Waiting...

(allposters.com)

I saw the movie 'the Terminal' last night, and it was pretty good, but kind of forgettable. I think Steven Spielberg is kind of stuck in the late-80s, there were a bunch of shots with streaming light highlighting the characters - reminiscent of E.T.

Oh, and the movie is based on the true story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who lived in the Paris airport for 18 years.

But something struck me - I think people outside of America have a greater ability to wait on things. Working in the computer lab last week, there was a tax help session for international students. Often, the people running the program were 15-30 minutes late in showing up and when I told the students that this was the case they shrugged and said that they would wait in the corner. If the tax program was for Americans, people would get pissy and hang around my desk and ask for information about who they could call.

Perhaps this is because America is a democracy and things get done because people complain about them. Maybe it's because we're more individualistic. Maybe it's because we don't have the normal 20-minute to 3-hour grace period of lateness that many South American and African cultures seem to have. Whatever it is, it's kind of interesting.

Senior Tour Update

(wikipedia) Columbia, MO

Well, it's been awhile since I started the Senior Year Tour project, and I've crossed a couple things off of my list. And I've added a couple things and crossed them off. Here we go:

1. Tonic nightclub: more enjoyable if you get there at 11pm instead of 10:30pm, like we did. Awesome event of the night: I was standing, looking over a railing, and I saw a guy out of the corner of my eye check me out and walk over. He started grinding his butt on me and I started laughing. He said "go ahead, you can touch it. I worked out for 10 hours today, go ahead." I just laughed and walked away.

2. True/False film festival. Fantastic. One of my favorite quotes from the event was when a yodeling musician was playing before 'American Teen' (very very good - check it out), who was in his mid-twenties and pretty cute. A woman in her fifties beside me leaned over and said, "He can yodel at me anytime." This made me want to date a guy whom older women think is attractive. I feel like they know what they're talking about.

3. Universal Thrifts update: Not open on Tuesdays, or whenever Jeff and I tried to go, but is most likely probably open on Saturdays only.

new things on the list:
7. Go to a Mizzou basketball game
8. Figure out where the 63 Diner is and go there
9. Go on a walk around downtown in the morning.

"Beauty Issue," part 1 of 1 million

Flipping through my roommate's Vogue from September 2007, I was wondering if the point of Vogue was for designers to simply put their best looks in advertisement form for 95% of the magazine and for Vogue to insert 10 articles or so and call it a wrap. And then I found an article.

And it reminded me that I have a document (which is how I keep diaries on certain issues) on my laptop called "Beauty Issue." In it, I keep various thoughts and quotes about beauty. Beauty confuses the crap out of me. It kind always has since puberty. That is why this post is part 1 of 1 million, because I doubt I will ever figure it out. But I wanted to post the article from Vogue anyway, because I think it has something to say about my generation of ladies and our struggle with beauty. Sorry for the typos, I had to type the thing out because I guess copyright people don't like for their articles to be posted on the internet for free. Well, this is just an excerpt:

Vogue Sept. 2007 “The Sloppy Syndrome: Is it a form of self-expression or an issue of self-esteem” by Jean Hanff Korelitz

“I decided to ask Julia Temple, a psychiatrist in Princeton, New Jersey, why so many reasonable women balk at the prospect of looking as if they’ve made some effort to look like grown-ups. ‘I see women who may not even realize they’re avoiding looking their best,’ she told me. ‘They feel they don’t deserve to look very good. Women who have been abused in childhood can be self-neglected in adulthood.’ When I explained that I had something less defensible in mind, she was familiar with that, too. ‘Avoiding the risk of getting hurt is very common. They look good enough, but if they stretch themselves it might not come off right.’

