jane dark's sugarhigh!

michael clayton

With his blocky size, his surfeit of charisma and screen gravitas, Clooney looks like something beyond the mere human, like he has swallowed every leading man in Hollywood and perhaps had Casey Affleck for a palate cleanser. Tilda Swinton continues to look like something beyond human as well, but more in a hire-me-for-a-remake-of-The-Man-Who-Fell-to-Earth kind of way. They slug it out herein for the fate of the little people, the human beings, making this more like, say, Transformers or Rise of the Silver Surfer than most legal thrillers.

welcome message

Hello. It is possible you have arrived here from the corp-blog of Sasha Frere-Jones, who has very kindly linked to this venue. If so, we should mention at least three things.

Regular readers can go back to tapping fingers, waiting for Michael Clayton review or thoughts on new Nickelback single. "I'll have the quesadilla. "

1) Sasha is a real inspiration; his own non-corporate site is the blog I've had bookmarked longer than any other, because he is a smooth operator and clever and insightful and cares, and is at least sometimes not a punch-puller, which puts him ahead of really most people who make a living from writing about culture for the publics.

2) We're not sure we fit much of that description ourselves, except for "cares." We are not sure what we do here. We think all the time about movies and poetry and pop music, because we like to; and all the time about politics and history, because there's no thinking that could happen outside those paul walls anyway.

3) Maroon 5 do not actually sound "a bit like Hall and Oates with a heavy Stevie Wonder fixation" nor are they "sneakily good at what they do." That might be a more plausible series of thoughts if it described Jamiroquai, except that the Jamiroquais are looking far (far, far!) up at Hall'n'Oates, and at their best were maybe "surprisingly half-decent." Maroon 5, conversely, is a sneakily awful Jamiroquai tribute band.

cinema quant: the update

37) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
36) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
35) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
34) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
33) Shoot'em Up (Clive Owen not in fact charismatic enough to make shit smell like roses)
32) The Nanny Diaries (Giammati plays exact same role as in Shoot'em Up, seen from other perspective)
31) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
30) No End In Sight (anti-war doc's breakout star, Seth Moulton, turns out only to want a better war)
29) Stardust (nice swordfight-played-as-videogame scene)
28) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
27) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
26) I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (It's funny, see, cuz they're not gay!)
25) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
24) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
23) The Brave One (a satisfying if false portrait of a Radiohead fan)
22) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
21) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
20) Ratatouille (sugarhigh!'s mother notes this is Singin' In The Rain)
19) We Own the Night (have you noticed that all Joaquin Phoenix's characters have the same scar?)
18) Resident Evil: Extinction (the cinematic ontology of helicopters remains to be written)
17) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
16) The Kingdom ("Let us do our job....We're good at this." Yeah, in what universe? Meanwhile good parts are all Blackhawk Down)
15) Superbad (Not-so-superbadinage; this is what became of Tarantino's New American chitchat)
14) Sunshine (Soderbergh's Solaris plus 28 Days Later divided by Nietzsche)
13) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
12) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
11) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
10) The Bourne Ultimatum (Steve on Julia Stiles' role: "in like a magic bullet, out like a cigarette butt")
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
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)

the company of poets: thesis 22

The critique of jargon (and for that matter the critique of intellectualism itself) does not serve the excluded nearly as much as it serves those who wish to have their own orthodoxies taken as natural facts. It forges a popular front from populists and the power elite.

elsewhere in the sugarhigh! universe

[Darkness at Noon: photo taken moments before 9/11 reading was called on account of weather; shirt made by East Bay graphics guru Jack Morgan]

A spin-off of sugarhigh! film reviews, the quarterly column "Marx & Coca-Cola" debuts at Film Quarterly (free download; click on "Content: Sample Article").

the company of poets: thesis 6

Thesis 6: Whenever somebody cites Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound, "He was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not," this person will be suggesting that he or she, their poetic community, and you if you are part of it, are Steins not Pounds. This despite the fact that they have just explained something to you. This despite the fact that the vast majority of poets who cite Stein or Pound are windy rationalists of the first water. In general this curious state of affairs is on par with the manner by which it will eventually turn out that everyone was bullied in junior high school, as if the bullies themselves had all risen up in a rapture at graduation so as to make war in heaven with the equally absent village explainers.