jane dark's sugarhigh!

paris je t'aime

...in which 18 directors set about proving it's impossible to make an interesting five to ten minute movie in Paris. The only ones who come close (Oliver Schmitz, Tom Tykwer) do so by approximating longer narratives via heavy flashbacking. Because otherwise it just can't be done.

15) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
14) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
13) Paris je t'aime (wasn't Smokin' Aces; didn't have Hayden Christenson)
12) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
11) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
10) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
9) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
8) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
7) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
6) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
5) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
4) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

disturbia

Having very little to say about Disturbia other than "Not-That-Bad goes a long way of late," we'll borrow the formulation of our movie date, who noted that the resetting of the Real Window story to the suburbs meant, at a basic material level, that there were fewer things for Shia Le Boeuf to peer toward from his bedroom window — requiring in turn that the panoplistic scopophilia had to be satisfied by a variety of, how you say, "techno-windows": monitors hooked and not hooked to remote lenses, cameras, cellphone screens, and etc.

The distinction between a window and a monitor as regards (so to speak) looking at the world has been one very much on the mind of Hollywood (et al.) for a while; one needs only consider the founding confusion of The Matrix, and what seeing really might be. The concept of ideology figures; so does simulation, and McLuhan's light on/light through distinction. What's striking about Disturbia is the extent to which this is simply not a big deal; for the most part, in this film, all windows are windows. In that regard its logic is less that of simulation-anxiety, but of marketing convergence, in which the phone, iPod, computer monitor, television and etc all function as of-a-kind destinations for content, or for the-world-repackaged-as-content. In this movie the content is one neighbor is hot and the other one totally sucks.

14) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
13) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
12) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
11) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
10) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
9) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
8) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
7) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
6) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
5) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
4) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

fracture

You may have noticed we've been wasting away again in hiatusville; what's more, in the grand tradition of the original paper-based zine also called jane dark's sugarhigh!, we've been coopted by mainstream media. An entry from this very blog will appear, or so we're told, in the next edition of Best Music Writing; moreover, as of July we'll be starting a column over at FilmQuarterly, which will basically cover the kinds of movies we've been covering here, more or less in this style. In fact, the editor wishes for it to be like this blog, but focusing on more than one film at a time. And what will it be called? Marx and Coca-Cola, natch!

Still, we are intent on logging every new movie seen in a theater. Hence...

We can't quite be sure, not being lawyers or etc, but we're pretty sure that the legal denouement of Fracture is, uh, total nonsense? Someone out there, enlighten us: wouldn't the bullet to be removed from the wife's brain equally be found to come from the detective's gun and not Hopkins'? And once one of you legal whippets clarifies this for us, can you elucidate on the plausibility behind almost every interaction between Gosling and his new boss? We have rarely been so baffled. Maybe there are a lot of invisible jump cuts. Seriously, a little help?

13) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
12) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
11) Fracture (was neither Factory Girl nor Smokin' Aces)
11) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
10) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
9) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
8) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
7) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
6) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
5) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
4) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)