Photo by Walter Kundzicz

Look out, I’m about to spew words about recent things I’ve consumed.

Netflix movies

Death Race 2000: Pretty goddamn brilliant. Proto-Starship Troopers-style sci-fi exploitation with a nice satirical bite. There’s a lot of Roger Corman productions on Netflix these days and I’m eating em up. The Big Bird Cage was another good one, also Switchblade Sisters. I love exploitation’s total embrace of excess and feeling: it’s horror, sex and violence congealed and lobbed right at your face. Which doesn’t always make it palatable, but at least it doesn’t pull any punches.

Theater movies

Gone: I saw this with a friend who has a thing for Amanda Seyfried. Afterwards I totally got it, because Seyfried turned in a great peformance. She was crafty, intense and unreadable. The movie kept me entertained. Low expectations are always a good thing. I loved Amanda Seyfried’s blue car.

We Need to Talk About Kevin: What a weird-ass movie. In fact it was best in its most weird and abstract moments. The problem was it was so fucking looong. I loved the fact that it was a movie about a school massacre where we won’t supposed to give a shit about the victims, it was all about the mom. It was a maternal horror story, but the horror stuff, especially toward the end, wasn’t punchy enough, it dragged and groaned. The brutal office party scene sticks with me, as does the opening sequence.

Books

The Hunger Games: Clearly readable, an achievement that one shouldn’t gloss over (even though I just did). I’m sure a million amateur pundits have weighed in on this already, but it’s truly a testament to how far we’ve come as a nation that an exploitation story about teenagers killing one another (and not having sex, of course) is one of our most popular stories among kids and adults. The romance was weak, as was the fact that they changed the rules halfway in. On the fence as to whether I’ll read the next two.

Champion, Photographs by Walter Kundzicz: I haven’t said much about my trip to New York a couple weekends ago, but geez, it was kinda brilliant and I kinda kicked some ass. I sold copies of Backwoods at the Rainbow Book Fair, and my table happened to face that of photographer Reed Massengill. After I got over my jealousy of how many books he was selling we had an enjoyable time in one another’s company. He has several books of photography and they’re pretty brilliant, erotic and human. But before the day was over I traded him one of my collages for this book of photographs, which he edited. It’s fantastic not only for the brilliant Kodachrome colors and hot dudes. Kundzicz has a sense of humor and poses his dopey muscle men with all kinds of esoteric fetish objects: football helmets, pitchforks, dish racks, eye patches, binoculars, telephones…the list is endless. It’s absolutely hilarious and unique.

Shirtlifter by Steve MacIsaac: I picked up several issues of this comic when I was Chicago some time ago and I’ve been meaning to write about it since. Anybody who enjoys stories of modern gay white men (re: Weekend) would do themselves a service to check these comics out, which are unflinchingly honest and crisply told. Lots of sex, though whether it’s erotic or not is sort of up for grabs. I’m more a fan of the strong, melancholy narration.

MOVIES

1) Meek’s Cutoff
A slow-motion picture by anybody’s estimation, with lots of long takes where nothing much happens, that is nevertheless filled with tension. Reichardt gives the audience choices. Do you care about these people enough to feel anxious about what will happen to them? Does the hubris of the whole American enterprise render them unsympathetic? Are strangers to be generally trusted or feared? The final scene offers a conundrum that is as politically relevant as anything I’ve seen this year.

2) Drive
Stylized to within an inch of its life. Every element in harmony. That the soundtrack and the costumes already have a life of their own says something about the potency of the vision here – this is one that’s going to stick around for a while, one that will instantly garner a cult.

3) Tree of Life
Saw this one in the front row of a packed movie theater. Near the end of the film I was closing my eyes frequently because it was all too much, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Staggered out of the theater 2+ hours later feeling like a veil had been put over my eyes, or maybe lifted from them – the world looked different for a good while, my perception had been altered.

4) Weekend

5) Cedar Rapids

Good not great: Melancholia, Tabloid, The Skin I Live In, Take Shelter, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, Bridesmaids

Need to see: Margaret, The Future, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Carnage, Win Win, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Young Adult, Fright Night, Our Idiot Brother, Another Earth, Kaboom!, We Were Here

MUSIC
(in no particular order)

Smith Westerns, Dye It Blonde: Listened to this one maybe more than any of the others this year. Every single song is good.

Black Lips, Arabia Mountain

Dum Dum Girls, Only in Dreams

Papercuts, Fading Parade

Crystal Stilts, In Love With Oblivion

R.E.M., Collapse Into Now

Real Estate, Days: I resisted this band for as long as I could, cause every time I tried them out it sounded so bland. But I think the blandness is sort of the point. This is easy-listening music for ***sters, and it doesn’t come much lovelier (and it sounds a lot like Felt).

Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Belong: Mostly for this song.

Cults, s/t

Jon Raymond is an Oregon-based writer you should get to know and appreciate. He’s published a novel, which I haven’t read, and a short story collection, Livability, which I highly recommend. He’s most well known from his collaborations with the filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, in fact two stories from Livability were made into films directed by Reichardt:  ”Old Joy” and “Wendy and Lucy” (starring Michelle Williams).  Both of them are well worth your time and attention.

In fact I’d rank “Wendy and Lucy” easily in one of my top-ten movie-going experiences. The tone of it is singular, pitched low but humming with emotional intensity. When the credits came up I had the curious experience of being glued to my seat, wracked with emotion, all but sobbing, while one row ahead of me old ladies bitched and complained about how terrible it was, how nothing happened. The film, about a young woman in dire economic straights, almost acts as a moral litmus test: how much are we supposed to care about one another?

