The Kids Are Damn Good

When I first saw the trailer for The Kids Are All Right, my initial reaction was one of despair. At the time, I was shopping my own comedy spec about a sperm donor who's discovered by his sperm children (in my script, there were 412 of them), and suddenly found myself in a jam. The director who'd attached himself to the project was no longer interested, and I was stuck without many places to go. So for several weeks, I avoided seeing the film, but the buzz was so good I knew I had to see it before it left the theaters.

It turns out that The Kids Are All Right is the best film I've seen all year. I enjoyed Inception, but its lack of character development kept me from becoming strongly invested in the story. The Kids Are All Right has an honest script that lets things play out realistically, flawed characters who drive the story by their choices and mistakes, and an incredible cast. I've never liked Julianne Moore or Mark Ruffalo as much as in this film, and Annette Bening is top notch as usual. And because it's ultimately more about the family than the sperm donor, it's different enough from mine that I still may have a shot. So I forgive you for making a great film.

Mark Olson's Gritty Prettiness

Mark Olson, founding member of the seminal alt-country group The Jayhawks, recently released his second solo album, "Many Colored Kite." It's a great album, gentle and beautiful. Admittedly, Mark's nasal, wavering voice and decidedly unslick songs are an acquired taste. But since his days in The Jayhawks, Olson has proven himself to be a premier Americana singer/songwriter.

Mark's music is earnest, unflashy, and favors expression over musicality. His melodies often sound constrained, and he revels in such simplicity that sometimes it's hard to hear a strong melody or musical hook. But when the songs are embellished with harmony vocals, bass lines, or additional instrumentation, the full beauty of his music is revealed. When he was in The Jayhawks, bandmate Gary Louris had the more pleasing lead vocal, but the soul of the band was Mark (which is why The Jayhawks became a mediocre pop band when Olson left). All the same, I think Olson sounds best when paired with Louris or his girlfriend Ingunn Ringvold's crystal clear voice to compliment his gravely sound and bring out the song's hidden beauties. Mark may not have the best voice or delivery, but what he does provide is a rock solid foundation for great songs.

The GOP and the Mosque at Ground Zero

The GOP’s outrage over building a Mosque at Ground Zero is more revealing of their simple-minded bigotry than any accusation I could make. The simple problem with their position is that they equate Islam with Al-Qaeda. Islam is one of the world’s largest religions. Al-Qaeda is a terrorist network. We see this all the time from the GOP though, and there’s a word for it: intolerance.

Certainly, Al-Qaeda would not approve of this Mosque, because they accept no form of Islam other than their own. And for all the GOP’s talk about freedom, what about religious freedom? Typically, they only support freedom when it’s for their own beliefs. But the real indication of freedom is allowing it for people different from yourself.

By the way, there’s already a Mosque at another 9/11 site: there’s one inside the Pentagon.

Prodigal Sons and the Academy Awards

I haven't seen many movies since the beginning of the new year because there really haven't been many I've been interested in seeing, but last night I stumbled across a unique documentary that demonstrates how truth can be stranger than fiction. Prodigal Sons begins as a story about a transexual's return to her rural hometown in Montana, but it becomes more about her relationship with her estranged tragic brother, and explores universal questions of identity, sibling rivarly, and nature versus nurture. Paul was valedictorian, class president, and quarterback of the high school football team, but after graduation, he moved to San Francisco and became Kim. Marc is Kim's older adopted brother, who was held back in preschool, didn't graduate from high school, and suffered a brain injury at 21 that left him severely emotionally unstable. While Kim tries to leave her past as a man behind her, Marc only wants to live in the past, and find out who his real parents are. In one of the strangest twists I've ever seen in film, Marc learns that he's the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. A film about two brothers dealing with identity shifts while hoping to reconnect with each other, this film is continually engrossing and unlike anything you've seen.

http://www.prodigalsonsfilm.com/

The Academy Awards continues to confound me every year. How did The Hurt Locker, a film which is essentially a series of bomb set pieces, win the Oscar for Best Screenplay? Here's a story with no character arc, which blatantly states its theme in the opening credits, and is mostly an exercise in suspense. It also bugs me that people praised the film for NOT making a strong statement about war. Why is that a good thing? Ironically, I think the film actually DOES say something about war, namely that it can make people crazy, so the fact that right-wingers have embraced the movie because they think it doesn't have a political message indicates their frequent inability to understand art. At any rate, I expect a Best Picture winner to be a revelation, which The Hurt Locker isn't. I would have given the Oscar to An Education.

Dad Unleashed!

I got this e-mail from my father after he watched Inglourious Basterds. I love a fired-up negative review so much, I just had to post it:

Finally watched Inglourious Basterds this week. What an incoherent mishmash of other, better movies (for Nazi parody see The Producers, for undercover silliness see Top Secret, for cinematic conflagration see Cinema Paradiso, for gratuitous and pornographic violence see something else by Tarantino or Peckinpah, for rewriting history, see Fox News or a Republican press conference). Pitt's character was an insulting, simplistic stereotype. I was really put off by using Aldo Ray as the name-inspiration for this guy; Ray was a decent actor who actually served in the Navy in WW2 - a "frogman," predecessor to the SEALs. He saw action at Okinawa (BTW, did you know that this battle resulted in 50,000 US casualties and 100,000 Japanese? Compare to D-Day - 10,000 casualties for all allied forces?). For his war service alone, Ray earned better homage than this crappy movie and cartoon character. Mostly the movie doesn't ever figure itself out. It starts with a credible, tense and terrifying scene, then wanders all over the place and violates its own promise, resorting to gore when it wants to "get serious." Its one redeeming feature is the actor playing the German officer, but his deal-making at the end is totally inconsistent with the rest of his choices. His self-interested choice is more like one a 21st century wall street banker would make. Overall, it seems like something that could have been written and directed by a 15 year old kid just making things up to fantasize an altered outcome for history and have fun with creepiness.

