Bright Star: A Review Sunday, Oct 18 2009 

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Last night, PJ and I went out to see Jane Campion‘s new movie, Bright Star, which depicts the love story between the English poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne. PJ is an admirer of her work, especially The Piano, and we’ve heard lots of Oscar buzz for this film, so we were really looking forward to seeing it. We both really liked it.

Here’s the trailer:

English professors like me and PJ know of Brawne solely as the woman Keats loved but couldn’t marry. Practically penniless, Keats couldn’t afford to marry, and within a year of their meeting in 1818 Keats began to show the early signs of tuberculosis. The entire length of their romance was less than two years, and much of it was conducted by correspondence.

The fact that few facts about their relationship are known beyond the existing letters written from Keats to Brawne (he had her letters burned at his death) poses a huge problem for the filmmaker who wants to tell their story. The temptation would be to completely fictionalize the story, veering into either melodrama or romantic comedy.

What I like most about Campion’s take on this story is that she has clearly avoided the pitfalls of modern romantic films, choosing instead to work toward cinematic realism. While there are lyrical elements to her film, she attempts to present this love story as quietly and simply as possible. She includes many of the elements contained in the letters and contemporary accounts, but she never speaks down to the audience. She shows us these characters and their story without wasting a lot of time on exposition. In doing so, she creates a very affective story, which, if not completely historically accurate, creates a pair of lovers that are believable and enthralling to watch.

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SotW: Celebration by Madonna Thursday, Oct 15 2009 

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This week’s song of the week is Madonna’s “Celebration,” which is one of the new tracks on her greatest hits album of the same title. It’s a great dance song:

This collection shows just how amazing Madonna’s career has been (so far).I wish it had a few more of the slower hits, especially “This Used to Be My Playground,” which is one of my favorites. But just about everything you would imagine is represented in this collection. (“Material Girl” is also one of my favs. And of course “Like a Prayer,” “Like a Virgin,” “Human Nature,” “Ray of Light,” and “Holiday.”)

I’m not ashamed to say that I’m a gay man of the Madonna generation — her career started at just about the same time that I started becoming aware that I was attracted to boys instead of girls. It’s so difficult to explain to younger gay guys just how important Madonna was to gay men my age. She was the first pop icon to embrace gay men openly and aggressively. She put her gay dancers front and center in her videos and then argued for a sexual liberation that included us all.

Britney is nothing like Madonna in this regard; in fact, her whole virgin thing early in her career was the exact opposite of Madonna. Christina is a little closer, at least in that she routinely includes gay people in her videos. But really there’s no one carrying Madonna’s message of living life fully regardless of who you are, which is why we’re fortunate to still have Madonna herself carrying the torch!

And I, for one, am delighted that she’s still pushing some of those boundaries. Why not trade in the hubby for a hot, young Brazilian model/DJ? (Made in Brazil, one of my favorite blogs, follows Jesus Luz fairly closely, so I feel that I’m up on — and loving — the Madonna/Luz gossip!) If anyone’s earned the right to have great sex with a yummy boytoy, it’s definitely Madonna. And if their relationship is about more than sex, than good for her. If not, good for her too.

As she sings in “Celebration,” Madonna has spent her career whispering “An invitation to the dance of life” in our ears. I’m glad that she continues to dance it too.

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Grand Slam Tennis for Wii Saturday, Oct 10 2009 

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I love tennis. I’ve loved watching tennis on t.v. since the mid-1980s. When I first started watching, my favorite players were Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert. Their rivalry was amazing. Then I fell in love with watching Pete Sampras and Monica Seles. More recently, I enjoy watching Venus Williams, Roger Federer, and, of course, my one true tennis love, Rafael Nadal (Isn’t he lovely? I’m so glad he’s healthy again!).

