HBO’s hit TV show GIRLS: what it should mean for everyone
I feel an enormous (and delicious) pressure to write about the hit TV show GIRLS, now on HBO, every Sunday. I have been told by my editors that women read, watch TV, and purchase “added value” products. I was surprised to learn that anyone still does these things. READ MORE >
How To Basic
He doesn’t say anything. There is no music, just food sounds, a suck and flap of raw meat hitting things, eggs smacked. I like most of all that he doesn’t talk. Doesn’t call this stuff anything, doesn’t name it.
Sometimes there is a joke: the food comes fully formed out of the oven, like silly, boring magic.
That is not as good as when the food just stays fucked up. Still, it seems like he can’t help but smash the food when it is most right. In this one the camera is shaking so much after he pounds the chicken apart. He is putting the smashed chicken into the oven for the joke to come out and he is shaking so much.
The 240 Best Movies of 2012
Last year I wrote a post, “The 248 Best Movies of 2011,” where I tallied all the film data reported at the site Year-End Lists, which reports critics’ year-end lists for movies, music, and books. Film critics surveyed include Andrew O’Hehir, A.O. Scott, Dennis Cooper, J. Hoberman, John Waters, Kenneth Turan, Manohla Dargis, and Roger Ebert, as well as journals like the A.V. Club, Cahiers du Cinéma, Film Comment, and Sight & Sound. The site also reports on the accolades dished out by various organizations and critics circles.
Since 2012 is now mostly a matter of record, I once again tallied things up, in order to see how critics have already begun to regard the past year. But before we dive into the data, a few caveats:
- The value of the numbers below is primarily relative, not absolute. Some critics were sampled more than once, since they not only make their own lists, but also contribute to larger lists (such as the Sight & Sound poll, or the New York Film Critics Circle Awards).
- Every time a film was mentioned, I gave it a single point. In other words, I didn’t weight films, even if a given critic’s year-end list was ranked. (I just don’t have the time to do that.) Honorable mentions and near-misses also counted for a point; that’s just the way it goes. But I think this is OK: my primary intention is to see which films are being thrown about in regards to “the best films of the year,” and I think an honorable mention does just as well as the #1 spot. We’ll let the frequency of mentions do the weighting for us.
- I also counted each award received as a single point. Thus, the New York Film Critics Circle awarded Zero Dark Thirty three prizes: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematographer—and that counts as three points for our purposes. I think this is fair because, in addition to seeing which films are being singled out, we’re trying to gauge how much they’ve been praised relative to one another. Counting awards like this will pull the most honored films toward the top.
Again, keep in mind that this is all pretty relative. I also won’t claim that we’re sampling all the data we should be sampling; I just went with what’s at the Year-End Lists site. Also, note that a strong bias was given to English-language critics, especially US-based ones—but that, my friends, is the data to which I have the readiest access.
Caveats aside, however, the results strike me as representative of the cinematic zeitgeist c. January 2013. Because without doubt, the two films from 2012 that I’ve seen critics talking the most about have definitely been—
Some things about Mary
Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (c. 1602), known colloquially as “Doubting Thomas,” shows the titular Apostle incredulously putting said incredulity to rest upon sticking his finger inside Jesus’ wound after his resurrection (whose phonetic ties to “erection” may be our first mouthful of phallicy). Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not yet seen and yet have believed,” a somewhat snarky comment directed at the proof contingency of Thomas. God, a prick in my book, denies the Virgin Mary any clitoral or vaginal stimulation, deferring to the “divine agency” of his bodiless baby batter. Anal seemed out of the question as well. Their son Jesus is likewise denied carnal knowledge with his own Mary (Magdelene), our codependent threesome the world’s first dysfunctional family. I’ve always found Jesus’ loin cloth a sunken concavity, almost tucked-in in trying perhaps to be a daughter. Emasculate comes from the latin emasculare, meaning castrate, fortunately used in a figurative sense. Ben Stiller’s comedic and dramatic qualms in Meet the Parents, Reality Bites, Greenberg, and There’s Something About Mary all tell the story of a dude’s trouble either getting or holding on to the girl. It’s bro humor, but not of sexual entitlement, rather, feminine-like worry and desire for love. Zoolander may even have a touch of peer misandry, and I find Stiller’s work “cutting edge” when it comes to chronic castration anxiety. Back in Rhode Island, in which most Farrelly brothers films are set, Mary’s mother and step-father, along with a doubting cop, cannot believe what Ted Stroehmann did to his “frank” and “beans” until they see it. Here the Farrelly brothers cut to the proof, in the unedited version at least.
