seen?

i think they are near genius creatively.

i was excited about seeing the film.

idlewild.

i missed it in theaters. i miss lotsa movies in theaters. haven't been to a theater in ages, so i rely on my netflix. most of the time, i just add movies to my queue as soon as they come out in theaters, cuz i'm very likely not to go see it.

so i finally got idlewild and watched it.

it bored me.

5 minutes into the film i wondered if i was going to like. then i thought about how i needed to make some flashcards for learning the preterite conjugations in portuguese. and i did that for a while. then i worked on a poem. then i realized it was over 30 minutes into the film, and i knew what was going on, i just didn't particularly care.

why?

it was a bit all over the place. and much as i love outkast's music, it played too much like a video anthology that they tried to loop together with the odd bit of drama.

basic story: percy and rooster are friends. percy is the quiet and dutiful young man, rooster the flashy and ambitious (but still somewhat dutiful) one. due to a couple of shady deals and murders, rooster inherits the nightclub where he's been performing with percy as his pianist. but he also becomes indebted to the local gangsters. o, and a beautiful young woman shows up who totally bewitches percy.

yeah, not terribly hard to follow. and it could have worked except it was disjointed...every once in awhile there was a song break which didn't advance the plot. relate to the plot, they did. but it the film kinda dallied around, went off on tangents, threw in effects just for the sake of it. it would've benefitted from a less is more approach.

if the songbreaks had advanced the plot, the film would have been gold. i loved the effects and animations - the rooster on rooster's pocket flask, the musical notes that came alive on the paper, the cuckoo clocks. but they were extra, not integral, and it's all gotta be bigger than the sum of its parts.

cohesion. it lacked cohesion.

oh outkast. i will say, though, that it was a first of its kind foray for them. they have the talent, and they have the bravery. i hope the next one works out better for them.

and since i really like shoes, here is a pair that i adore.

Labels: fashion, film, musica

Posted by call me aja at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments

oi,

i'm on to a new endeavor: learning portuguese. specifically, i'm taking a class entitled "brazilian portuguese for spanish speakers." the idea behind it, seemingly, that knowing some of the rules of spanish make it easier to learn portuguese. i am finding that portuguese looks a bit like spanish, not a whole lot, in my opinion, but enough for me to be able to gather enough info on a particular bit of writing in order to infer a meaning. but...it sounds not a thing like spanish. in my opinion. i tend to think spanish is a clean, easy language: if you know the general rules of pronunciation, diction, and spelling, while there might be a lot of them, are pretty much always applicable. in portuguese, i'm getting a lot of sometimes, maybe, and because.

that said, i LOVE my class. it's a great challenge, and i really wanna learn the language. my teacher encourages the class to visit brazilian websites, listen to brazilian music, watch brazilian movies. hmmm...i own city of god (cidade de deus, yes, i finally know how to actually pronounce that properly) so i've been watching it. which leads me to the most recent film i saw.



and a couple of weeks ago, i got the documentary bus 174 from netflix. took me a while to get into it, but i enjoyed it once i did. it's a no frills documentary about a man, sandro rosa do nascimento, who boarded a crowded bus one day in day in 2000 in rio de janeiro and took everyone on board hostage. in an attempt to get at the reasons why he did this, the doc. examined his background (his mother had been stabbed to death in front of him when he was a kid, homeless, living on the streets with a bunch of other kids, many of whom were massacred in front of the church where the slept). an examination of social ills that manage to be both peculiar to brazil and analogous to lots of other places. the criminal - human, understandably frustrated and paradoxically troubled to the point of committing completely incomprehensible acts. didn't offer remedies, though it did reflect on the rightness/wrongness of the principal players. the filmmakers interviewed the hostages, police involved in the standoff, sandro's aunt, some of his friends.