Spains Rafael Nadal returns the ball to Croatias Marin Cilic during the semi-finals of the China Open tennis tournament in Beijing Saturday, Oct. 10, 2009. Cilic beat Nadal 6-1, 6-3. (AP Photo/Elizabeth Dalziel)

Spain's Rafael Nadal returns the ball to Croatia's Marin Cilic during the semi-finals of the China Open tennis tournament in Beijing Saturday, Oct. 10, 2009. Cilic beat Nadal 6-1, 6-3. (AP Photo/Elizabeth Dalziel)

While I love watching tennis, I’ve never played it much. I played with my sister a bit when we were young. And PJ and I hit the ball back and forth a little in grad school just for exercise. I wish I could play (and play well). If I thought there was any hope at all, I’d probably be on the court as much as possible.

But finally there is a way for me to play, or at least to imagine that I’m playing — and that I’m playing against the greatest players, past and present: Grand Slam Tennis for Wii.

I’m the first to admit that I spend most of my free times these days playing GST4W. I bought it over the summer, and I love it. After a long day at work, the last thing I want to do is sit and think about anything; playing GST4W allows me to get the blood pumping a bit and let my mind forget all of the day’s work and just focus on strategy — should I hit a drop shot, cross-court with topspin, or a lob?

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SotW: Heavy Cross by Gossip Wednesday, Oct 7 2009 

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I remember when Gossip was “The Gossip,” but they’ve apparently dropped the “The” now that their new album, Music for Men, is out. Regardless, I’ve been listening to the album this week, and I’ve chosen “Heavy Cross” as my song of the week.

You can click here to see the official video of the song. It can’t be embedded. While looking for a vide that can be embedded, I stumbled across one of the remixes, the Fred Falke Remix, that I really like:

In the past few months, I’ve started really getting into remixes. Now I even look for them on YouTube and on iTunes. One of the things I like about this remix is that it sounds like an almost entirely different song from the original. Obviously the vocals are the same, but the change in music from rock to dance is a bigger shift than most of the remixes I tend to like use.

I could therefore imagine that, if you like the original version, you might not like this remix because of the huge generic shift. But I like them both. The synth/electronica vibe seems really cool to me. There are several more remixes on YouTube. I hope they come out as a single.

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The Class: A Review Sunday, Oct 4 2009 

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Yesterday, PJ and I watched Entre Les Murs, or The Class, a French film that was nominated for Best Foreign Language film at the Oscars this year. I wasn’t going to watch it with him at first, but then I was too tried to get off the couch. I’m glad I saw it: I loved it!

Here’s the trailer:

The film’s plot is deceptively simple: novelist and teacher François Bégaudeau plays a version of himself as the film follows his class over the course of a school year. The students in the class are played by non-actors; they’re kids from Paris who helped develop the dialogue and action through improvisation workshops with the director, Laurent Cantet, and Bégaudeau.

Nothing terribly dramatic happens over the course of the film. We see the teachers and their discussions in the teachers’ lounge. We see the kids, mostly in French class but also in the school yard, a concrete playground on which they sometimes play soccer. Some kids excel in class; others get into trouble. So in this way, The Class feels more like a documentary about a relatively nondescript junior class on French grammar.

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SotW: Dickhead by Kate Nash Monday, Sep 28 2009 

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Some time ago, our friend Wesley gave us a copy of Kate Nash’s Made of Bricks. It’s not an album that I tend to listen to straight through, but I do like several of the tracks individually. This week’s song of the week comes from this album: track 4, “Dickhead”:

While in general I like the idea of calling everyone who irritates me a “dickhead,” this song resonates with me this week because I was worried that I was acting like a dickhead in my dealings with a colleague recently. I’m not totally sure whether he thought I was being a dickhead, but in retrospect I thought I was.

To make sure I’m not a dickhead, from now on whenever I get irritated at other people’s behavior, I’m going to listen to this song once before replying to their email!

I’ll post the lyrics after the break.

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Frederick Wentworth, Captain: A Review Sunday, Sep 27 2009 

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Frederick Wentworth, Captain is a two-volume novel by Susan Kaye that relates the events of Jane Austen’s Persuasion from Captain Wentworth’s point of view. The first volume, None but You, came out from Wytherngate Press in 2007; volume two, For You Alone, was published in 2008.