Sandra Cohen, a Manhattan therapist, stressed that the casual-style trend of our culture at large is as much the culprit as our wounded psyches. ‘Twenty years ago, you couldn’t just turn up in anything at an event. You never saw jeans at the Metropolitan Opera, and now you do.’ Then again, she argues, dressing down can have a converse socioeconomic message. Even if people from disadvantaged backgrounds can afford only one good outfit, they never hesitate to put it on when the occasion calls for it. Wealthy women, on the other hand, can afford – financially and psychologically – to dress as if spending money on clothes were simply a matter of preference. ‘You have to be secure to wear torn jeans on Fifth Avenue,’ says Cohen. ‘Someone who worries that people might wonder if she has money is not going to dress that way.’

…equates looking too ‘done’ with ‘looking like Nancy Reagan.’ But Staple insists on seeing the bright side of falling short. She may ask friends to cut her hair so it won’t constitute a legitimate coif, but it’s actually part of a covert self-empowerment scheme. ‘Looking a little “off”,’ she discloses, ‘makes me feel bratty and in charge.’

Here’s my version of an explanation (and an extension of Temple’s risk-avoidance take). Remember that scene in A Beautiful Mind when John Nash has his aha moment in a bar and the seeds of game theory are sown? The scenario he uses to illustrate his idea involves a gorgeous blonde and her less lovely friends who enter a room full of attentive men. The men approach the friends but not the blonde, leaving her miffed as they swing their new dates onto the dance floor. Why haven’t they tried for the ultimate prize? Because they fear they’ll fail. If they aim lower, on the other hand, not only will success be easier to come by but no one will ever know that they’ve settled.

Those flip-flops, in other words, may mean: Do I look like I care that much? But the truth is, I do care."

Ok - one thing about the A Beautiful Mind story - I think it's fascinating and true. And this phenomenon of 'shooting low' is a very postmodern one, I think. One thing that struck me at the L'Abri conference was when Hans Bayer was giving his talk about the spiritual needs of contemporary culture, he said that the current generation has nothing that they would die for. And why should they? You can excuse everything away today, literally. Everything is kind of relative and extremism is looked down upon. To say it in a different way, I think someone of my generation would look at the story in A Beautiful Mind and say 'what? what's wrong with going for the friends? are you saying that beauty is only on the outside? maybe in their culture they like girls who are a little more mousey, who are you to judge that?' But that's not the point of the story, the guys went for second best, because they all knew what was best and didn't go for it.

I have to think a lot more about all of this.

OH! One more thing: maybe this really does all relate to postmodernism! In postmodern architecture, instead of really striving for 'beauty' in the classical sense, postmodern architects try to bring out the playfulness of their art, by mixing different elements and eras - pastiche. While the result isn't exactly beautiful, it is charming and approachable. Which would you prefer? Beauty or open-mindedness?

True/False is here!

(stolen from truefalse.org)

This is the first year I am able to attend (some of) the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, and I'm really really excited. Columbia explodes with movie-goers, and it's a total cultural community event. And the Rag Tag is getting a new building! (Vox article) Along with the new Rag Tag there are 10 other venues that will be showing True/False films (list here). Very very exciting. For your viewing (and deciding - for you Columbians) pleasure, here are links to all of the films being shown this leap year weekend (list online here):

• An Alternative to Slitting Your Wrist
• American Teen
• Audience of One
• Bigger, Stronger, Faster*
• Carny
• Cat Dancers
• Echoes of Home
• Forbidden Lies
• Girls Rock!
• Gonzo
• The Greening of Southie
• Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go
• How I Am
• I Think We're Alone Now
• Joy Division
• Knee Deep
• Life. Support. Music.
• Lucio
• Man on Wire
• The Man Who Ate Badgers (and other tales from the British Isles)
• The Mosquito Problem (and other stories)
• The Mother
• My Mother's Garden
• The Order of Myths
• Oscar Shorts
• Paradise: 3 Journeys in this World
• Please Vote For Me
• Secret Screening (Blue)
• Secret Screening (Green)
• Secret Screening (Red)
• Shake the Devil Off
• Song Sung Blue
• Sons of a Gun
• Stranded
• Summer Sun Winter Moon
• Taxi to the Dark Side
• To Have and To Hold
• Very Young Girls
• Working Title

Trailers Galore

I love love love movie trailers. They're so perfect and compact. Here's a wonderful page on Apple's trailer site giving all of the trailers for the Academy Awards this weekend:

