary relationship. Marlon Brando is a wayward American who has been living in Paris for several years. Following a sudden tragedy, he lunges into a secret affair with a malleable young French woman. They go about their 'normal' lives and meet at random in a mostly empty apartment to partake in coital activities, struggling (at the insistence of Brando's character) to maintain anonymity. The man reveals himself to be a deeply disturbed person who is completely disillusioned with conventional human interactions, while the woman (girl, really) continues to return despite other inclinations and a relationship with a kinder, though hyperactive and rather annoying, young filmmaker. The film is lavish, intense, and strangely captivating. The jazzy music swells into sudden torrents of strings and wild tango rhythms and then subsides just as abruptly, much like the emotions of the characters. Not recommended for children or conservatives.

Highly Entertaining
4 out of 5
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Plot: 4
Imagery: 4
Originality: 4
Soundtrack: 4 Last Tango in Paris
Overall: 4

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis - Jose Saramago

A quiet novel from the Nobel Prize winning Portuguese author. The protagonist, Dr. Ricardo Reis, returns to his native city of Lisbon after 16 years of self-imposed exile to Brazil. A poet friend has died. He spends a rather uneventful year in decline, talking to the ghost of his dead friend, mostly living in a hotel where he reads newspapers, wanders the streets, falls in love with a young guest and, of course, sleeps with a maid. With a mixture of magical realism, historical references (it's 1936, war in Europe is eminent and wealthy Spanish refugees slowly clog the city) and careful prose this story has potential to be a captivating and beautiful read. Unfortunately the plot is so stationary in its subtlety that the novel leaves instead an impression of painful tedium, which festers and grows to a near spite by the end when, as throughout, nothing happens. His death, portrayed as his taking his coat and following his dead friend to the graveyard, is a good demonstration of the book as a whole: an old man's detouring, distracted, procrastinated walk to the grave. For readers in reflective, time-abundant situations (patient old people) or academics where each minute detail can be reconstructed and massaged until it releases whatever point is to be found, this book may be good fodder for your arrogance. Otherwise, well worth skipping in a world so full of nourishing drive-thru wisdom.

Um?
2.5 out of 5
Buy this Book: The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis