Inconvenience Store

After realizing that all the cards in my house were either splattered with girly flowers or wishing people "Merry Christmas," I hopped into the car to buy some Thank You notes for my English homework. My dear mum took me to CVS, where I spent 2 minutes picking out cards, and she spent 20 minutes looking for coupons.

My mom is notorious for being able to spend more than an hour at CVS. I can only marvel at this feat for I could never bring myself to stand this frankly boring store for more than a few minutes. This is a convenience store, no? It's supposed to be in 'n out, not browse 'n linger.

Anyways, my mom first spent her time picking out the exact brand and type of Aquafresh toothpaste that was on sale. The sheer number of different types of toothpaste is pretty mindboggling, as it managed to cover an entire aisle, but it did not warrant the time it took my mom to find her toothpaste. As my mom took her time, I turned to the other aisle and ruminated on whether to get more tampons, but seeing that none were on sale, decided otherwise.

The next item of purchase was some Dentyne gum. While I deplored her to think altruistically and save the world from my bad breath, my mom rummaged through her purse, saying, "I must have a coupon!" Finding a coupon becomes a rather Herculean task when it involves looking for a 2x3 in slip of paper in a very large 5-pocket bag. Following that Asian cliche, I cringed as my mom eagerly dug through her bag in the middle of the aisle, in full view of the entire store.

At last, it was time to check out. Our cashier was elderly and foreign, not a good combination when your customer is the exact same thing. So my mom argued loudly over a 99 cent coupon while I subtly edged away from her figure. Thank god I decided against the tampons.

The Hit List 5/29/30

Everyone has their prom pictures up. Squee! Everyone is so pretty. So I randomly clicked through facebook and looked at all the pretty pictures. Aww! It seems that everyone else is already excited for prom next year, but despite all the gauzy dresses and perfectly-permed hair, I'm still not that excited. Perhaps it's because of those things rather than in spite of them.

My mom bought a bag of ridiculously delicious dried mango from Costo yesterday. This bag, as of now, is already half empty. (Keep in mind its a Costo bag.) The dried mango is perfectly sweet and tangy and chewy and soft and mangoey. If only there weren't so many calories.

Last Friday, I got my Amazon shipment of Kingdom of Heaven: Director's Cut and Ane Brun's A Temporary Dive. Guess what's occupying my computer right now.

Last Friday, we also hung out around Alice's/my house. A complete list of activities: ate cheese fries, watched 20 min of Big Fish, ate pizza, made a fire, made s'mores, ate marshmallows, burned napkins, blasted the radio, danced pseuo-sluttily, annoyed the neighbors, burned old papers, played BS, watched the battle scenes in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, drank water, annoyed my family. A note of this FFVII thing, why are all the Japanese guys effeminate and lithe, while the American men are butch and muscled? The Japanese anime guys are so much hotter.

The Festival de Cannes wrapped up yesterday with the award ceremony. Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley surprisingly (or not, since this is Cannes) won the Palme d'Or. Comment? Got nothing. I did get a good chuckle when people compared its title to Ghost World's The Flower that Drank the Moon.

A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan, 1951)

Marlon Brando is sexy. He's sexy while strutting down the street in a grease-stained wifebeater. He's sexy in a suit. He's sexy in a sweat-soaked T-shirt. He's sexy in the silk pajamas. He's sexy. Period.

Lest you think I watched this movie to jerk off, A Streetcar Named Desire is actually a vital part of my history project. I would have certainly breezed right by its ratty DVD case in the library if it were not for this project. But to my great fortune, I picked up this film.

A Streetcar Named Desire is fraught with tension, explosion, and passion anchored by its magnetic performances. Understatement may be the newest vogue, but Streetcar rarely seems dated in its outbursts of raw, and honest, emotion.

I spent a paragraph drooling over Brando, but one should not forget that it is truly Vivien Leigh's film. As the disturbed and shunned Blanche Dubois, Leigh paints a portrait of a Southern belle vastly superior to any work she did in all 4 hours of Gone With the Wind. Although some may argue Blanche to be an intentionally outrageous character, I feel that she is very real indeed. Blanche's passive-aggressiveness and her eager facade gave me strong impressions of people I have met in real life.

I don't have much to say about Streetcar except that it is one of the few "classics" I do not feel disappointed in. On a slight tangent, it is interesting to return to A Streetcar Named Desire after watching Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother, which references the former film heavily.

