pullquote

It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage

Let's hear it for the long-awaited release of the Adventures of Indiana Jones on DVD.

If you ask any academic who first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark at an impressionable age whether the adventures of dashing archeology professor Henry Jones, Jr., held any sway when it came to choosing the ivory tower, an honest soul-searcher probably would say yes. Who can forget, after all, the great scene in which Professor Jones, lecturing in full tweedy regalia before an enthralled classroom, notices the message "I love you" written on an otherwise demure co-ed's eyelids? Or when his swooning students bum-rush his office hours? Plus, look at what Jones gets to do during his leave year. No fusty revising that diss for publication for him--there are Nazis to fight! What a great gig.

Turns out, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports to the surprise of no one, that attractive professors like Indy consistently outscore their less comely colleagues by a significant margin on student evaluations of teaching. Get out! On a subjective measure administered to hormonal 19-year-olds? The same kids whose callous comments have the 'Fesser and his friends addicted to RateMyProfessors.com? Wow, the Chronicle doesn't care whose toes it steps on.

Aside from invoking painfully outdated slang ["Betty" and "Baldwin," if you must know] from Clueless, the article drops this science:

Rocky Kolb, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago [he must be excited about the solar ruckus], added: "It's a little known fact that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has a swimsuit competition for the Nobel Prize." [For working in that namecheck of the Nobel Prize, the bluster about winning so many being the only thing keeping the U of C warm during the cold Illinois winters, Dr. Kolb will no doubt receive a bonus.]

There is also perhaps the worst appositive I've seen in some time: "Dina Ibrahim, who is herself no stranger to objectification by students, says, 'Looks shouldn't count, but clearly they do. That means ugly professors have to really, really know what they're talking about if they want to get good evaluations, as horrible as that sounds. They have to work harder.' " Here's hoping the smug Ms. Ibrahim's next professional evaluation is given by a really jolie-laide boss with a Chronicle subscription.

Willie: Well I always thought that archaeologists were always funny looking men going around looking for their mommies.
Indiana Jones: Mummys.

And with that, the cinetrix cries uncle and promises to get back to writing about movies.

Wildfires On The Sun

Or, "look out, it's heading right for us!"

We knew there had to be a reason for our not-so-fresh feeling today: The most powerful geomagnetic storm possible hit Earth early Wednesday, threatening power outages, disrupting airlines communications and damaging some satellites. And here I was blaming the curry I ate last night at River Gods. Chef Park, an apology!

I was fortunate enough to work on a museum exhibit about black holes with the good people at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory a while back [what? you thought those descriptive placards on the museum walls edited themselves?], and this is just the sort of news that gets astronomers all het up. You should really take a look at this action footage, and not merely because it's entitled "Hot Shots from SOHO," a headline Jared Paul Stern would be proud of. For "a tremendous burst of x-ray light at a wavelength of 195 Angstroms," it's strangely soothing to watch.

A positive note: Strong geomagnetic storms can produce colorful auroras in the night sky visible as far south as Texas and Florida, beginning late Wednesday. Enjoy the Sun's home movies, people.

The Museum of Everything

...[F]ilms get their hooks in you by propping up memory, or perhaps more accurately by substituting for memory. You can trace each image back to an original encounter; various rooms, theatres, even nations exist primarily as the place where a particular image first emerged.

There were movies endured during all-night sieges of insomnia, movies left on while making love, movies clung to in the wake of disaster as a substitute for grieving.

It gets so bad you end up searching for an unchanging celluloid surface for a clue to vanished worlds, as if by starting up the movie the people who once watched it together would start up too. Ghosts summoned by ghosts. How often you've wished that memory could be as sharp, solid, and mechanical as a movie, that the mind could give way to remembering as effortlessly as the eye submits to the ritual glide of the camera on its tracks, accompanied by the off screen adult voice of a superannuated child...

from Geoffrey O'Brien's The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century, a book that changed my life.