the one thing that made me go hmmmm: they also interviewed a random college professor who read a whole lot of literary theory into the incident. now, in life, i love literary theory, but it didn't seem appropriate here. the rest of the documentary seemed so unpretentious, and seemed to examine its central character as though he were a real human being, not an archetype. that did not sit well with me. i got the dvd becase i had seen favela rising, and after i rated it on netflix, i read some of the reviews and found some people who found it to be too adoring and a touch out of touch, given that the film is the work of outsider americans. and one of the reviewers recommended bus 174. and yet, i thought this professor man that the makers of bus 174 brought on board the project - it would have made more sense to me if they had loaned him to favela rising to talk his theory there. because favela rising was obviously framing its protagonist as a archetypal figure, and bus 174, without any camera tricks, without much other allegory, otherwise not spinning any (anti) fairy tales - it seemed so earnest and grassroots. and the strict intellectual seemed out of place.

and by the way, bus 174 is long. i've watched it all and sent it back, so i suppose now i need another film in brazilian portuguese to watch. gotta keep those skills sharp. i really love languages. i should've been a comp lit major in college, or something.

Labels: film, languages

Posted by call me aja at 7:09 PM | Permalink | Comments

thought this event, taking place this weekend, sounded interesting...

11th Annual Harlem Stage On Screen (formerly Harlem Film Festival)
Curated by Michelle Materre & produced by Neyda Luz Martinez


FRIDAY – SUNDAY, MARCH 9 – 11, 2007


Don’t miss thirty-six provocative, engaging and innovative documentaries, features, shorts and stories that resonate with and convey the spirit and passion of communities of color.



Program I: OPENING NIGHT

Friday, March 9th, 7:30 PM, $10
2006 Sundance Film Festival Winner
"American Blackout" by Ian Inaba & Jean Phillipe Boucicaut



Program II : LIFE LESSONS

Saturday, March 10th, 12 PM, $10
Seven shorts -fact and fiction- related to education, personal and political histories.


Program III: THERE IS NO PLACE LIKE HOME

Saturday, March 10th, 2 PM, $10
Seven documentaries about displacement, gentrification, migration and cultural memory question,“Where do we go from here?”


Program IV: 4TH ANNUAL SALUTE TO WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH

Saturday, March 10th, 4 PM & 6 PM, $10
NY Premiere: "Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican" by Claire A. Watkins
Presented in collaboration with New York Women in Film & Television


Program V: GIRLS NIGHT OUT

Saturday, March 10th, 8 PM, $10
Eight shorts by or about women exploring themes of motherhood, aging, relationships and determination.
Presented in collaboration with New York Women in Film & Television


Program VI: TIES THAT BIND

Sunday, March 11th, 2 PM, $10

Seven shorts about family, dreams, tradition and the everyday heartaches and joys life brings.


Program VII: REVOLUTION AS ART

Sunday, March 11th, 4:30 PM, $10
Three films on Lorraine Hansberry and what it means to be an artist and committed to the cause.


For full schedule click each program or call 212.650.7100.



Discounts available through the Harlem Stage Box Office!

Weekend Pass $56, Saturday Pass $32 & Sunday Pass $16

Harlem Stage & NYWIFT Members $8.50

Students 12 & Under $5 w/valid ID.



Harlem Stage at The Gatehouse

150 Convent Avenue at West 135th Street

New York, NY 10031

www.harlemstage.org



For passes and/or discounts call 212.650.7100 or visit Harlem Stage Box Office, Mon. – Fri., 1PM – 6 PM, located at Aaron Davis Hall, W. 135th St. & Convent Ave. at The City College of New York. Also, open two hours prior to events.



Harlem Stage on Screen is made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.



