Funk Over

I think my bad mood is officially over. I am feeling much better for some reason. Perhaps it is the death rattle of the Bush presidency that is putting a spring in my step.

My computer crashed on Tuesday, by the way, and I have not yet recovered all of the data from the main drive. So that's a bummer. But everyone assures me that the data are recoverable; it will just take time. I am (strangely) doing okay.

I still hate this semester of graduate school and cannot wait for it to end, but the end—as they say—is in sight and I am excited to visit California.

So: a few movies. I have continued my trend of frivolity. This means that I, of course, caught Kenny Ortega's High School Musical 3: Senior Year. Frankly, I liked it better than the first two. I thought there were some nice, sentimental moments. Little Efron is becoming a much better actor than he was when he started in the business, and the plot is not heinous. This one, too, feels more like a musical than the first two. There is a dancing-on-the-rooftop number that is true movie magic. The songs in HSM3 are, like the songs in films one and two, largely unmemorable, but I didn't mind at all. The film has enough life and excitement to be worth enjoying. I am positive the film would be better served with alcohol, but I liked it quite enough without a martini in my hand.

I liked Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, too. The film, by the way, has nothing to do with The Thin Man This is a sweet romantic comedy about teenagers who love music. It's very fun. The dialogue is clever, but not overly clever, and the lead couple is engaging. Ari Graynor, who plays the sidekick of the main girl, is a drunk hot mess for most of the film, and she gives a truly hilarious performance that is nuanced and realistic. Michael Cera is adorable as usual, but the entire film is filled with memorable, silly characters, including Cera's bandmates in the film, who are both gay and spend the evening trying to think up a better name for their band The Jerkoffs. Anyway, this is charming and totally worth seeing.

A Couple of Movies

I have been having a terrible week in grad school, mostly all to do with how much improvement I need as a teacher, so instead of focusing on work when I get home, I have been spending time watching movies. Admittedly, this is probably not the best decision that I could have made, but that's what I've been doing.

First, I finally got to see Guillaume Canet's French thriller Ne le Dis à Personne (Tell No One) starring François Cluzet and Marina Hands among others. The film is a very American-style movie (at least to my mind), but it is an exciting murder mystery and I found it always interesting and often very, very cool. I should also point out, that the movie kept me guessing until the end and there was at least one point in the film when I looked at my friend and said "I have no idea who those people are or what they are doing": usually a good sign when a movie is filled with creepy villains. The film also stars Marie Josée-Croze, Nathalie Baye (fabulous) and Gilles Lelouche. But my favorite performance in the movie is from Kristen Scott-Thomas (love her) who plays the very cool lesbian best friend of the male lead. She is wonderful as usual, and her glances say a million things at once, sometimes even negating what she happens to be saying, She is amazing and I can't wait to see her in her next 2008 movie, Il y a Longtemps que Je T'aime, for which there is already talk of an Oscar nomination.

It is probably best that we say very little about the fact that I saw Dennis Dugan's You Don't Mess with the Zohan. Even less should be said about the fact that I actually thought it was mildly funny and interestingly antihomophobic.

And I found Adam Sandler kinda sexy. Even with that ludicrous haircut. OK I will stop. It's too much.

The other movie I saw recently was another movie I should probably be ashamed of: the low-budget gay comedy The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green. It looks like it was shot over a period of two weeks, the plot is ridiculous and predictable, the acting is less than brilliant, but...

the lead boy is very cute and, well it's really a rather lovely little comedy; my roommate and I loved it. We laughed out loud several times, and Meredith Baxter plays a great supporting character. If you are not gay, you should definitely skip Ethan Green, but if you are, you should probably rent it, because I can bet that you will like it.

Paranoid Park

I like Gus Van Sant. I was probably one of the only people in the world who really liked Gerry, his two-handed film with Matt Damon and Casey Affleck in 2003. And I loved his film Elephant, which a meditative and fascinating riff on the Columbine High School killings.