Mental Hygiene

Kiddies, the cinetrix has a lot of work to do today. Why don't you watch a video? Or, perhaps, an educational filmstrip [be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the page]?

Beeeeeep.

The 100 Scariest Moments on TV and film

According to Britain's Channel 4. Does anyone else find the lack of specificity a little irksome?

The 20 top scary moments in alphabetical order are:

28 Days Later (2002) - Fleeing from the zombies.
Alien (1979) - Alien bursting out of John Hurt's stomach.
An American Werewolf In London (1981) - The transformation into a wolf.
A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) - First appearance of horror icon Freddy Krueger.
Don't Look Now (1973) - Donald Sutherland thinks he has found his daughter.
Friday The 13th (1980) - The killer bursts out of a lake at the film's finale.
Halloween (1978) - Killer Michael's face appears behind Jamie Lee Curtis in a house full of bodies.
Hellraiser (1987) - First appearance of Pinhead.
Jaws (1975) - Severed head pops out of boat.
Psycho (1960) - The shower scene.
Ring (1998) - Sadako crawls through the television.
Se7en (1995) - Discovery of the emaciated man.
The Blair Witch Project (1999) - Heather Donahue in tears in the woods.
The Evil Dead (1981) - General mayhem in Sam Raimi's classic gore-fest.
The Exorcist (1973) - Possessed girl's head spins and she projectile vomits.
The Omen (1976) - The Oscar-winning eerie music score.
The Shining (1980) - Jack Nicholson chops through the door and shouts "Here's Johnny".
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) - Leatherface's reign of terror.
The Thing (1982) - A man's chest splits open as he is being given defibrillation and the medic's arms are bitten off.
The X-Files (1993) - Episode called Squeeze featuring the scary character Tooms.

"I was a mean girl"

From Virginia Heffernan's profile of Tina Fey in this week's New Yorker:

Nearly all Fey's colleagues mentioned her ability to be mean and disarming at the same time. . . . "The fight you have in your head with someone, that you’re never really going to have? . . . I think she plans one every day."

Please note, the 'Fesser was insisting last night that Tina Fey looks like the cinetrix, or perhaps it was the other way around. First I thought, how does the 'Fesser know about my daily fight planning? Then I realized it was part of a campaign to get me to wear more patterned hose.

Ich, Ich, Ich, Ich

Yesterday, under a glowering grey sky, through whipping winds, the cinetrix piloted her sturdy bike [sans academic robes flapping like a Hughesian crow's wings] to the local Landmark theatre. [disclaimer: The cinetrix appeared prominently as an extra in a Landmark commercial campaign you used to see late at night on pre-Queer Bravo.] Objective: Celebrate daylight savings and the final hours of a grass-widow weekend with a matinee of Sylvia.

In eight years of single-sex education, four spent at a women's college in Sylvia Plath's hometown, I never read any of her poetry or her prose. Perhaps her work seemed a bit obvious to teach to a bunch of privileged bright young things. So I knew about the stove apocryphally, the same way people know about the rats gnawing the undiscovered body of the junk-collecting hermit, and little else.

A question: Was there no paint save grim high-gloss smeared thickly over plaster or vinyl wallpaper in postwar England? And was it all really the colors of a bruise? The set design of Sylvia would have you think so. Paired with the keening, swooping, ululating of the strings on the soundtrack and the feeble desk lamps barely piercing the year-round gloom, it's tough not to think, "No wonder she offed herself. How ugly and overwrought everything is." The only color comes on lipsticked mouths like open wounds. It is all a bit much.

Gwyneth Paltrow delivers a fine, aching performance, husbanding her requisite tasteful nude scene for the crucial "she's come undone" moment, so we understand how naked she is in her madness and pain. Daniel Craig as Ted has the brooding forelock and the gorgeous accent, but when Blythe Danner, as Plath's mother Eulalia, observes that Sylvia must have fallen for him because she is afraid of him, the viewer remains unconvinced of his power to inspire this fear. Not looming enough, perhaps.

