The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others is so powerful! It is a really beautiful, haunting thriller that takes place in East Germany several years before the wall came down. It is about a Stasi agent who is spying on a writer and becomes empathic towards the writer and his lover. The Stasi agent is a very lonely uptight character, and watching him listen in on the lives of the artists and writers is so moving, like in The Conversation. It becomes incredibly tense and suspenseful as the Stasi agent begins to cover up his subject's dissident activity and thus silently conspires with him. The ending is very sad and sweet and powerful. I know sweet seems like the wrong word for a movie about the brutality of a fascist regime, but the face of the actor who played the Stasi agent... it is the final shot where years later he is buying a book by the writer that is dedicated to him, and he realizes that all his risks, and the consequences he suffered, were recognized and helped. In that last shot, his face looks... innocent. That's why it was "sweet", there was some consolation.

Live Nude Girls Unite

Last night I went to a friend's house to watch this excellent documentary (Live Nude Girls Unite) about a group of feminist strippers who tried, and succeeded, to unionize. The person making the documentary was/is a stripper at the club, Lusty Ladies in San Francisco, and is also a stand-up comic. She had a terrifically humorous and ironic perspective on the struggle, at the same time that she took it seriously. There were many interesting themes, about labor, the body, sexism and prostitution, as well as mother-daughter conflicts. I'm going to use this in my winter intercession class instead of a heavy-handed, salacious, and hypocritical Frontline piece called American Porn.

The Book of Beginnings and Endings

I just finished this lovely, uncharacterizable book by Jenny Boully. The Book of Beginnings and Endings is a series of, for lack of better words, prose poems. Each page is the beginning of a piece of writing, followed by an ending. And while each "essay" is very different, there is a beguiling unity to the voice. Something happens as you come to the end of each beginning, a sense of loss because what you are starting is slipping through your fingers, and when you turn to the ending, you don't know where you've gone. It is very beautiful, reminding me of Italo Calvino, Rikki Ducornet, and Ben Marcus

"My body wasn't taken with me, the soul being a very spacious thing. Our dreams were correct: we would come to, over time, discover independent yet certain truths.

Discovery number one: it is lonely."

Getting bored

I just watched The Client, a thriller with Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones, and some kid. The kid accidentally learns some mob secrets, and the DA's office and the mob are after him. It was sort of predictable, sort of enjoyable. Tommy Lee Jones was great.

I'm getting bored with writing about movies I saw. I really like the idea of keeping a record, but recording something like this just seems pointless...

Sweeney Todd

Am I the only person that doesn't like Johnny Depp? I think his acting is so two-dimensional and cartoonish. So little depth, so little subtlety. I'm always underwhelmed by him. And I think I'm kind of over Tim Burton.

All this to say, I didn't like Sweeney Todd at all. The leads' had terrible voices and the music was god-awful dull. The cool story was just butchered (ha ha) -- I mean, I was so, so bored. And I love Victorian stuff, and I love Helena Bonham Carter, and I love gore and cannibalism and revenge. And yet I was bored from the very beginning through to the end. I wish they had just made it a straight dramatic movie, without the singing. And I wish someone other than Tim Burton directed it. His heavy hand was in every scene, every shot, never for a moment letting you forget who directed it...

Shame and the Social Bond

I just read an article by Thomas Scheff, "Shame and the Social Bond" in the March, 2000 Sociological Theory. It discusses the ways that shame has not been adequately conceptualized in sociological theory, and looks at those theorists whose work at least touches the subject. He discusses a psychoanalyst, Helen Lewis whose work points to shame as the emotion experienced when there is a threat to the social bond, and he argues that shame is THE social emotion. He also links it to group conflict, violence and the effects of class oppression.

Tootsie

What a perfect way to spend a rainy Sunday. I saw Tootsie as a kid (more or less) and loved it at the time. I was pretty sure it wouldn't hold up, that it would be too dated. But, I really enjoyed it. Fun dialogue, Pollack-directed, slightly interesting stuff on gender, etc. There was something sweetly naive about it, the nervousness around homosexuality and feminism. That was dated, I suppose, but it just made me feel nostalgic for the pre-post days. You know, when irony wasn't always on some level self-referential.

Dustin Hoffman was exactly Dustin Hoffman, doing everything that he does that makes him who he is and makes him so likable. Jessica Lang was charming. Teri Garr and Bill Murray were hilarious in supporting roles. Ah, 1985 was so long ago! 22 years. It's astonishing.