Van Sant has been working in the same style as those films for a while now (on and off, of course), but I liked his Kurt Cobain movie Last Days considerably less than those earlier two movies.

This year's Paranoid Park is another meditative, quiet film, this time about a murder and a skateboarding teenager. It's a character study, but...

well I didn't really like it all that much. I mean, I guess I liked it. I love the style. I am glad Van Sant is still working like this. I particularly love the photography and I dig his unconventional use of music, too. But this movie doesn't really have much to go on in terms of content. The plot just isn't that interesting. Paranoid Park is also hampered by uneven acting. By which I mean that some of the supporting players, simply put, are bad. There is a young lady named Lauren McKinney, in particular (Paranoid Park is her first movie) who is terrible. Whenever she is onscreen she pulled me out of the narrative and away from my emotional involvement with the fascinating lead actor (Gabe Nevins, also in his first movie).

The use of non-actors in films occasionally pays off, but I find sometimes that these performers are too conscious of their own performances to be believable onscreen. Quite a few of the actors in Paranoid Park (McKinney is not the only one) did this to me, and so I just couldn't quite buy into this film the way I fell for Elephant and Gerry. Van Sant is still doing good work, but I wish he would use a more experienced talent-pool.

Things We Lost in the Fire

I took some time out to watch a movie this afternoon. I am so behind on my 2008 movies! So I watched one of the Netflix DVDs that have been sitting on my TV table for the last three months:

Last year's Things We Lost in the Fire is the first English-language film by Danish director Susanne Bier. (If you look at my list for 2007, you will see her other 2007 feature After the Wedding hanging out at #11. Briefly, I found After the Wedding to be a powerfully moving meditation on death, doing the right thing and parental responsibility. Quite frankly, I loved it, and I feel that it fully deserved its Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language film.)

Things We Lost in the Fire retains all of what I love about Bier. The film stars Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro as the wife and best friend of a man who has recently died. It's a very intelligent film about themes similar to After the Wedding. Fire centers around fascinating, quirky characters dealing with deep grief and attempting to cope with one another in addition to their loss.

The film is superbly acted, and Bier has a way with Realistic storytelling that gives us just enough to keep us riveted to the story without having to wallow in self-pity or sentimentality. The most moving scene in the film is actually one of the film's happiest. The family go around the table remembering things and quizzing one another on what they remember about their absent father/husband/friend. It's an incredible scene: totally simple and at the same time devastating.

I think what I like most about Bier's movies, though, is their intelligence. In its meditations on addiction and parenthood, Fire is a very smart film. Bier never takes the easy way out with her narratives. These lives have been disrupted by an act of violence and her film knows that things don't just go back to normal ever. But what Things We Lost in the Fire does give us—and what After the Wedding gives us, too—is the hope that human connection can help us cope with life's many tragedies. Things aren't going to be perfect, but they can be better.

New Conference News

I sent in an abstract for a panel at the American Society for Eighteenth-century Studies annual conference and I heard back from them a couple weeks ago:

Hello Laura, Liz, and Aaron,

I am impressed with your proposals for my ASECS panel, "Too Exquisite for Laughter," and would like to include your papers in the session. The papers appear to fit rather neatly together, which is quite the bonus.

Aaron C. Thomas, Florida State University, "'Perish the Baubles': the Conspicuous Unimportance of Wealth in Sentimental Comedy"
Liz Harbaugh, Florida State University, "(Re)historicizing Richard Cumberland's The West Indian"
Laura J. Rosenthal, University of Maryland, College Park, "The Sentimental Gesture in The West Indian"

I'm looking forward to a provocative discussion. If your plans (or working titles) have changed since submitting your proposals, please let me know as soon as possible.

So it appears that I will presenting at a conference this Spring. Here is the conference website.

And here is the abstract I submitted:

Though the traditional theatre history narrative commits to a linear development of the sentimental comedy from Cibber to Steele on through to Cumberland, more recent scholarship has aimed at the destruction of a strict division of genres for eighteenth century comedy. Many scholars (Robert Hume and others) have explicitly attacked the notion that Goldsmith and R.B. Sheridan formed a united front against the sentimental comedy, returning laughter to comedy and recalling its glory days.

