I saw the movie adaptation of Eat Pray Love this weekend. The elevator pitch is that it’s a privileged New Yorker lady traveling to different parts of the world to find herself after her failed marriage. Gun to my head, I actually like the movie. But I understand all the criticisms. The main character just feels shallow, entitled and whiny; there’s a false sense of empowerment and feel-goods with no real advice for the heartbroken.

To me, the movie is high on the emotion and low in logic. You have to emotionally be at a point where you can tolerate listening to Julia Roberts live out beautiful travel fantasies and go on oddball spiritual journeys in order to deal with her divorce. I haven’t read the book but I have a strong gut feeling that the book does much better in fleshing out the characters and capturing the moments and the grittiness and moral ambiguity. The movie is a glossing over of the facts and its more of a fairy tale for the naive modern woman.

I did enjoy it though. I’m in a place where I can look back and see that it was a good decision to break up. Even though I was the one who got dumped, at some point each person has to decide to let go, to forge ahead on their own, to look after themselves first and trust that the other person and the rest of the world knows how to look after themselves. I’m glad that we broke up because things were already broken. Some of these things could be fixed trivial but others ran deep, deep into the structure and the foundation of the relationship. I am thankful for all the lessons I’ve learned as a result. Hence, it was enjoyable to watch a movie about a person breaking up and leading a fantastic fairy tale life, I’d like to believe I’ll have the same fairy tale one day.

It’s been about 8 months since we broke up. When people hear me mention my ex-girlfriend, they assume it’s far in the past. In a lot of ways, it is.

I asked a girl out the other day; first girl I asked out since I dated my ex. A disarmingly cute and creative girl that just charms the pants off of me (literally). I don’t know her that well, the chemistry hasn’t really been established between us but she’s beautiful both inside and out and distraction I would readily welcome. She hesitated in answering, for a variety of reasons. I think she hasn’t really looked at me in that way. I’d like this to be an easy and simple seasonal romance but things are not really set up to be that way. Playing with fire perhaps but I’m tempted to try asking her out again.

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The actual movie? Wow. What a rude awakening. Right away, you’re slapped in the face. The opening scene is Max in his wolf suit screaming like a animal and chasing after his dog. The next couple of scenes show how Max is this angry, destructive kid that just wants attention but seems to only get hurt. It’s painful and hard to watch this kid get hurt and hurt the people around him. And it only gets more painful.

He ends up in the land of the Wild Things and these creatures, being figments of Max’s imagination, are just as flawed as he is. They’re children that don’t understand their strength and they continue to hurt each other through misguided social interaction. In his thirst for attention and power, Max becomes their king and the pattern continues: things are fun until somebody gets hurt and then all these raw feelings come up.

This film pulls you in to the disturbed psyche of an angry little boy. It constantly walks that line where everything is fun but we’re always an inch away from somebody getting hurt. Tumbling through the forest and throwing dirt at each other, everyone is laughing and playing but as the audience you just sit there and wait for it to all go to shit. It’s an incredibly challenging film to watch.

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The special effects are still top-notch and very awesome to watch. It’s a balls-out action movie with a undercurrent of sci-fi philosophy. No fucking politics, no diplomacy, no magic, and the some of the best martial arts choreography you’ll find outside of China.

Here’s my play-by-play.

Trinity is attacked and chased

The movie establishes itself as sci-fi and paranoia with futuristic green letters and a hushed telephone conversation between Cypher and Trinity. We are introduced to the angry, contained and complicated voice of Agent Smith. We’re treated to a great line delivered by the lieutenant, “You give me that ‘juris-my-dick-tion’ crap… you can cram it up your ass.”

Soon fights break out for no reason and there’s no mistaking that this is an action movie. Personally, the action here never did it for me. Carrie-Anne Moss doesn’t throw herself into the action as readily as the other leads; we don’t really feel the collision, the physicality. Her jump-kick simply has no force behind it. The other big stunt, jumping off the roof of a building and diving through a small window, is lessened because the various cuts distract and remove the audience’s frame of reference. I would have loved to see a single shot with no cuts, that would have made Trinity look superhuman and awesome.

