"Love Me Less, But Love Me a Long Time"

Yesterday I went to two cinemas and saw three movies. A grand Good Friday, even though I got so hungry at the Kip's Bay cineplex that I ordered chicken tenders, which then made my stomach a bit upset. Luckily it was nothing an overpriced Sprite couldn't fix.

First J and I went to see Be Kind Rewind by Michel Gondry, starring the usually tiresome and overly-schticky Jack Black and the more refined, versatile Mos Def. The film starts off slow, but turns into a laugh riot when the duo is joined by a local girl (Melonie Diaz). The trio make remakes of recent Hollywood blockbusters in order to satisfy the clientele of the soon to be shut down video store. These remakes--called Swedes--are brilliant. They make outrageous fun of and yet pay homage to traditional Hollywood product--from Robo Cop to Rush Hour II and especially Ghostbusters. The plot is heartwarming in the grand tradition of 40s weepies when a town unites and puts on a show, but here the town films its own mythic origins and deliberately agrees to invent its past. The films within the film are priceless and illustrate the importance of movies to people's lives without being preachy and judgmental.

After this hilarity , we sneaked into a recently opened animation feature based upon a book by Dr. Seuss. It features an elephant with especially good hearing, voiced by Jim Carrey (who was good in Gondry's Eternal Sunshine but I can't stand him generally--whoever told him he was funny when he was a child should now be punished!).

I wasn't so keen on seeing this film but J was eager to see it--he is a fan of animation in the cinema. I am not--I like animation on TV (especially South Park, but also Family Guy--I no longer care for the Simpsons) and I don't like Disney or Pixar. Shrek is okay but I am not a huge fan. (I did like Persepolis but that film subverts animation cliches--its almost anti-animation) Anyways J fell asleep almost immediately (well the seats are comfortable and they do recline) and seemed to be enjoying his nap so much that I decided to sit through it. After all it was made for kids and it couldn't last too long. Well it went on and on and no kangaroo with Carol Burnett's voice was going to save this venture for me (I kept thinking kangaroos don't live in jungles with monkees!). Plus in a game of "would you rather" -- I'd have to choose Jack Black over Jim Carrey anytime.

After J woke up and I visited the ATM, we jumped into a cab to take us to the IFC cinema on 6th Ave to meet up with D in order to see Love Songs (Les Chansons d'Amour) on opening day. D and I saw the coming attractions--and as it was a musical set in Paris that featured Louis Garrel who has the most pouty lips, the most unruly black hair, and the best Gallic nose this side of Gerard Depardieu--we decided it was a must-see. Garrel looks like he could have stepped out of a 60s Godard film, one in which he talks incessantly about the necessity and yet the tragedy of revolution as a way to seduce a female who may have the soul of a poet, but has the hair style that includes the bangs of a fashion model.

I remember Garrel from The Dreamers and from La Mere and if I were a few years younger I would allow myself to put a poster of him on my wall. He is perfect for movies about threesomes, fluid sexuality, and the most expressive ways to walk down Parisian streets--either with your male or female lover--or even by yourself (immersed in thoughts about the impossibility of lasting love or the ridiculousness of the bourgeoisie). Homeboy was born to brood.

Love Songs is a musical. Watching the film, one never knows when an actor is going to start singing--but they never burst into song like in an American musical, rather they slide into a recitative with music and rhyming lyrics. Written by Alex Beaupain, the songs are simple and hark back to Les Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Michel Legrand but also reminded me of Francoise Hardy at times--and Jacques Brel. Nobody sings with beautiful, trained voices but each has a singing voice that reveals a sweetness that the dialog might not show. I loved the music and must confess to having bought the soundtrack from iTunes. None of the staging of the songs is fantastical or especially imaginative--except one song that has two potential male lovers discuss their desires via singing into cellphones even though they are on the same street. Its easier for them to sing of their potential attraction via the phone rather than face-t0-face. Indeed.

Garrel's character looses his great love in the film, but then finds another unexpectedly. When he realizes his vulnerability he responds to the ardent confessions of his new amour, "love me less, but love me a long time." Those words stung me. Without revealing too much about my own romantic travails, I wish I had uttered such a line to those charming ex's who hit all the notes when they sang of love. If its my turn to be melodramatic, if I'd have to say that sometimes its not kind to rewind and its best to make your own remake...or Swede.

