The Wolfman (2010)

Guest reviewer, Ben: "I understand the silver bullets, but why waste the silver on shell casings?"

Food Documentaries

The Botany of Desire

Now a PBS piece done as a companion to Pollen’s book. On the surface, Pollen’s work is about helping humans realize they are not managing the natural world with the control they believe they have. In reality Pollen’s work is another way of making the natural world seem more manageable. It casts simple characters like potatos and apples as sweetly manipuatlive friends, who coax us into a hidden and happy partnership. I suspect this is the over-simplification of science that so angers almost everyone I know, but there’s something I like about it. First, it’s all about narrating the natural world, which is (finally!) my own interest--not the nature, but the narrative. Second, it recognizes animal activities like the import and export of agriculture as “natural,” which it is, in a culture that often see species transplantation as an unnatural crime committed by humans alone (no one here is defending cane toads, but certainly many of our mistakes are often very natural indicators of how commonly species break the balance of their ecosystem). Finally, even when I find some of Pollen’s analysis a bit dumbly uninteresting, I also find it sweet to see grown adults doing what children do: telling stories that are only a fraction of the apparent truth in an attempt to more easily live in the world.

I Like Killing Flies

I Like Killing Flies was recommended to me by a family member who loves both documentaries and oddball behavior. This movie must have been an easy win. It follows the move of Shopsin’s, a diner/grocery in New York from its long standing location in Greenwich Village to a new space in the Essex Street Market. The diner is notable for two reasons: its wholly unusual fare and its erratic chef and owner, Kenny Shopsin. Shopsin barks his way through the documentary, berating customers and family alike while pausing to debate at length his many personal philosophies with the filmmaker. Shopsin is amusing and contradictory, but after a while he seems hardly worth the film stock. For a personality project, Shopsin strikes me as another egomaniac, encouraged far past what might be amusing by a community a little too eager to boast of local color. The documentary was fun to watch, but it sadly neglected the real star of Shopsin’s: the food. The cooks at this diner have developed a 6-page menu almost as crowded as the kitchen—around 900 recipes total. The recipes are bizarre and funny and look delicious. I suppose the fascination with Shopsin stems from the public’s amazement that such beautiful and unlikely dishes come from so course a cook, but that narrative seems far less interesting than the story of the food itself. So, I’ll close this post by saying if I were in New York right now and in a group of fewer than 5 people I’d be ordering an avocado cheese tortilla soup, or a tofu pea peanut rice, or some lemon ricotta pancakes, or possible one of the brunch combination platters, either C, F, or N.

Titles III

For the sexiness.

Italy, how far you have fallen.

In today's BBC:

Italians shocked as horror film sparks panic attacks.

Parents and politicians in Italy are up in arms over US horror movie Paranormal Activity after several cinema-goers have panic attacks.

Did we watch the same movie? Pray Italy never meets with the likes of Takashi Miike.

Another snowday: nerdy documentaries

Frontrunners

I thought I’d love this because I enjoyed Spellbound. I am starting to sound like Netflix, or Pandora. The fact is, subject matter isn’t always a great predictor. I did love looking into the lives of Stuyvesant, perhaps New York City’s most prestigious high school, students. But the documentary, which follows 2 candidate’s run for Student Union President, fails to create the driving anticipation I hoped to feel. It clearly thinks it’s suspenseful—it invests a lot of time in dragging out the results with emotional and contemplative shots of the candidates. In the end, however, the race is at every point a total landslide. There’s no question who will win, and the movie fails to make me feel like a high school presidential campaign is important. Isn’t that what these movies are supposed to do? Help us see, for two hours, why something so inconsequential is of such great consequence to a small and loveable motley crew of Very Human characters? It was nice enough, but it didn’t.

Helvetica



The movie about typeface! I loved it. I loved having a whole two hours dedicated to how typeface changed advertising, and to how advertising followed the advent of high modernism and facilitated the establishment of one unified voice for the commercial language of countless corporations and at least two nations. It’s a great introduction to modern design trends and a wonderful survey of some of the contemporary artists who work primarily with commercial media—products we all use every day.

The true success of the film is its ability to make wholly compelling arguments both for and against Helvetica. As much as I love design I have always considered it the art of aesthetic choice, of selection and revision, not (because design and content can be isolated from one another) of social, political, or personal consequence. This film convinced me, at least to some degree, that the question is not so simple.

My favorite moment in the movie, without a doubt, occurs when a design artist is tasked with choosing the font for a book on his work and, because he finds the text boring and badly written, selects zap dingbats.

Titles II

These are my next title favorites because darling illustrations have been dreadfully overused in title shots since 2000ish, and neither of shots are precious. For They Live the graffiti points toward lawless humans as the "they" - an economic other more frightening probably than the aliens. For A Scanner Darkly I like translating the biblical glass to a sink drain.

Title screens

I've shared this already on Google reader, but I'm on an NTC posting binge, so why not? The movie titles collection that this graphic designer has posted is a wonderful way to lose hours of your life. The real beauty of this site is that many of these titles, on mouse over, give you the end screen of the movie. It's fantastic. Point A to point B in one mouse shift. I can't get enough of it. I now find titles so *meaningful*. I never realized how overdone white text on black screen is. I have finally confirmed my sense that font is so important.


So, because I don't want to work today, I'm going to post some of my favorite title shots from this afternoon's browsing. I tried to group them thematically below, but had tons of trouble with formatting. So I'll post them throughout the next day or so, as I feel like it.

First:

Billy Elliot and Elephant because they are beautiful.

Star Trek TNG season 4

CRAAAAAAAAAAP!

Lost, you pale in comparison.