Really, though, the performances are uniformly excellent, and Paltrow even turns in an impressive recitation of Chaucer's "Wife of Bath" while standing in a punt. As A. Alvarez, Jared Harris lends his art-house Spader-esque ability to make your skin crawl. I just wish I had written about it yesterday because the film is already slipping away from me, cartwheeling in eddying currents of air like the charred bits of Ted's manuscripts that it seems Sylvia is forever tearing and burning in a helpless rage. [Its rococo influence still lingers....]

Only one scene remains lodged in my memory, but not perhaps for the reasons the filmmakers would hope. A fractious Plath plays graceless hostess to David and Assia Wevill in the Hugheses' remote farmhouse in Devon. Convinced of the affair that her husband and Assia will only later embark on, Sylvia is surly and reckless, hurling plates on the table. It's quite funny, in a way.

After dinner, Ted retreats to the washing up and Assia follows, while David and a fuming Sylvia remain in the other room, listening to a recording of Robert Lowell reading his poem "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket." Lowell's thin, homely voice cracks and seems too light and scratchy to be a poet's to ears grown accustomed to the plummy, earnest tones of Paltrow and Craig. When I heard him, I was pulled out of the narrative completely. It made me want to hear the actual Plath and Hughes read their work, to feel a visceral connection to the people who had chosen the words, unmediated by the constraints of Plath's survivors or the ambitions of the cast and the filmmakers.

When the film was over, I emerged from the theatre to find that the rain still threatened. Daring the clouds to break, I climbed back onto my bicycle. Rather than heading home, I must confess that I went off and bought a passel of delicate cardigans in somber shades. That's the danger of these midcentury period pieces starring Paltrow. I come away from them suffused with longing--only it's for tweeds, wellies, and wet woolens.

After Life

I owe an apology to Elliott Smith fans. This morning I discovered that Pullquote has received a fair number of hits since his death because search engines returned my snarky post about celebrity deaths coming in threes. Grieving fans from as far away as Sweden, searching for succor, misspelled Smith's first name [all those "l"s and "t"s] the same way I had [bad, ashamed editor] and got my smartassed throwaway for their trouble.

It's kind of amazing that I never got into Smith's music, given that my all-time favorite genre is hyperliterate sad-bastard music. Something about the whispered sussurration of Smith's vocal delivery failed to connect with me. It happens. A sad song can make heartache majestic and loneliness ennobling. Even wallowing in self-pity can be transcendent with the right soundtrack. I played fast and facile last week with Smith's fans' feelings. I'm sorry.

To make amends, I want to recommend Kore-Eda Hirokazu's 1998 film After Life [Wandafuru raifu]. This beautiful little movie asks, What is the one memory you would take with you when you die?

Each week, people arrive at a strange municipal building, perhaps a small turn-of-the-century school, and are assigned to a counselor. With the counselor's help, each person must select a single memory, which will become the heaven that person will inhabit forever. Because, you see, everyone here is dead. After a week in this way station, the deceased gather in a small screening room, where they watch short films the staff has made of each person's memory. Once a person's memory has screened, he or she disappears into it for eternity.

The director's inspiration for the film came from his memories of his grandfather's descent into senility. The young Kore-Eda thought that growing old and dying meant losing your memories. Coming from a background in documentary, he set about asking 500 people to select one memory from their lives. Actors were shot on 16 mm. recounting these memories to the counselors. The memory movies were then filmed in beautiful 35 mm.

After Life is an incredibly comforting meditation on life, memory, and death. It's like the songs that stay with you: I find it difficult to do it justice in words.

The look and feel of the film itself is refreshingly matter-of-fact given its heavy subject matter. Those interviewed are extraordinary only in their normalcy: One teen-age girl initially picks a trip to Disneyland as her memory. She is the thirtieth teen girl to do so that year.

