filmosophy2:

(Where the Wild Things Are)

Talking Heads - Girlfriend Is Better

Stop making sense.

Just looked some stuff up because I felt like I should be more informed. This is totally the project I sang on. Weird.

(“Although the lyrics have been described as gibberish …”)

Dirty Projectors - Stillness Is The Move

You know what’s weird, is that I actually sang for Dave Longstreth on one of his SUPER WEIRD early projects at Yale. It was SO WEIRD. We recorded in a squash court. I remember feeling really uncomfortable the whole time. He kept asking us to make our voices sound less human. I showed one of my music friends the score for it (there are no words to describe how intricate, bizarre, and illegible this score was) and he said, “Well, this guy is either a genius or he is actually mentally disabled.” Looks like it was the former.

chriscantwell:

filmosophy:

A SOLIPSISTIC TRAIN RIDE

by Elizabeth Wilcox

All right, let’s get the business out of the way first. The Darjeeling Limited is probably no one’s favorite Wes Anderson movie. And that’s being diplomatic. When I told my boyfriend I was writing about Darjeeling for Filmosophy, his response was (literally), “What?? Why would you want to write about THAT movie?”

So, yes, I know: Darjeeling is flawed. It’s no Rushmore. I agree. But I think it’s worth talking about anyway.

Darjeeling is about three brothers—Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman)—who have distanced themselves from each other in the year since their father’s death (and their mother’s estrangement). At the behest of the suicidal Francis, they embark on a highly regimented “spiritual journey” to India with the intentions of saving the family. If you flinch at this description (it’s so cliché! it’s so reductive of India and spirituality! it’s so grossly indie!), you are probably right to. But I think the flaws in this film are actually intentional on Anderson’s part.

As A.O. Scott noted in the New York Times, “even when we learn bits and pieces of [the characters’] history … the sorrow is never traced to its source.” This is true. Even in the (fantastic) short film that precedes the movie, Hotel Chevalier, wounds both internal (Jack’s need to distance himself from his girlfriend, played by Natalie Portman) and external (Portman’s conspicuous bruises) go without explanation. Though Anderson’s tendency to flood his films with details seems to place him on the opposite end of the spectrum from the notoriously curt Ernest Hemingway, I think Darjeeling’s move away from emotional motivations is actually very Hemingway-esque.

This is a movie about solipsism, about materialism. This is a movie about possession and dispossession, about megalomania—about believing it is possible to control and erase the events and emotions of your life. Those who point out what they see as cultural insensitivity in this movie are spot-on; the brothers’ egos lead them to see India as nothing more than a convenient cultural context with which to draw an exotic veil over their inconvenient rich-boy neuroses.

But this problem lies in the characters, not in Anderson himself. In fact, Anderson not-so-subtly criticizes the way these characters behave. As the brothers sit in the dining car, they touch on the subject of their mother (“Heard anything from mom?” “No. Have you?” “Me neither”). Immediately following this exchange is a shot of each brother taking out a different anesthetizing medication. Peter’s is an “Indian muscle relaxer” that he got “at the pharmacy next to the train station.” For Jack: Indian flu medicine with a tranquilizer in it. And Francis pulls out the “strongest Indian pain killer you can get.” The brothers are literally using surface-level pieces of the Indian culture in order to numb themselves, to distract themselves from the real problems, to escape from the things that are actually important to deal with.

This same conundrum is at work in the unforgettable but highly troubling sequence in which an Indian child dies in a river-crossing accident; Peter tries to save the boy, but fails. Many critics latched onto this scene as racially exploitative (using another culture as merely a backdrop to enhance the white characters’ selfish revelations). But I don’t think Wes Anderson is that oblivious. Yes, the scene and sequence feel “off”—it marks a startling change in atmosphere and feels like an overly-forced epiphanic moment—but again, I would like to believe that the tone was intentional. That Anderson is offering a sly mockery of these privileged white men. That we are not meant to take Jack and Francis and Peter’s stoic, grave funeral expressions as important reflections of important emotions that we should all share, but instead as the misguided attempts of three men to feel a connection to something that they are not actually a part of.

Yes, the brothers appropriate a tragedy that lies completely outside themselves in order to feel somehow cleansed of their own emotional baggage. Even the way they talk about the death conveys this—Peter says simply, without cracking an expression, “I didn’t save mine.” “Mine”—the brothers see these Indian children as merely another thing in their long line of possessions, theirs to claim or lose track of.

