Author Archives: Duff

Chicago Film Festival: Blackout

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Dir: Jerry LaMothe

Actrs: Mostly unknowns (to me) but a few familiar faces such as Jeffrey Wright, Zoe Saldana, and Saul Rubinek.

This movie was EXCELLENT. Completely compelling. I turned in my ballot with a 5 and I hope it gets a major distributor. Excellent even though the print we watched had a HUGE time code along the bottom of the screen (blocking about the bottom fourth of the screen) and no credits at the end.
Focuses on the New York City blackout of August 2003*, details the events in one Brooklyn neighborhood, particularly focused on the tenants of one apartment building and the workers at one hair salon. (Based on true events from the blackout, but believe the specific particulars are fictional.)

Really really great. Great acting, great pacing, great suspense, great passion and concern… Loved it. Both thumbs way up.

*hello, I was there! that was my last night in New York and I wound up sleeping on a couch in Manhattan unable to even get to my apartment in Queens!, and walking up and down many sets of stairs in complete darkness, and going for a very scary walk on the dark streets trying to find Amy…

Chicago Film Festival: The Walker

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Dir: Paul Schrader.

Actrs: Woody Harrelson (main lead), Kristen Scott Thomas, Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin, Willlem Dafoe, Ned Beatty.

This was a bit of a mess. We were down with it for the first half and then things started to unravel. Had a very 80s/90s feel to it, hard to believe it was filmed recently. Full of Washington DC “high society” (oh sweet monkey sundae, are those people pretentious or what) and supposed intrigue. The attempt to make Harrelson’s character BOTH a gay dandyish society fop AND a gay in a serious relationship with a trendy political artist didn’t really work for us. The two sides of his personality never melded and the contrast of the scenes was choppy.

Some good acting, not terrible, but would be very surprised if this film ever really sees the light of day.

Big Screen: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

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Very, very moody and melancholy and slow and drawn out. Really really beautiful photography (cinematography?), particularly during the narration. Lots of Midwestern winter shots, snow covered wheat fields, sun dappled groups of trees. Empty rooms with wooden floors and empty rocking chairs and streaks of sun shooting across them.

Oh and yeah the acting? Brad Pitt is progressively manic (eventually becoming an actually intelligible version of someone similar to the character from Snatch) and Casey Affleck really grows on you, after seeming sort of idiot-savant like at the beginning. Mary Louise Parker was excellent in a (very!) small role, as was Zoey Deschanel. Wished Frank (Sam Shepherd) had made another appearance at the end.

At the end you realize the story isn’t necessarily about what it seemed. Thought the narration would be annoying, but came to love it (gives it a very storybook feel, kind of like the narration in Pushing Daisies, although in a very different genre of storybook).

And as I said, the photography was beeeeaaauuuuuuuuutiful.

Fiction: “Tolstoy Lied” by Rachel Kadish

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A love story about an academic, sort of a shoo-in to my book pile, don’t you think. The narrator has a very similar tone and feel to the narrator of Love Walked In, but a few years older, wiser, and more jaded. It’s literate and witty, and the compare-and-contrast overlap between problems with the boy and problems with work colleagues is done really well.

Nice friendship moments, nice relationship moments, good realizations.

I didn’t like some of the choices at the end, however. Doesn’t stop me from thinking it was very well-written and worth reading. But I’m a little irked with at least one character. Shows you how involving it was, eh? 😉

Fiction: “The Used World” by Haven Kimmel

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Just as insightful and heartbreaking and tender and comic and genius as you should expect from a Haven Kimmel book. A story of three woman, connected and disconnected in ways only known to one of them. Spirituality, and friendship, and family, and love. And pain, and guilt, and when can one forgive, and when is forgiveness off the table. Small-town America, with all its aches and pains. And particularly the pangs of those more worldly who live in it.

Quite, quite lovely. Kimmel is an automatic “buy in hardback” for me at this point.

À la Super Eggplant, currently, I am…

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Making: Fucking nothing. That’s right, NOTHING.

Reading: So my dad and I had this conversation about how we both just lovelovelove Slightly Foxed but we were both falling behind in reading it because every time you read it, you spend half the time you’re reading it running around looking for books in your “library” you’ve forgotten about and figuring out if you have that book by that author or some other book and going and buying more books because now it’s reminded you of a book…. Yeah and our ultimate conclusion to this long conversation was that sometimes you just have to read them to enjoy reading what they’re saying about things and NOT let yourself get into a frenzy of adding more and more things to your to-be-read pile. So last week I read the last four issues. And then I was at loose ends. OH NO. What to do. Then the Miracle Man came to visit from Hong Kong yesterday and we wandered by a bookstore and Holy Shit, Haven Kimmel has a new book out! Why didn’t anyone tell me??? So yeah. Now I’m reading “The Used World” by Haven Kimmel.

Watching: Fucking boatloads of fresh fall TV. Boatfuckingloads, I tell you.

Listening: New albums from bands I have loved awhile now: Athlete, The Thrills, Rogue Wave. The awesomely atmospheric Eddie Vedder soundtrack. New albums from James Blunt and Kanye (I like this one more and more the more I listen to, although I still agree with my initial thoughts that it’s not as joyful)… Of course, Ben Harper hasn’t left the rotation. New boys like Jeremy Fisher. New (to me) girls like Meiko, and Maria Taylor, and Sara Bareille…

Still Thinking about The Kingdom

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If you’re an obsessive, maniacal, ridiculous FNL fan like me, then hey, bonus, off-season sightings of Kyle Chandler and Minka Kelly who both have small roles. (And for Jericho fans, “Emily” is in it as well.) Also the background music is very FNL-feelin’. I don’t know if it’s actually also Explosions in the Sky and, sweet monkey sundae, I’m certainly not going to be bothered to look that up. But it FEELS like the same kind of dreamy, expansive, Texas-horizon, music.

I liked it more than it may have seemed in my previous comment.

Best of September.

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It’s a two-fer month, a study in contrast. One high energy, intense and dramatic; versus one calm, deliberate, determined and yet still as dramatic in its own way.
The best two movies I saw in September were “In the Valley of Elah” and “The Bourne Ultimatum” (I’m a little late on that one, I know). Both were excellent in very different ways.
The best two books I read in September were “Under the Banner of Heaven” and “A Three Dog Life”. As with flicks, high contrast between the two, yet equally satisfying.
The best two gigs I went to in August were Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals and The National.
I’ll [add to this] post later my favorite tunes in September…[I’ll talk about September tunes. Later. In another post. Hopefully. We’ll see.]
Random personal highlights: Buying lots of new Fall clothes, although hardly getting to wear them this month; Jen in town for drinks!!!; and FINALLY it’s time for FALL TV!!! [Kinda a slow month, eh?]
Lowlights? Can the summer heat go away now please? I’ve had enough.