The renovated Laemmle Monica movie house on 2nd Street in Santa Monica.
The upcoming end-of-the-line station for the Expo Line in Santa Monica.
At 6 am, a loud crack of thunder woke me up from my slumber, and the heavens opened up. Rain, hail everywhere! We got half an inch of rain in an hour, and just like that the skies cleared up leaving a windy and crisp day for us.
A bent tree among the straights.
It is a bit hard to read a book when I have a rare weekend off. Dallas Aunt comes to town, and finally I am free to do what I want to do: hang with friends, go see all the foreign films I’ve been meaning to see (Embrace of the Serpent and Son of Saul being great films and highly recommended by me.) Rachel Cantor’s new novel Good On Paper finally arrived for me at the library, but my I was ready to party down as much as I party down nowadays.
The problem is I really had to read this as quickly as possible judging from the list of books on hold I have with the library. About four of them are becoming available at the same time despite my best attempts to time them out. Fortunately since I hate driving and took public transit as much as I could, it gave me some good chunks of time to spend reading.
Here is a novel about a down-on-her-luck translator in New York City named Shira getting a seeming dream job translating the new work of a Nobel Prize winning Romanian/Italian poet Romei while trying to keep her makeshift family and life together. The first half of the novel builds the pressure in her life until it comes out exploding about 2/3 of the way through.
I’ll admit I enjoyed Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot a lot more than Good on Paper. I wasn’t as engrossed as I was in the former. Then again that could be the symptom of reading the first 100 pages while on transit. It’s a perfectly fine novel, although one thing lingered as I finished the epilogue.
At the point where Shira’s life explodes, I thought I missed something. It was certainly written with the intent of the mind-blowing explosion ready to happen. “Shira! he half shouted, his coital dream cracked open like a canteloupe.” “With the precision of film rolling backward, the pieces shot back into place, the shattering of my life became whole.”
Cantor brings back strains of prior events as she brings this all to a climax, and perhaps it is my shortcoming that I completely missed it. I knew it was a something, but what this something was mystified me for a bit. There I had Shira in bed completely devastated, and here I was in bed more fully clothed than Shira wondering why.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great book, but I am upset that I missed the full effect of the climax. But, I suppose, that is my own personal motif.
Over the last couple of days, I have seen a lot of Koreans get very angry at Chris Rock’s Oscar joke. Child labor is not funny, they rage. Not all Asians are good at math, they say (and seeing some of my cousins, I know that is definitely true.) As the furor kept getting louder and louder, it got me very self-conscious: did it make me a bad Asian that I actually chuckled at that gag?
As society has turned more into an outrage society where we express our displeasure in all caps on Twitter and Facebook and nuance is just another four-letter word, I decided I would only get outraged about real things. You know, that it wasn’t until the last decade that us Hapas were given equal rights in Korea. That I speak only in English in Koreatown to get better service than if I spoke Korean. That my entire time growing up at a Korean church it was made very clear to me that I did not belong.
So yeah. I found it very delicious that some Koreans got mad.
Brendan and I recorded our look back at the best films of 2010 in our very subverted and perverted minds. It really did sound like a very good idea at the time: revisiting the movies of 2010, seeing how well they aged over the last five years.
I was really excited by this. I started by scouring through Wikipedia for films released in 2010 and films that screened at Cannes and films that were nominated for the Independent Spirit Awards. There were 21 films that I noted, and I was all set.
I started with the appropriately titled Rabbit Hole directed by John Cameron Mitchell. If you are going to dive into a bunch of movies from 2010, it is sort of appropriate to see it as going down some sort of rabbit hole and into an alternative world. I should have known that it was a sign of things to come.
The notes I made about Rabbit Hole after watching it: Painfully mediocre. It’s an adaptation of a stage play (problem no. 1.) It’s just fine at best. A meditation on grief, all it is is a superficial snapshot. It’s nothing deep. And since it was a stage play, it has some LOUD ARGUMENTS. Disappointing since I like JCM.
There really were some low points. Life During Wartime, Todd Solondz’s sort-of-sequel to 1998’s Happiness. It just flirted with the characters we first met during Happiness and was just plain blah.
I didn’t think much of Inception, thought The Social Network was just fine and only made it through 15 minutes of Exit Through the Gift Shop before angrily turning it off and regretting this endeavor.
But here are my top 5 films from 2010 that was totally worth the pain of going through some pretty awful/mediocre films.
5. Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires)
Directed by French-Canadian Xavier Dolan, it’s yet another movie featuring a love triangle that the French love. It’s not as tragic as Jules et Jim (what is?), but no one is completely happy in the end. Dolan can frame a shot and has impeccable use of color which adds to the richness of
the movie. I loved it when it came out, and I loved rewatching it now.
4. Dogtooth
This Greek film is one of the most fucked up things I have seen in a while. A patriarch who has imprisoned his children in his home, the children are now young adults who are completely stunted. Unlike this past year’s documentary The Wolfpack, these kids have no concept of the outside world. It is one of the most audacious and biting satires made in a long time.