For information on other Harlem Stage presentations, Click HERE or call 212.650.7100

Labels: film

Posted by call me aja at 6:48 AM | Permalink | Comments

i'm taking this spanish class, just to keep up with my language skills, and during the first class, the teacher said that she will bring in a movie each week, and we will watch it. someone asked if we could watch volver.

volver is supposed to be a great movie, and ms. cruz is getting plaudits left and right for her performance and mr. almodovar is as well. but thinking about it on my way home last night, i had to ask myself a question:

why is it that we, as english-speaking americans, call the movie volver? obviously, that's the name the filmmakers gave it, but don't we usually translate titles? cidade de deus became city of god, Wò Hǔ Cáng Lóng became crouching tiger, hidden dragon. these were popular foreign films, in foreign languages, subtitled in english, titles translated into english.

probably to draw in viewers. is pedro almodovar a big enough draw to not have to translate the film's title? is penelope cruz? i mean, she's pretty, but her films, as far as i know, have not exactly been blockbusters, and she's possibly most well known in the us for having dated tom cruise.

the only other two films that came immediately to mind with untranslated titles were amorres perros and y tu mama tambien (aside: i did not get the hype about that movie, i just did not think it was that good, and not even gael garcia bernal can change my opinion on that).

i don't think i really have an answer for this question...unless...we're all so busy being scared of arabic-speaking islamic terrorists that spanish (obviously, in carried here by illegal aliens bent on stealing our jobs) are less of a threat...

Labels: film, languages

Posted by call me aja at 9:30 PM | Permalink | Comments

i really loved it when alejandro gonzalez inarritu, the director of babel told mr. governator schwarzenegger (when accepting the best picture award at the golden globes) that he promised that all his papers were in order. cheeky, i thought.

i was also very glad that babel won some awards, because they put it back in the theaters, so i got to finally see it last night. the tales of several families, interwoven: a moroccan family trying to survive and looking for the best way to defend its goats (vital to life) from desert jackals buys a rifle; an american woman, marriage falling apart, on vacation in morocco with her husband gets shot; a deaf japanese school girl who can't get along with father, tries to deal with the recent death of her mother and tries to fit into a hearing world; a mexican woman working as a nanny in california takes her charges with her to her son's wedding in mexico when her employer informs her that no one will be relieving her so that she can attend.

it's this last story that strikes me most. possibly because gael garcia bernal plays her nephew who comes to pick up her and the kids and take them to mexico. and mr. garcia bernal is indeed quite striking. but i have to say, his character is the strangest interloper (perhaps a cipher?) i've seen in film for quite a while. the way his character just completely disappears is so...odd...and kind of unbelievable. i'm not trying to give too much of a spoiler here, but his role is solely to advance the plot, to get the woman and kids across the border, whereas the other characters seem to have actual lives and lifestories.

a lot of critics have decried the film for its complexity. i refuse to criticize a film for being complex. instead, i say pay better attention, watch intelligently. the events of the film are presented in strict chronological order, although the way the stories skip about may seem to suggest that they are. the film that i couldn't help but compare it to was syriana, but syriana is quite different in that (if i am not mistaken) most of the events of the film are told in chronological order. the major difference seemed to be that, in syriana, the main characters of the main stories all converge at a single point. in babel, in the end all of the characters are unseen interlopers in the lives of the other characters - and the fact that they are unseen is the key. if the world of the film continued to exist on a real plan simultaneous to our own, we'd assume that most of the characters would never ever cross paths.

for some reason, i can't help but think of jorge luis borges and his ruinas circulares, the concentric circles of existence that various worlds are organized about. the worlds of the film's characters, my world, your world, the world of all americans, the world of all north americans, and so on, and so on, and so on. and on that note, i'm gonna end this post with two pictures, one of brad pitt and one of gael garcia bernal. because i can. because our spheres of existence are concentric, but as shown by the film, these circles can be bisected. (thanks.)

Labels: film

Posted by call me aja at 9:22 PM | Permalink | Comments

sent off the first batch of poetry submissions to magazines for 07...let's see what that does for me...got a bunch of movies from netflix that won't play (this is my second chance tryin to see capote, grrrr...and i got the vagina monologues and nuyorican dream, still.).