But even if we are free to explode the notion of the sentimental comedy as a genre that is useful to us now, it is important to explore what all the fuss was about simply because the eighteenth century Britons thought it such an important topic. To Steele, Dennis, Sheridan, Goldsmith, and Garrick, debates and discussions about sentimentalism were real, serious, and had material consequences.

My paper explores the material consequences of the debates about comedy by looking at eighteenth century characters’ sentimental ideas about money. In particular, I plan to investigate how wealth in sentimental comedies—from Steele to Sheridan—is both disavowed by the characters and central to the characters’ successes.

My title is taken from Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, where the fashionable Hastings professes his love for Miss Neville whether or not she comes to him with her dowry of jewels. Hastings does not (he says) need money to be happy; he needs only his beloved. But the secondary plot of the play hinges completely on whether or not Hastings and Miss Neville will be wealthy in addition to being happily in love. The characters in these comedies say that money is unimportant to their happiness, while the entirety of the play’s action is consumed with the question of whether or not the main (male) characters will get both the girl and the money. It is this denial that I find most fascinating about British comedy during the eighteenth century.

Moving beyond attempts at a generic taxonomy for eighteenth century comedies, this paper sees the sentimental as a shift in the bourgeois moral ideology of the dramatists and audiences of the eighteenth century rather than a shift in genre. This shift is evident most tellingly in the comedies’ (sentimental) attitudes about money. From Farquhar and Steele to Cumberland and Sheridan, the playwrights romanticize the impoverished and censure the affluent, while simultaneously the plays reject poverty and celebrate wealth.

Wow, upon re-reading it, that sounds really smart. I hope I am smart enough to write it.

Seen Around Talla-classy #2

I am continuing this series of amusing signs that I have photographed around Talla-classy.

Summers Realty, evidently, has figured out something that hardly any of us can figure out:

Evidently, if you buy your home through Summers Realty, you won't have any fights at home.

Next, we have Carlos' Cuban Café, where they have a fascinating new beverage item on their menu:

I imagine mojitos con camarones and mojitos con jamón and mojitos con albóndigas. Gross.

This next photo is an honest advertisement that doesn't really have anything wrong with it, but:

I mean, aren't all Vera Bradley patterns retired? I feel like anyone who carries a Vera Bradley purse is already attempting to look like they collect social security.

...And I meant to get a photo of the bumper sticker I saw last week that said "Chicks 4 Palin: God, Family Values, Guns, & Lipstick" but I was camera-less on that occasion.

Hamlet Dos

I haven't posted about Andrew Fleming's Hamlet 2 because I kinda didn't like it. It is supposed to be a kind of Waiting for Guffman-style parody of high school theatre, I guess, but it never really succeeds.

The movie stars Steve Coogan as a kind of closeted (we all assume) drama teacher who can't seem to get his wife pregnant and appears to have no talents of any kind. Suddenly a whole bunch of kids join his drama class, which has had only two students for many years, and he decides to write an original show for them to perform.

The show is not original at all, it turns out. It is a sequel to William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

The real problem of the movie is that the idea of this fantastic show hangs over the entire film. And Hamlet 2 the play totally delivers. Those are a sublime twenty minutes or so. But, unfortunately, nothing before it is really funny at all, and Coogan overplays his hand. His character is a total fucking nutcase and a complete depressive and he's a little hard to like.

It seems odd to say that I liked the play better than I liked the movie, but, quite seriously, those final twenty minutes where the cast actually performs Hamlet 2, to pop songs sung by the Tucson (or is it Sedona?) Gay Men's Chorus, are brilliant. There is this whole musical number called "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" which is totally inspired. There is a time machine and all kinds of other nonsense, too. It's really quite a great sequence. If only the rest of the film were up to the play.