3. Kaboom
I love Gregg Araki’s movies, and this one is a return to his nihilistic teenage apocalypse films of Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation and Nowhere (my personal favorite.) I love these stiff caricatures, the sexual fluidity, the music, the style. I actually rewatched this to cleanse my palate after watching Life During Wartime. It was very much needed.
2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes that year. It’s a very simple movie of a man preparing to die and is visited by the human ghost of his dead wife and monkey ghost of his long-missing son. You’re expecting something quite supernatural and extraordinary to happen, but it doesn’t. Oh, there is a catfish cunnilingus scene, but apart from that it is pretty straight forward. I just saw the trailer for Weerasethakul’s latest film Cemetery of Splendour which will be released in the States soon, and I must see it.
1. Trash Humpers
Not everyone is going to like this movie. In fact, almost no one is going to like this which is a shame. Directed by Harmony Korine and shot on fucked up VHS tapes, it appears like a bunch of found-footage clips in Gummo-like vignettes which make up a film. This group of miscreants in rubber prosthetic masks fuck shit up, force people to eat pancakes drizzled with dish soap, shoot hoops, light firecrackers and hump trash cans. While Gummo has moments of heart warming sweetness, Trash Humpers doesn’t let you off the hook. This is fucking genius and further proof why everyone should see all of Korine’s films.
I don’t know why it took me this long to do so, but I finally got around to reading Dorothy Parker. It made me wonder who are our best critics out there.
But one of her poems really struck me pretty deep. It’s called “Résumé”
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
Precious.
With the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge parked over the West in recent weeks, the thought of any rain reaching the ground here in Southern California seemed a pipe dream. Despite the still stronger than all hell El Niño that still exists, the RRR has trumped anything the Pacific could bring.
I knew they predicted some rain today, but I figured it would completely miss us out here. But at 1 as I was headed out to market, I felt some skywater hitting my head. It seems like it has come. Rain has come.
We’re not going to get much. The rain will clear out over night, and back to warm weather. The RRR will win out.
On a different note, can some of you folks in other parts of the country send us some water? KTHXBAI!
On the podcast Brendan and I have asserted before that in order to properly judge a year of films, you have to let it percolate for five years. I mean, a knee-jerk clamoring for movies that are clearly not great by any stretch of the imagination is a problem for the Oscars. I’m looking at you Crash, The King’s Speech, Argo, Birdman.
So since the Oscars are upon us at the end of the month, we decided to look back on films from 2010. You can look back at the winners of the Oscars for that year and see just how unmemorable most of the movies are. The King’s Speech? We can and will do better than that.
Brendan and I will list five (or so) movies that we really loved from that year. I already know there is going to be at least one disagreement, so that should be fun.
But in preparing for this endeavor, I made a list of movies that I have to watch (or rewatch as the case may be.)
Inception
Social Network
Fighter
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Tiny Furniture
Rabbit Hole
Life During Wartime
The Kids Are All Right
Dogtooth
Easy A
Exit Through the Gift Shop
Trash Humpers
Winter’s Bone
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
Blue Valentine
Biutiful
Kaboom
Heartbeats
Film Socialisme
The Housemaid
Howl
Am I missing some hidden gem? Something vital?
It should also be noted that this list of 21 films is not meant as an endorsement by me. There are a couple up there I really didn’t like.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know it was going to be warm and breezy. I knew it was going to get over 85F here in the Pedro, but I needed to be outdoors and moving. Besides it’s rare that I get bad allergies like my mom whose sneeze could crush eardrums — if I get hard of hearing in my later life, I will not blame the My Bloody Valentine concert I went to in 2008; that I will bestow solely on my mother.
After the first hill, on came the sneezes one after the other like a jackhammer punctuating the silence. By the time I came back home the nose water was flowing. By the evening the sinuses were pulsating in protest. And all around my desk were wads of used tissue that I set down hoping to use every available square inch before disposing. Jeez, I have become my mother.
Today they’re not as severe. I still have some nose water. I still feel the itch deep in my right nostril that I’m convinced is the source of all my troubles. But it will pass. At least I don’t have the flu.
For some stupid reason, when I was 12 I decided I wanted to read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It was the summer after sixth grade as I was getting ready to head into junior high, and I was out with a youth tour group in Korea. I was probably anticipating being by myself for the most part, so I guess I wanted a thick obtuse book to keep me company?
I ended up having a lot of fun and didn’t read that much of the book, but one thing that struck me early on was the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg before they headed out to sea.
He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply. “10 – A Bosom Friend.” Moby Dick. Toronto: Bantam, 1981. 57.
Between Ishmael waking up to find Queequeg’s arm around him to this, I was convinced that they had fucked and were in love. I may have masturbated in the bathroom of my room at the Tower Hotel in Seoul to imagining this scene in my head, the overpowering Pacific Islander gruffly manhandling the lithe white man and making him cry in pleasure.
Now that I’m re-reading Moby Dick almost 25 years later, I was struck at how I had the same feeling when reading these prefacing chapters. There is something between the two that I’m not sure was supposed to be quite so explicit in 1851.
It makes me wanna ask, Ishy are you queer?