Apple - Movie Trailers - 80th Academy Awards

'No Country for Old Men'

(link) - the creeper himself

Coming back from the L'Abri conference, we ran into a blizzard going through Iowa and had to stay the night in Mason City, Iowa. For about two months I considered going to Iowa State University to get a masters in Journalism and Mass Communication. If this weekend did anything for me, it convinced me that I made the right decision. Iowa is like a lame version of Minnesota (with its northern beauty and 10,000 lakes) and Missouri (honestly, the roads and scenery drastically improved once we crossed the state line). It's a barren wasteland (thanks to Patrick for the literary reference mid-car ride) and the state patrolmen are jerks.

In the Best Western in Mason City, the two cars from Veritas who were stranded there rented a $10 pay-per-view movie and we voted for 'No Country for Old Men.' It was awesome. And, because we were all feeling intellectual and analytical from L'Abri, we had a terrific discussion afterwards. Sorry for y'all who haven't seen it, but I will discuss the plot line.

We decided that Anton (the villain killer creepy dude) personified evil, Tommy Lee Jones's character (the sheriff) was 'good', and Josh Brolin (who is actually Barbara Streisand's STEP SON, not natural son - "Bad uterus, bad!"), who played Llewellyn, was the everyman- somewhere in the middle. There were some really good points made, and the discussion made the movie a lot richer for me.

However, I think Slate.com's commentary on the movie and soundtrack (here) sheds some helpful light:

"No Country is a different matter. Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Tom Bell starts off declaring, "The crime you see now, it's hard to take its measure." By the end of the story he's given up trying to measure evil because he's been defeated by it, professionally and spiritually. Bell is a new kind of character for the Coens, a once-strong man whose pain we understand and care about. We feel for him—even though nearly everything in the movie, including the soundtrack, is radically underplayed. (This being a Coen movie, the violence is not underplayed.)"

I forgot that the Coen bros. directed 'Fargo' - I think the movies look very similar.

I need to rent Magnolia.

More from the article on 'No Country for Old Men':
"The last thing we hear before the credits is the wind and the ticking of a clock. It's not just about death. It's the desert that is eternal and doesn't care about all the human messes played out on its surface, and the wind that will outlast us all."..."The Coens, in their often quirky and passionless way, still have always seemed to be searching for something eternal, and surely in No Country for Old Men they get closer to eternity, in both its human and inhuman dimensions, than ever."

whoa. I am so glad there are people out there who know more about this stuff than I do.

There Will Be Blood

nypost.com

I saw 'There Will Be Blood' with Awesome last week, and it was the first movie in a long time that, when I walked out, I had no idea what I just saw. It was gorgeous and difficult, but I had no idea what it said. This, from David Denby in the New Yorker (article), is really helpful:

"Anderson [the diretor] has set up a kind of allegory of American development in which two overwhelming forces—entrepreneurial capitalism [Daniel Day Lewis' character] and evangelism [the kid from 'Little Miss Sunshine's character] —both operate on the border of fraudulence; together, they will build Southern California, though the two men representing them are so belligerent that they fall into combat."

Pink Hair

Ever since my brothers and Kara took me to see Romeo & Juliet in the theater when I was 11, I have wanted to have a boyfriend that would dye his hair pink. Jamie Kennedy (yeah, the comedian) plays one of the Montague boys, Sampson. It looks so cool. This is the only picture I could find online, sorry it's tiny.

Sometimes it's just the right time to watch Romeo & Juliet.

Do the Right Thing

Mizzou shows free movies in auditoriums sometimes. Tonight was 'Do the Right Thing' by Spike Lee. There were 6 people there, including Julie, Awesome, and I. Man, that was a good film. I felt like the whole movie was filled with dichotomies. There is violence and non-violence. There is Black and everyone else. There is love and hate. And you have to do the right thing. One scene in particular struck me. Here ya go:

Sondre Lerche in real life

I don't know too much about this Sondre Lerche character, but the 'Dan in Real Life' soundtrack is almost exclusively him, and it's amazing. Hooray for $1 movies at Mizzou!