Rev. Wright Is Not Wrong

Yes, I understand why Barack Obama has to distance himself from Rev. Wright and the feverish sermons he delivered about the U.S. He has to ensure potential voters that he disagrees with his spiritual mentor in order to advance his candidacy. For example, I spoke to my friend C from Chicago--proud of her Senator but worried about McCain winning--and she said her mother professed that she just can't vote for Obama now. As if she was looking for a reason not to vote for the right candidate and found the rationale in finding evidence that he has been revealed as an "angry black man" from the South Side. And indeed Hillary and McCain are doing better in the polls since these sermons "went viral" even though Obama gave an excellent speech, and did not rely upon his oratorical flourishes in order to "sell it."

But I like that Obama sought out inspiration from a fiery preacher who is angry at the American legacies of racism and imperialism. It makes me like Obama more. And I don't agree that the anger that energizes Wright is of an earlier generation and that we have now moved beyond it. We are not "post-anger." Sexual and racial minorities--and the working classes--have neither achieved equality nor amassed power to transform their situation--nor do I think that they ever will under this economic and political structure that ensures oligopoly and the maintenance of a two party system through elections that privileges states with the smallest and the whitest and the most presumably heterosexual of populations via the electoral college (okay I'm still am armchair marxist who leaves his rent stabliized apartment to shop for designer goods at Century 21--I can embrace and critique my commodity festishism at once...as well as my own contradictions). Obama is wrong: the power of lobbyists is not an etiology for our stand-off. Lobbyists are but a symptom of a larger malady.

Yet I will feel better voting for Obama against McCain--knowing that he has been witness to Rev. Wright's righteous fury.

And I admit to my own contradictions--I don't believe that right wing preachers and Catholic priests should be allowed to espouse their political views on abortion and gay/gender rights. I defend the secular state and demand that the separation between church and state is strengthened. But I do think left wing clergy should be able to challenge their parishioners to see more clearly the reasons for political divisions and economic inequality.

Drunk Enough to Say I Hate Caryl Churchill's New Anti-American Play

Its happened. I've been offended by an artwork's anti-American stance. Me! It occurred as I was watching Caryl Churchill's new play at the Public Theatre, ridiculously entitled Drunk Enough to Say I Love You. The only kindness Churchill showed her audience was that the play lasts only 45 minutes.

The play is an attempt to distill the relationship between American and English postwar economic and political structures and especially foreign policy ventures into a relationship between two men. In this over-simplified allegory, one is a brash unapologetic American guy, the other is a more timid Englishman who is over-impressed by his lover's bravado, and his all encompassing world view. The Englishmen (named Jack as in "Union Jack"), though, shows signs of disagreeing with his American counterpart (named Sam as in "Uncle Sam"), but his love for his more butch American pal blocks him from really taking a stand. How tediously reductive! And wrong! How long will English writers put forward this notion of the more reclined, muddled Englishman who is dazzled by the more action-oriented American. Its a horrid cliche. And its just not historically accurate or politically useful.

I hate that European leftists use seven years of George W. Bush's regime here to act as if their countries have no colonial legacy and no history of imperialist atrocities. If America is an expansionist empire, it has only carried forth the traditions inititated most recently by the English and the French and before them the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Dutch. And England's recent imperialist misadventure in the Falklands/Malvinas and its recent mistreatment of Irish prisoners shows that independent of American influence, England has continued its neo-colonial tactics all on its own. England is not a timid, impressionable wimp homoerotically charged to reluctantly go along with American foreign policy.

This play evades how culpable England is to how the world was--and is--carved up. Think how many of the world's geopolitical crises have to do with the European legacy of imperialism. Think of civil war in Iraq which was provoked not only by America's invasion (Iraq's borders are a result of English colonial governance) and think of ongoing conflicts between Pakistan and India--the trace of England's cruelty is everywhere, beginning far before the U.S. entered the world stage and continuing alongside it, motivated by its own indigenous ideologies, not those imported from the States. And lest we forgot, the U.S.A.'s birth as an Anglo-American pseudo-democracy is a result of English repression. Otherwise America might just be a femme settler colony, all too willing to be a butt boy in the English empire.

The implicit, reductive message of the play is that America is fucking England in the ass. How tiresome and typical to reduce global politics to heterosexist views of "sodomy." I suppose Churchill knows nothing of power bottoms! She has to return to the old binaries of active and passive. And somehow Jack/England becomes an enabling partner in a dysfunctional relationship in which "Jack" looses his identity.

Shame on you Caryl Churchill!