Most human beings socialize and pretend to have fun on Friday nights, but I instead sacrificed my evening to prepare a little song and crappy video for you! Enjoy.
End of the year, or in this case, end of the decade lists are, by their nature, as protean as they are personal. If composed a month, or even a week from now, this same list might’ve seen a change in its order and even its content. There are several unavoidable evils that come along with something as subjective as picking one’s favorite movies. Recent films are fresher in your mind, and some might have added weight from being watched again (and again) after their release. But even with these in mind, I have created a list based on my own moviegoing experiences in the last 10 years (which is considerable, but by no means comprehensive).
The aughts were an important time for film. Studios started creating smaller, independent production companies and financing braver, more interesting cinema. Advances in technology have ushered in an era of low-budget pioneers, making the medium more accessible (even if many of these films never find distribution). And, on the grander public stage, even mainstream cinema saw a measure of refinement, producing smarter blockbusters/studio pictures.
A few notable exceptions from this list include animated film (Pixar has had quite a decade) and documentaries (this choice was mostly due to my limited interaction with the genre).
Even Kevin Arnold's little brother knows about the warp whistle
Hey there, got a few minutes? Great, then let me spin a little yarn for you. You’d better have a drink for this one, good thing I prepared this rum and coke ahead of time. What? Hmmm, tastes fine to me. Anyway, a profound revelation was imparted to me today, as I crafted a flute from PVC pipe following directions I found on the net. Let me note first of all that I don’t actually know how to play a flute but after failing to forge a working woodwind from a branch of dead poplar earlier in the day, I needed an ego boost. As the monumental plans to paint this flute orange and write “Warp Whistle” on it in order to woo hipster girls who enjoy reminiscing about retro video games they never actually played almost as much as they enjoy reminiscing about entire decades they wish they were born into, danced along my synapses, I was struck by a realization. No, of course I’m not alluding to you! Clearly you’re different. Here, have another drink.
Like “Juno” and “Thank You for Smoking” before it, Jason Reitman’s third film “Up in the Air” is a light, surefooted comedy rooted in moments of genuine heart. Like Juno MacGuff and Nick Naylor before him, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), the film’s protagonist, lives a lonely and somewhat troubled existence before he’s able, by uniting around his family, to transcend it. And like his previous work, “Up in the Air” is an achievement in technical filmmaking rather than one of emotional resonance; it is a solid, enjoyable indie film, but it is not as valuable or as enlightening as it purports to be.
With help from fellow BONer, Esmé, I’ve transcribed all the greatest lines from Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope. Some of these quotes are simply badass, some of them are funny, but all of them are beautiful when taken out of context. Juvenile commentary included free of charge! Hopefully, I will do the other two movies of the original trilogy at some point, but right now I sleepy. Now, bathe in the rejuvenating waters of nostalgia! Note that the quotes in bold are those deemed the most meme-worthy, by either my own judgement or by virtue of the fact that they already are memes.
Playing dress up is fun.
Nothing can provide as much intellectual security as the conviction that one’s position is not only factually warranted but morally imperative. This position is evident in the writings of activist (I hesitate to actually confer on him the honor of being referred to as a “scholar”) Ward Churchill. His “history” is more polemic than anything and frequently cast in extremely Manichean terms. But the most insidious part of Churchill’s work is not the sanctimonious presentism that pervades his scholarship, but the extreme “ends justify the means” mentality that leads him to conclude that innocent people deserve to die – and the cover of legitimacy his reputation as a professor lends to that position.
Anarcho-abolitionism?
A great deal of time was spent pondering how to begin this essay. Given the scope of the concepts at hand, there did not seem to be any way to properly introduce my ideas to the reader. So I decided to begin with the hackneyed postmodern device known as self-reference, thus absolving myself of the burdensome duty of being creative [end humor sequence]. Since most of the readership, which undoubtedly consists entirely of people I coaxed through facebook to follow a link here, is probably uninitiated in one or more of these concepts, it is necessary to explain each of them on the course presenting my own ideas.
In the inter-war period, an American communist organizer decided for some reason to open his speech with the above. It’s a line so preposterous that if someone told me the speaker was actually a free market fundamentalist in disguise out to make Communism look ridiculous, I would have no trouble believing them. Such is the stuff of this post. Although Poe’s Law was postulated in reference to fundamentalist Christianity, its applications elsewhere are legion. Roughly, Poe’s Law holds that extremism and parodies of extremism are indistinguishable. The tanned, thickly-accented Guidismo of the inhabitants of MTV’s Jersey Shore and the sheltered, fact defying logic and beliefs of the Marxist-inspired extreme left fit the bill perfectly.
Are you cussing with me?
“Honey, I’m seven non-fox years old,” Mr. Fox (George Clooney) tells his wife as the camera pushes in on them sitting down to breakfast, “My father died at seven-and-a-half. I don’t want to live in a hole anymore. And I’m gonna do something about it.” Then, after a pregnant pause, he tears full force into his meal, arms flying and jaws snapping, with the voracity of, well, a wild animal. This early scene stands in for a remarkable whole; “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” adapted from Roald Dahl’s beloved book of the same name, succeeds by oscillating effortlessly between complicated, even adult concerns and downright fun. Not carefree enough to be shallow and not serious enough to be tiresome, Wes Anderson’s latest is a triumph of balance, at once enjoyable and meaningful.
As she stumbles, panting, through thick underbrush at the beginning of “New Moon,” Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) comes face to face with that which she fears most. No, she doesn’t encounter a villainous monster (series author Stephenie Meyer has defanged or declawed most of these); instead, she sees herself grow old. Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson)―her pale, sharp-browed Adonis―also appears in the clearing, striding toward her senescent self. This nightmare, one of many Bella has during the film, exposes, as a central theme: her fear of aging, which she perceives as her romantic obsolescence. Will their awkward, mumbling love stand the test of time; or will Edward, when met with (as Yeats put it) “the sorrows of [her] changing face,” turn and fly? “New Moon,” an overlong mess of hormones and heartache, is not sure.
Since I was a wee tot with Jurassic Park velcro shoes and a bowl haircut I’ve played SimCity in one incarnation or another. I don’t mean that I’ve played it consistently for that long, but the concept of SimCity is burned into my motor memory right between potty training and coloring inside the lines (which I later stopped doing because it is a form of programming: going “outside the lines” is considered wrong, you do the math. I still do use the toilet though, quite routinely). The first SimCity I played was, well the first SimCity game ever made on the Commodore 64, then I upgraded to the Super Nintendo version when it came out. I remember very little about the Commodore version but the SNES version was one of my favorite games at the time. For those unfamiliar with the SimCity series, the premise is pretty simple: you are the omnipotent, perpetually incumbent, de facto mayor of a city that does not yet exist. You must then build a city starting with a power plant and then add “zones”, i.e. residential, commercial, and industrial zones. There is a meter that informs you of the demand for each type of zone so you get a sense of what to build. You can also build various civic and utilitarian structures like police and fire stations, airports, and of course roads and rails for transportation. And on you go like this, expanding, bringing in more and more citizens while managing a budget, balancing spending and tax revenue.
Bella the Vampire non-layer angsts her way into theatres.
Admin Note: In honor of the release of “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” and to whet your appetite for our forthcoming review, reprinted here is Kevin’s original review of “Twilight” from the UCR Highlander.
On atheism, the Belgian poet Émile Cammaerts wrote that “when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.” In the wake of Harry Potter, a global fascination that lasted over a decade, millions of people needed something to turn to. In many cases, that something was “Twilight.” It’s not hard to find the appeal, either. The characters are written broadly: Bella, the story’s protagonist, seems to be the perfect blend of what female readers are and what they wish they were, giving her an “every girl” feeling. Edward Cullen is dark and mysterious, sculpted out of stone, but also sensitive and protective; he’s James Dean getting your kitten out of a tree.
The paranoid theories that have proliferated on the American Right recently speculate about Obama’s “true nature.” He’s a a communist, a Nazi, a Muslim, and who knows what other anti-American things. It’s easy to laugh these ideas off, especially when they are being promoted by the motley crew of libertarians, 9/11 truthers, militia types and other dead enders that show up to teabag rallies. People forget that during the presidency of Bill Clinton there was a similar uptick in “militia activity,” the vast majority of which consisted of what is perhaps the most privileged class in America – suburban white males – becoming obsessed with the notion that they are being persecuted and doing army drills and drinking budweiser in the forest with their like-minded buddies. Because so many of these people are not “educated,” the self-appointed intellectuals among us (and, to be fair, anyone who has a modicum of familiarity with the issues at hand) dismiss them as stupid people with hilariously stupid ideas. Fair enough. And it is certainly hard to take someone seriously when they dress up in camo fatigues or colonial-era garb. But the Left in the United States hosts its own class of the conspiracy-minded.
A needle and thread, pushed and pulled through muslin, are kept in shallow focus during the first few moments of “Bright Star.” Their movements, rendered by the calm and certain hands of Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), mirror those director Jane Campion took with her subject. Rather than juggle all the years of John Keats’ life, she weaves gently through the last three, anchoring her film in the love and correspondence between Keats and Fanny. Though other aspects of Keats’ life―financial hardships, mixed critical reception―can be found on the film’s periphery, “Bright Star” concerns itself largely with hushed affections shared in summer hours, with words spoken and celebrated in the soft light of late-afternoon.