Reading: The Golden Compass

There's not much else to do on family trips than read by the pool and reject invitations to get in the pool by my nieces and nephew. And get a little Sun-In crazy (I haven't been this blonde since Allie messed up my highlights two years ago and I had a solid spot of yellow on the top of my head). Anyways, I was really proud of myself for reading the 400-page The Golden Compass in like 4 days until I talked to Kara who packed away a 1,000-pager (The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet) in about the same time. Whatever, she was an English major.

So, I read The Golden Compass because of the movie, of course. I haven't yet seen the movie, I was pissed at all the hubbub about Christians boycotting it (mostly on Facebook from what I've seen) and I will definitely see it. Also, I was intrigued because I had heard that it was the Atheists' response to The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. I wasn't going to check it out until multiple friends had read them (there's three in the series) and loved them. Also, Wampler (my campus ministry leader at Mizzou) loved it - or rather, loved the first one and thought they went downhill in quality for the last two.

The book reminded me a lot of Harry Potter in the style of writing and because it centered around one "chosen" child growing up not knowing who they really are and going on adventures and who will eventually save the world. As far as the Atheist undertones, the only clear way this came out was that none of the characters were completely honorable or completely dishonorable. In the beginning the Master of Jordan College (who had been taking care of Lyra - the main character - since she was little) tried to poison Lyra's Uncle Asriel (who's Lyra's only blood and very cool). What?? The Master must be evil, right? Well, no, not exactly. Later on it looks in on a conversation between the Master and his colleague and he did it only because he was afraid because of what Uncle Asriel was up to and thought it was the right thing to do. So do you hate him or not? Pretty much all of the characters are like this - in fact, I was a little annoyed by Lyra sometimes.

But having complicated characters is realistic, right? And also a sign of good writing, I think. However, it seemed like there was less of a possibility of there actually being a right answer, like the right thing to do. Everything was confusing. Overall, it was an interesting and entertaining book and kind of reminded me of The DaVinci Code in some ways, but I don't know why. Maybe because I felt like I had to finish it even after I got bored.

Boogie Nights

I saw Boogie Nights last night because I had heard a lot about it, and I feel like there's a lot of pop culture references to it, and I heard it was pretty good. Everyone is in this movie. Don Cheadle, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Mark Wahlberg, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Heather Graham, William H. Macy, John C. Reilly. Well, what I didn't know was that it is about a kid trying to break into the porn industry. The movie made me cringe and hate myself afterwards like Requiem for a Dream did. It's just a hard, gross picture of the dregs of humanity. It was hard to watch.

Towards the end of the movie (which took forever - it's 2.5 hours long), each of the characters' worlds started imploding. Mark Wahlberg gets involved in a drug deal that goes wrong and then gets the crap kicked out of him by some dudes in a parking lot. Don Cheadle in denied for a loan and is involved in a convenience store robbery. Heather Graham and Burt Reynolds try to mix reality and porn and kick the crap out of a random guy. Julianne Moore was denied custody of her son because of her involvement in the porn industry. Another guy goes to jail for porn.

I couldn't figure out if the ending was commentary on society not accepting pornographers and our own sexuality (some kind of puritanical backlash like what happened in Brokeback Mountain) or if it was a judgment on the pornographers for their sin and disgusting behavior (kind of like how horror movies kill off the "sinners" first).

Who knows, but it all got me thinking about purity. What is it? Why does God desire it for us? I think the answer is pretty clear of why it is desirable just by its contrast with the movie, but I want to think about it more. Should I not watch things that have a lot of pop culture references and that I hear are good because I know they're disgusting? This, of course, varies from person to person. But what exactly does purity mean?

Redacted

"Everyone complains about media overload, but no one, including me, wants to give up access to magazines, newspapers, TV, blogs, or Web sites - the thousands of sources of urgent or frivolous assertion. We are caught, willy-nilly, between hunger and surfeit, curiosity and dismay."

