Hello, my name is Emily. I am a dachshund.
I am cute, but generally confused. The origin of this confusion can be found in the name of my breed, which was derived from the original tachskreiger, literally ‘badger warrior’. I am designed to hunt badgers. If I have a quizzical expression on my face,
it’s because I’m wondering: Where are the badgers? or Why aren’t there more badgers around?
I feel ambivalent about the Oscars, I just don’t feel ambivalent enough. What I really want is to feel nothing, and instead, I hate them and love them, which is coincidentally how I feel about articles about the Oscars. They are a collosal con, and I want my cut. When I made a film years back, I confess to a practice Oscar speech or two, even though it was a film that wouldn’t be even be seen, let alone awarded. I believe it went something along the lines of: “Ladies and Gentlemen. Collected before me are all the worst type of hypocritical sycophantic liars, and now I’m finally one of you! Stop looking at me! I love you all! This award is meaningless, to myself and anyone in the world, and I’m keeping it! Thank you, and get out of my way!”
Wanting an award you detest is bad enough, but entertaining the notion of a best anything is just plain odd. Even if we could agree to that an Aristotelian material cause of beauty could lead to a formal cause of truth, Hume correctly points out that matters of fact, standing in opposition to relations of ideas, makes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button just fucking impossible to sit through. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s nothing better than seeing a movie in another country. I’m sure someday, I will regale you, gentle reader, with the tale of the Cinema Les Halles, one of the only multiplexes in Paris that shows 1) crappy American films and 2) crappy American films in VO, (version originale), English with French subtitles. It’s a place where Date Movie is transformed into Sexy Movie, and where they don’t know that they shouldn’t show 16 Blocks for any reason. Nevertheless, I spent all morning practicing, and it’s really the only French I know: ‘says-ee-em bloc’. So, two years from now, when I’m in a post-apocalyptic Paris, fighting over the last can of saucisson, and the pretty girl in the yaourt aisle, asks, looking wistfully through her bangs, “Savez-vous quelle etais la cause de la fini de la civilisation?”, I can reply, correctly: “16ième blocs.”
You don’t want to see movies: this is understandable. You have to drive to the theater; find parking, wait in line. The food is overpriced, and even the sweet stuff is too salty. The crowds are bad, tend to talk, or worst tell you to shut up if you’re talking (who on earth wants to hear what they’re saying in The Day The Earth Stood Still?).
As any of my friends will tell you, I am a very shallow person. I like my girls pretty, my chips nacho, and I don’t like it when my bands become popular. When R.E.M. became a superband, they were the same band, but they went from cool to uncool overnight. They redeemed themselves somewhat when VH1 aired their story behind the music, and I found out Bill Berry left the band to be a farmer, but even that was not enough.
Actually, he did have a pretty nice doggy.
Early on in Valkyrie, the filmmakers detail one of the many plots to kill Hitler, this one involving a bomb disguised as a case of Cointreau. There’s much sweaty fingers and machinations, and, naturally, the inevitable failure. It doesn’t take long for me to suggest out loud, as my namesake Scotty Evil might, “Um, it’s called a gun. They had a lot of them in World War II.” As the movie unfolds it becomes clear that the murder of Hitler not only requires an elaborate plot, but an extensive number of plotters. As I was growing increasingly frustrated (as yes, I’m aware it’s what actually happened, but it was also a movie), my friend Nathan, who would be much better at this job than I am, said, “What is he, Batman?”
You can never know what you’re getting when you sit down to see a movie, but this simple fact doesn’t mean that I can’t predict what an entire year of film will be like. If lazy screenwriters can rely on the cheap tricks that prophecy provides, so can I. Thus: the first film that I see sets the tone for the rest of the year. The darks days of January, the dumping ground for the crap the studios have no other place to put, are the entrails from which I divine the year. I am surprisingly successful with this technique. The jaw-dropping In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Seige Tale correctly predicted 2007, the best year in cinema since 1990 just as Cabin Boy presaged 1994, a year with Quiz Show, Pulp Fiction, Speed, Léon, Ed Wood, Heavenly Creatures, The Usual Suspects, and Cabin Boy.
Christmas, the time of presents (and some guy who got born or something), is also the time of early morning film outings. Christmas is one of my favorite times to see a film, since the roads are clear, and you feel a bit like you shouldn’t be there. I am not alone on this, since the holiday is the biggest movie day of the year, so feeling like you shouldn’t be there may be one of the biggest draws to seeing a movie in the first place. That, and avoiding the uncomfortable silence between presents and eating.
But how to choose from the plethora? I this time was faced with Benjamin Button (three hours long), Marley & Me (it takes 13 years for a family to love their doggie, and then it dies), and Valkyrie (The tagline of ‘Many saw evil. They dared to stop it’ having been changed from the much longer: ‘They went along with evil for ten years or so, and then, for their own selfish reasons, decided to make a half-hearted and incompetent attempt to stop it, only to fail and then die’. The shorter version fits better on a poster).
I went with the Nazi one. The Spirit.
Many years ago, the LA Weekly review of Showgirls was struggling to explain how difficult this film was to categorize (and Showgirls is that). The reviewer explained (and I’m quoting from memory here), “At one point during the preview screening, a man behind me said, ‘This is the greatest movie I have ever seen in my entire life.’”
That man was me.
This may be difficult to believe, but I was at that preview screening, and anyone who knows me will tell you those exact words have tumbled from my mouth more than once (though I was slightly misquoted. The exact phrasing is, “This is the Greatest Film. I Have Ever Seen. In My Entire Life” Happy to set the record straight). That being said, my friends are lying if they tell you that I say it about every movie I see. That being said, it is a phrase I will use at least four or five times a year. It is a statement reserved for the truly remarkable and wonderful, not the good. And to be clear, I mean it each time I say it. My Name Is Bruce is not a good movie. It may even be terrible. But that doesn’t stop it from being the greatest movie I have ever seen in my entire life.
Jacques Laçan was a french psychoanalyst who came up with the bright idea that the length of the therapy session should be according to the patient’s need. If you were in a space to open up, the session would go on for hours. If you weren’t ready to get better, he would kick you out after five minutes. I’ve always suspected that he quintuple booked, and would up getting paid for 20 sessions an hour, but you never know. History is still debating the accuracy of his filofax.