Watching these opening scenes, I can’t help buy think of Larry Wachowski’s penchant for BDSM. Trinity’s androgynous look, distant demeanor and the abundance of leather make her scenes feel like a love letter to Carrie-Anne Moss. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Neo is caught and bugged

Neo is introduced as a lowly cubicle worker caught in a web of intrigue, a bucketload of foreshadowing that he is The One, a mysterious contact that tells him to run, men in black chasing him down; we’re already rooting for Neo and unsure of who to trust. During the interrogation, his mouth just disappears off his face and you know shit just got real.

Morpheus talks a lot

Morpheus is unveiled and we can finally put a face to the voice. I almost wish he was more of an eccentric with quirks rather than this single-minded man that’s driven by some dramatic prophecy. He speaks in riddles but takes himself far too seriously; it’s contradictory to me for Morpheus to be so serious yet so aloof.

The dojo scene

It’s very forgivable that Neo throws out a stoner line like, “I know kung-fu,” because the very next scene is this amazing face-off between him and Morpheus. Both characters dive straight in and look like they’re actually prepared to land a hit and seriously injure the other guy. The choreography is just so delicious and it reduces the audience to a bunch of little boys drooling at such artful violence.

Neo meets The Oracle

We now well and truly understands that The Matrix is an artificial reality. Now it’s time to start breaking our assumptions and show that this revered Oracle is just some lady in a rundown apartment baking cookies. The dialog in this scene and our understanding of the Oracle is pretty pivotal to the rest of the movie, it’s a much richer experience if you think about what she says in relation to the rest of the plot. Namely: 1) Neo is not The One, “maybe in a second life”, 2) Neo will have to choose between his life and Morpheus’, and 3) Morpheus will find The One. Easy to miss but very rewarding.

Afterwards, brutal fisticuffs occur between Morpheus and Agent Smith. We see Morpheus demonstrate his devotion to his beliefs and we’re worried that if Neo has made the choice to let Morpheus die. Cypher reveals himself to be a traitor and half the cast is killed off to later be replaced by less likable characters.

Agent Smith talks a lot

We learn a lot about Smith here, the film establishes that he is not a faceless agent. He’s some kind of entity that is sick of policing The Matrix and sick of humankind. There’s a symmetry here with Morpheus’ early gas-bagging to Neo. It’s wordy and a lot of hard work to get to the virus metaphor but important to really become acquainted with this character. Besides, Hugo Weaving could read me the dictionary for all I care and I’d give it five stars.

Subway battle

Neo decides not to run and face Agent Smith head-on. It’s another gorgeously choreographed fight scene that highlights the strength that an agent has over a human. Also shows how futile it is to try and kill them because they just possess somebody else.

One thing that’s so captivating about the fights in this movie are the prolonged shots of punches and kicks being thrown and blocked. The camera just lovingly sits there like it’s a bystander in the perfect position to witness everything. There’s none of these bullshit fast cuts to try and electrocute the audience into a heart-sickening pace, we hunker down for a long fight between two adversaries.

Neo becomes The One

Death and resurrection, a beautiful moment of tension as Neo unceremoniously falls dead in the hallway and the agents walk off. Suddenly it’s revealed that Trinity has fallen in love with Neo which is very believable as the two characters have as much chemistry as two planks of wood leaning against a barn. We forgive though because Neo wakes up with the power to see The Matrix and stop bullets. The movie closes with an ultimatum delivered to the machines and Neo flying off.

Rage Against The Machine starts blaring through the credits and first-time audiences know they just sat through something that kicked a lot of ass while simultaneously made us doubt if we’re all caught in an artificial dream. 10 years later and this film is still unsinkable to me, I’ll see you all again on the 20th anniversary when it’s released in Hyper Lime Green Ray Holocube.

