This is Not the Plot You’re Looking For: ‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’ For Worst Movie of the Year

film & television July 2, 2014 Leave a comment

A_Million_Ways_to_Die_in_the_West_posterIt seems too easy, for a film with so much toilet humor, to label it a pile of dung. So let’s say instead say that A Million Ways to Die in the West is a resoundingly bad film that seems almost hellbent on removing any element that might actually be entertaining. The concept is great – set in a deliberately anachronistic American West in which the plot and setting are 1882 and the language and sex jokes are 2014, this could have been an engaging romp in which the tension between the elements cast humorous illumination on the conventions of both time periods and on the Western genre as a whole. And in a summer market saturated with tentpole action films and sci-fi franchises, a Western film promised a breath of fresh air.

Alas, MacFarlane reaches for a genre spoof in the line of Blazing Saddles or Airplanes!, and is unable to deliver on any aspect of it.

Albert (Seth MacFarlane) is a sheep farmer with a pretty, pouty girlfriend (Amanda Seyfriend) and a serious lack of self-confidence. The latter takes a further blow when his girlfriend dumps him in the first five minutes for mustachioed store owner Foy (Neil Patrick Harris). After getting wildly drunk with his friends Edward (Giovanni Ribisi) and Ruth (Sarah Silverman as a brothel-working prostitute), Albert meet-cutes the new girl in town, Anna (Charlize Theron). From there, the film loops slowly around Albert’s attempts to grow up and be a man (as coached by Anna), Edward and Ruth’s relationship drama, and the menace posed by famous gunslinger Cinch Leatherwood (Liam Neeson).

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Art Love – And They Lived Tenderly for Many Days

art & illustration July 1, 2014 Leave a comment

pascalcampiondigitalcoupleDigital art from talented artist Pascal Campion

What I’m Into Lately: Murder Mysteries, Austen Web Series, Northern White Wine

books poetry lit, this & that June 30, 2014 Leave a comment

65-third 1. Summer put me on a huge murder mystery kick for some indefinable reason, so I’ve been engulfing Agatha Christie like Turkish delight.

Third Girl. This is a twisty Christie in that you really have no idea where you stand until the last 10 pages or so of the novel – in some of her novels, especially the Marple ones, Christie gives us most of the information, but in this one nearly all of it is withheld so we’re as confused as the victim. I did figure it close to the end but simply by instinct rather than logic. Poirot is approached by a girl who is convinced that she has murdered someone – Poirot goes on the hunt and can’t find anyone who has been murdered! This is also one of the faintly disturbing ones – a girl is psychologically ruthlessly manipulated, so it left me with a feeling of unease. Nonetheless worth a read and there’s a sweet romantic note at the end.  (Side note: do you follow me on Goodreads yet?)

The Seven Dials Mystery. A very melodramatic and ultimately silly plot, but the character-writing is superb – Lady Eileen Brent, better known as “Bundle”, is the quick-witted, plucky daughter of a Lord, and when a man is murdered in her father’s house and some clues turn up months later, she goes determinedly on the hunt. She’s a delight and there’s some very endearing romance. A Superintendent Battle mystery. All told read for the dialogue and ignore the plot.

2. Emma Approved. This webseries based on Emma from the production team behind The Lizzie Bennett Diaries is not very good, but it’s finally picked up speed with the adorable latest episode which featured some flirtation between Emma and Alex Knightley.

3.montinore_borealis_12_750

Borealis Northern White wine. This 2012 Willammette Valley wine is what the wine shop recommended when I asked for a white that was slightly sweet. It’s still a little too sweet for my taste, but really grew on me over time. It seems to be a versatile wine, it starts out a little dry in the mouth then delivers sweetness; I would say offhand that it’s a wine better with food than drunk on its own, and that it goes well with Asian food. There’s something addicting about it nonetheless – it’s a perfect refreshing summer wine, I find myself reaching for it more evening after getting home. $12.99. Update: much more polished description from Drink here.

The Book of Lamps, being a psalm-book

books poetry lit June 30, 2014 Leave a comment

Came across this exquisite poem on Cellpoems and had to post it. From poet Jeffrey Pethybridge – “The Book of Lamps, being a psalm-book” is part of a book-length sequence entitled “Striven, The Bright Treatise,” which was written in the wake of my brother’s suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge in the winter of 2007. This excerpt from “The Book of Lamps” represents a fourth of the full poem; in its entirety, the poem is composed of 128 stanzas with each quarter attaining––as in the interrelated movements of symphonic structure––its own shape and theme.

