films

...of the New York Times:

Indeed, the ideal viewer — or reviewer, as the case may be — of the “Watchmen” movie would probably be a mid-’80s college sophomore with a smattering of Nietzsche, an extensive record collection and a comic-book nerd for a roommate. The film’s carefully preserved themes of apocalypse and decay might have proved powerfully unsettling to that anxious undergraduate sitting in his dorm room, listening to “99 Luftballons” and waiting for the world to end or the Berlin Wall to come down.

[...]

I’m not sure that this hypothetical young man — not to be confused with the middle-aged, 21st-century moviegoer he most likely grew into, whose old copy of “Watchmen” lies in a box somewhere alongside a dog-eared Penguin Classics edition of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” — would necessarily say that Mr. Snyder’s “Watchmen” is a good movie.

Scott sneers at Alan Moore, writer of the Watchmen comics, not realizing that he, Scott, is the tool of Moore's ingenious plan to destroy the movie, operating from the comic writer's high tech redoubt in Northampton.

Marcin Ramocki's film Brooklyn DIY opens at MOMA tonight.
Am curious to see it for the involvement of various friends but describing art in terms of neighborhoods can be problematic.
Did a "Brooklyn School" ever develop, after artists began settling the region? Do critics talk about it?
Answer: no, the New York critics mostly snub Brooklyn galleries.
So, did the artists develop a style or philosophy that is contrary to the Chelsea style, the way "downtown art" challenged uptown in the 60s or graffiti came to be identified with the East Village?
No, after 1997 or so (the demise of Soho, which mingled artist and gallery lofts), Brooklyn became the region where artists lived and Chelsea became the region where the same artists showed.
Waves of "frissons of difference" came not from within NY but from London, Los Angeles, Asia...
Will watch the film with an open mind and report back with any changes to the above.

Update: Good movie, and most of the people interviewed disavowed a "Williamsburg style." The archival footage of past art shows and present-day glimpses inside studios suggests much trash-picking and bricolage. Amy Sillman comments throughout but I don't think you ever see one of her (non-bricolage) paintings, just quick details.

Critic Sarah Schmerler, interviewed in the film, offers the best "reason for Williamsburg" but it is esentially faint praise. She compares art to the gold in Fort Knox that backed US currency at one time. She feels that for New York to be a credible art center, tangible evidence of actual, vigorous artmaking should be on display somewhere in the city, otherwise galleries are just sterile delivery systems for culture happening out of town. This is a sophisticated variant of the "at least someone's doing something" declaration I used to hear in Dallas when I lived there years ago. Something is better than nothing but that doesn't make it important. Ironically the director of the film did much to advance art into the 21st Century with his Williamsburg gallery vertexList but computer and cyber-discourse is almost completely absent from the movie. For the next Billburg doc someone will need to talk about Ramocki.

"Crime?"
"Posting the 'THX Sound' on his synthesizer history website."
"Sound quality?"
"Extremely poor."
"Resolution?"
"Extremely low."
"But still recognizably the THX Sound?"
"Yep."
"Somebody might use it at the beginning of a movie. Prison, $200,000 fine. "

Manohla Dargis on Jerry Lewis:

Though Mr. Lewis meddled in the editing of CinderFella, a modern spin on the familiar fairy tale, the movie is an astonishment, despite some draggy moments and a little late-act sentimentalism that threatens to turn his character, an orphan in servitude to his greedy stepfamily, into a figure of pathos. Few scenes show the [Frank] Tashlin-Lewis union better than the knockout musical number in which Fella, swanked out in a crimson jacket for his initial meet-and-greet with the storybook princess, dances down an impossibly long staircase to the big, brassy sounds of Count Basie and His Orchestra.

By the time he makes his way to the understandably stunned-looking princess (Anna Maria Alberghetti), Fella has captivated the entire ballroom. He awkwardly takes the princess's hand, and the two begin to move harmoniously around the white polished floor. They separate, then join together, hitting the floor in synchronous, jazzy motion until Fella suddenly motions for her to stand still. And then, as the horns keep blasting and blaring, he begins jumping around her, drawing circles with his hands while his legs turn into airborne right angles. It's a ridiculous expression of pure kinetic energy and — as is often the case with this performer — a blast of untamed, untamable libido that threatens to destroy the carefully controlled gathering like a bomb.

The bomb doesn’t go off — it never truly does in his films — but he does throw it. That, in part, is what the French recognized about "le roi du crazy" before the Americans got hip to his transgressions. "In the homogenized and pasteurized, chlorophyll America of today," a French admirer wrote in 1956, "Jerry Lewis will continue to offer this unfailing formula for the little man in the face of mechanization." He added, "It's much easier and funnier to drive people crazy than to let yourself be driven to distraction by them."

Always thought David Byrne took some of his early "big suit" dance moves from CinderFella. It is some of the best nerd dancing you will ever see.

(YouTube has it, for the next five minutes or so)

Bush era, Reagan era
Time of blandness in movies
Government functions handed over to corporations
Rogue CEOs
Mutilated character becomes cyborg
Vigilante style plot for knucklehead demographic
Handsome leading man, concerned female in Platonic relationship
Invincible body armor
Protagonist fights more powerful machine

Aside from all that, no comparison. Robocop is hands down the tougher, better film, with critique of American futurism and jingoism spread through the "background" in the form of satirical TV broadcasts and products such as the "6000 SUX" automobile.

Iron Man is pseudo critique, putting all Bush-era maleficent acts on the head of one all-powerful corporate type, while serving up "kill the vaguely Middle Eastern terrorists" hokum that's been in every blockbuster since the late '90s.