The 2012 Master List

An attempt (how successful it will be, only time will tell!) to keep track of things read and seen (no rewatches included). Possibly played, but probably not listened to, as the amount of new music I get a chance to listen to these days is sad and embarrassing. Not in any order, except the most recent things will be at the bottom of the lists.

FILMS WATCHED
Haywire (Soderbergh, 2012)
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Almodovar, 1990)
Laddaland (Sukdapist, 2011)
The Ghost Writer (Polanski, 2010)
Diary (Pang Bros., 2006)
Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Hark, 2010)
Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocal (Bird, 2011)
Take Shelter (Nichols, 2011)
The Doom Generation (Araki, 1995)
New Rose Hotel (Ferrara, 1998)
We Need to Talk About Kevin (Ramsay, 2011)
Shame (McQueen, 2011)
Young Adult (Reitman, 2011)
Cabin in the Woods (Goddard, 2012)
Plague Dogs (Rosen, 1982)
Days of Being Wild (Wong, 1990)
The Five Year Engagement (Stoller, 2012)

BOOKS READ
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
On Writing, Stephen King
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

SHORT STORIES READ
"The Gingerbread Girl", Stephen King
"I'm Starved for You", Margaret Atwood

GAMES BEATEN
The Legend of Zelda: The Skyward Sword
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Memory as Trauma

"Do you know what people in China eat when they have the money?" my mother began. "They buy into a monkey feast. The eaters sit around a thick wood table with a hole in the middle. Boys bring in the monkey at the end of a pole. Its neck is in a collar at the end of the pole, and it is screaming. Its hands are tied behind it. They clamp the monkey into the table; the whole table fits like another collar around its neck. Using a surgeon's saw, the cooks cut a clean line in a circle at the top of its head. To loosen the bone, they tap with a tiny hammer and wedge here and there with a silver pick. Then and old woman reaches out her hand to the monkey's face and up to its scalp, where she tufts some hairs and lifts off the lid of the skull. The eaters spoon out the brains."

Did she say, "You should have seen the faces the monkey made"? Did she say, "The people laughed at the monkey screaming"? It was alive? The curtain flaps closed like merciful black wings.

-Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior, 1975

Laddaland Review

...Laddaland calls to mind two recent excellent Asian films: Ho-Cheung Pang's Dream Home, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata. Like Dream Home, it presents a horror-veiled satirical take on the plight of regular folk hoping to own real estate in today's economy, but its humanistic heart echoes Kurosawa's depiction of overwhelming external forces dismantling the unity of an otherwise loving family... Click here to read my full review on Twitch.

A Heroine Evolved

Marina in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Vera in The Skin I Live In.

Bodies and Ghosts (or You Know, the Usual Capsule Reviews of Recently Seens)

Haywire

As far as Soderbergh films that have been tailored for a non-actress to show off the skills she's known for go, Haywire is more successful than The Girlfriend Experience (which, above all, is fatally boring for a movie about a call girl in the recession played by a pornstar). Gina Carano isn't much more competent a dramatic screen presence than Sasha Grey, but she doesn't really need to be. With an all-star class coyly teasing out their roles, and nicely orchestrated action scenes amidst stimulating locales (Barcelona, Dublin, New Mexico, old...Mexico), Haywire delivers, mostly. I can put my few formal complaints aside (score was awful, Barcelona color pallettes annoyingly sepia'd out to indicate past tense) to appreciate the whole: a smart "lark" that suggests more going on, evidenced in Ewan McGregor's loaded line in reference to the heroine: "Oh, you shouldn't think of her as a woman. That would be a mistake."

The Ghost Writer

Hey, it's Ewan McGregor again! Here Polanski crafts a bizarre world of grey sands and wind, a theatrical CG scape peppered with classically trained Brit thespians that creates an unsettling divide between this strange cinematic place and the real America/Britain being satirized. Enough unplaceable tension and black comedy to bring it to the kind of heights expected from its director, but a disjointed enough feel to keep it from being on par with his finest work.

Diary

The Pang Brothers, those prolific hit-or-miss pan-Asian (and now North American) sometimes masters, sometimes hacks are known for films full of promise that they usually squander by the second or third acts. Speaking as a fan of theirs, I have to say Diary follows the same unfortunate formula. There are some beautifully eerie images present in this Hong Kong psycho-horror from a few years ago (one depicts a giant wooden marionette stomping by in the background of a woman's nervous breakdown), but ultimately it ends up repetitve and over-explains itself.

Because It's Private, and Not Normal

Just a few quick thoughts on movies recently seen.

Martha Marcy May Marlene
Anchored by a pitch-perfect performance from Elizabeth Olsen (far removed from her supremely uninteresting sisters), Martha looks at the after-effects of a traumatic event earnestly, subtly and with enough humor and humanistic responsibility that it never slips into histrionics or pretentiousness. John Hawkes as the Manson-esque cult leader, and the rest of the supporting cast are similarly fantastic; which is not to say that the direction should be ignored. Sean Durkin has crafted a beautifully shot film that won't be easy for me to shake--a feeling that maximizes retrospective empathy for the title character.

Broken Embraces
After loving The Skin I Live In as I did, it seemed like Broken Embraces was the next logical place to go. Almodovar's second most recent film is an entertaining piece of self-reflexive melodrama, with a magnetic performance from Penelope Cruz, who is always compulsively watchable. However, the pieces surrounding her story, and the too-revelatory ending scenes end up dismantling the film somewhat. It's a minor Almodovar that encompasses some of his most quintessential themes, and thus is a fascinating paradox if not a particularly good film ultimately.

Paranormal Activity 2 & 3
One of the most effective tools in horror filmmaking is the art of withholding, but my main complaint about the first Paranormal Activity is that it abused this technique to the point that it just wasn't as scary as it should have been. The 2nd, and especially 3rd movies rectify this by showing more creepy shit without ever overdoing it. The 3rd is easily the best of the series and stands as one of the best American horror movies I've seen in a long time (admittedly, I'm not sure that says a lot). The "Bloody Mary" sequence is truly a brilliant feat of minimalist filmmaking, and will stick with me for awhile.

Insidious
I'd heard good things about this movie, and I tried hard to like it. When all is said and done, though, it's a silly, meandering series of increasingly bizarre (and bizarre in a dull way) scenes that reveal themselves to have been building towards a shallow, cheap, barely-earned twist ending. There are effective moments, but they're few and far between. Passable if one is desperate for a horror fix, but that's the best I can say of it.

VIFF 2011: THE SKIN I LIVE IN Review

...Everything is grey, in a dizzyingly confusing way. When the credits roll--after a sure to be oft-quoted final line--there is no sense of emotional satisfaction. This is perhaps the most brilliant, lingering thing about the movie... Click here to read my full review on Twitch.