I.

Drug-tired, at a loss, above the lucid waves.

II.

Palms rested on the railing (like anyone
looking out at the Pacific sun-set).

III.

Palms pressed against the railing, the      last
solid thing held, the limit touched—
drug-tired from the chronic drag of days.

IV.

Palms open to the light-
ness in letting go: liberty, relief—
but also plummeting and irrevocable;
the waves, unsparing.

V.

Palms pressed flat up
against the wailing wall
in your gut, ulcerous,
pocked by guilt, shame—
secret pains in being.

VI.

Palms open and upturned,
good little supplicants,
what is their (secret) prayer?—
what is open to praise?

VII.

Candor?—the grace of accuracy
to say what happened? Facts
merely disclosed by the Angel
of the Police Report?

VIII.

The right note to elicit
briny-air?—or that thick beach-chill
along the skin at dusk? The nouns
to summon it.

IX.

The fall is four seconds long, the body
reaches a speed upwards of—as physics
describes the case.

X.

(The truth is I know the truth is
made through work: lucid, unsparing).

Read the rest at Cellpoems

 

Art Love – ‘Red Umbrella’

art & illustration June 28, 2014 Leave a comment

redumbrellaart

by Leonid Afremov

Recommended Summer Drama: Buzzer Beat

film & television June 28, 2014 Leave a comment

bakameansiloveyou104

Buzzer Beat is a 2009 Japanese drama starring Yamashita Tomohisa (better known as Yamapi) and Kitigawa Keiko. This is a drama about a group of young people, it’s set in summer, mostly light-hearted, features a lot of outdoor scenes, and in general has a magical, buoyant vibe that makes it a perfect summer show.  It’s a drama about two thoroughly decent, intelligent, hardworking people (played with great charm and beauty and chemistry by Yamapi and Kitigawa) who have an instant connection, become friends while both are involved with other people, and later fall in love. There’s so much magic and loveliness about the way their relationship is portrayed. Yamapi is a talented basketball player struggling to get his groove back, and Kitigawa is a self-assured, charming, endearing violinist. There is some drama and angst but it’s mostly fairly low-key and this is a great romance and a fun story about a group of friends and about growing up.

Watch

The Summer I Was Sixteen

books poetry lit June 28, 2014 Leave a comment

The turquoise pool rose up to meet us,
its slide a silver afterthought down which
we plunged, screaming, into a mirage of bubbles.
We did not exist beyond the gaze of a boy.

Shaking water off our limbs, we lifted
up from ladder rungs across the fern-cool
lip of rim. Afternoon. Oiled and sated,
we sunbathed, rose and paraded the concrete,

danced to the low beat of “Duke of Earl”.
Past cherry colas, hot-dogs, Dreamsicles,
we came to the counter where bees staggered
into root beer cups and drowned. We gobbled

cotton candy torches, sweet as furtive kisses,
shared on benches beneath summer shadows.
Cherry. Elm. Sycamore. We spread our chenille
blankets across grass, pressed radios to our ears,

mouthing the old words, then loosened
thin bikini straps and rubbed baby oil with iodine
across sunburned shoulders, tossing a glance
through the chain link at an improbable world.

-Geraldine Connolly, Poetry 180

Travel until your dreams find you

this & that June 27, 2014 Leave a comment

travelmap

Book Review: Unlocking the Air and Other Stories by Ursula K. LeGuin

books poetry lit June 26, 2014 Leave a comment

UnlockingTheAir

 

Unlocking the Air and Other Stories

I read only three of these stories and couldn’t finish. There’s an emotional turbulence running through each of these stories that reminds me of both A.S. Byatt and Ray Bradbury, and left me with a profound sense of unease. A strangeness haunts these stories, both metaphorical – as in the tale of a miniature, almost-but-not-quite dollhouse a professor builds as a stress reliever (a microcosm of his world) – and literal, as in the tale of a family who wakes up one day to find their water running red. This is Ursula K. LeGuin at her most skilled – she writes with every bit of A.S. Byatt’s erudite passion about people, intellectual choices, selfishness, and how said choices lead people inevitably into various social and economic classes, where they remain for the rest of their lives. The stories are impressive, literary, and gripping. But I did not like them. The effect they left was both unpleasant and strong, and I’ve found life to be too short to spend my time on that. I am putting this down without regret.

Art Love: Portrait of a Lady

art & illustration June 26, 2014 1 Comment

stevehanksPortrait by modern-day watercolor master Steve Hanks