The New Coen Brothers' Movie

I really liked Burn after Reading. It's classic Coen Brothers' humor and more than worth the watch. I may even see it again. Joe Morgenstern called the movie a "cheerful trifle" and "forget after seeing," and I understand how people can thing that Burn is rather inconsequential when compared to the Coens' most recent powerhouse of a feature No Country for Old Men, but there is a lot to be said for funny, and Burn is hilarious.

In Coen fashion, it's absolutely ludicrous. The characters are figures of deep ridicule, making inane (and hilarious) decisions, and the whole film is a riff on the real spy movies of the 1960s and 1970s and all of those pseudo-spy movies of the 1990s (and even more recently—I should mention—the unbearable Charlie Wilson's War). Burn never takes itself seriously even when it is pretending to do so. The thing is, it pretends really well, and it is the very pretense which is so funny. We know we aren't supposed to be taking this seriously from the get-go, and so every ridiculous nuanced character trait that these characters have becomes hilarious. I thought it was great.

Oh yeah, the film stars George Clooney, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich (who is brilliant), Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins and JK Simmons. The best part, though, is Brad Pitt. He is absurd, and his acting is flawless. I am laughing just thinking about his moronic behavior in this movie.

Wanted

The Angelina Jolie vehicle Wanted, which stars James McAvoy as well as Morgan Freeman (who, I'm increasingly inclined to believe, does not turn down any role he is offered) is a derivative, inane, piece of junk of a movie.

When I say that Wanted is derivative, I mean, specifically, that Michael Brandt & Derek Haas's script is a complete and total rip-off of the Wachowski Brothers' 1999 feature The Matrix. Nearly all of Wanted's plot points faintly echo the exploits of Neo and Morpheus and Trinity. And it should not surprise you at all that Wanted totally pales in comparison to the film it copies. Its accusatory politics, its moral high ground, and its smug message of carpe diem all seem lifted from 1999. If any of this were interesting I'd tell you, but none of it is. Wanted is totally absurd and laughably bad. And Angelina Jolie is not even in it enough for it to be a vehicle worthy of her abilities.

New Allen; Same as the Old Allen?

Many have remarked that Interiors—one of my favorite Woody Allen movies—is Allen's Bergman movie. So totally is Interiors a tribute, a loving homage, to Bergman, that it is impossible not to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen's newest feature, as a tribute to a man who is clearly one of Allen's new favorite filmmakers.

For Vicky Cristina Barcelona is obviously a loving homage to that master of camp, that brilliant genius of storytelling: Pedro Almodóvar. Allen has adopted a kind of feeling of Almodóvar for his newest film, and the moments when this Almodóvage shine through Allen's script are the film's best.

I liked Vicky Cristina Barcelona quite a bit, but I also feel the same way about it that I felt about Allen's other 2008 feature. The problem, see, is that Allen still has really great stories to tell, he just isn't so great at telling the stories anymore. As such, Vicky Cristina Barcelona knows a lot about human nature, love, relationships, desperation, and passion. In this way it is a smart, even wise, film from an aging, brilliant director. But most of Allen's formal devices don't work well at all. The entirety of the film, for instance, is framed by a narrator telling the film's audience all about the characters and their weaknesses and foibles. The benefits of this are manifold: the exposition is easily, cleverly delivered, and is immediately dispensed with; conflicts are created without dialogue; glances and gestures become immediately much more meaningful. But the narration sacrifices something incredibly important. We know the characters extremely well from the beginning of the film due to the narrator's voice, but he (it's a man's voice) also creates a distance between us and the characters. So we become better than them, smarter than them. We know their weaknesses and so we don't need to discover them. This gives the whole film a cynical, rather glib air, and our affection for the characters suffers for it.