Labels: film, poetry, tryin to get published

Posted by call me aja at 7:35 PM | Permalink | Comments

guess who fixed her own computer?? yes ma'am (or sir), i fixed my own computer, cuz i'm just brilliant like that, plus i figured i'd google a few tips to get the old girl back up and running while i was at work. so yay, becky (maybe i'll call the computer becky) is back in biz just in time for me to write my hundredth blogpost.

this weekend, i went to go see the the pursuit of happyness. and yes, it was inspirational, and a bit of a tearjerker, and i enjoyed the movie, but now that i have seen it i can say that the misspelling of happiness is just not justified in my eyes. sorry. in truth, it's probable someone would have to have lost their life for correctly spelling the word in order for misspelling it to be ok with me. i am not a fan of intentional misspelling. and i mean to differentiate intentional misspelling from typos (lord knows i do enough of it on this blog...but NEVER in anything i consider to be a professional bit of writing, i proofread like it's my job.) and from spellings that attempt to represent the phonetics of vernacular speech...although that can also be taken slightly overboard. but to throw in a y where there should be an i, just to point up the misspelling, it irked like nothing else.

ok, but the point is the movie is good. though if i were to criticize it (i mean, besides for the messy title) i would say that it didn't give me enough shots of him at work to make me understand why mr. gardner was so good at his job that he ended up getting hired. the movie makes it seem as though he deserved the post because he suffered so much, but we know good and well his employers didn't know that. they didn't hire him because they felt bad for him, they hired him because of all the good results his work brought. they attempt that with the pension fund manager guy at the football game...but the pension manager guy ends up turning him down...and they talk about his reasoning and work ethic...but never any results from that wonderful efficiency and ethic. by results, i mean accounts landed, that sort of thing.

also, if i may point something out that is tangentially related: in the movie hitch (which i will admit was entertaining cute date movie, and i'm not a fan of cute date movies), will smith starred opposite eva mendes not just because she's gorgeous (she is) but because the producers feared that if they put a black woman in the lead actress role, white moviegoers would go see it...and if they put a white woman in that role, moviegoers both black and white would be turned off. in the pursuit of happyness, thandie newton plays the traviata wife - but i had no idea she was even in the movie until i got to the theater. and she leaves midway through the movie. and she is sufficiently ambiguously ethnic...when she was in mission impossible, i heard folks refer to her as that latina girl (she's english and zimbabwean). so what gives with black women on film? why is film afraid of black women? on another tangent, seeing that movie made me understand why my girl sheena said thandie newton, despite her pretty face, is just too skinny.

Labels: film

Posted by call me aja at 7:12 PM | Permalink | Comments

that's what a woman said coming out of the theater last friday. had gone to see "stranger than fiction," and this was her analysis of the film. yeah, ok, sure. i rolled my eyes when i heard that one. i felt that was a bit heavyhanded, i mean, it's a will ferrell movie. and it was a friday night. and...maybe i just rolled my eyes because i don't know a proper definition of postmodern.

well anyway, went to go see "stranger than fiction" on friday with the family. in general, i'm ambivalent towards comedy as a genre - when it's good, i love it; when it's bad, i loathe it. so on a regular basis, i tend to split the difference and just not care about it. i don't hold comedy to a lower standard than i do anything else in entertainment, and i often find myself disappointed or (even worse) bored. incidentally, i feel the same way about pop music, newspapers, news broadcasts, and radio shows. (i love reading news online, though, and i love good morning america.)

but i really wanted to see "stranger than fiction" because it seemed kinda clever. and overall, i rather enjoyed it. will ferrell played a man who finds deduces, with the help of a nutty professor type (played by dustin hoffman) that he is the main character in a novel. and that the novel ends with his untimely death. so he decides to find the author of the novel, played by emma thompson, and convince her not to kill him.

the laughs i got were not nonstop, but were well-earned. in my opinion, the movie's one failing is that if failed to fully flesh out the rules of the world in which the plot takes place. this could be a grave fault, leading to complete bewilderment, except that everything else was well done. will ferrell was wonderfully subtle, emma thompson's character was surprisingly yet convincingly dark. it was like a comedy, not simply for the point of making one laugh for a few moments, but layered over a very sharp observation the blurry line between comedy and tragedy. in fact, the film points this out explicitly, in a conversation between ferrell's and hoffman's characters. and when ferrell's character goes about trying to determine whether or not the story being narrated about him was, in fact, a comedy or a tragedy, well, i found the evidence for either case to be equally compelling. and the fact that it was art about the process of another art form...i was intrigued. it's a bit tongue in cheek, almost self-referential, but not quite. (if any of this touches on postmodernism, please, someone let me know, and i will revise immediately.)

