"We were comfortable, though, because we could live on very little, satisfying most animal requirements in a fiercely minimal style for which we had developed a defining and mitigating aesthetic. But that level of comfort had an anvil hanging over it. There were all kinds of contradictions and paradoxes in the air: between tribal insularity and overweening if somewhat unworldly ambitions; between the placidity of daily routine and the drama of the collective imagination; between our voluntary poverty and the poverty assigned to our neighbors by social forces; between the large money that circulated not so many blocks away and its players' utter neglect of their own back forty; between the scarcity of land in the city and the picayune value of so much of it; between New York as world capital and New York as armpit. But such questions failed to appear and were at best subliminally registered. We felt as though we were living in the aftermath of some cataclysm we hadn't quite witnessed, some war that had taken place while were asleep or away for the weekend. We naively thought that the downward spiral would simply proceed, that the city would be drained of its wealth and cleansed of its wealthy and that we could move into their vacated penthouses when tumbling rents and our minimally increased wages eventually agreed to shake hands."

-Luc Sante, Author's Afterword, Low Life:
Lures and Snares of Old New York

This is all I can give you.

br />
As for film, Oh-Six is the slowest start in forever. Not counting stuff I saw in Toronto, I've seen, uh, one release so far. It was the Jonathan Demme concert doc on Neil Young's recent record. I'm not gonna bother with letter grades unless I can guarantee I'll hit the triple-digits this year, and three months in that's looking unlikely. I'm all but retired from reviewing, but if I get on some of the local lists, I might be back in the game before this damn frost lets up.

I did get over to see John Waters introduce a Marguerite Duras film the other night. It was The Truck a hilariously slow... ahem... vehicle for a young Gerard Depardieu and an old Marguerite Duras, in which they sit around discussing a screenplay for a movie she might make about a brutish Communist truck driver who picks up a delirious female hitchhiker. Judging by Waters' introduction, it was going to be the slowest thing ever, but it actually found a funny little rhythm. According to Waters and Film Comment's Kent Jones, it'll never see the light of DVD, so don't sweat if you never stumble across it.

Adieu, Oh-Five!

1.

<>

10.

NB: Because Regular Lovers is likely to never receive a commercial engagement in this country, it's ineligible for my CultureVulture Top Ten . Thus, everything shifts up a notch and the French dramedy Kings and Queen anchors the 10-spot. Also, for a look at the worst that 2005 had to offer, check out my year-end wrap-up where I try to bring up the house-lights on this way middling year in movies.

SNACK ATTACK MUTHAF***A!

We love that Chronic - WHAT? - cles of Narnia!

This is the face of success.
I've been pull-quoted for some Korean DVD sales. I ran the page through a translator, and this is what I said about that movie: "the paul wey does and chu supervision the profit which dissects the neurosis of the males the motion picture which is fun it is cut, it makes without." Totally.

Even better, the Korean title of In Good Company is The Exorcism Which is Khem It Ladles, Ni. Word.

Gross.
The Sarah Silverman joke about "when life hands you AIDS, make lemon-AIDS" was actually written by Jimmy Kimmel.

And since both this article and this article mention The Aristocrats brou-haha, it seems like a good time to bring up the ridiculous press release I got yesterday, extolling the March of the Penguins parody that Bob Saget is undertaking. I'd like to scan the release, but that's an awful lot of work for this. Here's an excerpt:

Following his personal triumph in THINKFilm's summer sleeper hit, THE ARISTOCRATS, Bob Saget and THINK are reuniting on FARCE OF THE PENGUINS, a comedic send-up of a similarly titled documentary that is in production with a planned release in Spring, 2006. Saget will write, direct, produce, and will perform several of the voices in this comedic adventure that will combine spectacular and heartwarming wildlife photography with an irreverent and decidedly R-rated theme and soundtrack... "The idea for this came organically," Saget says. "I was watching the "March" movie at a screening at my friend's house, and I couldn't stop doing the voice-overs of the penguins, reminiscent of when I did the voices of the animals on the video show. My friend David Permut said, there's a great comedy movie in this!!"

Yuck! Adding queasiness to nausea, the release also included this little tidbit: "HBO has just ordered a script for an R-rated sitcom, built around Saget, that he will co-write, produce, and star in, portraying a Phoenix gynecologist raising a fourteen year-old boy." I had to share.

Reminder:
Tomorrow, Wednesday the 9th, Duke is showing The Wayward Cloud. This is roughly two years before the film could possibly appear here otherwise. Basically, it'll put you among a few hundred people in the western hemisphere who've had a chance to see it, including audiences at Cannes, Berlin and Toronto. That's where I saw it, and if you're holding out for something more outrageous than a musical about watermelons and porn-set shenanigans, well you'll be waiting awhile. Hank Okazaki is one of the real-deal unsung cinephiles in the Triangle, and we have him to thank for this occasion. [8pm. White Auditorium, East Campus]

Capote. [Bennett Miller. 2005. 35mm. 10/30/05.] C.
Draws a big "meh" from me. Hoffman does a fine job mimicking Capote's affect, but there's nothing really transformative about it. The Aviator may have been a big puff piece, but at least you knew when Hughes was being a lunatic and when you were supposed to empathize with him. Capote is profoundly ambivalent about its titular popinjay, basking in his vanity one moment and almost tsk-tsking him for it the next. Too often the tone follows Capote's own air of smug self-satisfaction, or maybe it's just that if there was supposed to be some deep love for Perry Smith in there, I didn't see it. I found his repeated references to his poor childhood as an "outsider"--god forbid--particularly offensive, considering they were usually levied at folks either on Death Row or mourning the loss of a dear friend who'd recently been murdered in a most horrific fashion. The key scene is obviously found in his last visit to Smith's cell, where he reveals the shallow pools of his sympathy, which had previously doted literature ("Thoreau was in jail for being an outsider, too") and dictionaries on Smith, whose poetic soul bewitched him so. Snapping back at Smith meanly ("There's not a single detail of the English language on which you could enlighten me"), Capote demands details about the night he and Hickock killed the Klutter family. I guess I should be thankful, given the genre's pathetic reliance on triumphalism, that there's any ambiguity at all on display here. But with another Capote biopic on the way, I'm having trouble seeing just why this literary featherweight--Capote closes with an epigraph noting he never finished another book after In Cold Blood--is so damn relevant to the culture at large.