Coraline Jones

I'm a sucker for handmade films. The work of Jan Svankmajer leaps to mind as paragon of the form, especially his seminal interpretation of Alice. Now there's another magical adolescent in the arena: Coraline Jones.

A true indicator of a film's awesome factor is its effect on youth. Bored kids in the theatre are worse than a bout of Dengue fever, talking on the phone or with each other, hurling epithets at the screen and generally running amuck, caring nothing for the experience of anyone else unfortunate enough to be there. If you are at a screening of Wild Strawberries, it would be entirely in keeping with social mores to soundly evacuate the ruffians and restore necessary calm; at a matinee of The Nightmare Before Christmas, on the other hand, you might need to take the chaos as an indicator that the film has failed to reach its target audience. Fortunately Henry Selick, the director of Nightmare, knows how to create an engaging story for all ages and there have been a dearth of riots at screenings of what is recognised as a handmade classic. Selick has struck again and dare I say surpassed himself with his adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline.

I arrived at the evening show ready to enjoy the film. It was my birthday and judging from the buzz surrounding Coraline, I was expecting it to be good. Just how good, however, I could not imagine. Nor could the noisy adolescents who came rumbling into the theatre in the midst of previews. Great, I thought, the night is ruined. They settled in a couple rows away and proceeded to mock the 3D glasses and whatever preview happened to be showing, either Pixar's UP (the simple premise of which could be promising) or Dreamworks' Monsters vs Aliens (a Pixar wannabe that nevertheless could be fun). Within a few minutes their racket died down, coincident with the start of Coraline, and was never heard again: they were completely and utterly silenced by the film, and like me found themselves in a mesmerized state for the next 90 minutes.

What stronger recommendation do you need?

1001 Movies You Must See

Friends, there is a new blog where myself and other film aficionados will be posting reviews as we wind our way down a very long list of "must see" movies. Come check us out!

Farewell Andrew Wyeth

The great American painter Andrew Wyeth died peacefully in his sleep today, abed in his beloved Pennsylvania. His works have been a profound source of encouragement and joy for most of my mature existence and I mourn his passing as I would a dear friend.

What Spidey Can Teach Obama

Yesterday a special issue of Spider Man's comic hit the stands in which he meets President-Elect Barack Obama (no, I did not buy it). Other than being a tawdry method of generating sales, as the fan website newsarama points out, there is a valuable lesson Spidey can impart to the incoming President:

The Press Isn't Your Friend!

As our friendly neighborhood wall crawler has learned time and again, getting your name in the headlines is not always grand. While Obama is unlikely to be called a "masked menace to society" any time too soon, as Spidey is daily in the editorial pages of the Daily Bugle (the comic book version of The New York Post), he will surely be the subject of many pundits ugly or uglier than J Jonah Jameson.

Note to Obama: Spidey usually responds by webbing Jameson's pants to a chair

96 Films To See Before Dying

The ever-intrepid Rollerkaty introduced me to a book that is sure to dominate the rest of her natural existence: 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. Katy and her husband never have to worry about what to watch again, it's all right there in the book.

Pondering the huge commitment of watching more than one thousand "must-see" movies, I've found myself breaking out in cold shakes and developing strange skin afflictions -the pressure is too much! Don't get me wrong: an avid filmgoer since an early age, I have no doubt that I've seen at least a thousand movies. Putting it into such a formal list, however, makes the wieght of such viewing all too palpable and is for one so sensitive as myself an intolerable burden.

What to do? I've a notion...

What if the number were less? What if one were asked to watch two movies a week for one year in order to achieve cinema legitimacy? -the suggestion that movies exist we must see before death implies that not having seen them makes us somehow less. Wouldn't a lower number be more realistic?

While I do not necessarily adhere to the idea that you have to see certain movies in order to have "lived", there is nevertheless something wonderful in experiencing the arts that brings greater dimension to life. Stay tuned as I progress in narrowing the "96 Films To See Before Dying".

I'm open to suggestions. Please feel free to share a film or three that you consider essential.

Two Great Tastes...

The Shaw for Delicious Gluttony Must Be Stopped But Can't goes to: Haagen Dazs' Chocolate Peanut Butter ice cream.

It gets inside. The other day I was reading that there's a parasite, toxoplasma gondii, that creates in its host an attraction to the smell of cat urine. I've got one of those, but for the smell of chocolate peanut butter ice cream.

Cal-Raven's Ladder

The Shaw for Most Anticipated Sequel in Books is...

-the third in Jeffrey Overstreet's Thread Series: Cal-Raven's Ladder. Auralia's Colors (image above) is the first, Cyndere's Midnight the second in Overstreet's four-part fantasy series. With each book, the storytelling gets better and the characters more engaging, and from what I've seen of the third book so far the author is continuing to take us onward and upward.

Check out this series to see why I am eagerly anticipating Cal-Raven's Ladder.

A World of Music and Ideas

This year's Shaw for Consistent Excellence in Radio Diversity goes to...

I am a recent convert to KBCS 91.3, having stumbled across them after my cassette player gave up the ghost. Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, they have the most diverse/eclectic radio programming I've seen in a single station, mixing social consciousness with funk, jazz, soul, electronica, medieval, latin, zydeco, R&B, Indian ragga... the list goes on and on. They stream online and maintain an excellent archive of past shows: definitely worth checking out.

Spoiler Alert

I can always count on Wooster Collective for good material, and they have earned the Shaw this year for Best Spoiler Art for Family Film, with this graffiti:


(watch out, it's a spoiler)

The Shaw Award

Are you like me, fed up with all these award shows that operate on the same template? How many different ways do we want to be told what the best album/film/book of the year was? Oscar has one opinion, the Golden Globes another: different ceremonies, same award categories. Zzzz...

I'm looking for a more personal approach. We live in an age of You/Space/Book, where the things we love as individuals have a public platform. Rather than continue operating off the old model, I wish to suggest a new standard: The Shaw Award.

The Shaw Award is a cascade of highly-peculiar categories that directly respond to specific things that made a year great. Watch this space for the month of January to see just what I mean. In the spirit of the Oscars, these will be referred heretofore as "The Shaws".

The Shaw for the I'm Not Heath Ledger Performance of the Year award goes to:


The Joker!
(Not to be confused with Heath Ledger's other masterpiece, A Knight's Tale)

Seriously, watch The Dark Knight and see if Heath Ledger doesn't completely vanish inside his performance. It's one of the most incredible transformations of an actor I've ever seen.

Eartha Kitt 1927-2008

Like many of you, my first time seeing Eartha Kitt was as Catwoman on the cornball 60's Batman tv show; what placed her permanently in my heart was listening years later to her rendition of "I Want to be Evil":

Yuletide Wish List

Inspired by my good friend over at Rollerblog, here is my wish list for the season: an archery kit and laptop (because I haven't gotten around to buying them for myself), Star Trek: The Motion Picture dvd (so I can stop listening to the soundtrack and driving my housemates batty), and a nice 1964 paperback edition of I am Legend by Richard Matheson (because Will Smith does not belong on the cover of this excellent novella).

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

This is one of those films we like to call a "hum dinger"...

As you can tell from the above image, Donald Sutherland is not pleased with you. Or to be more precise, the alien pod thing that has taken over Mr Sutherland's existence is not happy, really, with any human being remaining in the city of San Francisco. When he sees a human, he points, he squints, he screams. Not a happy moment for anyone involved, especially if you're human.

Wonderful film. Check it out if you happen to be in the mood for pod people (and when are you not?).

Why I Enjoy Fringe

My one hour of television viewing each week is on Tuesday to watch Fringe. Last night sidling up to the tube, my housemate was watching the end of her show and when I sat down she said, "Are you watching 'Cringe' or whatever?" That's the love in our house. Against the grain go I. Esoteric science mixed with conspiratorial derring-do, smart dialogue and enough mystery to generate a thousand harebrained theories -what's not to enjoy?

Yesterday's was the last episode for a few weeks and quite eventful it was. One of the "fringe" elements in the show is memory overlap, specifically between the main character, Olivia Dunham, and the man who betrayed her, John Scott. In the show pilot (sadly the worst episode of the season thus far) Olivia entered his memory to retrieve information crucial to that week's plot. This was tricky: John was dead at the time.
Subsequently she has seen him pop up in random places. It turns out that parts of his memory overlapped with hers and now reside in her brain, and as a result she sometimes experiences his memory as her own.

Sound confusing? Over the stretch of several episodes, the show has worked admirably to explain this phenomenon to the audience, culminating in a great moment last night when Olivia mistook one of John's memories for her own. In a previous episode she actually went into one of his memories to search for clues, very Charlie Kaufman-esque with creepy overtones of lost love gone terribly wrong.

One of the show's core strengths is the relationship between Dr Walter Bishop and his son, Peter. They are wonderful. Joshua Jackson plays Peter with a lot of soul -which I suppose fans of Dawson's Creek will recognize. John Noble, last seen as Denethor in the Lord of the Rings, treads a thin line with his character, teetering between cute nonsense and scientific brilliance, finding at the intersection a fascinating study in obsessive behavior.

The show has it's problems. One of the villains is a Hannibal Lecter knockoff, while others are under-cooked. The actress who plays Olivia could use some coaching on how to act outside of the one-note range. Nevertheless, there's nothing else so weird and fun like Fringe on tv these days, and to judge from the season so far, it's just going to get better.

Farewell Old Friend

13 years ago on the eve of moving to San Francisco, I purchased a double-deck Sony cassette player. Last night the last of its belts gave out. After blasting Al Green in the late evening, I flipped the tape and after pressing PLAY was met with the telltale squeals of a tapehead belt that no longer rolls at the correct speed. This was the right-hand deck. The left-hand deck wore out a few months ago in the midst of a dubbing session. It was only a matter of time...
Thirteen years. Not bad. Nobody expects a cellphone to function that long, let alone the medium of a defunct technology. (Oddly enough, the CD player was the first component to fail, lasting less than a year.) I will miss my friend and companion.

The Proposition

Damn good film.

It was inevitable that I would see a film written and scored by Nick Cave, and this was well worth the wait. Fittingly enough the director John Hillcoat is adapting Cormac McCarthy's The Road for the screen. Should be a perfect fit.

Paradoxing

Though I am not versant with cooperative multiplayer gameplay online, I am aware that it is extremely popular. Call it the virtual option for competitive personalities who are not otherwise inclined to athletics. Folks get heated in these games, facing off against each other in virtual sports and shooter arenas, and often the language used reflects players' passion for victory. By hurling racial epithets, a player seeks to disorient others and thereby distract them from playing effectively.

Psychologists call this behavior “paradoxing,” and it’s a classic attempt to gain the upper hand, to become dominant. Competitively, writes Owen Good, this frustrates and angers and diverts player concentration out of the game. Cooperatively, this aggression trumps decision-making and leadership on the arena of play.

What's unique here is that online you cannot see your fellow players. Consequently, you can out-paradox someone and undermine their crude strategy by simply asking, "What if I told you I was a minority?" While you may or may not be someone sensitive to the epithets, this question causes the other player to stop and wonder and effectively fall victim to their own behavior.

Then again, you can always take advantage of another unique aspect of online play and simply hit "mute" on the other players and listen to your favorite mix of zen techno.

Inspirations

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

The opening paragraph of Shirley Jackson's novel, The Haunting of Hill House, should scare the beans out of any aspiring writer. The grace and impact of the simple prose are awesome.

Music is a large part of my writing process. Of late, the 4th symphony of Brahms plays constantly on my decrepit cassette deck. Symphonies in general are conducive to the writing of novels, I find, and are in regular rotation when I am locked away inside my blue light pod pummeling at the page. The symphonies of Brahms lately drive me on, as well as those of Dvorak and (inevitably) Beethoven.

The Arc of History

"The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice." -Dr Martin Luther King, 1963
"Americans put their hands on the arc of history and bent it toward the hope of a better day." -Barack Obama, 2008

Don't Forget to Vote

"Gum Election is a guerilla art project which started in New York City in October 2008. It should encourage people to vote on November 04th and also not to spit out their chewing gums carelessly on New York Cities already dirty streets."