One Sentence Movie Reviews: "Fly Away Home"

Fly Away Home (1996): "If you possess an ounce of cynicism, fly away home now."

Deep into Movies:

Just what the hell counts as Bollywood? Or Screwball Comedies? How about Hammer Horror? Does it involve assault with hand tools?

Stop asking stupid questions! Green Cine Movie Primers explains it all.

For the way I'm feeling right now...

"I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen." – Carson McCullers

I know you've been waiting...

But Dave and I have resumed our mindless chatter on movies called Talking Pictures. Waste 45 minutes here.

In praise of the cupcake...

SF Gate has this analysis of why the cupcake has returned to fashion.

Ovid Has it:

The next time someone tries to tell you how great things were then and how crappy they are now, please direct them to the following...

"Let others praise ancient times. I was glad to be born in these"

--Ovid (via The Writer's Almanac)

I suppose you've heard this already but...

Flickr's creators are going to be on the cover of Newsweek. Damn (via Laughing Squid).

Oh and can anyone get the "How Geeky Are You?" quiz to load?

Tsotsi, Kevin and Dave:

Please do yourself a favor and see Tsotsi, playing at a movie theater near you. I'm recommending it highly even through praising a Best Foreign Film Oscar winner from South Africa featuring poor black teenagers seems like peddling liberal guilt. I even saw it in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco where the only person of color was a starling alit on a telephone pole across the street. For shame!

Dave had recommended I check it out after sending me a few kwaito (a Johannesberg-hybrid of house music and hip-hop. It kicks ass) tracks from the soundtrack. Dave is black which is less rationalization than turnabout. I've made him see more than a few holocaust movies in the 12 years of our friendship Besides his people are from Ethopia not South Africa. Mine had all emmigrated to America before the holocaust. Kindly forget the preceeding two paragraphs.

Tsotsi's a movie about a violent young man who in the midst of a crime, discovers he's unwittingly kidnapped a baby. His heart doesnt' turn to mush. He doesn't even become a nice guy. Like The Accidental Tourist (which takes place in Baltimore, where Dave and I met), the film spends its entire running time leading up to a simple gesture. It's only after we get there that we realize how profound that gesture is.

Tsotsi doesn't milk poverty for cheap sentiment the way I thought City of God (Dave loved it. Kevin hated it). It exists fully inside the slums and upper middle class suburbs of post-Apartheid Johannesberg. They the whole world not a microcosm of a lesson for us all.

Here's the deal. See this movie. It's 90 minutes, breathtaking, intense, powerful. If this isn't why you go to the movies, get over it and thank me later. Or thank Dave who got us here in the first place.

One Sentence Movie Reviews: "Camp"

Camp (2003): "Cram 3 movies into two hours and you'll probably get one decent one out of it"

Read Recently: "Whores on the Hill" by Colleen Curran

Title: Whores on the Hill

Author: Colleen Curran

Backstory: Purchased from A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books after reading an article about "Prep Fiction."

Notes: Like my father before me, I love entertainment about teenagers and high school. Having enjoyed the heck out of Prep, I figured this might be a darker, racier take on similar subject matter. I was right.

Verdict: Whores on the Hill meets your expectations then races past then. The plot is unapologetically trashy. Three girls in a Catholic school stay out late, drink too much and have lots of sex. There's enough "my school skirt flited up" to satisfy several manners of pervert (including me). But Curran doesn't stop there. She hurls in scorn, violence and tragedy yet never apologies. Her characters don't ask for our pity or sympathy. They don't learn from their mistakes and they certainly don't grow up. Much like Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, Curran's novel indirectly argues that being fucked up holds more lifeforce than being healthy. She doesn't accuse "normal" people of fraud the way Welsh does but she doesn't deny her heroines the joy or liberation recognizing their sexual power. In an ending as hardened as it is melodramic, Curran argues that if we think young female sexuality is inherently denegrating and dangerous to its pracitioners, well then maybe that's more about us than it is them.

I appreciated her for it.