Early Morning Viewing
by Giampaolo Bianconi
I’ve been plagued by jet lag for the past few days, waking up around 4 wide-eyed and unable to roll over and talk in my sleep for hours (like I’d like to). It’s a nice, icy blue time of day–good to catch up on some reading, but even better to do some lonely home viewing. Here are a few of the things I’ve been enjoying at unlikely hours.
1. Breaking Bad — Okay, maybe you shouldn’t watch this at 4 AM: its tone is downright apocalyptic; and it’s more melodramatic than AMC’s other amazing offering, Mad Men. But Breaking Bad is not only engrossing and addicting, it’s pointed and truly modern in a way that fills a void left by The Wire and The Sopranos. The Season 3 premiere might be the best “the way we live now” ever.
2. By Brakhage — I’ve been revisiting these in preparation for the day when I buy Volume Two. Watching Brakhage without the flicker of the projector can be bizarre, but on DVD in the deserted morning it seems perfect: just let yourself zoom in, frame by frame, and watch everything pass and flow. But don’t look at it like a painting: it’s a film.
3. JFK — Why, yes, a healthy dose of epic conspiracy theory before the sun rises is more enjoyable than at night with friends. Paranoia is better in the dawn? Maybe. Don DeLillo in the evening, by the fire; Oliver Stone in the morning, with coffee. Back and to the left.
4. The Silent World — You’ve seen The Life Aquatic. Now spring for the real thing: Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle collaborated on this Oscar winning documentary which seems timelier now more than ever. All the DVD collections of Cousteau’s explorations are also highly recommended.
5. Guy Maddin — All of Guy Maddin’s bizarre and beautiful films are made better by early morning confusion and lightheadedness, especially Archangel and the amazing Careful.
Screen Memories
by Giampaolo Bianconi
Iron Man 2, dir. Jon Favreau (2010)
Nothing in Iron Man 2 seems old: like the arc reactor in Tony Stark’s chest, everything glows for no reason. The screens with which Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) interacts throughout the film go past physical presence and become the very air of Stark’s workshop, which he can manipulate with his touch. He not only tells robots what to do, he is himself a robot. It becomes difficult to stop thinking you’re watching The Jetsons. (more…)
You May Not Have Been Anywhere But You’re Certainly Going Somewhere
by Giampaolo Bianconi
(Might be a few–you know–spoilers here.)
After watching the finale of Mad Men‘s third season on Sunday night, I feel embarrassed. How could I have honestly thought that Don Draper would leave 1963 crying over his dissolved marriage or whining in his office at Sterling Coo?
Someone at Roger Sterling’s daughter’s wedding said that we, America, recovered from FDR’s death by dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one, it was his implication, looked back. Don Draper once said there was no American history. There’s no history of Americans, you could say–as individuals we have no personal histories, nothing but where we are and where we’re going. North American Aviation. The Moon. The War in Vietnam. (Eventually, bell-bottoms.) Besides, you never saw yourself where you where anyway.
Sunday night, everyone expected tragedy–we expected a rerun of JFK getting shot, another one of our idols to come crashing down. He didn’t. Draper spent most of this season genuinely bored–sleepwalking through an affair, so bored at work he was convinced he could do everyone else’s job. By now, you know the story–it was like a great men on a mission movie, but, you know, on Madison Avenue. Don regained his sense of purpose. It’s a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, he could have only found after the lack engendered by JFK’s assassination. A moment of pervasive emptiness–what did we do?–we did something. America hates a vacuum. Last night Draper filled his vacuum with a torrid sense of urgency that will propel him–where else–into the future.
Assassination Nation
by Giampaolo Bianconi
The JFK motorcade, frames before shots are fired.
I’ve been watching Mad Men‘s current season with wide eyes, waiting for Hildy to burst into tears and snot all over Pete Cambell, screaming, “They killed the President!” Sunday night, it happened — and if there was anything surprising about how Weiner and Co. handled the event, it was how straightforward it was: just a bunch of people watching television, like on 9/11. (more…)
Were There Wild Things? (Wild Things Review, Take II)
by Giampaolo Bianconi
(Note: Matt’s previous post on Where the Wild Things Are can be found here. Also, this review contains some spoilers on the film. Just to know.)
Simply put, childhood does not exist. Its existence is contingent on its status as memory, not as experience or reality. Childhood has value only once it has actually disappeared, only has reality in the mind of the adult who conceives of his past, its purity and its frustrations–which are so “moving” because they remain our frustrations as we grow older. This means that childhood–no matter how liberating its primal scream, is really a call for conservatism, for a construction of the past as we imagine it. It has no forward motion and denies memory: it seeks to be without place or time, yet remains only in the place of our mind and the time that has past. Childhood is not real.
The Company Endorsement – Sept. ’09
by Adam Hirsch
Things to do, things to see, things to read in these last weeks of summer: