jane dark's sugarhigh!

52 pickup: the year in movies

A comprehensive list of new releases sugarhigh! saw in a movie theater in 2007, ranked from least to most interesting. All films received individual reviews, sometimes no more than a phrase, over the course of the year. Contents may have shifted during travel. Summary of year: via an inexorable systemic logic, unwilling mothers in movies must keep babies so that they can survive to be children in jeopardy in all remaining films.

52) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
51) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
50) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
49) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
48) Shoot'em Up (Clive Owen not in fact charismatic enough to make shit smell like roses)
47) The Nanny Diaries (Giammati plays exact same role as in Shoot'em Up, seen from other perspective)
46) Severance (Theatre was quite clean)
45) Sweeney Todd (Edward Razorhands and the three-note melody)
44) American Gangster (Clarifying how good The Wire is)
43) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
42) Two Days In Paris (Felt more like a week)
41) Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem ("Predator's a scrub," notes a friend)
40) No End In Sight (Anti-war doc's breakout star, Seth Moulton, turns out only to want a better war)
39) Stardust (Nice swordfight-played-as-videogame scene)
38) Dreamgirls (The club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
37) Avenue Montaigne (One brief image of the young Dani)
36) I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (It's funny, see, cuz they're not gay!)
35) Hot Fuzz (Lighting in British supermarket)
34) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
33) The Mist (Too much monster/not enough mist)
32) The Brave One (A satisfying if false portrait of a Radiohead fan)
31) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
30) Golden Compass (How long before Compass vs. Narnia: Requiem?)
29) Charlie Wilson’s War (But what about Owen Wilson's war?)
28) We Own the Night (Have you noticed that all Joaquin Phoenix's characters have the same scar?)
27) Ratatouille (sugarhigh!'s mother notes this is Singin' In The Rain)
26) Juno (In which young Juno has a moment of clarity: "Sonic Youth fucking sucks!")
25) Michael Clayton (Good year for films that could've been called Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem)
24) Resident Evil: Extinction (Cinematic ontology of helicopters remains to be written)
23) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
22) Helvetica (It's about the font)
21) The Kingdom ("Let us do our job....We're good at this." Yeah, in what universe? Meanwhile good parts are all Blackhawk Down)
20) Superbad (Not-so-superbadinage; this is what became of Tarantino's New American chitchat)
19) 30 Days of Night (Apparently the graphic novel series has a murderous book club)
18) Sunshine (Soderbergh's Solaris plus 28 Days Later divided by Nietzsche)
17) Blades of Glory (Ambient Ferrellage)
16) Disturbia (Strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
15) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
14) The Bourne Ultimatum (Steve on Julia Stiles' role: "in like a magic bullet, out like a cigarette butt")
13) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
12) No Country for Old Men (Javier Bardem's Hairdo vs. Josh Brolin's Mustache: Requiem)
11) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
10) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
09) I Am Legend (Omega Man Takes Manhattan)
08) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
07) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
06) Southland Tales (Impossible to think about, or stop thinking about)
05) I’m Not There (Tacit admission that the real Dylan vamoosed in the 70s; nothing would be funnier than a sequel)
04) Transformers (Has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
03) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)
02) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
01) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)

aliens vs. predator: requiem

There were more characters than there were audience members. We felt overdone and huddled in the dark, hoping not to call attention to ourselves lest they fall on us suddenly and without mercy. It was like a nightmare, or a scene in a horror movie. We held our breath and exchanged glances, indicating panic with our pupils. They said and did cruel and empty things, the humans, and we hoped they would pass by without destroying us.

charlie wilson's war

"Zia didn't murder Bhutto," says Julia Roberts' patriot, introducing the President of Pakistan, also a general, at a function. Shortly, Hanks's congressman repeats the line incredulously, and she again affirms the sentiment. At some distance from the small theater where we sat, free-basing Good'n'Plentys, Bhutto's daughter was en route to being murdered by the current President/General.

