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Re: “Goodbye to All That”
Hate to eavesdrop at my own wake, but it would be pretty selfish of me not to clarify that Mark *Martin* did the Amis interview. (I am a great editor though.)
"Literature, Culture and Media" is the program, Kenji, and thanks.
Re: “Your Dark, Shadowy Weekend at the Movies”
It wasn't ever thus, you guys--George, you can always content yourself with Ford and Fonda's YOUNG MR. LINCOLN.
Re: “Your Dark, Shadowy Weekend at the Movies”
The Depp performances are varied, sure, but he's essentially just picking new celebrities to subtly imitate, and new facial expressions to wear when breaking character to deliver one-liners...
Ok, I don't necessarily believe that 100%. But still. I'm a great fan of repetition, honest (Hong Sang-soo!), but I find this whole exercise to be increasingly wink-nudge and self-gratifyng. (This is especially evident in the in-jokey conceptions of the roles Burton invariably casts his wife in.)
Preferences will differ but--and this is a reason why I love the b&w cardboard sets of ED WOOD--I did rub my eyes when you called SWEENEY TODD a great-looking movie, as I find Burton's aesthetic to be so much smoothed-over color-correction. (Also, he doesn't really know what to do with the camera. All his camera movements happen in postproduction, it looks like, and it's frankly embarrassing watching him put together an action sequence, as with the DS vamp attacks.)
Re: “Your Dark, Shadowy Weekend at the Movies”
I will say that, if you have a higher tolerance for Burton and Depp's latter-day schtick (which has grown too self-indulgent to sustain a sensitive mood) and aesthetic (which looks like airbrushed ass) than I do--my review is pretty much about me exhausting my own personal level of tolerance for same--you will have, in the case of DARK SHADOWS, a bit of an out. Pinkerton's review in the Voice, which digs in rich detail at Seth Graeme-Smith's screenplay, points out that the schtick from whence the movie's lamest jokes come is recycled from his high-concept lit-historical-genre mashup novels, so there's *that*, anyway.
Re: “10 Songs Pulp Almost Definitely Will Not Play in NYC This Week”
Well, "We Are the Boys," from the Velvet Goldmine OST, obviously.
Re: “The 10 Most Ridiculous Things Old White Men Have Proposed About Women And Vaginas”
Not that you necessarily expect an answer, but, as you can see with the Head Start one especially, one goal of the above-quoted individuals is to maintain, through biological means, the subservience of women to existing hierarchies of social and economic power, hierarchies which these dudes in their infinite whiteness sit atop. Read "whiteness" in this context as a shorthand signifier for unearned and unexamined privilege, which isn't universal of course but is remarkably consistent throughout the examples Syd cites.
Re: “SXSW: In Which Killer Joe Gets the Q&A It Deserves”
You know, I don't think I know enough to say, really. But my impression is that his promotion of genre films has been achieved in large part by ever less honest brokering between films and an easily-flattered-because-entitled audience? Not being myself an online movie geek (I don't remotely mean that in the pejorative sense), I probably can't speak very well to his virtues.