- David Denby in The New Yorker

True that. This was in a review of his for the movie "Redacted" that looked awesome, but, according to Denby "is hell to sit through" because of scenes of rape and other stuff. Here's the trailer that makes it seem wonderful (trailer).

Baaaad Movie Accents

On that obnoxious window that pops up with the MSN Messenger there are usually articles with highly entertaining and interest-grabbing titles for articles that hardly ever live up to them.

Today there is a link to "Accent-uate the Negative: With a nod to Russell Crowe, the 10 all-time worst movie accents" Wonderful. However, they missed my all-time favorite. My dad and I enjoy action flicks on our twin Lazy-boy recliners down in the basement and one time we picked out Triple X: Judgement Day or something with Vin Diesel in it and I actually thought maybe the female lead's bad accent going in and out was part of the plot or something, like maybe she was a traitor. Oh, no no.

Here's MSN's list:
1. Dick Van Dyke as Bert in "Mary Poppins" (1964)
2. Brad Pitt in "The Devil's Own" (1997)
3. Angelina Jolie in "Alexander" (2004)
4. Gary Oldman in "State of Grace" (1990)
5. Uma Thurman in "Henry & June" (1990)
6. Tim Robbins in "Mystic River" (2003)
7. Winona Ryder in "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992)
8. Forest Whitaker in "The Crying Game" (1992)
9. Liam Neeson in "Schindler's List" (1993)
10. Kevin Costner in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" (1991), "JFK" (1991), "A Perfect World" (1993), and "Thirteen Days" (2000)

Taxi Driver

Okay, so Darjeeling Limited was sold out, which might have been my fault for not getting tickets because I thought the RagTag opened at 5. Whatever. So Julie, Awesome, and Soulmate (not mine, Awesome's) went to see a free showing of Taxi Driver in Jesse Wrench Auditorium. It was really intense. I was expecting for it to be really bloody and gruesome, being Scorsese. But I wasn't expecting it to have nothing of the familiar narrative arc of anything I've seen before.

Julie and I were talking afterwards and she started the movie off thinking that Travis (Robert DeNiro) was looking to Betsy (Cybill Shepherd - who used to be really pretty and not at all scary) as a love interest for his hope in life, but then discovered that she was "like all the rest of the girls" and moved on to try to save Iris the 14 year old prostitute (Jodie Foster - weird) but that kind of failed too and then tried to assassinate a Presidential candidate as a last act of desperation. I kind of thought that the whole thing was a message towards the meaninglessness of life and how Travis couldn't really find anything to fight for or live for.

There's a great scene where Travis goes up to another older Taxi driver they call the Wizard and in a round about way asks him what the meaning of life is.

---

Wizard: Look at it this way. A man takes a job, you know? And that job - I mean, like that - That becomes what he is. You know, like - You do a thing and that's what you are. Like I've been a cabbie for thirteen years. Ten years at night. I still don't own my own cab. You know why? Because I don't want to. That must be what I want. To be on the night shift drivin' somebody else's cab. You understand? I mean, you become - You get a job, you become the job. One guy lives in Brooklyn. One guy lives in Sutton Place. You got a lawyer. Another guy's a doctor. Another guy dies. Another guy gets well. People are born, y'know? I envy you, your youth. Go on, get laid, get drunk. Do anything. You got no choice, anyway. I mean, we're all f---d. More or less, ya know.
Travis Bickle: I don't know. That's about the dumbest thing I ever heard.
Wizard: It's not Bertrand Russell. But what do you want? I'm a cabbie. What do I know? I don't even know what the f--- you're talking about.
Travis Bickle: Maybe I don't know either.

Oh, and on Wikipedia (article) they said that the end is a dream sequence. That makes a lot more sense. Also, whenever this movie would come up while I was growing up my mom would always talk about this crazy guy who was obsessed with the movie and tried to assassinate Reagan to impress Jodie Foster. Here's the story. Weird.

Oh, and Julie -- the passenger in the taxi who was stalking his cheating wife was Martin Scorsese!