But can we blame them? It is so easy to take refuge in material things. Nearly everyone who sees the movie notes the obvious metaphor: the bulky luggage the brothers cart around with them throughout the movie is a stand-in for their overwhelming emotional baggage. However, perhaps this is not merely a surface-level simile, but instead an indication of what the brothers, in their solipsistic fashion, believe they can do – they believe they have the power to turn their emotions into objects, that they can take the edge off of life by translating feelings into things.

This is not the first time Anderson has presented unsavory characters in his films, but it is perhaps the most troubling, as we don’t form a strong emotional attachment to Francis, Peter, or Jack. In a way, that makes Darjeeling Anderson’s most harsh, realistic film—and also the least likeable. When we watch The Royal Tenenbaums, we can see Royal’s glaring flaws as a husband and a father—but we are also so drawn to his character that we are able to excuse his failings, to laugh at them.

Anderson doesn’t give us such relief in Darjeeling. We have the flaws, but not the reason to love them. And maybe that’s good. Maybe we need a kick in the pants, maybe we need to be reminded that there is a real danger in alienation and repressed feelings and the substitution of witty remarks for true statements that might make some human connection. These tendencies that appear more and more often in our culture are not hip and cool and attractive. They are repulsive.

But I think there is hope in the end. Angelica Huston—as the boys’ mother, now a nun who has renounced earthly possessions and materialism—gives a fantastic performance as a woman possibly scared by the tendencies and egos of her own sons. And her own escape forces us to confront certain questions: is it human nature to run away from things? What does spirituality mean? How long is a journey? Is love really best expressed in the negative spaces?

I don’t rank The Darjeeling Limited among my favorite movies, let alone among my favorite Wes Anderson movies. But at the end, it makes me feel something. As the brothers run to catch their final train, they toss their luggage out into the empty landscape. I don’t think Anderson meant to imply that they have shed their emotional issues; Francis, Peter, and Jack still have a shitload of stuff to work through when this movie ends. But there does seem to be a new openness to feeling something, a new willingness to be vulnerable. A new commitment to stand on the balcony next to someone who hurt you deeply and see Paris no matter how much it hurts.

Elizabeth Wilcox is a writer and graduate student living in Los Angeles, CA. She tumbls here.

I see your point. But I think Wes Anderson IS JUST LIKE Jack, Francis, and Peter. Can a filmmaker make a film that acknowledges his own faults while still heartily embracing them? That’s one hell of a filmmaker, if so. If there’s a realization here, Anderson himself hasn’t accepted it. I’m not so sure how attentional the solipsism might be here, at least for the purposes you give.

Also, C-3P0 is not made of brass.

Yeah, I mean, I acknowledge that this is very possibly a completely fallacious take on the film. But I don’t know. I struggle with why he’d make it in the first place … and I especially don’t like to think that people are THAT blind to things that may possibly come off as racially or culturally insensitive. That there must have been SOME understanding that these characters are not sympathetic.

And I’m sorry, but C-3PO looks like a tuba to me. A brass tuba. The end.

damndanm:

Marion Peck, “Fuck You”

WANT.

Fuck yes.

Page 2 of a letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo written about 120 years ago (Arles, on or about Wednesday, 21 November 1888). From this amazing exhibit of all of Van Gogh’s letters.

Translated excerpt from this page:

As for me, I think more about Rembrandt than may appear from my studies.

[sketch]

Here’s a croquis of the latest canvas I’m working on, another sower. Immense lemon yellow disc for the sun. Green-yellow sky with pink clouds. The field is violet, the sower and the tree Prussian Blue. No. 30 canvas.

jwes:

grayskymorning:

New York City

too bad it doesn’t actually look like this.

Um, hi, Jenny. Can we talk about how I JUST NOW figured out who you are? I’m an idiot. And also I’m glad you’re making art and doing well. And that you survived BI. The end.

things
forgotten
I could


burn in hell forever


set the glass
down, our
emotion’s moment


eyes vs sunlight


how removed
here, from
here


towards the unfamiliar and


frankincense forests
against the discerning light


everybody
sudden


frightful indeed, the sound of
traffic and
no appetite


the crowd


I would like to be
beautiful when
written

(via seanbury)

Hey TTA guys - Just change the title of “Oprah is Dead” to “Oprah is Retired.” WHAT WILL BECOME OF US