One more thing needs to be said about Vicky Cristina Barcelona, though, and that is that I must tell you that Penélope Cruz is a revelation. I can't remember her sexier or funnier or more fabulous, even in an Almodóvar film. I think that may be because Almodóvar's films usually have several fabulous, sexy, funny women in them, and Allen's movie has only Miss Cruz. As it is, Allen has written Penélope Cruz one of her best roles ever, and easily her best English-speaking role. Cruz is a firestorm: a wicked, fantastic, cruel creature who destroys everything she touches but is incredibly vulnerable and sad. It's a great performance in a film that, the more she is on-screen, seems to exist only to showcase her. Cruz takes over this movie. She is the only thing anyone will be talking about when they leave this movie. It's a tour-de-force, not to be missed, and I hope she gets nominated for an Oscar. She's that great.

Tel Aviv?

I had this interesting dream last night. In it, I had gone on a bunch of job-interviews before getting accepted to the PhD program. Two of these interviews—for some reason—had happened in Israel (this part of the dream was in the past). In the dream itself, I was talking to a woman who was offering me a job for the U.S. government. It was related to Israel in some way, but I wasn't going to have to move to Tel Aviv or anything. The job they were offering me was in Mobile, Alabama. And they were going to offer me an enormous salary. And I was considering it.

Here's where the dream kinda went off the rails. The woman offering me the job was a kind of older, heavier woman à la Miriam Margolyes, but with a more butch haircut. She had also brought a kind of entourage with her, which included at least one man who looked like Craig T. Nelson—this man might have been her husband, but I'm not sure; she could easily have been a lesbian. At some point, though, all these people, as well as my parents (oh yeah, my parents were there) dressed up like characters in The Rocky Horror Show. Then they danced for me. And then they danced for the camera. By this, I mean, that my point of view in the dream shifted and it was as though I were watching a musical episode of television. I wasn't watching an episode of television, but the staging of the musical number resembled television musicals so much that I immediately recognized it as such. Strangely, I can't remember what song they sang.

Then Craig T. Nelson and my dad got into a huge physical brawl. Both men were wearing fishnets and hideous silver lamé dresses. There was biting involved. And my dad tried to tie Craig T. Nelson's wrists with zipline, but Craig T. Nelson overpowered my dad (he was from the U.S. government, so I assume he was some kind of CIA agent or something).

Craig T. Nelson left my dad on the dining room floor and went to go start up his cessna, which was parked in the backyard. And in order to start his cessna, he had to spell words using tiles from a game of scrabble.

And then I woke up.

Words

How grossly, how devastatingly inadequate is language to express what we sometimes wish to say. How wondrous, too, it must be said, that our language (this one in particular) can say so much, that it possesses such nuance, that it is so supple, so skilled at parsing even slight differences.

We even debate semantics. I prefer "client" over "resident" or "teaching assistant" over "classroom facilitator" over "discussion leader."

But so often I find that there is simply nothing to say. There is nothing clever enough, sincere enough; sometimes there are no words. Surely it isn't because I don't know the words; I know so many. I am inclined, rather, to think that it is—instead—that we have failed to invent words for so much of what we feel.

Worse yet, so much of the vocabulary we use to describe how we feel about people has, through overuse (disuse?), become clichéd and trite.

There is only one way out: we must invent more words.

Or perhaps we could paint. Or sing. Or dance.

Back to la Escuela

Today will be the first day of my third year of graduate school, the first day of my PhD program. And I hope to be posting on here more often.

I may even (finally) post a review of Woody Allen's new feature Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

It's been raining here seemingly forever. The heavens began to empty on Friday morning, and the deluge lets up here only periodically, for an hour or so, and then it begins again. The power has stayed on at my house, though, at least for now. (I heard others in the Hassiest of Tallys lost theirs for several hours.) And now I've heard that the rain wil not stop until next Sunday: next Sunday. We are to have an entire week filled with lots of rain.
But it is the first day back to school and I suppose this is better than sweltering heat...

My Intro Class Is So Clever!

My students all have to do a project (in groups of four) that has a creative element to it. A group that presented today gave me the following:

Out of it.

Sorry. My life is really busy right now. Back soon.