Persuasion has been my favorite Austen novel for about 20 years now. I first read it as an undergraduate. I enrolled in a summer class that surveyed the second half of Brit Lit. All we read was novels Austen, Dickens, Hardy, and Waugh. Up to that point, I had never read any of Austen’s books. I immediately fell in love.

In retrospect, I’m not sure why I felt this way, but I immediately felt that I was like Anne Elliot waiting for my man to come back to me. (I was also a big fan of Somewhere in Time, so maybe I just liked the come-back-to-me theme.) I was still a closeted gay boy back then, who was scared to face his sexual desires. Maybe that made me feel like a woman who was watching life pass her by. Whatever the case, I loved the novel and it’s been my favorite ever since.

So, I was looking forward to reading this novel from Wentworth’s point of view. As I’ve written about before, I love Austen rewrites, but most of those seem to focus on Pride and Prejudice and Mr. Darcy. He’s great, but he’s no Wentworth. If we’re all honest about it, we’d admit that Darcy’s falling in love with Elizabeth makes no sense — Austen doesn’t really explain his conversion and personality transplant very well. But Wentworth’s love for Anne is all there for us to follow. We understand his recognition that they belong together, even though the original story is from Anne’s point of view.

What I’m getting at is that Austen gives someone like Susan Kaye a little more to work with than she does the re-writers of Pride and Prejudice. Kaye has inherited strong, believable characters and a plot that is romantic and realistic. Her task, then, is to take these elements and make something new out of them. She more than succeeds. Frederick Wentworth, Captain is arguably one of the best adaptations of any of Austen’s novels to date.

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Rock Haven: A Review Saturday, Sep 26 2009 

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Last night, PJ and I watched Rock Haven, a 2007 film about a nerdy Christian boy who falls in love with another boy when he and his mother move to the community of Rock Haven, California. Here’s the trailer:

The movie was written and directed by David Lewis and stars Sean Hoagland as Brady, the closeted Christian. Brady and his mother are devoutly religious, and Brady is more than a little nerdy — he loves playing trivia games and looking at the stars through his telescope, for example. But then he meets Clifford, a hot nineteen-year-old who likes to sun bathe on the beach.

Owen Alabado plays Clifford as a mixture of shyness and self-confidence. He’s spent most of his life in boarding schools. This has made him shy about his sexuality, but he’s also independent and self-assured in other areas of his life. He and Brady start hanging out together and most of the first half of the film is about the two of them falling in love, the first time for each.

These new feelings, of course, cause problems for Brady, who can’t reconcile his sexuality to his religious beliefs. Consequently, he spends most of the film getting close to Clifford and then pushing him away and then repeating this process again.

Overall, I really liked this movie. First off, the cinematography in this film is really beautiful. Christian Bruno does an excellent job capturing the beauty of the coastline, the ocean, and the two boys.

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SotW: Pony by Kasey Chambers Friday, Sep 25 2009 

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This past weekend, PJ and I went to the PawPaw Festival here in Athens. When the weather is good (like this year), it’s a great opportunity to be outside, see friends, drink some pawpaw beer, and listen to live music. This year, you could actually walk around with your beer rather than stay in the beer garden, pictured here, which made the event much more fun.

The “beer garden” is usually surrounded by an orange plastic fence. It looks less crowded here because lots of people got a beer and then walked around the rest of the festival, which includes lots of tents featuring various local products.

While we sat on a bale of hay while drinking another beer, the band that was playing, local band Broken Ring, performed Kasey Chambers’s “Pony.” While listening to them sing, I was struck by how much I like this song. Even so, I currently have no Kasey Chambers music on my iPod–even though PJ has several of her cd’s. I’ll have to fix that soon!

Here’s a video of Kasey Chambers singing “Pony” live:

I’ll post the lyrics after the break.

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Cat Tuesday: A Cheap Cat Fountain Tuesday, Sep 22 2009 

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Our friend Wesley forwarded this video to us. I wish our cats did funny things like this! 

 

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