just for kicks, i decided to check out the film's reviews after i saw it. according to the reviews, i shouldn't have wasted my money on such a failure of a film, for surely it is a flop, its ambitions notwithstanding. hmm. one reviewer even went so far as to suggest that the filmmakers should have "liberated" the romantic comedy that lurked in the subplot, as that would have been more compelling. hmmm, again. i was glad the film didn't liberate its inner rom com, that would have been typical. and besides, if the inner rom com had been liberated the critics would have panned it for being another rom com. i really enjoyed it. and bravo to the filmmakers for trying something a lil different, slightly adventurous.

Labels: film

Posted by call me aja at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments

i got two movies i was really looking forward to seeing a couple of weeks ago: sylvia and sugar cane alley. i'd never seen sylvia, and it had been years since i saw sugar cane alley, but i remember really enjoying it. sylvia is a biopic about sylvia plath, the literary genius who was also rather unfortunately emotional unstable. love her poetry, and the bell jar was semi-autobiographical fiction brilliance. sugar cane alley is one of the most well known and acclaimed caribbean films, a coming of age story about a young boy growing up in martinique.

too bad neither one of the dvds would play. i tried cleaning them, etc, they just wouldn't play. so i sent them back.

then i got happy endings, broken flowers, and murderball. i liked, but didn't love, happy endings--one of those dark comedy ensemble films telling the separate stories of several dysfunctional characters that eventually all intersect. when it was released to theaters, it was critically well received. have no idea how popular it was. i found it entertaining, but not very compelling or even as terribly unique as the reviewers made it seem. as i was watching it, i constantly was reminded of the last book i read, all aunt hagar's children by edward p. jones: both the movie and jones made a habit of using a lot of foreshadowing, and of telling what would happen to the characters 10, 20, 30 years down the road, long after the action of the story, as the writer/filmmaker is telling us, is concluded. (i know professor mendelson would kill me for writing this paragraph. do not, he always said, fall into the trap of comparing the last 2 things you read.) sent happy endings back and got atl. cuz i'm told i should see it, and i do love t.i.

next i tried really hard to watch murderball, but i found it waaaay too uncomfortable to watch the gentlemen in wheelchairs banging into each other and flipping their chairs over and landing uncomfortably on their faces, necks, etc, in these rugby matches. i had to turn it off after about 20 minutes. so, perhaps i am a punk, but it was too emotionally draining for me to watch. back in the day, when oz was on tv, i also found that too emotionally draining to watch. but i haven't sent the movie back yet, cuz i might give it another try.

and i haven't even attempted to watch broken flowers again. it's a bill murray movie, and i hadn't heard about it in life until i saw it on my friend's netflix queue. the netflix friends feature has provided me a gold mine of film recommendations, so thank you to my netflix friends. anyway, i found myself unable to sit through a bill murray film in the 90s: what about bob? and groundhog day just did absolutely nothing for me. i heard good things about adaptation, but i've never seen it. lost in translation, however i adored. i watched it because i'm a scarlett johansson fan. so i think i'll watch broken flowers and then watch adaptation, too.

and i just thought i'd add that i'm really looking forward to seeing will smith's new movie the pursuit of happyness in theaters, but i'm bitter about the misspelling of happIness in the title. i understand it's all symbolic and whatnot and pertinent to the plot and message of the film, but it irritates me. but i'll see it anyway.