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1. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, he was fucking fantastic in Brick
2. Zooey Deschanel, I only know her from HHGG but she’s cute too
3. They used Regina Spektor’s Us in the trailer
4. I love romantic movies that make no promises about a happy ending

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Watchmen is a very awesome comic book that flips a lot of superhero stereotypes on their head and it probably addressed the specter of the Cold War in a very accurate way. But in this brilliant post-Watchmen world that movie audiences have since grown up in where they have awesome things like The Dark Knight and no imminent threat of nuclear holocaust, it’s like trying to sell a Walkman at an Apple store.

Personally, I love the Watchmen comic and I heartily embrace the film as an homage; a swelling of adolescent nostalgia.

However, I think there’s not enough to ensnare a wider audience, to them it’s like a gore film with a costume fetish. They lovingly transliterated the book to the big screen, perfectly recreating shots and dialog and then they cut out everything to achieve a runtime of under 3 hours. But at some point the story shifted from being greater than a sum of its parts to just… the sum of its parts. I loved the attention to small detail but I think ultimately those who are not already “in the know” about the backstory will feel left out.

The songs used in the movie probably betray the most about the filmmakers. Songs so laughably cliché, the mood jumped back and forth between parody and cringe-induction therapy. Somewhere in the whole decision-making process, there must have been somebody with a nostalgia for oldies music so strong and so unstoppable that they were ignorant to the music’s wider cultural significance and subsequent overexposure. That sums up the whole film: a loving tribute to the classics but one that ignores how the world has changed around it.

In short: I love this movie for the beautiful niche that it fills but I cannot, in good conscience, recommend you see it. Unless you like large blue penises that are drawn by computer animators.

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Thankfully, I can declare this Oscars Night a huge success. I was already asleep by the time the Oscars started and woke up to catch the Best Supporting Actor. Sure, I missed out on the (super fabulous) opening dance number, Anne Hathaway playing the sexiest Nixon ever and Best Supporting Actress but that’s ok. YouTube bailed me out.

I adore this new format of getting past Oscar winners to say something about the nominees. It was magical to see the torch passed on like that and it really makes it feel like a night where they celebrate their peers and their profession. Anne Hathway got this amazing praise from Shirley McClaine that was easily worth as much as an Oscar if not more.

Personally I think it was a foregone conclusion that Heath Ledger would win. By now, I’ve learned to accept that few people win an Oscar based on their work on a single film. If perhaps he hadn’t so tragically passed, I believe he still would have been the favorite but I probably would have been more nervous.

Slumdog, oh Slumdog. I don’t see why people love you so much. I like you and I think you’re a very solid movie but I don’t get the critical acclaim. The whole love story didn’t entrance me as much as it did others. Don’t get me wrong, I loved all the scenes with the little children but I got tired at the end. I felt Jamal was a little too single-minded about this girl that he doesn’t even know anymore, too wrapped up in trying to ride in on a white horse. I thoroughly enjoyed being introduced to glimpses of Mumbai but I wanted them to push it further: really highlight the disparity of the class system and why no one would ever expect a slumdog to have the answers.

The same goes double for Benjamin Button. Sure, Cate Blanchett looks fabulous as a dancer but the movie just didn’t sweep me up. If I had to pick one thing it would be all the scenes that were set in the present-day hospital room. To say that Katrina was fast approaching and that the diary was real just pulled me out of the fantasy. That being said, I loved Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), her character was like something straight out of a fairy tale.

Finally, one of my favorite parts of award shows like this is recognizing snippets of past films during the montages and identifying all the talent that the camera shows quick shots of. I do believe I spotted Tina Fey over someone’s left shoulder.

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Did you ever watch Blade Runner? I’m sure a lot of you did. Please tell me you did. I’m going to talk about it here but there will be zero spoilers because I want you to enjoy it.

We had to study it as part of our Year 11 curriculum and I found it an unintelligible mess. It was way too dark, the music was dated and it was overflowing with dramatic symbolism. All the while, our teacher kept banging on about the heavy borrowing of themes and devices from film noir and all the mentions of death.

Previous to this, I think I had seen it on TV as a kid. “I like science fiction,” I told myself as I sat down to watch it. I was impressed by the cityscape but fell asleep soon after. Snore.

