Arts & Film

Dir. Peter Howitt Laws of Attraction is a passable rom-com with a standard adversaries-become-lovers plot. Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore play two of Manhattan’s top divorce lawyers with very different styles (he’s casual and often unscrupulous, she’s straitlaced and takes the high road) who predictably fall for each other. Meanwhile, Michael Sheen and Parker Posey chip in gamely as an over-the-top rock star-fashion designer couple whose divorce proceedings pit the lawyers against each other.

Dir. Peter Berg Based on the book by H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights is set in the oil town of Odessa, Texas, a world in which football is religion. The film is shot to emphasise the flat landscape of Odessa, all heat and dust, the sheer emptiness of a town that has nothing to look for but the Friday night lights of the title. That sense of urgency pervades the game scenes of the film: you can almost feel the crunch as the adolescent bodies slam into each other.

Dirs. Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha Made by the same people who made Ice Age, Robots moves from prehistoric animals to a world of robots and other sentient machines. The animated film tells the tale of Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan McGregor), a young hopeful inventor from Rivet Town who longs to make it as an inventor in Robot City and to meet Big Weld (a joyous Mel Brooks), head honcho of an eponymous firm and Rodney’s idol.

Dir. Mike Nichols At his best Mike Nichols makes you never want to fall in love. His finest work - The Graduate (definitely on my personal favourite list of movies) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - always suggests that love implies the possibility of betrayal.

Everything that needs to be said about the winners has been said elsewhere - heck, the photos of the law firm of Swank, Eastwood, and Foxx are so oversplashed, I thought I’d put up a pic of Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski, who won for Best Documentary. So here’s some random minor thoughts from yesterday’s ceremony:

I used to write a music column for the Harvard Crimson back in 2000 and 2001, as fellow blogger Balderdash has discovered. That made me think of resuscitating some old ones, adding in the hyperlinks that a print column could never use and making minor amendments. I’ll start with these thoughts on Eminem’s “Stan” and Steely Dan, first published in March 2001 after the Grammys.

Will post Oscar thoughts soon. Meantimes, Nerve.com’s Film Issue is Excellent, capital E intended: Jonathan Lethem writes a paean to real sex on celluloid in “Donald Sutherland’s Buttocks, or Sex in Movies For People Who Have Sex”, while Bruce LaBruce highlights five of the most interesting taboo films, including Salò. Probably Not Safe For Work, but good food for thought for any film buff.

So Patty turns out to be the gay Simpsons character. Not surprising, really, since this would involve the least changing of backstory. It’s kind of sad that the running joke that Selma gets all the dates (despite them being identical twins) is ending this way, though.

The New York Times has a review of the Damien Hirst exhibit at the Boston MFA. I’m kind of torn on what to think of Hirst, whose work I first saw at the Tate, back in the days when the Tate was in Pimlico. Sometimes I feel he’s just too obvious about modernity and soullessness, other times I really like the clinical nature of his work.

Having just watched the clips on NBC’s website, the American remake of “The Office” looks to me like an awful idea. For one, it’s too shiny. By this I mean - the clips have a certain overly polished sheen, whereas the original version had that brilliantly awkward mockumentary feel to it. And for another, it just seems to be trying too hard to hammer in the “office life is terrible” theme. Of course, you can’t judge a show by a few clips, but this does not look promising for a show whose original incarnation I love.

The baseball forum that I belong to likes to go off on tangential debates, and one right now is “what city has produced the most great musical acts”? Clearly of course London, New York, and LA would do well, but those are industry towns which wannabes tend to move to. Outside of that trio? Someone made a very good case for Manchester (the Smiths, Joy Division, the birth of club culture in the UK) being right up there, and some of the usual suspects (Detroit; Athens, Georgia; Nashville; Memphis; Seattle) were named. Here’s the ones I named:

By Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin (The Harvill Press) The Wind-up Bird Chronicle starts off simply enough, when Toru Okada and his wife Kumiko lose their cat, and turns into a masterful novel, spanning philosophy, Japanese history, and metaphysics, among other things.

Just (re-)watched all three seasons of “The Office”, Ricky Gervais’ and Stephen Merchant’s amazing comedy. The show is a mockumentary about a nondescript paper merchant in Slough, and it’s spot-on about the levels of jealousy that occur when the stakes are small, as they are in office politics - all these petite fiefdoms and petty jealousies and puffed-up self-important egos ruling over empires of cubicles and staplers. (Question: when Scott Adams - of Dilbert fame - watches “The Office”, does he feel a deep sense of being owned? Not that Dilbert is bad. But “The Office” is that good.)

With Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator in theatres now, I thought I’d revisit an old film of his - after all, it’s only one of the greatest concert films ever made. And what a film it is: true, The Last Waltz’s star-studded lineup of the Band, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Ringo Starr, and others makes this a record of some kind of magic nexus of great musicians, but Scorsese also manages to make this a true film, rather than just concert footage spliced together.

(V2 Records) They’re playing Weller’s cover of Sister Sledge’s disco classic “Thinking of You” on the radio in these parts, which inspired me to pick this up. Studio 150 - named for the Amsterdam studio it was recorded in; certainly it’s a less evocative name than Abbey Road - is Paul Weller’s collection of covers, and the former lead singer of the Jam certainly takes on an unusual genre-spanning selection - everything from Neil Young’s “Birds” to Rose Royce’s “Wishing on a Star”. It’s great to know that while the Jam were creating such modern classics as “A Town Called Malice”, they were also paying close attention to disco - I’ve noticed that the rock snobbery against disco seems a lot less pronounced in Britain - and indeed the general fascination with soul music first shown in the Jam’s Motown covers is present here too, shown by the inclusion of Nolan Porter’s Northern Soul classic “If I Could Only Be Sure” and Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Bottle”.

Dir. Bill Condon Kinsey is Bill Condon’s biopic of pioneering sexologist Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson), harkening back to the bad ol’ days of the 1940s, when - to put it bluntly - nobody knew anything. It was an era where questions on sex were just much groping in the dark (some of the questions people are shown asking are ineffably sad in their ignorance) and small wonder: prior to Kinsey’s famed 1948 publication Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, almost no serious scientific study had been done on the subject of sex.

Dir. Jay Roach Meet the Fockers promises a lot, especially with its powerhouse cast, but ultimately it’s like having your parents knocking on your door during a moment of passion - lots of great build-up, only to have a disappointing climax.

Dir. Howard Franklin Ah, trashy filler movies for holiday afternoons. Larger Than Life features Bill Murray as Jack Corcoran, a mid-level motivational speaker whose long-lost circus-performer father passes away in Maryland and wills him Vera, a circus elephant (played by Tal, also the star of the truly terrible Operation Dumbo Drop). Unfortunately, both his options for ridding himself of the elephant involve sending Vera cross-country to California, either to Moe (Janeane Garofalo) in San Diego, who wants Vera to be part of a breeding herd in Sri Lanka, or to Terry (Linda Fiorentino) in L.A., who wants Vera to be a Hollywood performing animal.

Dir. Richard Linklater Wild, raucous, and highly satisfying, School of Rock is Richard Linklater’s entry into “mainstream” filmmaking. The film is at times juvenile, with all the elegant stupidity of an AC/DC song, and at times rambling, much in the manner of a Rush solo, and yet glides by all the flaws on sheer adrenaline.

There are some reasons why every music magazine creates lists at this time of the year. The sentimental: it’s the end of the year as we know it, and writers feel they have to take stock. The necessary: the only albums released after Thanksgiving are Christmas ones and greatest hits compilations, which are really boring to write about, so magazines need new ideas for feature articles. The altruistic: lists help readers make Christmas shopping decisions. The selfish: lists are fairly easy to do, giving writers more time for Christmas shopping. The lazy: as anyone who’s read High Fidelity knows, many conversations of music buffs are already about naming the top 5 or top 10 in various categories, articles that are just lists let writers copy out their conversations into text. The egoistic: every list has one obscure pick, so that writers can show off the breadth of their knowledge. The pugilistic: every list has one controversial pick, so that writers can pick fights in which they can show off the breadth of their knowledge. The J. Jonah Jamesonian: lists sell magazines, because people like to argue with them, debate them, and write letters and blog posts to complain about what was included/missing. The brown-nosing: lists allow you to pack references to the most bands in a short amount of space, thus cementing your relationship with the various PR firms that keep you supplied with free albums and tickets at the will-call counter. The capitalistic: maximising the number of performers mentioned also means you can sell more ad space to record companies and other companies that might be interested (“hello Coke, I’m mentioning Lindsay Lohan this week, would you like to buy a full page ad?”). Having said that, Spin’s idea of listing the top 10 “most accurately rated” musicians (Tone Loc, the New Radicals, Van Halen) is pretty funny. And it’s sad that Lohan’s record comes out under Casablanca records, a label with a more illustrious history.