Labels: film

Posted by call me aja at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments

went to go see the last king of scotland on friday. came away from it feeling, at best, lukewarm. (my friend downright hated it...sorry bout that.)

the last king of scotland, based on a novel of the same name, is the story of the (fictional) personal physician of idi amin. while i don't have a problem with fictional characters parading in and out of films inspired by or about real personages (malcolm x comes immediately to mind - all kinds of fictional folks there) the film suffered from being almost totally about the fictional person, and only skimming the surface of idi amin's story.

idi amin is quite possibly one of the most notorious leaders in recent history, and yet, for some reason the film pretends that his personal physician could be completely unaware of his ruthless tyranny.* unlikely that someone on the inside, whom amin trusted, could be so isolated. and his actions alone, without the frontloaded plot concerning the privileged, young scottish doctor nicholas garrigan's improbable sexcapades in uganda, could have occupied an audience.

the performances by the actors, however, were not disappointing. forest whitaker played an alarmingly captivating amin, and james mcavoy (who was wonderful as mr. tumnus in the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe) had the part of the bored, well-to-do european youth looking for some excitement (and changing the world and feeling real important in the process) down pat. i can't fault the actors here at all. and not even so much the writing, because the dialogue was great...i think that the film could have done with some judicious editing in the storyboard phase. or perhaps some reimagining of it's dramatic structure, because while the elements of a good film were there (premise, cast, crew, etc) the sum of film did not turn out to be more compelling than its parts.

*i mean really...in the previous post, tropicália, i briefly mentioned literary artistic anthropophagy (cannibalism), the artistic aesthetic of "eating" other aesthetics. idi amin, on the other hand, has been accused of actual cannibalism. yeah. and that, as monumentally shocking a charge that is, was just a footnote in this film. and literary cannibalism gets mountains written about it every year.

Labels: film, never forgetting

Posted by call me aja at 8:39 PM | Permalink | Comments

my favorite bob marley song of all time. so when i heard that they were doing a movie by that same title i thought, please, don't let this just be random cultural commodification, especially for the sake of a craptacular movie.

and let me just say, catch a fire is definitely NOT that. went to a screening of it last night, and really really really enjoyed it, which is saying something because one of the projectors at the screening room broke (who knew bryant park hotel would have such poor equipment?) so we had to watch the film on one projector -- and films come on many reels, in the case of catch a fire, there were 5 reels, so that meant five breaks to switch the reels on the one working projector. these breaks were more than mildly annoying, but to think of it another way, it also means five moments when the audience might lose interest and leave. and that did not happen.

i found myself riveted. catch a fire is the story of what ordinary people are driven to do/become under extraodinary circumstances. many movies recently (syriana and paradise now come immediately to mind) examine what is it that makes pushes an ordinary human being (and let's face it, most human beings are quite ordinary) to become a terrorist. catch a fire makes a similar examination, but with two glaring differences. (1) the context for catch a fire is not the current middle eastern conflict, but the struggle to dismantle/maintain apartheid in south africa, and (2) this film is based on the true story of an actual individual, patrick chamusso. chamusso is played by derek luke, (antwone fisher in the eponymous film) who was brilliantly convincing in this role. his work stood up to comparision to the south african actors about him. bonnie henna played his wife precious, and the two had remarkable chemistry. chamusso is like the most typical suburban husband and father, loving, hardworking, not particularly political though not politically ignorant, even coaching a neighborhood soccer team. but is he capable of resisting apartheid? what would drive him to that point, when his life was so (comparatively) good?

tim robbins played a most deliberative police official who's job it is to suss out the "terrorists," anc activists. i thought it interesting that the word terrorist occured several times throughout the film - it seems that, since 9/11 terrorist is a word that everyone throws about freely. after the screening there was a q&a with the producer, robyn slovo, who said that there was no intentional insertion of the "war on terror" motif into the film - that's just the way that period in south africa played out.

robyn explained that the film was quite a personal labor of love. it was written by her sister, shawn slovo, based on the story of patrick chamusso, which mr. chamusso related directly to shawn. robyn and shawn's father, joe, was an anc activist who knew mr. chamusso personally, and remarked to his daughters that if ever a film about the struggle against apartheid was made, it should be about patrick chamusso. and his daughters obviously listened.

