let them eat cake

This post has been a little late in coming, but...

October 16th marked the anniversary of Marie Antoinette getting the pretty little wigged-adorned head chopped off by the dissatisfied peons of revolutionary France. Bryan, Jacob and I celebrated in the only appropriate way possible- we had a tea party.

The entire even was fun. I woke up early to whip egg whites to stiff peaks to make meringues and we tracked down a few kitschy teacups at local thrift stores to supplement the ones I already own. The result was a diabetic coma waiting to happen, with heaping plates of slices of spice cake, towering Earl Grey and Chai teabags, stacks of meringues, bushels of peanut butter cookies and heaps of cheesecake.



See the full Flickr album here.

♥

This Italian woman looks so pretty with her lingerie-ish dress, red shoes and smile...

(The Satorialist)

baking with style

Treated myself to an apron from Anthropologie. I'd like to think I'm domestic in more of a Julia Child way than a Martha Stewart way. Baking pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting is a good way to stay intellectually occupied when the spy-business is slow...

"amelia" never takes off

Biopics are tricky sort of film to get right. There have, of course, been plenty of really great biopics that seamlessly take the true story of a historical figure to the silverscreen, but more often, they fall into one of two camps: factually overblown and melodramatic or exceptionally dull.

Somehow, “Amelia,” the recent biopic on aviatrix Amelia Earhart by director Mira Nair (“Monsoon Wedding,” “Vanity Fair”), manages to be both.

By simultaneously avoiding the well-known aspects of Earhart’s life and failing to shed any new light on her, Nair presents a biopic unlikely to either entertain or teach moviegoers.

With her cropped haircut, tan and freckles, Hilary Swank looks so similar to the Earhart that, at first, the movie seems to hold a lot of promise. But things go downhill fast. Swank, in her leather aviator jackets and silk scarves, might look like the legendary aviator, but her questionable delivery of what proves to be abominable dialogue kills the image.

The script seems to have been written by someone who has never actually heard human conversation. Even at its most colloquial, the dialogue sounds like a bad inspirational speech.

The film's most intense and ridiculous moment comes a mere twenties minutes in when Amelia and navigator nearly fall out of the plane midflight (spoiler alert: they don’t die).

Awkwardly paced, the movie lingers overlong in the emotional scenes and sprints through any sequences actually involving flying.

For a film about an aviator, Nair seems to have managed to almost entirely ignore aviating. To compensate for leaving out most of what makes Earhart memorable, Nair injects her personal and romantic life with a great deal of melodrama.

Much of the film is spent covering conflict between Earhart and her husband/ publicist George Putnam (Richard Gere), as Earhart struggles to assert her independence within her marriage.

Nair seems undecided about whether to color the marriage as passionate or unhappy, with Earhart alternately sharing tender moments with Putnam on the runway and defending her right to have an affair if she chooses.

On her solo flight across the Atlantic, Earhart encounters a dramatic thunderstorm and panic threatens to overwhelm her. But, in clichéd biopic fashion, salvation comes in the form of a childhood flashback, as Nair cuts jarringly to shots of a young Earhart racing a horse through a thunderstorm. Though the cinematography here is undeniably beautiful, the scene does nothing to advance the storyline and is painfully cheesy.

The most interesting character is the brief appearance of Elinor Smith (Mia Wasikowska), a much younger pilot seeking to usurp Amelia’s place as the highest profile female pilot. Unfortunately, her subplot lasts a mere two scenes and she is never granted any sort of closure.
But this seems to be true of all of Nair’s characters, who seem to come and go before any development can take place.

Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston), the navigator who disappeared alongside Earhart, or Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), Earhart’s supposed lover (though Nair never really specifies whether the two are engaged in an affair), are dropped into the story very awkwardly.
There is never any sense of attachment to any of the character, and feeling of investment in Earhart’s record breaking flights. Though Earhart and her story are very compelling, there is somehow nothing compelling about Nair’s “Amelia.”

Earhart’s story is rich with fascinating material, but Nair instead superficially explores her marriage and mechanically ticks off the achievements of her life.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Nair’s take on Earhart is the suggestion that Earhart was a better celebrity than pilot, portraying Earhart’s success as a product of her marriage to one of the inventors of public relations. But even this assertion is hedged, as Nair appears to be torn between her perception of Earhart as a romanticized vagabond or as a celebrity enterprise.Is she is trying to reinforce Earhart’s image as an all-American idealist or is she trying to expose the darker side of Earhart’s life?

Earhart’s story is a legendary mystery, but viewers are likely to walk out of “Amelia” even more mystified than when they walked in.

