January 2012
26 posts
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“Nowadays everyone must love (or at least pretend to love) pleasures that were...”
– A. O. Scott is making some good connections here. (via elisabethdonnelly)
I….don’t know? The thing is, work like Drive and The American are really imitating French revisions of American pulp stories (Godard, Melville), sometimes even imitations of those films (Michael Mann, for one), so...
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I Feel The Pressure / Under More Scrutiny
oneweekoneband:
Hump day, right? It’s not accident that we’re talking about Graduation on Wednesday. (It is 100% accidental, actually.) On the third day, Yeezus gave us a transitional album, a flashy new persona, shutter shades, and it was good.
I’m going to lay my cards on the table: as I implied in my introduction, I heard Graduation last of all Kanye’s solo albums. I really missed out on a...
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“The song’s passivity and pretense come through in the music, too. Listened...”
– Lana Del Rey Lights Up the Internet
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I just don't think Lana del Rey is that bad.
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Do you remember that fool?
blackamazon:
redlightpolitics:
Professor at London School of Economics who wrote some awful drivel about Black women being ugly?
I now have to wonder if they put something in the water at LSE or if people with certain inclinations naturally gravitate towards the institution, as news of students engaging in Antisemitic drinking game emerge. From the article:
LSE students are facing...
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rgr-pop:
terrorbull replied to your post: So many anons have been harassing Christianna for…
yeah, you should totally kick some of that theory over here. I feel icky about shoplifting mostly just because I’ve only seen white punk dudes do it (everyone else “grows out of it” I guess), and I generally hate most things that white punk dudes do.
This is something I started writing about last...
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“When I started making those weird voices, a lot of people told me how whack it...”
– Nicki Minaj (BlackBook Magazine)
THAT’S. WHAT. I’VE. BEEN. SAYING. y’al be letting your anti-femmeness fool you. just cause she’s wearing pink don’t mean she ain’t fucking with shit in some supercreative and intelligent ways.
(via so-treu)
Boom shot
(via blackamazon)
Nicki Nicki Nicki. On the...
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The Iron Lady
dir Phyllida Lloyd, 2011
The Iron Lady is exactly the kind of mediocre movie that trips me up when I try to write about it, because it was mostly well-made, the performances were great (Meryl Streep and Jim Broadbent are both incapable of bad acting; and Thatcher’s daughter is Olivia Colman from Peep Show, who’s brilliant), it looked good, etc. But it’s still a biopic...
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“I’d argue that Bella’s desires are direct responses to the patriarchy we...”
– The Bloody, Twisted, Inverted World of Twilight: Violent Vampire Sex, Demon-Babies and Overwhelming Female Desire | | AlterNet
I will never get tired of thinking about Bella’s lust.
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Timelines
seanfennessey:
-“What to put in the magazine on December 5? Certainly not ‘We Bought the Zoo,’ or whatever it’s called.” -David Denby, in a letter to Scott Rudin, December 4, 2011.
-David Denby reviews We Bought a Zoo, January 9, 2012.
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unbest:
Brenda Cromb on The Handsome Furs’ “When I Get Back” (from Sound Kapital, 2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
I first heard “When I Get Back” in the upstairs concert space of a pub in Islington. The Handsome Furs aren’t as big in England so I’d somehow wound up right next to the stage. They introduced it as a song about being on tour and all the promises they made themselves about how...
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Why I loved Melancholia, and why Tree of Life left... →
Stephanie Zacharek at the Slate Movie Club.
I feel like this year you were either a Melancholia person or a Tree of Life person. I was definitely a Melancholia person.
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“but then anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes...”
– virginia woolf (via libraryland)
karaj always posts the most relevant quotes.
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new scissor sisters with azealia banks! →
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Melancholia Marginalia finds Manolha
richardrushfield:
Manohla’s piece on the interlocking web of references in the opening of Melancholia shows why we still can’t say TV has caught up with film as an art form. TV with its unlimited space to play out a story can build up characters year after year in a way that film can only imply. But in the hand of a filmmaker like Von Trier, it can imply it pretty well and one carefully...
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Resolving, 2012
Last year I made a couple of resolutions. I kept a log of all my reading and movie-watching - something I’ve done before in various ways - but this was just an easy-to-refer to word document. The other was to write more. I haven’t been great about the writing, but I have tumbled pretty prolifically, which is something.
1 – Write something (even something short) about every movie I...
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mootpoint's Best of 2011
branduponthebrain:
submitted by mootpoint
(In no particular order)
(And bearing in mind there’s a ton of 2011 stuff I haven’t gotten to yet)
- Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)
- Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
- Bridesmaids (Paul Feig)
- Drive (Nicholas Winding Refn)
- We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay)
- The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar)
- Melancholia (Lars Von Trier)
-...
December 2011
40 posts
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“The thing is, I remember being 19 and 20 and having crushes on these older...”
– Of literary seductresses and confessionalism
I wrote a thing about Adrien Brody. I’m sorry internet, I just needed to get it out of my head.
theremixbaby:
mootpoint answered your question:more like ryan lol’connell amirite?
I don’t blog about it, but I do it and one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to just stop hate reading.
Yeah, to be honest, I don’t really *get* hate reading, but I’m not trying to judge anyone who gets something out of it, whatever that may be (amusement? self-righteous anger? lulz? not sure!). Nor am I trying to...