with films like this, it's deceptively easy to pick out your hero and villian conclusively. patrick chamusso is still alive, and at the end there is footage of him meeting derek luke, who plays him in the film. tim robbins's character, nic vos, is a composite character based on two security inspectors, who, as it turns out, refused to tell their versions of events to the truth and reconciliation commission. so i guess, in this case, mr. chamusso's version of events gets to be history (which is always written by the victors.)

i had to ask robyn about the title, why catch a fire? she said that bob marley's music resonated with anti-apartheid struggle of the era, and it resonated with the filmmakers personally. but i found it odd that the song catch a fire was never at all used in the film. o sure, there was plenty of bob marley music at the most climactic moments, especially could you be loved? and exodus. but catch a fire didn't even play during the credits. i suppose there is something to be said for the subtle tie-in...and i suppose there is something to be said about the fact that the title will also resonate with bob marley fans who may not know anything about south africa.

anyway, catch a fire opens oct 26 nationwide, and in feb 2007 in south africa. (ms. slovo said she believes it will be well-received in south africa, especially given the national climate/attitude that resulted from the truth and reconciliation commission, but south africa suffers from a severe dearth of cinemas in the rural areas.) go check it out. and if you care nothing for its social implications, it also has some good action sequences.

Labels: film, never forgetting

Posted by call me aja at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments

haven't done one of these in a while, so i thought i'd write about the recent netflix activity. netflix is truly a miracle in my life. honestly. without netflix, the only moving images i'd ever see would be good morning america, law & order, america's next top model, project runway, and grey's anatomy. i'm about to divorce myself from desperate housewives, but that's neither here nor there, cuz i have netflix to diversify my viewing experiences.

ok, so i just sent back guess who. first, i will remark that i really like that the title does not include a question mark. second, i will say that i remember this movie being dismissed by critics as neither good nor bad. but i really liked it. the storyline was more than plausible. the actors were convincing, at least to me. ashton kutcher and zoe saldana made a nice on-screen couple. funny, but not too slapstick. not too over the top with the moralizing, but it clearly had a point. it may not make any best ever lists, but i'd recommend it to just about anyone.

i have in my possession favela rising. i have been dying to see this film, a documentary about a drug dealer turned community activist in rio de janeiro. since my very young days, i've had a deep and abiding fascination with brazil, this big country that is obviously quite flawed and yet still ridiculously beautiful. this film documents the rise of the afro reggae movement in rio, and to me, one of the most interesting aspects of the african diaspora is the way in which its cultural features are so easily adopted across the diaspora, despite language and economic barriers. will let you know what i think of it.

i still have crooklyn, and i've had it for a while now. don't plan on sending it back for a least a while longer. classic, classic film - i remember really identifying with troy, the little girl in the film. obviously, this was before i was aware of such a possibility as identifying with a fictional character. certainly, at the age when i first saw the movie, i couldn't know that in a few years i would be moving to the south, and that i would have the same type of cultural confusion as troy did when she visited the south in the movie. pure love for spike lee for this gem.

and a little look at the queue: i should be receiving paradise now sometime this week. paradise now was nominated for the best foreign language film oscar this year, and apparently it won the golden globe. it's about two palestinian young men who are preparing themselves for a suicide mission.

and i've moved city of men up to the top of my queue, now that it's been released on dvd and because of the deep and abiding fascination i have with brazil that i mentioned earlier. a mini series directed by fernando meirelles, the same gentleman who brought the world city of god and the constant gardener, both of which are top notch films that get better with each viewing. and after that, i have sylvia, because i find sylvia plath to be fascinating and brilliant.

ok. so if a theme is to be found in all of this, it would appear that i pick my movies because their topics are either (a) fascinating or (b) brilliant. to me. or maybe, i should work on finding some other adjectives to use...