[Study needed on length of time it takes to make a movie based on political events as measured against time it takes for events to repeat themselves. Notes: competition of film and reality, appearance of collusion as competition, etc.]

sweeney todd

Edward Razorhands

A film dull enough to allow considerable time to wondering about the similar ugliness of Timothy Spall's Beadle Bamford and the beadle in Courbet's "Burial at Ornans" (that's him in the red).

the golden compass

Softporn from the standpoint of steampunk.

The shift from Pullman's book to Weitz's film, in terms of its central conflict, is akin to making a movie of the French Revolution in which the crux is that Marie Antoinette is mean to kids. As much as we understand that children's books especially do put children in harm's way, as a narrative trope this has now become as powerfully counter-political as, say, the writings of Ayn Rand were in their day.

juno

Saw this film opening night in Berkeley. Agreed all around: Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, all cute. Overall verdicts: "cute" (Bill), "excessively cute" (Juliana). Thought often of another Berkeley movie, The Graduate, which premiered forty years ago to the day. Main thought: did the excited audience of four decades past find that naïve/knowing folk music to be as cripplingly awful as this? It would be a mistake to call it distracting — as if the taste of sea-water could distract you from drowning.

quotables

"...dangerous toys from Communist China..." threatens the comically-named Kitty Pilgrim on CNN, encoding in a single phrase the nation's transparent shuddering delight that the Cold War is still on! — but now without any political dimension whatsoever — to be fought entirely on the terrain of the commodity...

every movie is half malevich

more teaser, less firecat

As much as we love Bobby Christgau and believe him to be not just decent but heroic, Latifah's had it up there with "democratic vitality." We assume he is not referring to any recent candidate's debates, and means something about the energetic breadth of the year's music. We find ourselves curious as to what traits distinguish this empirical phenomenon as "democratic vitality," rather than, say, "the current regime of niche marketing."

And voting Kala numero uno at the same time? The cognitive dissonance could just kill a man. Stay tuned for our year-end note...

here for the welcome to the party

Sugarhigh!'s entries for albums and singles of the year can wait — freed from the beat-the-presses race to publication, we can afford to stall until the very end to total our PlayCounts across three computers, an iPod and a phone.

The periodicals are already getting down to business, as they must, and we would like to note that Jody Rosen — whom we met once in a hotel lobby, and believe to be entirely true to the game — has declared his top 3 albums of the year to be M.I.A., Miranda Lambert, and Brad Paisley. It practically gives us shivers. Among almost a billion albums, Mr. Rosen and sugarhigh! turn out to share basically identical beliefs.

We might note two distinctions almost too minor to mention. First, while we also had M.I.A. first and Miranda Lambert second (what are the odds?), we had Brad Paisley's album one slot lower, at #4 — which you'll admit is a barely relevant variance. And second, for sugarhigh! this was in 2005.

i am legend

A perplexing film, at once relentless in its linear drive and all over the place. For the first 75 minutes, it's just Will Smith's Robert Neville, the last good man, versus the denuded and albinofied zombies; it's all very kill whitey, though the film seems obdurately unaware of this blazingly obvious fact. Also never mentioned: in the background of Neville's Washington Square townhouse are masterpieces presumptively boosted from MoMA (Henri Rousseau, a couple Van Goghs, etc; he seems to favor Post-Impressionists). The film shares the trope of institutionally marked art rescued by individuals in civilization's collapse with V for Vendetta and Children of Men; do we smell an ideologeme on the rise?

These seemingly incidental elements perhaps make more sense against the film's closure, as the cure is delivered to the lone community of survivors, in a walled enclave in Vermont. For all the fortifications, inside the gates is idealized small-town America. No museums here, no furreign paintings or any other cosmopolitan corruptions. It is, let us say, contamination-free. Goodness has survived after all, and in a dizzying inversion, it's white as an unsullied snowdrift and just as rustic, coded into the town with its autumnal New England crispness, its white-painted wooden church steeple rising salvifically in the exit shot. It could be any day in the history of virtue, except it's not — as the overvoice informs us, it is September, 2012. In fact, it is September 10th as the cure is delivered, the last day of the era of contamination...

third rail

Median and mean are hard to measure, but the modal reaction to the Mitchell Commission report seems to be: Roger Clemens! This is usually followed by some formulation either of "Wow, it's worse than we thought," or "I knew it all along." Neither of which is a story.