Scenes of the counselors describing their progress with this week's caseload are marked by petit bureaucracy. Antagonisms and rivalries are rehearsed with cozy familiarity and affection. The characters move through spare, shabby rooms dominated by large, old-fashioned radiators, and the tiles in the baths are cracked. Even the special effects for the memory movies are touchingly low-tech. Cotton-batting clouds are reeled past on clear fishing wire.

Yet somehow it all works and leaves you with a catch in your throat. Transcendence comes in the embrace of the ordinary, as the fleeting, ephemeral nature of the memories gathers weight and heft in the retelling. Outside, the mournful, slushy snow glows bluish white, but we are assured that the cherry trees blossom each spring.

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment's surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

Shantih

What do you do with the mad that you feel

When you feel so mad you could bite?

I still miss Fred Rogers, and I find myself singing his songs and heeding his advice more often than you'd think.

That said, I was pretty much in a biting rage yesterday. I was on my beautiful Schwinn cruiser, stopped at a red light at an intersection, when I heard honking behind me. I turned back to face the grill of an enormous green Ram van filled with sniggering college kids. They kept honking and gesturing, so keen were they to make that right on red [forget what could possibly be so urgent when you're 20 on a Saturday afternoon], until I finally crossed against the light, visions of Maximum Overdrive dancing in my head. It was a clear case of group think mixed in that potent cocktail of boy at wheel eager to impress the girls he's with as well as assure fellow boys that he's cool. Alone, none of them would pull such shit; together, it's inevitable. Grrrr.

Most days, I love living in America's college town, where the ready availability of amenities I cherish--art houses, indie music outlets, smart people, bookstores a-go-go, ethnic restaurants, live music, cultcha-writ-large--far outweighs the psychic damage of being a thirtysomething female in the land of assless teen nymphets. Other days, I'm ready to sign the executive order authorizing the deportation of America's youth back to the suburbs from whence they came. Seriously, we do the nation a service by enduring its young at their most obnoxious. These kids in the van were turning my gorgeous fall afternoon into one of those other days.

So I followed them. Or, more accurately, I used deductive logic to double back to their likely destination and attempted to use group shame to elict an apology. I was surprisingly civil-tongued for one who's been chastized on two continents for swearing like a longshoreman. The driver grudging said sorry, but he kept insisting I admit it was kinda funny. Yeah, death by a hormone on legs piloting a vehicle he doesn't know how to drive. Hi-larious.

Then he said, "Why don't you ride on the sidewalk," and I lost my cool a little. I may not live in Davis, CA, but cycling laws in Massachusetts are pretty clear about the illegality of riding on sidewalks. There are even obnoxious little drawings of a bike with a circle slash at every curb cut. I know the law, but more often than not, no one seems to have tipped off our out-of-state student pals--you know, the ones who cram four cars per apartment and take up all the parking.

Your curmudgeonly pal the cinetrix will not apologize for being a "Boston driver" even on her bicycle. In fact, I have a theory. Native drivers are nervy and always on the offensive, but they're skillful. However, because so many out-of-state students extend their undergraduate idylls by lingering for first jobs and graduate degrees, they throw the delicate driving ecosystem out of whack by lacking the innate confidence to drive defensively, thus fucking it up for us natives through their hesitancy and unpredictability.

Wow, but it's breezy up here on this soap box. But before I leap down, let me tie this back in to the cinematic for you. You should know that when I was just a wee cinetrix, three of my family's favorite flicks were The Blues Brothers ["New Oldsmobiles are in early this year."], Better Off Dead [my otherwise respectable father is given to announcing apropos of nothing: "I want my two dollars!"], and Pee-wee's Big Adventure ["What's wrong with this picture? It's me--without my bike!"]. My brother watched "CHiPs," Breaking Away, and BMX Bandits over and over. All of which should explain a lot about my approach to the road.

Francis: Remember the first time I saw your bike? You came riding past my house and I came running out to tell you how much I liked it even way back then?