Paris, I Loved You More

Loving a person can seem so messy and complicated, but somehow, that fear of commitment just doesn’t seem to apply to cities.

“New York, I Love You” is intended to play like a valentine to the city of New York, a kaleidoscope of the serendipitous romantic possibilities the city has to offer. Steeped in the atmosphere and diversity of the city, populated with handsome pickpockets, method actresses and sarcastic prostitutes, it almost succeeds.

“New York, I Love You” is the star-studded, trans-Atlantic companion to the pseudo-French film “Paris, Je T’Aime” (“Paris, I Love You”). Unlike “New York, I Love You,” “Paris, Je T’Aime” was comfortable being exclectic. It succeeded by incorporating all kinds of love: between two men, an ex-husband and wife, a mother and child or Steve Buscemi and the Mona Lisa. It was comfortable intermingling the esoteric with the obvious and the conventional with the bizarre.

But in “New York, I Love You,” when the stories don’t feel disappointingly clichéd, they make no apparent sense. A few manage to succeed, including Brett Ratner’s tongue-in-cheek take on the class system at the high school prom and Joshua Marston’s tongue-in-cheek, yet ender, exploration of an aging couple’s marriage. Ethan Hawke appears in a short by director Yvan Attal in which he “shares a moment” with a beautiful women while smoking on a street corner (poking fun at his role in 1995’s “Before Sunrise”).

Natalie Portman, who appeared as an American theater student in “Paris, Je T’Aime,” returns to play a newlywed Hasidic Jew in Mira Nair’s thoughtful vignette about love and marriage in a city where so many different cultures and religions are brought into contact.

But the movies highlight is Portman’s directorial debut, a short, subtle piece that touches on the unique kind of love between fathers and daughters as it follows a little girl and her dad through Central Park.

Less engaging is Fatih Akin’s bizarre portrait of a struggling artist (Ugur Yucel) and a beautiful, mysterious herbalist (Qi Shu) and Shekhar Kapur’s eerie depiction of a friendship between a crippled bell boy (Shia LaBeouf) and an aging opera singer (Julie Christy).

In its entirety, “New York, I Love You” has a dramatically different feel from “Paris, Je T’Aime,” but then, this is love New York-style. It has a faster pace, a harder edge and the perfect kiss takes place in the backseat of a taxicab.

The disjointed editing style certainly evokes the chaotic streets of New York, but the intermingled plot lines are difficult to follow.

In a final scene that shows the faces of the movie’s characters projected onto the screen-like sides of New York’s distinctive skyscrapers, the movie’s main point is clear. New York is the sum total of the people who live there. And in fact, the movie is so preoccupied with the love stories between its people, it loses sight of the city itself. The short films of “Paris, Je T’Aime” are detailed love letters to the neighborhoods themselves, steeped in the culture and landmarks of the districts. But other than a few pans of the New York skyline and a quick time lapse of Grand Central station, “New York, I Love You” largely ignores its setting. Perhaps it would have been better titled “New Yorkers, I Love You.”

Unfortunately, the love lives of New Yorkers simply don’t seem to translate as well to the big screen as the love lives of Parisians.

Though watching a woman bickering with her pharmacist about whether or not she should be taking birth control is a decidedly New York moment, it is simply grating on the big screen.

The hundred-little-love-stories film style should have stayed in the City of Love.

Unfortunately, producers are looking to apply the gimmick to more cities, with three new films scheduled to be due out in 2011.

Let us hope the people of Jerusalem, Rio and Shanghai lead more fascinating love lives.

happy anniversary of marie antoinette's beheading

robot child.

I suppose I realized something really important this morning. And that is that I still have a heart.

I have such horrible romantic ADD and intimacy hesitancy, I started to think maybe I'd killed whatever it is that makes people capable of attachment and vulnerability.

But if I am capable of being hurt and angry like this, maybe I'm not a robot after all...

deschanel killed the indie star.

Janis Joplin once crowed "Guess what! I might be the first hippie pinup girl." She was naming herself rock royalty for 1970s counter culture.

Over 30 years later, Zooey Deschanel is trying to do the same thing for Indie rock.

Deschanel is nothing if not a self-appointed, unadulterated Indie pinup girl. But unlike Joplin, Deschanel isn't trying to be tongue-in-cheek.

She's a calculated, unadulterated overdose of Indie. "(500) Days of Summer" seems to be an open declaration of her candidacy; it showcases her singing, feminine style and je-ne-sais-quoi to great effect.

Of course, Deschanel wasn't an Indie-pixie-princess back in 2003 when she co-starred in "Elf." She was just another blonde actress with a decent voice and a good sense for comedic timing. She should have faded into obscurity.