After a brilliant early career, Clemens' trajectory was defined by
• a return to dominance after a mild decline
• thrilling greatness for longer than thought possible
• unheard-of power approaching 40 and after
• a record number of awards and a run at numerous other records
• a huge fucking head.

If there's a story in the Clemens revelations, it's not that the Rocket was juiced. Or that we shoulda known he was juiced, or did know he was juiced. It's that he bore transparently and exactly the same signs of juicing as Barry Bonds, and rode them to utterly parallel and heretofore unknown achievements. And yet there was no talk of asterisks, no endless whisper campaign, no media indictment, no requisite holiday party debate over Roger. The fetishistic spanking of Barry Bonds, which predates the millennium, is now obviously rendered as the racist exercise that many pretended it wasn't. The spankers got off on it, under the flag of moral judgment: essentially a free shot. And the justifications just look embarrassing now. Barry's case wasn't more obvious. He wasn't closer to the spotlight or the record books. He was not even a bigger asshole. But he was quite a bit darker of skin.

gossip girl (new york stories?)

Hello. Perhaps you are visiting via the perspicacious linking taste of Time Out New York — which would seem to make this a fine occasion to take up a matter concerning New York. It is also a matter — a very small matter — concerning a New Yorker story, a review of Gossip Girl, by Nancy Franklin. It is a matter of such irrelevance we can't help wasting a New York minute on it.

The show has problems. They include the plot, dialog, and acting, which may seem like a lot. Serena, as close to a lead as the show has, is played by an actor who could generously be described as a lesser version of Piper Perabo. Ponder that. It is, one should note, not a lot of charisma on which to base an almost-major network show. The article concludes — at considerable length — that what makes the show appealing must be its scenario, the megaprivileged life of the Upper East: "Because this is a world open only to the few, it’s of great interest to the many. (And, it goes without saying, of ginormous interest to the few.) It’s not hard to imagine that girls all over the country would want to get a glimpse of this tantalizing spectacle, because they’re never going to experience anything like it in real life." From this springboard, the article — and this will aggravate a person — takes the opportunity to linger almost exclusively over the show's newyorkness, with kneejerk references to Sex and the City, correctives about the true nature of Brooklyn, and an apparently sincere taking-to-task for the show playing fast'n'loose with location shooting. Say it ain't so!

Franklin does seem intimately familiar with the zip code in which the show purports to reside, reeling off actual preparatory academy names which are much funnier than the essay seems to think, and waxing specific about what sort of dresses girls there wore in 1988 as opposed to now. At the same time, she seems surpassingly oblivious to the culture-consuming world beyond 10028, and what's happening out there. She mentions the show's "primary purpose of marketing pop songs, which are heard throughout." Actually, we're pretty sure that an untested show on the CW isn't marketing "What Goes Around" by a non-New Yorker named Justin Timberlake, and the like. Mr. Timberlake, who comes from a land down under 72nd Street (it's called "Tennessee") may in fact, along with his staff and servants and holding company, be receiving a certain fee for his participation. We are just guessing.

One can't but suspect that the article's indifference to the facts on the ground of culture leads to the review's disastrous point-missing. Franklin passes entirely cursorily over the show's structure, significantly modified from the original series of books, in which we are led through the tangled webs of the social scene by "Gossip Girl, who isn’t a character, exactly; she’s a presence, an omniscient stand-in for our voyeuristic selves. In the books, Gossip Girl chronicles online the activities of the half-dozen or so main characters, and her postings are interspersed with traditional narrative; on the TV show, Gossip Girl’s reports are presented as voice-overs." And that's it for the conceit. Back to quips about the Abercrombie catalog, and Williamsburg.