Now, Raymond and Reichardt’s third collaboration, “Meek’s Cutoff,” is in limited release. It’s going to take forever for it to get to Pittsburgh but I’m patient.

Also, Raymond wrote the script for Todd Haynes’ mini-series adaptation of “Mildred Pierce,” which is currently showing on HBO, to which I don’t subscribe, so I’m coveting that experience too.

Repost from old blog, 10/9/2006

“In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing. But if you’re using sex to sell sneakers, then you’re not just selling sneakers, you’re selling sex as well, and you’re contributing to the sexual temperature of society. You’re going to get people who, unsurprisingly, become overheated in that kind of sexual environment, and if they attempt to assuage their desires by resorting to the widely available medium of pornography, they’re going to have their moment of gratification, and then they’re going to have a much longer period of self-loathing, disgust, shame and embarrassment. It’s almost like a kind of a reverse Skinner-box experiment, where once the rat has pushed the lever and successfully received the food, then he gets the electric shock.”
–Alan Moore

I just finished reading Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s incredible graphic novel Lost Girls. I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect from this book, even though I was intrigued after reading interviews with Moore (the quote below is from a wonderful interview with the Onion AV Club, and I urge you to read it because it nearly blew my mind). Being somewhat of a [novice] student of erotica, though, I had to pick it up.

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I uploaded my favorite scene from the underrated 2005 Mary Harron film “The Notorious Bettie Page” to YouTube. Lili Taylor’s words here always make me emotional, and remind me of this quote from Roger Ebert: “It isn’t the sad people in movies who make me cry, it’s the good ones.”

- It subverted genre cliches deftly. Every drug movie needs a moment when the addict hits bottom and finally examines himself, I thought it was pretty clever that “The Fighter” had its drug addict character quite literally watch himself in an HBO documentary (the filming of which frames the first third of the movie).

- Marky Mark is in great shape and showing as much skin as in his you-know-you-masturbated-to-him Calvin Klein days.  One could create a convincing argument that he looks even better with a little meat and age to him.

- Christian Bale created a wholly convincing, endearing, sad crack addict character.

- It made me want to see more boxing movies. People in the audience actually cheered during the final fight, and clapped at the end.

- It’s doing well, so it’s a sort of financial redemption for David O. Russell after “I Heart Huckabees,” meaning maybe he’ll get to make another movie soon, which would be great news. “Three Kings” might be one of the best war movies ever made, if you could call it a war movie.

- Great soundtrack. They used a Breeders song, ’nuff said.

- It’s spirited. Even when it threatens to depict the local color a little cartoonishly, it’s a welcome spin in a genre that could easily devolve into dour gravitas.

- There were at least two “Marky Mark’s butt in sweatpants” shots that could be construed as gratuitous.

For all these reasons and more, “The Fighter” is deserving of your time.

a.k.a. “How I Spent My Depressing Saturday Night”

This movie is such a touchy subject.  All I’m going to say about its veracity-related issues is that I wish they didn’t bother me as much as they did.  Imagine if somebody made a movie about you – using your name, appearance, known aspects of your personal and professional life – but created you into a character that would forever alter how you were seen by the world.  God only knows who the fuck the real Mark Zuckerberg is, but everyone who sees that movie – me included – is going to think they know him, and that he’s basically a sociopath.

That said, I enjoyed it.  I can’t say I was overly impressed by the writing – honestly this might be the first Aaron Sorkin project I’ve ever seen – though the fast pace and rhythm was refreshing at least, and there were some choice zingers.  It’s more Fincher’s movie, for my money, and the best sequence comes early with a series of shots of Zuckerberg walking across the ersatz Harvard campus.  Visually (and aurally, as supplemented by Trent Reznor’s tense, menacing score) the sequence is moody and evocative, similar in look and effect to that wonderful shot of suburban houses near the start of Fincher’s “Zodiac,” in the way that neither quite look like anything you’ve ever seen before.  Jim Emerson has some great thoughts on that sequence over here (it’s the best piece I’ve read so far about this movie).

Repost from old blog, 9/26/2006

I just finished a book, The Girl in the Box by Ouida Sebestyen. I suppose it could be considered a teen novel, and from what I understand a lot of teen girls read and were freaked out by it around the time when it was published in 1988. The jacket is beautiful in its way [and the cover displayed above, though similar to the original design, is not the same. The original is an illustration, not a photograph, and is much darker and more expressionistic], perfect in its design, and it would fit comfortably on the shelf next to V.C. Andrew’s Flowers in the Attic and Morton Rue’s The Wave, though I’m not sure I could explain why (something to do with perfect cover designs, explosive subject matter, and nostalgia). It definitely runs laps around both of those books, writing-wise.

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Repost from old blog, 8/5/2008

The Stoned Age (1994)

You’d think that “The Stoned Age,” an unabashadley low-budget, straight-to-video film, wouldn’t fit in the pantheon of classic stoner movies such as “The Big Lebowski” and “Dazed and Confused” (“Happy Face” is also up there for me). Mostly you’d be right. The film is almost relentlessly ugly, misogynistic and homophobic. Plus they only smoke weed once, and it’s schwag.

But it must be said that “The Stoned Age” has a charm all its own. Is it better than “Dazed and Confused”? Not by a long shot. But amid all those underlit interiors and garishly colored body fluids lies a pretty solid script. It moves at a steady clip, and by the end, you may be surprised to find yourself actually caring about the characters. There are some moments of subtle humor (the oft-repeating “just some guy” description) that had me laughing out loud.

Full Disclosure: I probably watched this a million times when I was in high school, but under the impression that I was watching it ironically. This is the first time I’ve seen it in years, and I could sort of appreciate the modest skill that goes into creating its characters.

Recommended? Yes.