Vidiot Tumble

So, I'm moving to LA.

Thanks to everyone who has contacted me and/or posted and/or tweeted the news. A crazy confluence of events conspired to make this happen. The weekend after my last job ended, I went to LA for four days to cover AFI Fest, and had an expectedly great time; a week after that, Scott Foundas announced he was leaving the film editor position at the Weekly; I sent in my resume, didn’t hear anything and thought I didn’t have a chance; I went back to LA to visit family and friends and on my last day in town took a meeting; exactly two weeks later, I’m packing up my apartment. It is surreal.

Things I want to do before I leave New York in three weeks (I’ll add to this list as new ideas come to me):

~~1) Become Foursquare mayor of~~ ~~Provini~~. done and done.

2) See my first ever Broadway show (ideally, A Little Night Music)

~~3) Find someone (or someones) to eat~~ ~~Momofuku fried chicken~~ ~~with~~. I found chicken eaters, but Momofuku has zero chicken reservations left between now and when I leave (January 15). Boo. Chicken fail.

Best Films of 2009, part 2: Top Ten

See Part 1 of this series, on the runners-up for my top ten list, here. Tomorrow I’ll post Part 3, on my favorite undistributed/yet to be distributed films of the year, and then Part 4, on my films of the decade.

This is actually a top 12, for reasons to be explained within.

10. Inglourious Basterds

9. The Hurt Locker

8. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

7. The Limits of Control

6. Cargo 200

5. Beeswax

4. Summer Hours

3. The Girlfriend Experience/The Informant!

As far as I’m concerned, this was the most impressive year of Steven Soderbergh’s career, and his two 2009 releases are inextricably linked. I just wrote a story about this, will insert a link here when it’s published.

2. Two Lovers

1. Silent Light & Frontier of Dawn

Because of confusion regarding what constitutes a theatrical release (5 days or 14 days? In a traditional movie theater, or as part of a festival put on by a museum?), I named two different films on the indieWIRE and Village Voice polls. I knew Silent Light was not eligible for the Voice poll, because its 5 days at MoMA made it eligible for their poll in 2008, so on that list I named Philippe Garrel’s Frontier of Dawn as my favorite film of the year. Because that film played only 5 days at BAM before IFC released it on VOD, I thought it wasn’t eligible for the indieWIRE poll, which stipulated in the rules that a film must screen theatrically for a full week, so I chose Silent Light, which did 2 weeks at Film Forum in January. Whatever. They’re both masterpieces.

Today I wrote a thing about The White Hotel, the (for lack of a better four-word synopsis) surrealist erotic Holocaust novel that everyone from Barbra Streisand to David Lynch has attempted to turn into a film. Most recently attached to the project: Brittany Murphy and her creepy husband.

Above: the inside cover of my paperback copy of the book. For anyone wondering why this book is so hard to adapt, that image should go some way towards explaining — it’s almost a literal illustration.

Best films of 2009, part 1: honorable mentions

People have been asking me where they can find my lists of the best (or, really, more accurately, my favorite) films of the year and decade. I thought I had pimped these pretty extensively when they went up at ToNY and indieWIRE, but hell, I’ll post them here too, just for the chance to add extra bullshit/context.

First, since I already used my Tumblr to shout out my runners-up for best films of the decade, here, in alphabetical order, are my honorable mentions for best films of 2009, with links to relevant things I’ve written about them where applicable.

35 Shots of Rhum, Avatar, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The House of the Devil, I’m Gonna Explode, Julia, Medicine for Melancholy, Night and Day (above), The Road, Tetro, Valentino: The Last Emperor, The Windmill Movie.

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Merkin devotes much of her nearly 8,000 word piece to analyzing Meyers’s unique triumph in “Hollywood, [where] the glass ceiling is more shatterproof than in many other industries, giving way only when the pressure of accumulated evidence is brought to bear.” Merkin decides that Meyers’ success as a “Hollywood player” is at least partially due to the fact that, “aside from Nora Ephron, it is hard to think of another female director with as recognizable a cinematic imprint as hers, a certain look and feel that you can point to and credit, for better or worse, as uniquely hers.”

This statement might inspire anyone who has ever seen a film directed by a woman other than Ephron or Meyers to start reeling off examples of female filmmakers with their own “recognizable cinematic imprints.”

— Blah blah blah women, blah Manohla, Jezebel, Bigelow, blah blah stupid Nancy Meyers NYT Mag profile, blah blah blah. It IS complicated!

“ It comes as no surprise that Dr.Drew writes about narcissism because he genuinely wrestles with his own.

—

When Sex Rehab started to air, I was going to pitch a story about Dr. Drew as celebrity (and thus, an embodiment of much of what he tries to “cure” in celebrities), but then I fell into my own K-hole of post-employed narcissism and just … didn’t. I’m glad I didn’t try, because Sex Rehab’s Duncan Roy has now written a first hand account of his experience with the show, and it’s pretty great.

Note: whether or not Dr. Drew is a narcissist or even an adequate sex therapist, I would still be happy to accept his sex therapy, if you know what I mean.

I wrote a little thing about my favorite film of the decade, Punch-Drunk Love, for Salon.

I’m not sure if the above image is fan art or “officially” associated with the film (I found it on this French tribute page, which is an excellent source for P-DL reference imagery), but I think it’s a nice visualization of my point that the film is a fusion of cinema and painting.

Salon only wanted 300 words, and after I turned it in I thought maybe I should write more on this theme, but I’m not sure if it would make sense to do so outside of an academic context, and I’m definitely not sure I want to go there. We’ll see.

UPDATE: I should also note that this piece is part of a series, in which a wide-ranging group of filmmakers and writers consider their own favorite films of the decade. Some of my favorites include Mary Harron on Inland Empire, Andrew Grant on Synecdoche NY, and Michael Tully on The Real Cancun. That last piece begins with the sentence, “No, I’m not kidding.”

Gossip Girl characters list the best of 2009

OF COURSE The Maid would rank high on Vanessa’s top ten, and OF COURSE Blair would love Wishful Drinking, but I can’t believe the revival of A Little Night Music wouldn’t have been a late inning contender for her top ten. I mean, it’s Sondheim + Angela Lansbury + CZ-OMG-J, so she would have known it was coming way before Scott Brown’s rave.

Am I just using a fictional character to talk about myself here? Whoops.

“ I think it’s actually interesting and important to note that President Obama’s chief speech writer is a 28-year-old guy. I mean there’s no way that “The Simpsons” hasn’t influenced the way that guy tells stories.

— A quote that somewhat seems to contradict the title of the story it’s from: Why The Simpsons No Longer Matters.

“ Group votes of any kind tend to cancel out radical options on either side in favor of the middle. If you are not surprised that neither Ron Paul nor Ralph Nader has ever been elected president, you should be equally unimpressed by the fact that The Hurt Locker and Up in the Air have taken the bulk of this year’s pre-Oscar honors.

— Why do all the awards honor the same movies?

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Best Films of 2009, part 2: Top Ten

Best films of 2009, part 1: honorable mentions