But I got my hands on the hi-def version of Blade Runner – The Final Cut and I love it. Seriously, the visuals make up 75% of this movie. It’s so crucial they’re there. My high school teacher showed us a terrible VHS taping of a television airing. Blade Runner is the kind of movie that was never meant for VHS because the scenes are drenched in darkness. You could not see shit.

The opening shot of the film – Los Angeles cityscape. (Click for larger version.)

Interior of the Bradbury Building. (Click for larger version.)

I picked these two shots at random to demonstrate how important the visuals are. The cityscape is our introduction to the world of Blade Runner. It shows Los Angeles of the future; a dense city with these scary smokestacks that belch fire. When viewed as an aging VHS bootleg on an old TV, it looks like a mass of grainy black with some twinkling spots inside it. There’s no feeling of exactly how far the city stretches or how grimly beautiful the eruptions of fire are.

The second shot is the interior of the building where the face-off between the good guy and the bad guy. One lies in wait with his gun drawn, his heart still racing from the previous fight. The other steps out from the elevator, calmly approaching after hearing the death cries of his now-dead comrade. It’s a integral piece of suspense-building but in the VHS world it translates to, “What the fuck am I looking at? There’s a light patch there with blurry stuff and black everywhere else. This is worse than The X-Files.” It’s distracting and it pulls you out of the scene.

This is without even opening up the can of worms when you talk about the different versions of Blade Runner (some spoilers). The television airing has less violence and various focus-group-inspired changes that were against the director’s wishes. Worst of all is the protagonist’s narration that mostly detracts from the dramatic tension.

Bottom line, Blade Runner is a film that takes itself very seriously. There are a lot of themes you can eek out of it. All the words are very carefully weighted to be a part of a greater whole; nothing is wasted. All the visuals build upon these themes and, more importantly, serve to convince you that the movie should be taken seriously.

For me, The Final Cut is a brilliant work of art. It removed everything that I hated in the original version. It revived these luscious visuals and absolutely none of it looks as tacky and disappointing as the crap in the remastered versions of Star Wars. It elevated the film from a pulpy detective story to a thought-provoking tour de force. I love it.

For more information see:

• the official website
• NYTimes coverage
• buy from Amazon

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One is a memory. Just before Lachlan and Geraldine left Seattle, I took them to eat hot pot at a Sichuanese restaurant. While we were pulling in to the restaurant, I was trying out my Short Round impression on them. As we were leaving, I was doing some other impression of like a funny conversation with a hairdresser or taxi driver or some other everyday occupation except that I had my wires crossed and it was more like Short Round the Taxi Driver. Anyone remember what that occupation was?

The other one is a yearning. My girlfriend and I recently watched The Lion King over the weekend and I want to draw some sort of parallel between the movie and this election. It doesn’t work; there are none. I think I just have my wires crossed again.

P.S. Mufasa’s death? Still super freaking sad. Re-watching this has just solidified the idea that Disney are far better at creating sad moments than happy ones.

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“You prefer a magic trick, instead? Watch me make this pencil disappear.”

Uh huh. I’m still on hiatus but this movie rocks so please add your spoiler-iffic thoughts in the comments. If you haven’t seen it yet then we aren’t friends anymore. You’re demoted to a frenemy.

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Eight things I am passionate about:

1. Food
   Because it’s a beautiful, universal and something that everyone on Earth can be passionate about. Whether it’s Coke vs. Pepsi, the right way to BBQ or why the nice people in Top Chef always get kicked out first.

2. Humor
   Because I laugh and joke when it’s least appropriate. Because everything needs to be laughed at eventually. Whether its your childhood embarrassment or a life-destroying catastrophe.

3. Television
   My babysitter, my best friend. It’s what I’ve spent so much of my life in front of, what taught me half of the language and culture I know and what I’ve bonded over. It’s my favorite pasttime.

4. Friends

5. Loyalty

6. Fixing computers

7. Music

Eight things I want to do before I die:

1. Skydive

2. Have kids

3. Catch a train around Europe

4. Drive a very expensive car

5. Love

6. Revenge

7. Reply to a blog meme – Check!

8. Say goodbye.

Eight things I say often:

1. Evidently.
   Usually said in a kidding, charming kind of way but occasionally in a very waspy way.

2. Absolutely.
   A reply in agreement with a suggestion. E.g. “Want to get naked and use our bodies to paint this giant canvas?”