Even though I liked the film, I have to agree with his points. I think I was too entertained to care while watching, but the "eye for an eye" attitude towards Nazis did bother me. And I did question the German officer's deal with Pitt. But now I'm all fired up to do my own crushing review! I've been trying to stick to movies I really like to avoid being negative, but there's nothing like an impassioned, rip-it-to-shreds diss!

My iHate

I don't ask much of my computer. I don't need it to perform complicated, high end tasks. All I want it to do would seem to be a simple, common need: to transfer music from an iPod to iTunes. Yet, the designers did not include a way to do this, and there seems to be no simple solution without purchasing software from a 3rd party or doing lots of disc-burning. And I'm boiling over with frustration.

Before my old computer bit the dust last year, I moved our iTunes library onto my wife's iPod so we wouldn't lose the thousands of tracks we'd uploaded and purchased. (Okay, I'm really feeling like a sucker for using their branded spellings when their shitty devices cause so much trouble, so from now on I'll just refer to them in lowercase.) I figured I'd simply move the tracks onto the new computer. But I quickly realized Mac does not allow this, presumably to limit illegal file sharing. But every person who buys a new computer will encounter this basic problem. What are they supposed to do when they want to rebuild their itunes library? Moreover, if users don't change their synchronization settings with their new library, itunes will ERASE the files on their ipod when they sync it up, as the new library is empty. It doesn't make sense to have a one-way transfer road when itunes has so much more space and is supposed to be the library. The ipod should be able to move things back and forth as needed, to replace old tracks with new, and to free up space.

Sure, I could leave all the music on the ipod. But what if it runs out of space? What if I want to swap out old music for new? My main problem is that the ipod with all the music is my wife's, while I have my own ipod. (I had to buy a new one after my first one failed, which is another story of frustration. Mac handheld devices are so fragile that if you simply drop one you can't expect it to work again) Until mac provides an efficient way to transfer files from her ipod to itunes, I can't put any of our old library on my ipod, nor move my music off of her device. Believe me, she really loves it when she uses shuffle and a death metal track comes on.

Some users discovered a "back-door" way to copy the music back to itunes. But alas, if you keep up with the itunes updates, this is no longer possible in the new version. However, itunes 9 does provide a way to transfer files from ipod to itunes, PROVIDED YOU BURN THEM ALL TO CD FIRST AND THEN UPLOAD THEM. Like I'm going to do that.

The only other solution I've found is to use 3rd party software I've found online, but unless you purchase the full versions, they only allow transfers of one file at a time. For a library of thousands, that is not gonna work either. Finally, it seems as though Mac will allow transfers of MP3s purchased through itunes, but ultimately this is to their benefit because it encourages users to purchase itunes MP3s instead of CDs. Forcing users to use what I consider an inferior and ever dwindling music format is sad for music itself, but I can talk about that later.

So I'm stuck with our complete music library on my wife's ipod, and only newly added music on mine. I think I'll start carrying around a discman again; at least it functions as one would expect.

Catching Up

Here's a quick catch-up since I haven't posted in a while. Of the movies I've seen in the last few months, here are a few I'd like to comment on:

AN EDUCATION (2009, dir. Lone Scherfig)

Based on the memoirs of British journalist Lynn Barber, An Education is a sharply focused coming-of-age drama with excellent performances. Jenny is a culture-hungry schoolgirl pressured by her father to attend Oxford. But when she meets the older and charming David (perfectly cast in Peter Sarsgaard) who introduces her to music, art, and the finer things in life, she thinks she's found a shortcut to getting what she wants and plans to bail on college. The best film I've seen in a while; highly recommended.

INVICTUS (2009, dir. Clint Eastwood)

Based on the early challenges of Mandela's presidency, Invictus might have been a great film, but it only manages to be a fair one. Mandela's story is certainly incredible: a man jailed for 28 years assumes the presidency and must immediately forgive his captors in order to unify the country. But the film does not focus on this part of his life. Rather, at the time of the film's story, Mandela has already completed his reconciliation, and is trying to teach his fellow South Africans how to do the same. As good as Morgan Freeman is at impersonating Mandela, he's "all dressed up with nowhere to go," as one reviewer put it. Told as a sports story, the film's climax is not as rousing as it should be, as it's hampered by sloppy execution.

UP IN THE AIR (dir. Jason Reitman, 2009)

Very similar to his last writing/directing project Thank You For Smoking, Up in the Air is about a smooth-talker with a heartless job who has trouble connecting with his family emotionally. A very hyped film that's merely an okay one, Reitman's work feels like a feature-length student film: hyper-real with excessive narration and unemotional but cool-sounding stats and figures delivered quickly.

CRAZY HEART (dir. Scott Cooper, 2009)

What's the point? Jeff Bridges is great in the starring role, but Crazy Heart is nearly identical to the 1983 film Tender Mercies, only not nearly as good. Both concern an alcoholic country singer estranged from his child who is taken in by a kind younger woman and her son. What makes the carbon copy even more puzzling is the fact that Robert Duvall, who won an Oscar for playing the country singer in Tender Mercies, is one of Crazy Heart's producers and has a small role in the film. Bridges showcases legitimate country music chops, but the drama of the film feels cliche when compared to Tender Mercies' poetic, Oscar-winning screenplay by legendary writer Horton Foote, who'd previously adapted To Kill A Mockingbird, also featuring Duvall.