darkthirty

Highlights - Ron in love, Harry on serendipity, Slughorn whenever he is on screen, and especially Luna, odder than ever. What I didn't like was the 40 minutes of stupid wasted time, over-extended talky scenes that amounted to little more than romantic twaddle, entirely unnecessary, one extremely insipid, dopey "action scene" involving the burrow, an utterly botched cave scene, which failed to strike any chord, like most of the emotional scenes in this comedy, beside some self-referential amazement at the quality of the film's own design and craft. Prettiest, and least significant of the HP films. Thank goodness for Broadbent and Lynch, cause even Carter was made to waste screen time. The problems with this film are Shared between Yates and Kloves. There is, after all, little enough Rowling in it. HBP movie gets 6, because itis very pretty and funny. That puts it on par with the Columbus ones, albeit for different reasons. Actually, I was very unimpressed with the lofted lighter lumos scene that replaced Dumbledore's funeral. Understand please that the 6 is because the movie is funnier than 98% of the so-called comedies I've seen.

While I was writing about House of Gaunt before going tonight to the HBP movie, I posted a very clear and concise version of my thoughts at Awardsdaily. From what I gather, my criticism is shared by many reviewers, who while loving the visuals, are noting that the romance and the main plot seem disconnected. Well duh! They cut the connect out!


Sleepless, the band. Their only release is from 2001 (there's another band with that name now, plus a dj, and several other music related projects, and a film, with the name), Winds Blow Higher, on The End records, who have released Agalloch, November's Doom, and Nadja, and it was a kind of experiment - shoegaze, progressive rock, a bit of folky doom metal. I don't know much about the band at all, but I like the music, I've been listening to it for a few months.

From the deleted last.fm wiki entry (I guess the new band doesn't want this kicking around)

( Sleepless )

Oh, hey, I'm darkthirty on twitter, follow me. Mostly these posts (via twitterfeed) and occasional things from the iPhone.

Moon is something too rare in movies lately - it's a film about ideas told with emotion, as opposed to effects and gadgetry, and tells a story through the actions of the characters, without unnecessary exposition, and without any moralizing cheapness, a flaw that destroyed, for some of us, the twin behemoth extravaganzas of bad taste The Dark Knight and Wall-E (but which cheap moralizing unaccountably is more often praised in mainstream art in our age than challenged.) A good example of this film's uncompromising sense of what is appropriate occurs when the main character sets aside a live video feed at a point that makes no sense at all for the viewer, but absolutely perfect sense for the main character. A ham-fisted director would have shoved focussed the dog's viewer's nose attention toward the pile of crap meaning of the scene, but Duncan Jones directs with much more sense than that, and uses a limited budget to marvelous effect. That budget eventually curtails the fun, it has to, but not before Moon gets 8.5. 

Cessation of funding for the MAP van, and DEYAS needle exchange, the closing of temporary shelters in areas too close to middle class people (who will then say what a horrible place the downtown eastside is, where they insist the shelters belong, not in their "heritage view") the Lord of the Rings (the security prep for 2010), the "downtown embassadors" (read people paid to move the homeless along suddenly becoming something else, in retrospect), and, while the 2010 budget blasts off to who knows where, look at the rise in welfare rolls! The 2010 disaster isn't on its way, it is here already.

I didin't think the film would be universally hailed, after the rather horrid early reviews last year, I am grateful for this first somewhat negative review this time around, and even if it does say 3/5, all the things I feared about the movie are confirmed here. I'm telling you, the missing House of Gaunt, and the fumbled ending, is going to be the true legacy of this movie. We'll see.

Rashomon has been restored, using an archival 35 mm print, and it looks just beautiful. It's playing at the Cinematheque until July 8, Vancouverites, part of the Cinematheque's Essential Cinema series. Must try to see Rules of the Game next week, which I've only seen on DVD.

I have bought tix for the midnight showing of HBP at Scotiabank Theatre Cinema 1. My son and I will be there.

Why didn't I know about this series before? I really like it.