3. Motherfuck
   Because sometimes “fuck!” just isn’t enough to convey the complexities of modern life.

4. Clusterfuck
   Something I inherited from my old boss. Everything we worked on there was a clusterfuck.

5. Bollocks
   I use this to add to my fake British-y charm. I don’t think it’s working.

6. Thanks.
   Is it just me or are most Americans very frugal with the thanking of restaurant people? I thank people for inviting me in, taking my order, re-filling my water, everything. It feels weird to just ignore the waiter or busboy while they do things for you.

7. Awesome
   I wish I could stop saying this word, its meaning has been diluted. I dress it up now with “awesomesauce”, “awesomeboat” or “alsomes”.

8. How’s life?
   Much better than a simple ‘how are you’ because I genuinely would like people to tell me how they are doing.

Eight books I’ve read recently:

1. Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris
   I’ve heard David Sedaris read several times on This American Life and I always found it blisteringly funny. I am so-so about the book, I think his voice really adds something that is missing in his words.

2. Then We Came To The End – Joshua Ferris
   Oh this is a brilliant book. Think The Office but instead of humor, it’s pettiness and frustration and ugly rumors. It’s closer to an actual office.

3. Kiss Me, I’m Single – Amanda Ford
   Yes, everyone needs to read this book. Whilst it’s targeted towards single women of the marrying age, it works for any single person that can’t stop stressing about the fact that they’re single. Also, it will only take you two hours to read. Must have.

4. On Writing – Stephen King
   If you enjoy thinking about the process of writing, you’ll enjoy this. Even if you’ve never read or hate Stephen King.

5. The Big Bang – Em and Lo
   Umm, this is a sex manual but not in the kinky Kama Sutra way. It’s a rational, light-hearted approach to the topic and if you like sex then you should read it. Unless you already know everything about sex. I’ve re-read it a lot.

6. No One Belongs Here More Than You – Miranda July
   Poignant, beautiful collection of quirky short stories. You will love this book like an ugly three-legged dog; it’s unusual and not what you’d expect but it’s got a heart of gold.

7. Tabloid Tokyo 2
   Pulpy trash that I bought for the flight home from Japan. Full of Japanese tabloid stories that make you think the nation is full of fucked-up perverts.

8. Eats, Shoots & Leaves – Lynne Truss
   People love this book, I enjoyed parts but ultimately got bored of it. I am not a big enough grammar nerd.

Eight Movies I have seen Eight times:

1. Austin Powers – International Man of Mystery
   I still love this movie because it has not been quoted to death.

2. Home Alone
   Why did Macaulay Culkin have to grow up?

3. Forrest Gump
   I am unusually drawn to this movie. I occasionally address my brothers as “Lieutenant Dan”.

4. The Matrix
   Yeah, I’m a geek. I kinda wish they had stopped at one movie.

5. Terminator 2

6. Pulp Fiction
   A movie so good, it makes John Travolta look cool.

7. High Fidelity
   Eh, kinda overrated. I’d put it on par with the underrated Swingers. Although, the sex scene is hilarious and shares top billing with Office Space.

8. The Lion King
   I love most Disney movies that don’t involve princesses.

Eight people who should do this meme:

1. Clink
   Yup, I know this internet meme is totally going to bring her back. Just you watch. We love you, Clink.

2. Deutlich
   Because. She’s my ex-wife and we share a love for one word sentences. No. Seriously. Dude. Also, it will be funny to watch her try and narrow things down to just eight.

3. I’m a Craigslist Whore

4. poodlegoose

5. *purewhitewave
   She’s a barely-contained ball of passion.

6. 20nothing in seattle
   She’s about to stop blogging! Boo.

7. Dennis Hotson
   Aha! A wildcard entry.

8. All my friends that started blogging and forgot about it
   Studds, Lachlan, Hui-Ai, Fay, Addy, Geraldine and Kanye West

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