Results tagged “at the movies” from Drama Queen

Jonze is a personal favorite, though by the time I was introduced to him via the Beastie Boys' brilliantly appointed Sabotage video (Moustaches all around!), he was already a camera-strapped, guerilla skate-video-directing, gen X anti-hero. However, Jonze's mild demeanor and minimalist responses during curator Joshua Siegel's between-screening discussions reveal him to be less irony-soaked iconoclast than pensive and understated messenger of joy. Which sounds corny, I know, but seriously it's true.

The retrospective kicked off with an evening devoted to Jonze's and Maurice Sendak's close friendship, featuring three short films: a documentary about Sendak; a comic short-short Jonze and actor Catherine Keener made as a gift for Sendak's 80th birthday (they reenact an incident during which Sendak's sister ditched him at the New York World's Fair to sneak off with her boyfriend, and which served as the inspiration for In the Night Kitchen); and a scene from Jonze's upcoming full-length adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are. 

The most remarkable thing about the films is that watching Jonze's shorts is much like watching his excerpted Wild Things, except with Sendak cast as Max (Sendak disagreed with Jonze about Max's age anyway, saying "Who cares how old he is?") and Jonze as the monster. In a way, the whole enterprise seems geared to force Sendak into acknowledging that perhaps his life isn't quite the torment he'd like to believe. When Jonze asks Sendak to name just a few of the people and circumstances that have thus far made his stay here less of a burden, his list is long, lovely and sad: Eugene Glynn, his late partner of 50 years; his sister, who helped raise him; his brother, who helped him craft tiny toys out of wood. 

It's too bad the Sendak doc isn't being shown in multiplexes before its companion feature; they'd obviously make a great pairing. But it sounds like the main event will stand on its own just fine, traditional narrative or not. Chicago Tribune film critic and At the Movies host Michael Phillips says it's the best film he's seen all year (but don't tell, because he hasn't reviewed it yet), and he's already been to Sundance and Cannes. 

However, the real strength of the MoMA's retrospective isn't that it's an effective publicity machine for Jonze's newest film, although it is. Its strength is that it pays tribute to a director whose eclectic work is finally becoming a clear vision. Look no farther than the Torrance Community Dance Group's unaffected street theater and Christopher Walken's unexpected bouyancy for proof. Jonze's work is greater than the great Sendak, and the MoMA's collection serves to show that he's been singing an ode to joy all along. 

But even in Disney's case, the trend toward younger, shall we say, less sophisticated, coverage (Go on, click. I believe that's a beer bong around new co-host Ben Lyons' neck), bodes poorly for the arts and literature, and all the cumbersome effort involved in understanding them. Anyone else notice that as the arts pages shrank, somehow everyone found room to add video game reviews? Mind you, I'm so addicted to Facebook's Packrat game (God help me) that my skin itches just thinking about it, and my husband and I are about to install a Wii so our children will invite their friends here, rather than always wanting to go elsewhere (read: to a home with Wii). 

But there's only strategy involved in video game coverage, and maybe some cheats and codes. Rolling Stone might send Peter Travers to hole up in his living room for a few hours with Grand Theft Auto, and he might be into it, but that still doesn't make it a movie. (And yes, I'm aware that Talladega Nights was neither enlightening nor fun, but like it or not, its expository demands made it a movie.) I'll grant that maybe video games are even their own paradigm and don't have to subscribe to traditional narrative standards, but neither are they, even in their most sublime form, searching for a higher meaning. Their purpose is to be a fun game. 

Nonetheless there's an entire cable channel devoted to analyzing this zillion dollar a year industry. Meanwhile the A&E network, despite having a few thousand years of art history to which they might defer, and in a desperate bit to attract some viewers, any viewers, resorted to Gene Simmons' reality show (God help us all) and Sopranos reruns. How did we get here?

The arts are thrilling, and should be treated as such--in print, online, on television. Letting people in on the process, as the Grease and Legally Blonde reality shows did, isn't necessarily the answer, but overall, they sure don't hurt in drumming up a little excitement for the whole package. In fact, wasn't Siskel and Ebert a reality competition anyway, where you root for your favorite intellectual to come up with the most clever retort, and your least favorite to prove once and for all what a moron he is? 

However, the situation is so much more dire for the publishing industry. There are no flashy tv shows dedicated to reviewing literature, and as far as I know, there never were. If magazines and newspapers--you know, places for people who read--stop covering and reviewing new books, I shudder to imagine a world where the public is left to slog through the grammatical wasteland of Amazon.com reader reviews and trust the whims of Barnes and Noble's public relations department. And once books are no longer critically acclaimed, where will Hollywood get the bulk of its ideas? From video games?

Oh yeah, right.

Screw it, I'm going to play Guitar Hero. Wasn't there a Kiss song on there somewhere?