The conceit, sugarhigh! is here to tell you, makes the show (though we admit they aren't doing enough with it). Gossip Girl is not, in fact, a character within the narrative's world (though there is a voice we hear); it's certainly not, in Franklin's one stab at "analysis," a substitute for our watching. It's a blog with Kristin Bell's voice, which posts news, salacious stories, gotcha pix and so forth about the popular students. It is, in short, a gossip site. The show's imagination is that celebrity journalism has made its way to high school.

Which is not to say that Gossip Girl merely proposes that the scions of the superwealthy are the not-yet-acknowledged legislators of the world and the rightful subjects of TMZ and Perez, which wouldn't be much of a breakthrough. The show's idea is that the form of celeb gossip is now the significant way of knowing about one's own life. What's interesting — and really, it's compelling — about Gossip Girl is not the conceit itself, but the life it proposes: one in which, when someone makes eyes at you across the party, you can check out their cachet and date-rape record on your mobile before they meet you at the bar.

So it is that the show sets up a logic where all relevant knowledge is routed through said device, with its always to-hand camera, its browser set to the Gossip Girl site, its text messages which come particularly in handy when you need the 411 on a boy but are in the middle of a conversation with him. For all the biz talk about designing shows that can be watched on a phone, this is the first show that takes the phone entirely seriously as something more than a new distribution platform — as the technological kernel of a form of life. It's no wonder that one episode ends with Sum 41 on the sndtrk singing "I'm nothing without you" while Serena chucks her mobile in a trashbin. She has it back by the next episode: once again, she's something.

Of course, the show's grownups don't quite get it, which is a way of saying that the cellphone is the new rock'n'roll, a way of understanding the world that separates generations. It allows a negotiation of the threatening information cloud that seems at once ultra-contemporary and a perfect figure for the ambient anxiety of adolescence. The irony is that the adults exist to demonstrate something that the kids already know, which is that their social and romantic decisions are actually business calculations, requiring the most current information to be figured correctly, a real-timing in which feelings appear as facts, and the slightest differentials in the grand and weightless flux of data can make your fortune, or break it. Thus, in addition to the show's insight about life after landlines, it manages to figure teen romance as a kind of arbitrage.

Which is to say: if Gossip Girl is about New York in any meaningful way, it's about Wall Street. The remainder of its settings are color and alibi. Coincidentally, one can always say the same about the New Yorker.

helvetica

"You can put as much nationality in the spacing of a typeface as in the typeface itself or something."

— Danny van den Dungen (pictured above)

two days in paris

Guiding cliché: a version of everyone's fucked up and that's finally okay they can still successfully pair off.

Compare favorably to Waitress: also directed by female actor who appears in film, equally clichéd account of human psychology — this case just happens to be a somewhat less noxious banality.

Compare unfavorably to "One Night in Bangkok."

[ps: modernism/modernity discussion left unfinished: once art stars, displace by machines, turned to chess. Now chess stars, displaced by machines, turn to politics.]

correct adjectival form of "shoegazer"

Shoegazey.

Disadvantage: could rhyme with Swayze. Advantage: could rhyme with Fugazi.

no country for old men

A pretty good movie concerning how the world in which men change their shirts only when shot is slowly being put out of business by the suburbs.

virgins, pop stars, and the three songs rule

We have yet to hear a good song from Hannah Montana, but won't be surprised when we do. It's like getting a good Christmas present from your uncle who works in Silicon Valley: he's clueless, but he's got pockets full of money and friends full of advice, and sooner or later he's gonna nail it. Ditto young Hannah, who should probably stop taking advice from her daddy, who hasn't caught a good song since 1992.