This is a great Blu-ray, the 20th Anniversary edition of Do the Right Thing which was released in Region 1 today, with a new doc, and a new commentary track, 11 newly discovered deleted scenes, plus all the special features from the Criterion DVD. This is a must have. And the transfer to hi-def is stunning.
Now, I know some of you still haven't seen this great movie - the 20th anniversary editon also came out on dvd, so now's the time to see it anyone who hasn't. It is, to be honest, no easier to watch the scene below, 20 years later, but that's partly what makes the film unforgettable - no one else has really captured on film, and taken the audience to, this level of frustration and anger, not the way Spike Lee did it here.

Save us from the whiney babies, please.

I have always understood the religious impulse, in particular the Catholic one, and rejecting the church does not mean I won't listen to magnificent music by William Byrd, or The Innocence Mission, or My Epic - in fact, I can hear this music and understand it, identify the passion behind it, and often enough share a sense of that passion. I can appreciate Tom Cruise's acting without any reference to his connection to Scientology. I can buy Steve Vander Ark's books without feeling compromised in the slightest. Melissa and Emerson at Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet are still ludicrous and bland, pop tarts filled with sand, I say. Surely I'm not the only one to notice?

I can ship Harry/Hermione without growing a tail and turning purple. I can be part of fandom without being one of the simpering fools.

I could care less about Michael Jackson, or the unsettling and morbid fascination with his broken life, his ridiculous gestures, his drive to befriend all those idols, or his utterly wasted millions of dollars, and I could care less about the vultures who surrounded him, anymore than I care about the circumstances of David Carradine's death. I still sort of like 3 or 4 of  Michael's videos, and that's it - there is nothing more. The Guardian deleted an online article critical of the news coverage of Michael Jackson's death, and that pisses me off more than I can express. That is surely a crime against the living.

There's so much fear in this world now - the great internet means some kind of freedom they say, but is anyone being honest, aside from occasional comments on anonymous memes?

More and more freedom to say less and less heterogeneous things. Scary.

I was quite worried at the 2 - 0 score at the end of the first half - I suspected the USA would need to score 3 to have a good chance of holding on in the second. And, in fact, Brazil scored 4 goals then, though only 3 were counted. Still, I was pleased with the performance of the US team. I would have included Adu for Casey in the subs all at once.

Daniel Alves, whoa. Way to silence the great vuvuzela. I really hope USA does well against Brazil on Sunday, but I have to say, that is one nice free kick. 

Neat. Onyewu was double solid, while DeMerit just plunked everything out, but it worked. And what the heck was Ramos thinking about all game, because there must have been more than just football going on, to get caught like that.

Polish production of The Lime Works, a novel by Thomas Bernhard.

And since I'm talking favourites, I somehow missed this piece when it was published in February in the Guardian online. Says Geoff Dyer of  the Tarkovsky film  "...it's not enough to say that Stalker is a great film - it is the reason cinema was invented."

Oh heck, regarding the 20th anniversary Do the Right Thing (The Great American Movie) Blu-ray release later this month, let me direct you to this article. Here's a bit below - remember, a film I hate almost as much as Brokeback Mountain or Milk, and for pretty much the same reasons (they are, at core, sentimental hallmark cards of self-satisfaction more than movies - innocuous stuff you'd see on a country stage in summer), Driving Miss Daisy won the Oscar for best picture, when Do the Right Thing wasn't even nominated.

"Lee: There was a benefit for Barack Obama on Martha's Vineyard when he was running for the Senate. I didn't really know who he was. He came over and said, "You're responsible for me and my wife getting together." Then he told me how they saw "Do the Right Thing" on their first date, and then went to Baskin-Robbins for ice cream and talked about it.

Smith: We're actually responsible for a whole new era in American political achievement.

Lee: I think he is a very smart man, because if he had taken Michelle to see "Driving Miss Daisy," things would have turned out a whole lot different."

In the worst possible result for a very tired-looking Italian team, the Americans (remember, I'm a USA fan in one sport only, and that's football) showed up fit and feisty for their final group game against the wonderful Egyptians, and played up to their own standard against that very very tired team. They needed some goals, and to keep a clean sheet, and they did so. Well done USA, I say, and well done South Africa in the other group. We are still on track for the dream Spain/Brazil final - and this Brazilian team is a strong a side as that country has ever fielded, I really must say, which means, of course, this is a good a football team as I've ever seen. The Italians played two very confused and disorganized games, I thought, and they have paid dearly for this - and the score could have been much worse but for the woodwork. But, to speak from my heart, the USA did what it had to do in that final group game, and they deserved the victory. They'll need everything they have to face boldly what most think is the best Spanish side ever.