But somewhere in the last six years, Zooey (or one of her handlers, but that's a discussion for a different column) recognized an opportunity, an unfilled niche. It was a light bulb marketing moment.

One Erin Fetherston photo shoot, one folksy-pop "She & Him" album and some brown hair dye later, she was ready for her Indie crown.

But even as Deschanel is a divine summation of all things Indie, she is also indicative of everything that ruined the movement. A mere composite of everything that has previously proved to be marketable to Ray Ban-wearing Indie hipsters, she is more deserving of a place in Indie's obituary than its Hall of Fame.

Though originally driven by genuine creativity, Indie has since dissolved into a game of pandering to the lowest common denominator. Productions are no longer daring, but instead a regurgitation of tried-and-true plots, characters and jokes.

There was something more authentic about Natalie Portman when she played Sam in "Garden State," back before the movie studios discovered that doe-eyed, quirky-but-classy brunettes were an untapped goldmine and a box-office-guarantee.

But let us argue semantics for a minute. The duality between Indie and independent has been brewing for a long time now.

"Indie" originated as a abbreviated take on the word independent. However, it has come to give name to things that exist within the limited stylized spectrum of the movement. Meanwhile, "independent" refers to that which is produced outside the creative and financial control of corporations. The two are not mutually exclusive.

But much like "pop" (which derives from "popular," not bubblegum), Indie has become a word more indicative of its connotations than its literal meaning. Somewhere in the last five years, Indie went pop.

"A Mexican Werewolf in Texas" was a low-budget production that received a horror branding, even though it was certainly more creatively independent than August's gag-fest "Paper Heart."

"Paper Heart," lead by Michael Cera, features an overload of cute and a break-the-fourth-wall sensibility; in other words, "Paper Heart" is likely the most Indie movie ever made.

The difference between low budget and studio-produced is rapidly diminishing due to increasing quality of technology, decreasing costs of production and ease of distribution over the Internet; independent music and film is more available then ever. Even so, people still seem to prefer film and music that has been styled to look Indie to the genuine article.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Indie movement is not a love affair with the personal and non-corporate, but instead an addiction to a particular, contrived sensibility. For a movement founded on individuality, it has become a corporate marketer's dream laughably quickly.

Instead of branching out, perhaps even looking locally, individuality has been reduced to a race. To be unique is to find something passe by the time it hits the radio or DVD.

Meanwhile, the misnomer Indie continues to insist that individuality is essential. It has become a kind of modern mantra.

But being unique doesn't mean being very unique. If Fox Searchlight had any doubts about its ability to sell to a generation of kids supposedly hyper-obsessed with individuality, they were assuaged by "Juno" and "(500) Days of Summer." Both films did astoundingly well at the box-office by sticking to the Indie formula.

Heavy with imitators and short on anything fresh to imitate, the Indie movement is collapsing inward like a dying star. Deschanel isn't to blame, of course. She is merely the captain of a sinking ship.

Contrived and sold-out, Dechanel is ideally suited as the Indie poster child. Not a mere movie or song, she is hypocritical Indie personified.

Joplin reigned over a decade of free love, social reinvention and individual empowerment; Deschanel is the Marie Antoinette of the movement to sell individuality.

Let them eat "Juno."

Reprinted from my column in the Sonoma State Star.

tea for two.

the dream interview

Last night I dreamed that I interviewed Emma Watson. It was at her house, in a living room that looked suspiciously similar to my grandmother’s. I was there to ask her questions about her past and upcoming role as Hermione in Harry Potter. I’m not really sure what she was wearing, but I do know that Dream-Me was thoroughly envious of the blur of paillettes, metallic chains and luscious fabrics. When I told her I would die for her frothy navy blue skirt with white trim, she told me that she had designed it and that she was starting a fashion line (apparently my subconscious understands modern starlets all too well… after all, she’s already leapfrogged from child actress to model and fashion icon to Karl Lagerfeld muse and the newest face of Burberrry. A fashion house is the natural progression, no?). We talked about Hermione some more, and Dream-Me asked a lot of “deep” questions like “What movies do you watch to prepare for playing Hermione?” and “What actresses are role models for you in terms of actual acting technique?” And then she told me about her clothing line which was named “Anna Watson” after her middle name. And when I asked her to describe the general “feel” of her clothing line, she recited a string of gibberish that might have been songs lyrics and that I had a TERRIBLE time trying to write down because I couldn’t write it as fast as she was speaking, but I also knew that it was so nonsensical, I would never be able to reconstruct it from shorthand notes. Maybe my subconscious is telling me I need to start taping my interviews. The journalist side of me is immensely proud that I’ve apparently got the hang of interviewing. After all, now I know I can do it in my sleep.