Media Mix

Some movies I rented recently, which I highly recommend:

Idiocracy, released with no publicity whatsoever and went almost straight to DVD, is writer/director Mike Judge's long-awaited followup to the cult classic Office Space (itself a brilliant and dead-on look at corporate "life"). An average guy is frozen in the year 2005 as part of an Army experiment and wakes up 500 years in the future (kind of like the premise of Futurama), only in the interim the human race has devolved in intelligence such that people can't speak in complete sentences, people are named after snack food brands, and humankind has become too moronic to solve even its most basic needs (like growing crops). Thus, Mr. Frozen Guy, whom no one can understand because he uses big words (in comparison) and is put in prison for "sounding faggy," has by default become the smartest person in the world and is made Secretary of the Interior by the President (who is a former porn star and wrestler). It's an hysterically funny dystopia, although my only complaint is the timeframe: I don't think the atrophying of human intelligence is as far away as 500 years. I give about 10!

Little Miss Sunshine--Yeah, everyone has seen this already, but it takes me a while. A dysfunctional family road movie. I was really not expecting to like this, as I thought it was going to be cloying and sappy, but it was surprisingly darkly funny, which I liked. I was also expecting one of two equally sappy and cliched endings, and it actually went in an unexpected direction. I highly recommend this one.

A Scanner Darkly--Philip K. Dick is one of my favorite writers, and while his 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly (about the symbiotic relationship between narcs and drug users) was not my favorite, I was hoping to like the movie. Maybe I need to give it another try, but I just did not care for it. I think the problem was the animation--it was shot as a live-action film then "rotoscoped" to make it look like an animated film. There is something unsettling (which could very well be the point) about that style of animation that just bugs me. It's kind of like the visual equivalent of nails on a blackboard.

Garden State--I saw this at the Spectrum in Albany a couple years ago when it came out, and I've wanted to see it again ever since and finally rented it (I may buy it). How I love this movie. Zach Braff (who stars in that TV show Scrubs which I have never seen) wrote, directed, and stars in this indie film about a twenty-something actor/waiter who revisits his New Jersey hometown after having been away for almost a decade. Emotionally numb from having been on some form of antidepressant since childhood (thanks to his psychiatrist father), he goes off the meds for a weekend and finally learns what it's like to actually feel something (meeting Natalie Portman's free-spirited character helps in this department, as well). This is a very funny, very moving film, that is up there with Sideways as one of my favorite moves of the past few years.

I almost saw The Queen yesterday at the Saratoga Film Forum, but we had a surprise sell-out and I offered to relinquish my seat to a paying customer.

In other media news, I am almost finished a really good first novel by Joshua Ferris called Then We Came to the End, a dark comedy about life in an advertising agency following the dot-com bust in 2000, and the attendant paranoia over lay-offs. Although I am not finished with it yet, it is so far highly recommended. It took me a while to realize this, but the narrative voice is the first person plural ("we")--there is no single "narrator character" but is instead narrated by the group of coworkers en masse. It shouldn't work as well as it does, but it's a very enjoyable book.

In music news, I picked up the latest album by The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible, which after a couple of spins I like, but need to listen to a few more times to fully appreciate. I am having a hard time getting into the new Shins album Wincing the Night Away; I liked Oh, Inverted World and Chutes Too Narrow a lot but there is just something about the new one. I don't know; maybe I need to give a few more tries. I also picked up a 5.1 Surround Sound version of The Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed which is really cool.

Happily, sports season is over. No more college football, no more college basketball. Syracuse choked in the Big East quarterfinals and got snubbed by the NCAA and did not make the tournament. No brackets for the Orange. So I can just watch March Madness without really having any stake in it (except I hope Duke loses).