My Favorite New Movies of 2012
“Star War’s Uncut: Director’s Cut” (2012)
Here’s a roundup of my favorite newish movies, with some thoughts on each one. If you appreciate and/or doubt my taste in motion pictures, here are my lists from 2009 & 2010 & 2011. And here are some overall notes:
- Films marked with an * can be watched for free online; just click on the title.
- Roughly half of the films are from 2012; the rest hail from 2008–11. As I argued in my posts “How Many Movies Are There?” and “How Many Movies Have You Seen?“, no one can watch every new release when it comes out (especially when they’ve recently started a PhD program). I prefer to think of my lists 2009–present more as an ongoing project than as definitive statements on any given year. (I also feel free to revise my opinions over time.)
- You may find relevant two older posts—“How Many Cinemas Are There?” & “Why Do You Need So Many Cinemas?“—where I decry the habit of so many film critics to consider only feature-length theatrically-released films when making these kinds of lists. (All other cinema somehow disappears at the end of the year! Which is particularly odd at the present moment, when broadband has been revitalizing the short movie form.)
- If you want straight lists of the titles without any commentary, just skip to the end.
And now, without further to do, here are 30+ relatively-new movie-things that I saw and have thoughts on, starting with—
I. MY 10 FAVORITE NEWISH FILMS THAT I SAW THIS YEAR AND FEEL COMFORTABLE RECOMMENDING THAT OTHERS CHECK OUT
Movie Potpourri
I.
In “Encore,” (Book XX, Seminar, 1972) Jacques Lacan claims that St. Teresa is coming in Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1652) — one may imagine his soft pink academic finger placed right on it — which seems post-whateverly reasonable after reading the subject’s autobiography, in which she states “I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan.” Which all seems mild when you consider how close-ups on the weeping Virgin Mary’s tears seem like misdirected facials, or the clitoral countenance of all those emanant halos. This of course, may just be the torrent of my head. Lacan says “the habit loves the monk,” a playful adaption of l’habit ne fait pas le moine (“the habit does not make the monk”), which is a figurative way of saying appearances can be deceiving. The habit this monk loves is a shameful thing. A lesser Bernini, Rob Reiner has Meg Ryan fake it in When Harry Met Sally (1989), which confused my 13-year-old woody; didn’t know if it should stand at attention or smirk at the hip adultness, its severe almost hostile realism that women may have been faking it all the time. I’ve always found “I’m coming” — a partner’s bored face rendered invisible by the proclaimer’s eyelids — rather endearing: we are announcing our spiritual itinerary; that finally, after the chess match of texts, the avalanche of tiny drinks, the angry limbs of mutual cadence, we are hereby almost present.
Fili was the dwarf who I thought was played by Ryan Gosling
Maybe it’s just me?
250 Points: The Hobbit, or, As Expected, a Bogus Journey
- I really, really hated Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. I think it only fair I get that out there, right up front.
- Why did I hate them so very much?
- Well, it’s complicated.
Oh those sexy Asian movies
I am looking for a movie I once saw. I’ll describe it as best I can remember.
It is an Asian movie.
A Lot — Basically All — Gay People are Normal and Don’t Deserve Any Special Attention Whatsoever
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Newlyweds were kind of popular shows on the telly when I came to the conclusion that if I were to ever do that disgusting activity that you should probably never do it would be with a boy.
Sometimes, while flipping through the trillions of telly channels, I would stop on Queer Eye. The snippets that I saw of the “queer eyes” turned and twisted my tummy terribly. They had lots of product in their hair, wore insufferably strange trousers, and, just in general, looked as if they had spent the last gazillion hours scrubbing themselves in a shower stall. All these boys seemed to care about was their bodies. They didn’t watch PG movies or collect teddy bears or commit French poetry to memory. Their primary concern was the appearance of their flesh as well as the flesh of the straight guys that they were making over.
Straight people are just as corporeal as gays. Nick Lachey is a straight boy. He sort of has massive muscles and wears product in his hair. Whenever I saw Nick on the Newlyweds, I said to myself, “I do not want to be like this boy. I want to be like Jessica!” Jessica was quirky and inquisitive. She was thoughtful about that which she interacted with. She asked questions, like why a tuna fish company would name themselves Chicken of the Sea. Nick seemed unable and unwilling to string sentences together. But Jessica was a cute chatterbox, like Anne Frank when she was in school.