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"strategic confession"
militantmaudlinist:
Chris Kraus: And that’s why this book is a strategic confession. I’m very drawn to the use of the first person. When I started the Native Agents series of books for Semiotext(e) seven years ago, it was to publish the kind of writing that I liked — and that writing was entirely in the first person. And yet it was not an introspective, psychoanalytic “I.” It was an “I” that...
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Afsun Qureshi: How the Brits stole Christmas —... →
wrenkin:
This is stupid, but the most frustrating thing is that after a decade in the UK the author misused “bob”.
Also in 16 months I have never heard anyone say “Bugger off”.
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Xmas Eve in the City:
- Made my favourite cookies.
- Did fancy eggnog. (We doubled the bourbon and added a bit of vanilla.)
- Have a duck roasting.
- We’ve got red cabbage braising.
- We also have: potted Stilton, venison pate, sausage rolls, little phyllo tarts, toad in the hole, mini mince pies, and an assortment of German ginger cookies.
- Plus champagne, cava, white wine, red wine,...
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“But it’s an impossible role in an impossible movie that has no reason for being...”
– ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ Review - NYTimes.com
‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ : 9/11 :: ‘Life is Beautiful’ : the Holocaust?
(via doree)
This reminds me of David Mamet’s essay about Schindler’s List, “The Jew for Export” (I know Mamet is completely repellant these...
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Notes On "Camp" →
feministfilm:
sl33pcr33p:
saltmarshhag:
sonofapritch:
chikuwaq:
By Susan Sontag, 1964.
I don’t have any particular affinity or strong feeling for Sontag one way or the other, but because it’s a seminal text I feel compelled to reblog this. I think #23 is my favorite.
55. Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to...
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“In truth, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” isn’t about Sept. 11. It’s...”
– ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ With Tom Hanks - Review - NYTimes.com
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Film Studies For Free: FSFF's Favourite Online... →
feministfilm:
mootpoint:
So much good stuff here!
This is really useful and interesting. Also, I also would like to recommend the Directory of Open Access Journals, and especially the journals Genders, Outskirts, The Scholar & Feminist Online, Thirdspace, Visual Culture & Gender, n.paradoxa, (for gender studies), Cinema, Excursions, Film-Philosophy, The Irish Journal of Gothic and...
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Unbest: Susannah Young on EMA’s Past Life Martyred... →
unbest:
Susannah Young on EMA’s Past Life Martyred Saints (2011) (iTunes, Rdio, Spotify)
Totally out of step with Unbest’s mission, my thoughts for this piece actually stemmed from writing my year-end album blurb assignments for Prefixmag. This year, I totally won the lottery and got…
This is really great. I don’t think I listened to enough new music to competently write a...
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In the Internet age, the model for literary... →
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“His triumphal miserablism, which many critics find innovative, reads to me as...”
– Best Music 2011: Drake’s just a classic passive-aggressive Canadian. - Slate Magazine
Carl Wilson on Drake. mootpoint.tumblr.com is a pro-Drake blog, but there’s some truth in this. This is a flaw I understand.
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Film Studies For Free: FSFF's Favourite Online... →
So much good stuff here!
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super must-read on feminist archiving at...
karaj:
(lau-fi: dandyprof)
Feministing interviews Kate Eichhorn: ”Women of my generation have always been deeply committed to imagining what might be gained by returning, if only provisionally, to the partially completed social transformations of the 1970s and 1980s, and feminism’s ‘scrap heap’ is one site among many where this work is being carried out. That’s what attracts me to the...
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Wham!'s "Last Christmas" Is the Most Horrible... →
a) I disagree with this, “Last Christmas” is amazing. Last year my partner and I listened to dozens of covers on youtube. You really start to see how good a singer George Michael is when you hear others mangle it.
b) I really feel like I need to talk about the version that is shooting for Christmas number 1 in the UK, by the cast of the Hills-meets-Jersey Shore show The Only Way Is...
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“Woman-hatred may be too active a term here. (Except when you’re talking about...”
– Ann Powers, author of the essay most used to justify uncritically loving Odd Future (via bmichael)
I noticed this too!
“There’s one other aspect to the adulation of Hitchens that’s quite revealing....”
– Greenwald (and, the more interesting thinker, Bady) is spot on about this. (via michelledean)
ayup. the whole thing is really worth a read but i especially appreciated the acknowledgment that certain of his worst views were “not ancillary to his writings but central to them.”
(via isabelthespy)
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Film Comment’s Best Released Films of 2011 →
Normally I try not to stress about “best” lists since I officially don’t really care about these things, but why is Midnight in Paris doing so well on year-end lists? It’s in Ebert’s top 10. Richard Brody put it at 15th best movie of the year for the New Yorker. It got a Golden Globe nomination. (In the comedy category, but still.) It’s 18 here, ahead of Drive,...
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power
sapphelle:
Living in the earth-deposits of our history Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old cure for fever or melancholy a tonic for living on this earth in the winters of this climate Today I was reading about Marie Curie: she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness her body bombarded for...
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“To quote the comment from Amanda above: “Yes, the Ryan Gosling meme has...”
– Creator of Film Studies Ryan Gosling responds to the The Ryan Gosling Meme Has Jumped the Shark post I linked to the other day. SO META.
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“But Feminist Ryan Gosling is doing more than just placing feminist theory next...”
– The Ryan Gosling Meme Has Jumped the Shark | Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style