As a union dues paying member here is a centennial celebration I can get behind. I've been excited for it all week and everything has been a total bizarro world confluence leading up to Friday, March 25th 2011.
One: Go ahead and Netflix stream the PBS documentary about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The ending will haunt your dreams.
Two: Watch an episode of Venture Bros. that makes a Jacob Riis joke. Spend an hour looking at Riis photos after being reminded he exists. Think about why The Alienist was never made into a movie. Wonder what it would take for Scott Rudin to make that happen.
Three: Watch the entire North and South series to get your Northern England industrial Victorian squalor on. Especially helpful if there's a Downton Abbey shaped hole in your life and you need more quiet Brendan Coyle dignity in your diet.
It'll be kind of difficult to do this all on a Friday but maybe make a weekend of it? Celebrate unionization and child labor laws! Do it!
Julian's shoe game in Less Than Zero is second to none. I know that leather sandals are really frightening for your average man, but this is so Antibes in the 20s incredible, you cannot deny it.
It's sort of like that argument about having not seen Evil Dead II yet. If I just ruined the film for you, it wasn't on your actual to-do list. When were you going to get around to it? Next Halloween?
Your willful suspending of a belief in physics and geometry is essential for not viewing the end of this film as a megalomaniac ensnaring two piteous naifs in a suicide pact. Does that altimeter reading mean they're still 300 stories below sea level? Was this film viewed by a very young, very impressionable Alber Elbaz? So. Many. Questions.
Are we excited about this? There's a lot of bedding. It sort of feels like a Pottery Barn commercial? I think owning ovaries obliges me to see this but I'm not counting down the days.
This Spike Jonze short film is also available for viewing. It's good like Where The Wild Things Are but I always feel duped by modern sentimentality. I like it as it's evoking a feeling but it's totally useless five minutes later. It tells me nothing about who I am and what I really want. It doesn't even open up the conversation about such things, there is nothing for my brain to chew on. Afterwards I feel like I ate the whole pint of ice cream just to soothe an imaginary hunger. I hate the empty calories of Generation X/Y films.
We're a generational sect of thumbsuckers who are perma-nostalgic. The problem with our nostalgia is that we're just nostalgic for other good times, we aren't nostalgic because we're living through a collective harsh like the Great Depression or Vietnam. The reason the 60s were so productive is due to all the depression babies hustling towards the future because their past sucked so hard. We're not running away from anything (except growing up) and still, couldn't possibly want more.
One could argue for Iraq: Part Deux as a modern equivalent to Vietnam but our generation's war is socioeconomically segregated. There is no mandatory conscription to level the field and politically motivate the kids. It affects a limited population that more than likely isn't stoked on seeing Spike Jonze and Sofia Coppola movies. There isn't a lot of Venn diagram crossover for Sofia Coppola film fans and soldiers in Kabul, I am assuming. She makes films for people who are just like her or people who aspire to be like her. Où est l'égalité, Sofia? I am your key demographic and I am turned off. If I am turned off, then who the hell is still turned on by this?
Which brings up yet another issue I have with Sofia's films. There's a very strong "beautiful sad girl" bent to all of them that is pretty boring. Still going strong with that theme four films in! Pretty (and most often rich) girls are unsatisfied too. How do we plumb those depths yet again? Why are women (possibly just daughters of famous out-to-pasture directors) given such praise for a continued parade of shallow moving magazine editorials? Why aren't we asking more of her, would we have treated Tarantino's fourth feature with such delicacy and reverence? I dunno, you can't have it both ways. You can't be down with the cause and critical of women at the same time. We all gotta like each other's garbage and support each other's bullshit, right? I mean, shit you've already got my eleven dollars Sofia, how about you put a little fucking stretch in your game?
