There’s a part of me that thinks Adam Brody is basically a star.

And - look at this speech! It’s incredible. It basically could’ve gone straight in a John Hughes film with ease. Good writing.

The Last American Man →

tetw:

by Elizabeth Gilbert

Eustace Conway is not like any man you know. He’s got perfect vision, perfect balance, perfect reflexes and travels through life with perfect equanimity. He is smart and fearless and believes he can do anything he sets his mind to - like saving America.

Read this article, it’s amazing, and the book is amazing too. Elizabeth Gilbert’s journalism made me want to go into writing, which is why it’s been hard to see Eat Pray Love become such a monster that people think it’s the only book she ever wrote.

“It was in that context that The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou came out in December 2004. Oozing ambition out of every pore and self-consciousness with every move, the movie remains the most divisive entry in the Anderson canon. Unscientific measures like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes rate it as his worst, a judgment with which this Anderson fan concurs. He was approaching the pinnacle of his cultural influence—the “Wes wannabe” was fast becoming the decade’s version of the Tarantino imitator—and had made a movie that felt more like an exhibition. It was the work of an artist who had become the curator of his own style. Seven years later, it remains Exhibit A in the case against Anderson—and, paradoxically, a reminder of his value to film culture.”

— An apt article on Wes Anderson’s work, from Reverse Shot. I do think that Anderson’s work - and its legacy - has certainly suffered from the fact that so many films have aped Anderson’s style. Seeing Aquatic in theaters was a nightmare, however. Every “joke” was just funny for weirdness’ sake, and there was nothing to care about.

"I'm here to make a movie. I'm not here to make friends." - David Fincher on his career

[What killed this piece? The fact that the US-remake Dragon Tattoo trailer leaked that very weekend in the States. But I had a glorious 24 hours where I was one of the first people who saw the trailer! Note: Fincher superfans in Sweden all resembled Meatloaf in Fight Club, which was odd.]

David Fincher took a break from day 133 of shooting on his American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to make an appearance at the Stockholm Film Insitute’s “Actors Studio” at the Cinemateket on Friday, May 27th, where he talked about his directing career to an audience of scruffy Swedes with movie dreams. Showing flashes of self-deprecation and his famous steely reputation, he was funny and frank, whether talking about the failure of his debut feature, or his advice to today’s aspiring filmmakers (“write a script and make a film, this is an interesting enough generation with no excuses”), along with tantalizing hints about his upcoming version of Stieg Larsson’s best-seller.

The session ended with the red band teaser trailer for Dragon Tattoo on the big screen, the sounds of Led Zepplin’s “Immigrant Song,” with vocals by Karen O, booming, quick cuts of Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara as the leads - shots that were pointedly recognizable from the original, revealing nothing, and the tagline was wicked, classic Fincher: “The feel bad movie of Christmas.”

On Aliens 3: “I was lucky enough - my first movie stunk. For my second movie, I siezed control. You have to find the thing you will kill to make and make it a certain way. I’m here to make a movie. I’m not here to make friends. But you can’t say that the first time, because it’s kind of douchey.”

On Seven: “The violence of Seven is psychological, which is part of what I thought was powerful about the script. It was far more horrible because it exists in this Pandora’s Box of the imagination. You remember it differently from what you see.”

On Fight Club: “When I first read Chuck Palahniuk’s book, I couldn’t stop laughing. It was so sick and funny at the same time. I embraced it immediately.” While the failure of the film in the theaters was a matter of timing (too close to the Columbine shootings), “it sold 13 or 14 million DVDs. It paid for itself five times over on DVD.”

On The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: “Another movie about death. I loved the metaphor. If you could go in the other direction - beauty, vitality, youth - when you know what to do with it, chronological events conspire to bring you regret, to bring you loss.”

On Dragon Tattoo: “We found a place [on location] three weeks ago that was like ‘Yes, this is why we’re shooting in Stockholm. The cobblestone streets… [The Swedish original] is a really handsome thriller with a towering performance by the girl. Hard to follow.”

On directing: “It’s a circus, it takes 90 people at least. You have to understand what people are going to be best responsible for managing this entity, otherwise you’ll just be pissed off and irritated, which I am all the time anyways. I’m just now getting what storytelling is, the thing that you’re going there to catch, lightning in a bottle. It’s great to have a technical background and to know the physics so you can get to the thing that’s really important - the moment that people surprise you. I tell people, I’m selling immortality. If we do this and do it well, it will last forever.”

From a 2008 interview I did with Jeff Nichols, the director of Shotgun Stories* (go see it on the biggest, prettiest screen you can find - 35 mm of gorgeously shot film) and the upcoming Take Shelter:

One thing I was curious about, Michael Shannon and his weird head?

It’s enormous, isn’t it? I had never met him in person before, but you couldn’t miss him coming down the escalator at the airport. But there’s something interesting that happens when you put him on film. It kind of evens itself out. 

He’s a fantastic actor with an interesting face that’s handsome from some corners and Willem Dafoe from others.

My fiancée’s maid of honor actually thinks he’s totally hot and I’m just baffled by it.

* In some ways, Shotgun Stories is reminiscent of a David Gordon Green film if David Gordon Green kept going with atmospheric southern art films and didn’t make the leap into the mainstream that brought us Eastbound and Down, Your Highness, The Pineapple Express, and the wonderful-looking (sarcasm) The Sitter. The evolution of David Gordon Green, however, is another post entirely!

“Part of the nature of culture is that we retell stories that are meaningful to us, again and again, in different ways,” Mr. Jenkins said, pointing to Homer’s “Iliad,” Virgil’s “Aeneid” and Dante’s “Inferno” as “continual reboots of Greek mythology.”

Viral things you could do

These are some really good ideas that I’ve had that I don’t have the time, obsession and inclination to do. But if they’re in your wheelhouse go for it!

1) Create the ultimate mash-up DJ mix of Violent Femmes’ s/t classic and the Taylor Swift songs that would go with it. Imagine the really cool photoshopped cover! It would be pretty epic since Violent Femmes feel like uber teenage boy and Taylor Swift can be uber teenage girl. The girl that the Violent Femmes are trying to date is DEFINITELY Taylor Swift.

2) Someone should really soundtrack a whole South Park episode to Beach House’s Teen Dream. The results would be both trippy and ethereal. Like Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz!

Recent lessons

1) It’s hard to realize that you can love something, but despite the quality of your love, something doesn’t have to love you back. It’s also difficult to realize that stupid dating techniques of treating people poorly - like my favorite, the a couple of good dates and then disappearing fadeout - are fully applicable to all sorts of categories in life, not just person-looking-for-someone-to-love. These love metaphors are even more difficult to wrap your head around when you’re dealing with things in the category of “career” and “apartment” as opposed to “relationship.” Courtship has its roles in all sorts of facets of your life! Even when you feel like you’re done with courtship in the traditional sense.

2) There’s something really dissonant about finding award-worthy performances in mediocre television shows. Exhibit A: Ian Hart realistically - it’s disturbing, really - embodying a schizophrenic in “Courtney Cox runs a Tabloid,” or the show that you may remember since Cox and Jennifer Aniston kissed during one episode (the only real promotion it got, right?), Dirt.

3) In the pantheon of films women my age grew up on (Pretty Woman, Pretty in Pink, Dirty Dancing, Empire Records, Reality Bites) Dirty Dancing was never my fave. It always just seemed like abortions and endless dance montages. But I never really gave it a chance. I never sat down and watched it the whole way through, and I didn’t grow up with it playing on an endless cable loop. However, recently, I decided to rewatch it, since it popped up on Hulu - and it’s kind of good! Particularly the first 45 minutes or so. You can tell, just by the very personal, intimate tone, that it was written by a woman. It’s a shame that by the halfway point, it devolves into about 8 dance montages in a row. That’s what turned me off the film as a kid. I understand why it’s been called “Star Wars for girls.” I can’t imagine a remake.

