First: if you have not yet seen Pariah, I suggest you remedy that. I fell completely for the protagonist Alike (say it uh-lee-kay) and her attempts to express her identity through poetry, clothing, friendships, relationships. The movie has a lot of heart, a lot of strong performances, and pulls no punches. Here are a few other things it does well.

The specificity of the setting. Stories that resonate universally come from particular places. There’s no such thing as a portable story, as Robert McKee says in Story and I quoted five years ago talking about The Wire. 

The assumption of viewer intelligence. Pariah drops you right into Alike’s life, without wasting time hitting you over the head with where you are and who everyone is.

Doesn’t get rid of the parents. There are strong scenes in Pariah that focus on Alike’s mom and/or dad, with Alike herself offscreen. They’re very effective in showing the pressures both parents are under that affect the way they interact with their daughter.

Storytelling via fashion. I’m a big fan of the way identity can be conveyed through style choices, and Pariah does this very deliberately, as Eniola Dawodu explains.

In conclusion: more like this, please.

The movie Boy. Not just the film itself, which is fantastic, but experiencing it as part of the Portland International Film Festival. It was my first time at PIFF, seeing a whole new community of people serious about an art form, and they’ve been here all along, right in my town.

The Happiness Myth by Jennifer Michael Hecht.
In this book Hecht helps us out of the stew of cultural assumptions we spend our lives cooking in, explains various ingredients in the broth, and shows some ways our particular stew differs from recipes prevalent in other places and times. The reader stands refreshed and dripping. The book is frequently funny and profoundly smart.

The audiobook of True Grit, as read by Donna Tartt. No, I haven’t yet seen the Coen Brothers movie. Right now I’m just falling into the voice; both the narrative voice, Mattie Ross as created by Charles Portis, and Donna Tartt’s very effective rendering thereof. A whole worldview, concisely and amusingly evoked.

And since I saw them a few weeks back, I can’t stop listening to The Handsome Family, whose music brilliantly combines doleful and joyful. I don’t know how they do it but I’m very glad they do.

I think the most important thing with horror, where a lot of horror fails, or [the] horror doesn’t work, or that it dies for me is that I don’t care about the people that nasty things are happening to. I mean, you got like this little family, and then the genetically mutated grizzly comes along and he’s found a barrel of goo out in the forest so he’s become like really dangerous and he kills the boy and the mom, the dad lives. If I think they’re pretty unpleasant and I don’t believe at all from how they talk to each other that they would really care about one another, these people, and that they’re just walking around trying to look good in a movie – what the hell do I care what this bear does? While… it’s so, I mean… You can take a person that you don’t care about on film and just slowly cut him to pieces with a chainsaw and just [go]… ’Oh well…’ But if a person you’re really engaged in steps on a nail…

– from a long interview that you probably shouldn’t read if you haven’t seen the film

Sidebar Elderly Moment: the movie is set in 1982, and the protagonist, Oskar, is 12. All throughout, I never registered that it was a period piece…maybe because in 1982, I was 12. ETA: Simple Arithmetic Fail: Actually, I was 11.

The Order of Myths, in Mobile, Alabama, is the oldest of the mystic societies that build Carnival floats and give masquerade balls during Mardi Gras.

But the title also evokes the myths that the city tells about itself.

Here’s an article about the director, Margaret Brown, that you probably shouldn’t read until after you’ve seen the film.

See the film.

The trailer emphasizes schtick, and there’s certainly schtick in abundance, but if that’s all you see when you watch this movie, you’re missing a lot. It’s about how we construct our realities based upon our understanding of how the world works. It’s about lies, and the processes by which lies are found out, or not. It’s about how the act of interpretation creates meaning and imposes a narrative on events, even if the interpretation is wildly off. It’s hilarious and brutal, bleak but somehow uplifting in the midst of the bleakness, because it so clearly shows the murk we’re in.

It’s also an outstanding parody of espionage thrillers, from the over-the-top music to the paranoid cinematography to the dour (and bemused) Russians to the familiar lines of dialogue: “Who do you work for? Who do you work for?”

Who do you work for? And how does that lens color your notion of what’s going on?

Here are two things that are awesome:

Catholic Church Fashion Show from Federico Fellini’s Roma. I won’t try to describe it. Just watch it.

Featurette: The Eyes of Laura Mars — Helmut Newton and Rebecca Blake photographs, a lovely Faye Dunaway, a young Brad Dourif (aka Doc from Deadwood), and magnificently extreme late seventies styles. (Personal to garretfw: if you ever need to appear in costume, I think you’d be an excellent Dunaway-esque Laura Mars.)

Oh, and an extra awesome thing, unrelated to decadent fashion unless you consider Guys and Dolls costumes to be examples of same: thanks to caitiecait for letting me know that a passage from Empress is up on literaryquotes!

The Salon review is interesting. The reviewer reveals that an interview he did with Gibson in 1993 was the first piece that he ever composed digitally.

The subject line? Well, the documentary came out in 2001, pre-9/11. It was filmed in the late nineties. Web 1.0. And while there’s mention of the dizzying pace of modern life, and how things are different now than they’ve ever been, you notice as you watch: that now is gone.