Labels: film

Posted by call me aja at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments

the netflix rundown and what i'm reading.

manderlay- i loved it. it got some spotty reviews, but i put it on the queue cuz of the premise: a plantation in 1933 where the slaves had never been freed. a woman passing thru stumbles upon the place and undertakes the task of spreading liberty. quite provocative.

dogville-so manderlay is the second movie in lars von trier's meditative trilogy on america. so yeah, i watched them out of order...manderlay first. then i got dogville, and i watched half of it, and then the dvd stopped working. sigh. what i will say is about the lead character, grace - she was played by nicole kidman in dogville, but by bryce dallas howard in manderlay. kidman's grace was much more tentative about life; howard's was much more authoritative. unfortunately, i haven't been able to see the end to see if there is a reason in the plot for the difference.

do the right thing- this movie came out when? 1989? yeah, still soooooo ridiculously relevant. i recommend it to everyone, all those folks who politic about gentrification, all those folks who have no idea what it is, all those folks who want to see vintage spike lee, all those folks who wouldn't know spike lee if he wore a nametag. plus, the action takes place on the hottest day of the year, and it's been HOT round here lately.

and what i'm reading: on the road by jack kerouac. a classic, that i have read many many times. i confess, i really wanted to (re)read junot diaz's drown, but my copy of the book seems to be missing. and it's autographed...i hope it turns up.

Labels: film, literature

Posted by call me aja at 8:08 PM | Permalink | Comments

this weekend, some friends and i were talking about interracial dating, and one of them mentioned something she'd read before - some writer suggested that black women and asian men get together and do some serious coupling, since they are the ones generally left out of the interracial dating world.

and then today, i read this article on slate talking about how, apparently, bob dylan has always had a thing for black women. definitely something i'd never heard before. the article suggests a bit of the fetishism, but then many discussions about interracial dating do the same.


what's most interesting, i guess, is the very fact that it's article-worthy that bob dylan is attracted to black women. funny, funny world we live in-the us census bureau finally allows for people to identify as biracial or multiracial, supposedly indicating a sign of the times, and yet interracial couples are still something of an oddity.

case in point: that movie "something new." now, i haven't seen the movie. but it seems to me that, whenever there is an interracial couple in film/television/media, that film/show/whatever is about the interracial couple. if interracial couples are so common these days, why is it that a couple in a film never only happens to be interracial? when they made that movie hitch, they had to cast a latina as the leading lady because american audiences at large would not go to see a movie where a black man dates a white woman, and only black audiences would go see a movie that featured a black couple.

well, maybe they could have cast halle berry in that role. of course, she is the exception, not the rule-an unthreatening black woman. then again, perhaps they could not afford halle berry? i dunno.

as for the title of this post: it comes from an urban outfitters t-shirt. honestly, i really wouldn't know if everyone loves a black girl....


urban outfitters, despite making the t-shirt, doesn't even love black girls all that much. it was apart of that series, you know, everyone loves and italian girl, everyone loves an irish girl, everyone loves a jewish girl. notice how all of the other shirts reference specific affinity groups? and then we have: black girl. this is not quite the same, after all, urban outfitters did not manufacture a shirt that says everyone loves a white girl, and yet there's nothing that says everyone loves a jamaican girl, everyone loves a sengalese girl, everyone loves a yoruba girl, cuz black girls are treated like they belong to an entirely homogeneous group. and i will admit that black girls are beautiful as a group, but also incredibly diverse...this thing about the t-shirts is pretty tangential, i will admit, yet typical.

Labels: fashion, film, yeah i said it: race

Posted by call me aja at 7:44 PM | Permalink | Comments

i'm at work right now, so this one will be brief.

now reading: i bought helen oyeyemi's the icarus girl on saturday, and i just started reading it today. i'm only 10 pages into it so far, but it promises to be just as brilliant as all the reviewers say it is.

movie reviews: the squid and the whale - i just didn't get the point.
monsoon wedding - maybe i'm (actually) a sucker for a happy ending. loved the movie.

Labels: film, literature

Posted by call me aja at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments