Monday, January 29, 2007
Much More Exciting Than One Hand Clapping...
Or much creepier depending on how much of an arachnophobe you are. The sounds of spiders mating, enjoy.
Monday, January 08, 2007
Movie Review: Monster
This movie kept popping up in my path over the past 3 years. I knew Charlize Theron had won an Academy Award for her role as Aileen Wuornos. I had heard words such as "powerful", and "chilling" used to describe it, but somehow I had always kind of passed it by on the shelf at the library, clicked by it on cable, thinking, "I'm sure it's great and all, but I would really rather watch "The Simpsons" right now." I recalled watching about 1o minutes of it a few months back and the scene in which Theron's character describes having her newborn baby taken away after giving birth in a home for unwed mothers was so depressing that I switched back to the Style network.
Lo and behold, I was flicking through channels on Friday night and it was on IFC again. It was kind of weird, because I quickly realized that I had started watching it again pretty much at the exact point where I had left off the first time. And this time, I couldn't click away. I've recently been undergoing a rebellion against my film school background and was getting some kind of perverse pleasure gorging myself on "Isaac" and "Access Hollywood". Screw you Jonas Mekas! Tara Reid had a botched boob job but she's bravely bouncing back from her downfall. "Clap for her people!" Between that and coming of age in an era where Julia Robert's character in "Pretty Woman" was supposed to be inspiring, I really have an aversion to movies about prostitutes. It's usually either some kind of Lifetime Channel-infused ABC After School Special for grownups about what kinds of horrible things happen to people who don't go to college, or it's some kind of trumped up fairytale about a hooker with a "heart of gold".
That kind of media atmosphere is what makes Theron's character so fascinating to watch. There's a lot of scenes where you can tell that she wants that heart of gold, but deep down she knows that she's really got a heart of battery acid. And thank you, makeup department for turning Ms. Theron into something so much more than that brand of "Hollywood" plain jane like Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce". There are quite a few times when she looks so believably wasted and shot-to-hell that I found myself leaning back in my seat. Thank god I didn't see this on the big screen.
And there's a lot more to this film than some overly stylized glossy movie about what Hollywood people think lower middle class Anglo-Saxon Americans act, think and look like. (Tony Scott, I'm looking at you.) Aileen Wuornos' only glamour is the fact that she is so unsettlingly real. She's the woman you've seen sobbing outside a casino at 3am in Las Vegas. She's the one you saw washing her hair in the sink at a truckstop in Montana on your post-college cross country road trip. She's the one arguing with her partner at the bus station until the security guard walks over. She's the woman who kept bugging you and your friends for cigarettes at that seedy motel you stayed at. She's someone everyone has seen out the corner of their eye and kept moving, not wanting to really know or get involved.
It actually turned out to be a pretty good movie which was more than I expected. There was a scene in a lawyer's office when Aileen tries to quit hooking and get "one of them office type jobs" that was hilarious. The lawyer is the first person who actually has the guts to tell Aileen that she is wasting his time and has wasted her life and she verbally lets go with both barrels at him. I started laughing until I realized that I was rooting for a woman who killed seven people. I really like films that do that to me.
Lo and behold, I was flicking through channels on Friday night and it was on IFC again. It was kind of weird, because I quickly realized that I had started watching it again pretty much at the exact point where I had left off the first time. And this time, I couldn't click away. I've recently been undergoing a rebellion against my film school background and was getting some kind of perverse pleasure gorging myself on "Isaac" and "Access Hollywood". Screw you Jonas Mekas! Tara Reid had a botched boob job but she's bravely bouncing back from her downfall. "Clap for her people!" Between that and coming of age in an era where Julia Robert's character in "Pretty Woman" was supposed to be inspiring, I really have an aversion to movies about prostitutes. It's usually either some kind of Lifetime Channel-infused ABC After School Special for grownups about what kinds of horrible things happen to people who don't go to college, or it's some kind of trumped up fairytale about a hooker with a "heart of gold".
That kind of media atmosphere is what makes Theron's character so fascinating to watch. There's a lot of scenes where you can tell that she wants that heart of gold, but deep down she knows that she's really got a heart of battery acid. And thank you, makeup department for turning Ms. Theron into something so much more than that brand of "Hollywood" plain jane like Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce". There are quite a few times when she looks so believably wasted and shot-to-hell that I found myself leaning back in my seat. Thank god I didn't see this on the big screen.
And there's a lot more to this film than some overly stylized glossy movie about what Hollywood people think lower middle class Anglo-Saxon Americans act, think and look like. (Tony Scott, I'm looking at you.) Aileen Wuornos' only glamour is the fact that she is so unsettlingly real. She's the woman you've seen sobbing outside a casino at 3am in Las Vegas. She's the one you saw washing her hair in the sink at a truckstop in Montana on your post-college cross country road trip. She's the one arguing with her partner at the bus station until the security guard walks over. She's the woman who kept bugging you and your friends for cigarettes at that seedy motel you stayed at. She's someone everyone has seen out the corner of their eye and kept moving, not wanting to really know or get involved.
It actually turned out to be a pretty good movie which was more than I expected. There was a scene in a lawyer's office when Aileen tries to quit hooking and get "one of them office type jobs" that was hilarious. The lawyer is the first person who actually has the guts to tell Aileen that she is wasting his time and has wasted her life and she verbally lets go with both barrels at him. I started laughing until I realized that I was rooting for a woman who killed seven people. I really like films that do that to me.
New Year's Resolution: Get 'er done.
So...
I feel like I got a lot done last year (see above), but some things are still being pushed around on my plate like birthday cake at a Weight Watchers' meeting. I got real ambitious a couple of months ago and posted about re-designing my website, it's gonna be great, blah, blah. If you've ever seen that episode of "The Office" where Michael Scott eats the free pretzel with all the toppings, you'll know what I'm talking about; one gets all hepped up about a project, collects all the crap on Del.icio.us that one can find, does a bunch of layouts and sketches and then what? A new client comes along, it's Christmas, your baby starts learning how to walk and she's constantly lurching around the living room like a drunken sailor...
I'm such a victim of our national obsession with time-management and organization that it's not even funny. I'm pretty sure there's a church basement somewhere right now full of people standing up, hands shaking around a cup of coffee saying: "I'm Bob, and I'm a Google Calendar addict" I sit down in front of my monitor everyday with a wad of stickies saying things like: CVS list, lists of books to look for on Amazon, stuff to do on Squidoo, things around the house to organize.
This year is going to be different though. I've sworn off the obsession with writing every little thing down on a sticky note because a) it sometimes takes more time than actually doing the thing itself, and b) I just went through a bunch of paper scraps that I had squirrelled away in a drawer and 85% was stuff that really wasn't that important to do in the first place.
But back to the website redesign, I DID start to work on it and ideas for a timelapse effect animation going on the background of a blog-like index page are starting to congeal. A quick (3-minute!) experiment in using an animated GIF as a background image did work and can be seen here.
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