Stu is surprised at the Cooperstown Farm Museum, a series, 2010

Stalking Stieg Larsson

This spring, exiting the Stockholm-Arlanda airport, I found myself in a hall which enthusiastically proclaimed, “Welcome to Sweden!” From its walls, huge portraits of the country’s greatest cultural exports greeted me, head shot after head shot. There were actors and directors (Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Ingmar Bergman), austere portraits of authors (Astrid Lindgren, August Strindberg), and, in 1970s color, ABBA under disco lights, and Bjorn Borg, whacking a tennis ball. At the end of this procession, as if its grand finale, was a full-body photograph of Stieg Larsson. His head rested on his hand, in a position not unlike that of Rodin’s thinker. It’s a familiar photograph, the same one that appears on the back of each of his books: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

(I wrote this for The Paris Review. Read more here…)

Avoid this movie!

Because I care, I want you to know: Friends With Benefits is so limp, so flaccid, that I walked out of the theater after 40 minutes. The promise of glorious AC couldn’t even keep me in the building. And it was marginally better than No Strings Attached!

The sort of tragic thing about the movie was the giant poster of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, situated behind Kunis’ bed. Kunis and Timberlake were jabbering, bantering, and it wanted to be screwball comedy but it was mostly just bad jokes, back and forth, forever. The lines, they felt like lines. Even though Kunis has charm and screwball timing - to a degree, mind you - Timberlake was just a big smug zero. When Patricia Clarkson walks in and spells out “L-O-M-B-A-R-D” for some reason (Carole Lombard shoutout, obvs), there’s actually a smidge of fizz between her, Timberlake, and Kunis, but then it went away again. Kunis actually had a little chemistry with Bryan Greenberg, who plays some doctor she dates, and it just made Timberlake’s suckiness all the more obvious. But really, Emma Stone screaming on the phone in a cameo, or even her glowering picture coming up on an iPhone, was funnier than anything here, as she is actually someone with some screwball DNA.

If screwball jokes are going to be funny, they kind of have to be coming from a place of wit, whether it’s wordplay, acute observations about characterization, whatever, anything, but these were just words. It made me think fondly of the Gilmore Girls (better jabber, better actors who could handle said jabber) and In the Loop (actually the best screwball comedy of the past whatever years… and it was about politics! What?). And the actual titillation of having sex with your impossibly good-looking friends wasn’t there at all - what I don’t understand about both of these movies is that they make sex seem so boring. Shouldn’t there be some fizzle? Some intellectual verve and chemistry? Something in the eyes? People talking about sex before they do it makes it seem like such a transaction. Something Pulp would’ve sang about on This Is Hardcore. Come on! I would buy it more if these characters have a hot sexy time and then sort of argue on the parameters.

I didn’t even get into the repeated flash mob jokes, the lame 90s references of Third Eye Blind and Semisonic’s “Closing Time,” and the fact that the film was muddy and ugly. The extent of the film’s ugliness was really pretty appalling - exterior shots of New York, made to make the city seem glorious and inviting, had digital noise and grain on the edges. Most of the acting two shots seemed to be in front of a green screen, with New York city scenes added afterwards. (Probably the case!) There was nothing seamless about it. A few lame jokes doesn’t make it ok. A glorious New York-set rom com is a lovely thing to aspire to!

At least I don’t have to see the preview for Crazy, Stupid Love anymore. I have it memorized by now. I kind of can’t buy Ryan Gosling as a boring metrosexual superstud, I have to admit. Timberlake, on the other hand…

whitehinterland:

While it’s on my mind, really think it’s about time we revisit the work of my hero D’Angelo. Just in the way Aaliyah’s musicbecome such a touchstone for post-millenial musicians, I hear echoes of D’Angelo (and ?uestlove’s j-dilla inspired grooves on Voodoo) in much of today’s left-of-center R&B. Seriously, if this song doesn’t get it going for you, we need to have ourselves a little tete a tete. -xoxc

Casey is so right, and this video is awesome. D'Angelo on tour for Voodoo was the best concert I’ve ever, ever, ever seen. Something magical was going on. Picture the extent of the feminine hysteria in the room - 5,000 women standing on fold-out chairs and screaming like lusting banshees for two hours straight. When D'Angelo ran out into the crowd, wearing a wifebeater, he came back and the tank top was a mere necklace of fabric around his neck, ripped completely to shreds. He ended with a twenty minute vamp of “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)” where one by one, his twenty person band left the stage and then it was just D, alone, with a keyboard, saying “I love you, Boston. Do you love me?”

The reply? “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”