The Minnesota Trip (2010)

June 29, 2010

Eugene and I will be canoeing in Minnesota early July, starting from Boundary Waters Canoe Area Entry Point #57, Magnetic Lake. I haven’t gone canoeing up in the Boundary Waters in a long time, and am really looking forward to it. Below is an image of our route:

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True Blood: Bad Blood (Season 3, Ep. 1; 2010)

June 20, 2010

Season 3 opens with the apparent fact that everyone from Bill to Eric to Sam to blah have done tons of abdominal exercises between the time Sookie ran into the bathroom to mull her future at the end of Season 2 and the time she ran out of bathroom to discover Bill had abandoned her. [...]

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Prick Up Your Ears (1987)

June 20, 2010

The story of Joe Orton and his partner, Kenneth Halliwell, tracks the latter’s relationship with the former’s burgeoning success. It is, of course, tragic, but the tragedy is less a reflection on being gay than an attempt to understand the symbiotic relationship between two men when that unanimity becomes encumbered. Personally, I’ve come to see [...]

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Er shi si cheng ji [24 City] (2008)

June 9, 2010

Zhang Ke Jia maps the changing lives of contemporary Chinese and with 24 City, his target is Chengdu in Sichuan province, where factory 420 is being shut down to be converted into state-of-the-art condominiums. Basically, the film is a drama that is masked as a documentary, where we spend time listening to people whose lives [...]

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The Ladykillers (1955)

June 7, 2010

To see Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers must be like what it will be like for a youngin’ to see Ewan McGregor pull the condom off in Trainspotting, which is to say, impressionable and revealing. I’m anxious to see Star Wars again, actually, having experienced this Ealing Studios black comedy where he is no less [...]

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Angels & Demons (2009)

May 23, 2010

Tom Hanks getting a haircut made for a much better movie. Note though, that better does not mean good. The Da Vinci Code was so languid and expository that, really, Angels & Demons could not have been worse, but it could have been better. Is it just Dan Brown’s fault? Think about it – this [...]

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Synecdoche, New York (2008)

May 16, 2010

Synecdoche, New York is a film that resonates with a lot of my education. I like framing it within that prism because while I remember sitting in class, reading Derrida and Bahktin and everyone else in between, the experience of it is a little fuzzy. And if I position myself in that desk, paging through [...]

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Les plages d'Agnès [The Beaches of Agnès] (2008)

May 9, 2010

Les plages d’Agnès is a documentary about French new-wave filmmaker Agnès Varda. I haven’t seen any of her work, but conceptually as a filmmaker crafting her autobiography in film, this is an exquisite portrait that sometimes falls into the realm of hagiography. She sets herself up as an enigma, and the film’s structure reflects the [...]

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Es kommt der Tag [The Day Will Come] (2009)

April 30, 2010

MoMA’s annual Kino! film festival is a venue for modern German films to be seen and often receive their premieres in the U.S. This year, I got to see Es kommt der Tag, which is a film exploring karma and its personal and weighty effects on relationships among loved ones. The first twenty minutes side [...]

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An Education (2009)

April 26, 2010

An Education is one of those films that plays against itself, hyper aware of what it is and so constantly works to make you believe its charlatan and be charmed by him. This works largely because of Carey Mulligan, who is incredibly charming as the naive British girl caught up in the sophistication she craves. [...]

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