Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Sunday, August 15, 2004 The Pitch: It's like The Red Shoes meets Elephant! They should make "Altman" into a verb, to be used as an expression of getting rooked out of a couple of hours of your life by a critically regarded filmmaker who is too talented to be written off entirely, but too uneven to be trusted--as in "I've been Altman'd!" Or "That movie Altman'd me!" Or "Yeah, I went down to the video store to rent something, and somehow I got Altman'd."(Now, that I think about it, similar coinages like, "I've been DePalma'd!" or "Never, ever, ever will I allow myself to get Spike Lee'd like that again. Ever." have their appeal, as well.) We rented The Company last night, sort of the light, breezy follow-up to La Dolce Vita, and laid around and drank booze as I said we might. The booze and the lying around was great but The Company was awful--an utterly plotless dance film disguising its pointlessness as a verite snapshot of the world of ballet. Neve Campbell co-produced and co-wrote the film and starred in it, and before seeing the movie I thought it was laudable that she wanted to create a movie that showed the actual workings of a ballet company, and avoid the standard focus on a single dancer struggling to become a star. Now, after seeing the movie, I just want to put a boot in her ass--the films may assiduously attempt to avoid any of the standard dance movie cliches but they somehow manage to create horrible new ones: after Neve dances a solo to a Van Dyke Parks' arrangement of My Funny Valentine, the movie bombards us with covers of My Funny Valentine to track the dull and vague romance between Neve Campbell and James Franco--at the end credits, when a string quartet version of the song started in, Edi and I both groaned aloud (and we both love the song--or used to, before this film) and I said, "What is this? The fucking Kronos Quartet version?" Horribly enough, it was. Anybody who's even watched a single season of ballet (a.k.a., me and my drunk girlfriend) could have constructed a better movie about a ballet company than The Company, and my only hope is it made enough money that someday someone will actually get the money to try to make the movie again. But, until that day, don't let yourself get Altman'd--wait until he produces another Gosford Park, or just go and rent that again. Fortunately, we rented a back-up DVD--The Work of Director Spike Jonze, which managed to explore music and dance, reality and fraudulence, satisfy two drunken viewers and maintain a steady stream of engaging and original ideas--if there's a more subversive rap video than "Sky's The Limit," done Bugsy Malone style for the Notorious B.I.G., I'd like to see it. That was Saturday night. Today, it was all about getting a new curtain put up in the bedroom. We'd put it off for months and today showed us why--between the pricey pieces of crap Pottery Barn calls curtain rods, the tender pieces of fusilli disguised as screws and the paradoxically crumbling-yet-impenetrable wall and frame surrounding the bedroom window, I would have rather engaged in a cardoor-slamming-on-hand endurance competition for two hours. Then, if that wasn't enough joy for me, I began the process of moving lazybastard over to a new server. As of right now, that's included such winners as ftp'ing my entire site to the wrong directory, screwing up my email lists and having to wait for DNS propogation to straighten things out, and sending a message to my mailing list that at least one person suspected of being a virus. Fortunately, I also have everything a man in my position needs to get over such problems: a great girlfriend, Ethiopian food, and cheesecake. Despite doing so extensively in every paragraph in this entry, I really have nothing to complain about. posted by Jeff Lester | 10:17 PM | |
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