I love this game!

Wow, are they ever fun to watch - the two best games of the Confederations cup have involved Egypt. Lovely.

I posted this on facebook, but it belongs here too.

1. Persuasion - reveals a deeper, broader sort of melancholic truth than anything else Austen wrote - there is a constant sense of suspension, of deferred lives, that seems quite contemporary to me
2. Pride and Prejudice - it's a joy to read, the author is having way too much fun, and it feels like she's just revelling in the ability to suck us in whole
3. Mansfield Park - I've never been exactly sure of what Austen was doing here, but it reads like Austen is talking about much much more than what simply on the page - perhaps this novel is a kind of vastly superior failure, as if Austen meant to attain a sort of realism that became just a bit too dangerous. I like the book a lot, even if I don't feel I've discovered it's true purpose - the title seems key - "a man's field" - perhaps something broader than "the two inches of ivory" she usually worked on
4. Emma - entertaining
5. Northanger Abbey - feels occasionally like an exercise more than a novel, but still fun
6. Sense and Sensibility - okay, I love Elinor, but I don't enjoy the book as much as the others

I recommended Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to my almost 13 year old son, looking for new directions in fiction, along with Ray Bradbury and, well, Charles Dickens, or at least, David Copperfield (which, so wikipedia, was Freud's favourite novel) - all writers I read when I was very young too.

( Granada's Sherlock Holmes )

In his short, frightening and rather disheartening, but unquestionably honest novel Yes, Thomas Bernhard refines this humanist pessimism thus -

After all, there is nothing but failure. If we at least have the will to fail we make progress, and in everything, in each and every thing, we must at least have the will to fail, unless we wish to perish at a very early stage, which of course cannot be the intention behind our existence.

( Thomas Bernhard's Yes )

I knew two people in high school who killed themselves ( Suicide )

I am writing this partly in response to happy_potterer , the last post( Taboo )

And death, on TV, is now angels, and offices with stick-it notes, or hell, immortals, forget death. All very Jungian, and not at all Freudian.

No wonder suicidal kids feel there's no one to talk to. There isn't. They'd just get pumped with drugs and ostracized, since all the anti-psychiatry of the last few decades has diluted the profession with dangerous and useless Jung-inspired new age claptrap, which has never understood the slightest thing about suicide. Of course, Jungian-inspired quacks only exist where the profession hasn't been out-right eradicated.

FOX news has now determined that Wang Weilin (or whoever it was) had a gun in his shopping bags when he stood in front of the tanks in probably the most iconic moment of individual passive resistance in the late 80s, because this man was not even a part of the organized protest, but saw horror coming and attempted to stop it, in a gesture that is without a doubt one of the most purely heroic real life acts ever captured on camera.

PS The entire Frontline special on this real life hero is online here.

Articles like this will only become more frequent as the news coverage of my city self-consciously reflects on the 2010 Winter Olympics. It's such a crock, however. I tried to post this comment below, but the script is buggy. There's no reason it shouldn't be printed among the comments.

"Actually, just make every pharmacy in BC have a needle exchange program, and other harm reduction supports, and the DTES would not look like it does - not in a month, even, let alone a year, or ten. If addiction is really a health issue, as all the professionals and legislators say, why are the services for this health issue so localized to a few little places, and mostly the DTES? I repeat, the "solution" to the drug trade and the health crisis in the Downtown Eastside is to have harm reduction programs and needle exchange programs everywhere - the responsibility de facto has been shunted to Insite and Pivot and so forth, because no one else wants to do something constructive.

The truth, the fact of the matter, is that Vancouver needs the Downtown Eastside so all of its other fancy neighbourhoods don't have to share the burden, and it also supplies an easy "morality fix" to the armchair baton-wielders and civil rights tramplers.

What a two-faced lie this city lives."

PS - some members of Black Mountain have worked at, and I think some might still work at, Insite - FTW.