Pee-wee: I love that story. [Jumps on bike and pedals away]

I enjoy being a girl: thirteen

So, I finally saw Thirteen. Shit, Nikki Reed is one charismatic con artist. If you're looking to lose a few hours growing increasingly despondent about the state of today's youth, I advise you to read the comment threads on the IMDb listing, too. Lotsa young Canucks weighing in, which is odd.

I don't think there were any kiddies in the theatre when I saw it tonight. With or without an earnest parent. It had been demoted to the tiniest screen in this second-run house, and the audience, such as it was, was nearly all post-collegiate women with the occasional sensitive guy harboring hopes of action, maybe. Or at least points toward action someday. But I'm being unfair.

Before I go any further, I'd like to call a moratorium on the following tropes in girl-bildsdungroman movies: scenes of cutting, actual or implied eating disorders, shoplifting, overwhelmed single moms, looks of panic/dead-inside eyes during the inevitable squeamish-making sex-too-young scene. We get it, okay? Girls are in trouble and we have no idea what it's like, so the filmmaker will show us in excruciating detail. Hey, if I want to catch up with the plight of the girlies, can I just check out Lauren Greenfield's photos instead?

With that out of the way, I can say that I liked this quite-similar movie a lot more than Blue Car. Even with the grainy DV cinematography, Thirteen was a better-acted, better-looking movie. Also, it was strangely refreshing to have the corrrupting influence be another girl, and not some predatory guy.

And, of course, there's Holly Hunter, no bigger than a girl herself, unafraid of showing her wrinkles or her white knuckles as she tries to hold on to her sobriety and hold her family together while her adolescent daughter Tracy's centrifugal force threatens to spin it apart. There's so much to say about her performance, and about how richly written her character is. But what I keep thinking about is her dirty fingernails, stained from all the color jobs she gives women in her home to earn a little extra money.

Evan Rachel Wood is a wonder as Tracy, the good girl beguiled by evil Evie to go bad. [Plus, she looks like my friend Buick.] And that's the thing that this movie does better than others of its ilk: It gets, and shows, that no matter how sexually or pharmaceutically precocious the seduced [and abandoned] good girl Tracy ultimately becomes, she is far more thrilled [to the point of busting an adorable move] to get Evie's digits at the beginning of the movie than she is by kissing any boy once she is rendered cool by association. Everything she does--shoplifting, getting piercings, getting high--is because she is in love with Evie. They are not lesbians: The--woo woo--kissing scene is a great example of girls giving their hormones a test run in a safe way, and not any Ur-lesbian moment. Tracy is in love with who Evie gives her permission to be.

Evie is, however, a manipulative, needy, emotional vampire, and while she's set up to be the bad guy, she's ultimately the one for whom your heart aches. Tracy's mom may not be perfect, but she's there, and she won't be pushed away. Evie recognizes this and tries to worm her way into something that's missing in her own life. When she's rejected, she lashes out and tries to destroy what she can't have. It's a great performance.

I'll be the first to admit it: Adolescent girls scare the shit out of me. I remember enough of how it felt --without having to dress like a hootchie mama, too--that I can't begin to understand how angry they must be.

Good thing the majority of them are most likely not Times readers. This piece from Sunday's magazine sure doesn't make surviving adolescence intact feel like more than a fake-out.

Aside: The closing credits of Thirteen rolled to Liz Phair's "Explain it to me," from Exile in Guyville. It was just the right exhausted valedictory, but, if anything, it depressed me even more as I left the theatre. Why? It reminded me of that smart-mouthed Midwesterner who was such a revelation in 1993. I didn't buy her bravado for a second; I recognized it. Now, she too seems to have fallen under Evie's [and Britney's. And Avril's] spell, chucking it all to get high on what it feels like to be popular. I heard her new single in a car dealership today, nestled between "What if God was one of us?" "I Try," and "Who will sa-ayy-ave your soul?"

Good question. I'm guessing the answer is not the Matrix, unless you're Neo.