Degrees of Separation

It's kind of sad that I am staying at home thinking about this instead of going to prom. But alas, I'd probably find this much more amusing anyways. So follow the below logic to see what I figured out today:

Wes Anderson directed The Royal Tenenbaums.
The Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack features singer-model Nico (who has a really cool man-voice).
Nico plays herself in La Dolce Vita.
La Dolce Vita is directed by Federico Fellini.
La Dolce Vita was shot at Cinecitta.
Cinecitta is Fellini's personal movie studio.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (an American movie) was the last film shot at Cincecitta.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is directed by Wes Anderson.

Isn't that a fascinating circle of esoteric connections? But wait, there's more!

In my last post about La Dolce Vita, I mentioned that my feelings toward the film exactly mirrored my feelings toward another film. And guess which one that would be? Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums! I disliked both films upon my initial viewing, but then grew to like them more with time. I also felt that they both had strong individual scenes but weaker overall structure. But wait, there's still more!

Well, I'm guessing here, but I'm most likely right. Wes Anderson, being the type of director he is, probably has countless references to Fellini in his own films.

Who knows? Perhaps I will one day grow to love and adore Fellini as I much as I do Anderson. But on a purely superficial scale, Anderson is much more handsome than Fellini will ever be (considering he's dead).

La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960)

La Dolce Vita is a film enshrined in the pantheon of the best of the best. Widely deemed Italian master Federico Fellini’s masterpiece, its influence on pop culture is found everywhere from People magazine to Lost in Translation. Oh how I hungered to finally see this film.

But in my humble opinion, La Dolce Vita did not turn out to be the full course Italian dinner I expected; it was more like a slice of Domino’s pizza—passable but hardly exciting.

Most likely, I have simply not understood the complexities of La Dolce Vita, and I do not feel like sitting through a 3 hour commentary at this moment. It is certainly a film I will have to revisit after watching Fellini’s earlier works.
La Dolce Vita’s structure is high episodic, and the film itself is nearly 3 hours long. To sum it up, the film is a series of episodes about journalist Marcello’s encounters with his jaded lover (Anouk Aimee), a ditzy American startlet (Anita Eckberg), his suicidal fiancée, his irresponsible father, various prostitutes, his inwardly troubled friend, his photographer colleagues, and his ridiculously rich friends. The disjointed structure is obviously intentional, but it seems to fracture the film into installments too sporadic to gel into one unified film. Even as I type this, I realize that the last scene with the café girl does pull together many thematic and narrative strands.

At its core, La Dolce Vita is a satire and condemnation of the moral debauchery of the upper class. Under a glamorous exterior, the rich are revealed as shallow, corrupted, ignorant, and immoral. This is no profound realization, but La Dolce Vita does provide an intriguing portrait of Via Valento’s glitterati. The problem is, as Marcello himself says of the rich, “You’re really not that interesting.” Marcello views the world of the rich as both a cynical outsider and an eager admirer, and as fascinating as the glitterati may seem, it isn’t long before their lives—and the film—become tedious.

La Dolce Vita is more coldly cynical and emotionally distraught than I had expected. This is not a point of criticism, but an observation on how the film is remembered as whole. I was always under the impression that it was a playful romp—in the vein of Moulin Rouge!—through the lives of the rich and famous.

The dark tone of La Dolce Vita does give it moments of cold, seductive beauty. The scene where Maddalena asks Marcello to marry her through a stone speaker while simultaneously making love to another man is one of the most fascinating sequences I have ever seen. The miscommunication evident throughout the film is most clearly represented in Maddalena’s disembodied voice floating down to Marcello sitting in an empty room. As Marcello replies that he loves her, Maddalena is passionately wrapped in the arms another man.

I don’t think that Fellini is remembered as a particularly political filmmaker, but he does throw in many jabs at the Catholic Church in La Dolce Vita. While I found the Madonna sequence intrusive (mainly because his deranged fiancée Emma spent so much time in it), the opening scene with “Jesus” flying through the sky is justly remembered as ingenious.

I guess my final opinion toward La Dolce Vita is one of indifference toward it as a whole, but awe at certain scenes in the movie. (I have yet to mention the famous dip in the fountain portrayed in the above picture). My feelings, however, seem to be tipping to a more favorable opinion the more I think about it. This last paragraph reminds me an awful lot about another review I wrote…