But finally it's of little matter. The Lizzie McGuire-ing of country music is a fait accompli, and we don't even mean the fact that American Idol's majority of successes are country acts, which would only be surprising to those folks with geographical and/or snobby milieu-formed blinders obscuring their grasp of what American music actually consists. We mean, in short, Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift is a gawky high-school student with a thin voice, a billion-dollar hairdo, a pointedly incompetent sultriness, and television looks. In interviews, she likes to talk about how she wrote certain songs while sitting in class, and so on. At any given moment, it's not clear what she's good at, except for embodying the ambiguous ego ideal of a good chunk of the population, which is not a bad start if you want to be a pop star.

But if you don't look "in any given moment" but over the last year's span, you'll discover that she now has three songs that have not only been radio hits but are quite good indeed: "Tim McGraw" (see discussion below the fold here), "Teardrops on my Guitar," and now "Our Song." And as we know, three songs is the rule: just as when a young, impoverished Jane Dark made the fast rule never to buy an lp without foreknowledge that it had at least three good songs on it (a lesson learned after getting burned by that Grand Funk Railroad disc with their cover of "The Locomotion").

That the first two singles were ballads is passingly curious, especially given the thinness of Swift's voice; that the new single' vocal attack is almost certainly indicative of Nashpop's slow and plausibly deniable rapprochement with hip-hop (given it a listen or two, you hear what we mean) is itself a bit odd. But what is finally explicable, or at least describable, is the cultural sequence to which Taylor Swift is a kind of closure. The routing of pop stardom through television is scarcely a new fact (Ricky Nelson, etc etc) but has certainly taken on a new force since the new Mouseketeers fueled the old teenpop. However, it was the bifurcated reality of Duff/McGuire that really set the new tween machine in cultural relief: awkward high-schooler on TV, and (shortly thereafter) charmed pop princess on stage and chart. The two paths intersected in the Lizzie McGuire movie, in which Lizzie herself, rather than the actress who played her, became a pop star. Now Hannah Montana, the television character, tours as Hannah Montana, the pop star, but releases songs as Miley Cyrus, the person. But as we suggested, that sequence has now returned to its zero point. It should be the case that, now that we have Taylor Swift, we no longer need any Hannah Montanas.

Once upon a time the unresolvable ambiguity of female adolescence, of that transition from one mode to another (a shift, one can't help but note, in mode of [re-]production; truly the site of the great mysteries), took the rigid cultural form of the virgin/whore bifurcation. While this punishing cookie-cutter is epochs old, the contemporary pop-cultural formulation is perhaps best summarized in the '84 movie Angel: "High School Honor Student by Day. Hollywood Hooker by Night." This, you'll note, is a particular formula, for a particular place and time: the generality of "virgin" has been replaced by the specifics of "high school student," while the generality of "whore" has been actualized in a specific place, and a particularly loaded one: Hollywood.

From Hollywood, the next leap isn't far — but it is striking. For it now appears that the "whore" portion of the ambiguity can be replaced happily by "pop star." The structure of this current apparition — high school student by day, international pop star by night — has its own story to tell. It's evident that the structural role that "pop star" plays here is deeply connected to "whore"; it remains otherwise inscrutable, despite the reasons weakly offered, why Hannah Montana must conceal her night-time career from her classmates. The activity of selling yourself on the open market — or really, of entering into the machinery of selling yourself — finds its happy ideal in the image of the teen pop star, and yet somehow remains a dirty secret. It's as if, even with the issue of illicit sexuality neutralized by the shift in job description, the issue of the first commoditizing of bodies cannot be made unproblematic.

Of course, just because this narrative shift makes visible some fact about social labor, that doesn't mean it can wish away the cultural anxiety over female and child sexuality. Indeed, the very implausibility of this particular "wishing-away" testifies to the insolubility of the fear. "Culture" — the ascent of Taylor Swift and Hannah Montana equally — is always busy wishing away even as it's busy making visible. It stands in the same relation to "economics" as "pop star" does to "hooker"; if there is any distance between culture and economics at this late date, one might find its measure there.