At work today, I had a nice hearty laugh at Tom Wolfe's expense. I'm cleaning up the buy counter, pricing and putting away books, when I stumble onto a trade paperback of I Am Charlotte Simmons (which happens to be a book that I would read only upon pain of death or the promise of fat stacks of cash). Printed in big letters on the back of the book is "The new book from America's greatest living novelist". Are you shitting me? If Tom Wolfe is the greatest living American novelist, the U.S. of A needs to gracefully bow out of the literary game, maybe accept the fact that it's something modern americans suck at (like soccer). I can't even begin to imagine an ego so bloated, so mammoth that it would actually allow that to be printed on his own book. Its like Oprah and her magazine: does she really need to be on the cover of every issue? Can't she let somebody else hog the camera for five seconds? Giant carnivorous egos; unleashed from their mortal frames, they would sweep across the surface of the earth like the Blob. All of this is really a roundabout way of saying that I think Tom Wolfe sucks harder than a black hole.
Aside from bearing witness to the hubris of Mr. Electric Kool-Aid, work was relatively uneventful. Yet another day free of tweakers and elderly folk with bowel problems. Frankly, a part of me misses the mayhem, even if it does smell fairly... ripe.
When I got home after we closed up the store, I had dinner, watched the Daily Show and The Colbert Report, played Guitar Hero until I realized that I still had no chance in hell of beating "Crossroads" (gods damn you to hell, Clapton), and tossed another DVD into the player. I'm not a nostalgic person by nature, but I have been digging out films recently that I used to catch on IFC, films I haven't seen in years. SLC Punk was one of these cinematic trips down memory lane. Tonight's flashback was The Doom Generation, "a heterosexual film by Gregg Araki" (that line still cracks me up). When I first watched Doom, it was after seeing another of Araki's films, the even-stranger Nowhere. I loved Nowhere, even if most of it was totally surreal and nonsensical (the gist: imagine a typical film of high schoolers partying at night, hooking up, doing drugs, and occasionally getting abducted by reptilian aliens that turn them into giant insects... and no, there isn't any explanation for why aliens are running around, they just are, and the film is still cool). What struck me about Doom was its weird mix of bizarre unexplained events (body parts get severed and still function independent from their body, 666 pops up as the purchase price at every gas station the characters visit), mundane "whatever, dude" dialogue between the three leads, the angst-free love triangle (thank the gods, nothing aggravates me more than an angsty love triangle), all the sex (much of it is still a bit risque: I'll never look at light-up yo-yos and cowboy belt buckles the same way again), and the music.
As mentioned in my Kicking & Screaming review, I'm a sucker for a good soundtrack, and The Doom Generation has one hell of a soundtrack: Ride, Love & Rockets, Belly, Cocteau Twins, Jesus & Mary Chain, Aphex Twin, Nine Inch Nails, Lush, The Verve, Curve, and my beloved Slowdive. What really stayed with me the first time I watched it, and what lingers in my mind after watching it this evening, is the closing shot of the car driving off into the horizon while Slowdive's "Blue Skied an'Clear" plays on, right on through the credits. Its a beautiful song, sad and lush and vast and full of empty spaces, like the kind of music a choir of angels would write for a walk through a desert. Even the music that the characters talk about that isn't on the soundtrack is all aces: The Smiths get a verbal hat tip, and Rose MacGowan's character Amy spends a minute or two staring at a This Mortal Coil boxset in a record store. Even if the film was rank and pointless shit (and many people are of the opinion that Gregg Araki's work is all rank and pointless shit), I probably still would have bought the DVD, just based on all the goodwill built up from that incredible music.
So how was the film now? Pretty good. It was the perfect length (about 90 minutes): any longer than that would have just killed the film. Is it a bit pretentious? Yeah. Is it taking the piss and mocking nihilism? Yeah. Is Rose MacGowan's performance more or less just an excuse to be topless and say fuck 15,000 times? Yep. What saves the film and elevates it above most "check-me-out-I'm-edgy" art-house fare is the sense that the film doesn't give a fuck about itself. Things just happen throughout the story, for no reason, with no context, just because. In any other film, this kind of haphazard "and now here's something else that is totally irrelevant" sensibility would be infuriating. In The Doom Generation, it fits perfectly with the slacker characters, disconnected from everything going on around them. Like all rebels-on-the-road movie, there's a bleak ending, and its filmed in a very disorientating fashion, but it works. The Doom Generation is definitely a film that isn't for everyone; frankly, I can't think of anyone I know that I would recommend it to without any reservations. In spite of that, I liked it, and like SLC Punk, I don't regret spending the $$$ for the DVDs. Now if only I can find a copy of Nowhere (which is out of print and unavailable on every freakin' used DVD store on the Net... grrr....).
And now: web surfing and sleep!
Aside from bearing witness to the hubris of Mr. Electric Kool-Aid, work was relatively uneventful. Yet another day free of tweakers and elderly folk with bowel problems. Frankly, a part of me misses the mayhem, even if it does smell fairly... ripe.
When I got home after we closed up the store, I had dinner, watched the Daily Show and The Colbert Report, played Guitar Hero until I realized that I still had no chance in hell of beating "Crossroads" (gods damn you to hell, Clapton), and tossed another DVD into the player. I'm not a nostalgic person by nature, but I have been digging out films recently that I used to catch on IFC, films I haven't seen in years. SLC Punk was one of these cinematic trips down memory lane. Tonight's flashback was The Doom Generation, "a heterosexual film by Gregg Araki" (that line still cracks me up). When I first watched Doom, it was after seeing another of Araki's films, the even-stranger Nowhere. I loved Nowhere, even if most of it was totally surreal and nonsensical (the gist: imagine a typical film of high schoolers partying at night, hooking up, doing drugs, and occasionally getting abducted by reptilian aliens that turn them into giant insects... and no, there isn't any explanation for why aliens are running around, they just are, and the film is still cool). What struck me about Doom was its weird mix of bizarre unexplained events (body parts get severed and still function independent from their body, 666 pops up as the purchase price at every gas station the characters visit), mundane "whatever, dude" dialogue between the three leads, the angst-free love triangle (thank the gods, nothing aggravates me more than an angsty love triangle), all the sex (much of it is still a bit risque: I'll never look at light-up yo-yos and cowboy belt buckles the same way again), and the music.
As mentioned in my Kicking & Screaming review, I'm a sucker for a good soundtrack, and The Doom Generation has one hell of a soundtrack: Ride, Love & Rockets, Belly, Cocteau Twins, Jesus & Mary Chain, Aphex Twin, Nine Inch Nails, Lush, The Verve, Curve, and my beloved Slowdive. What really stayed with me the first time I watched it, and what lingers in my mind after watching it this evening, is the closing shot of the car driving off into the horizon while Slowdive's "Blue Skied an'Clear" plays on, right on through the credits. Its a beautiful song, sad and lush and vast and full of empty spaces, like the kind of music a choir of angels would write for a walk through a desert. Even the music that the characters talk about that isn't on the soundtrack is all aces: The Smiths get a verbal hat tip, and Rose MacGowan's character Amy spends a minute or two staring at a This Mortal Coil boxset in a record store. Even if the film was rank and pointless shit (and many people are of the opinion that Gregg Araki's work is all rank and pointless shit), I probably still would have bought the DVD, just based on all the goodwill built up from that incredible music.
So how was the film now? Pretty good. It was the perfect length (about 90 minutes): any longer than that would have just killed the film. Is it a bit pretentious? Yeah. Is it taking the piss and mocking nihilism? Yeah. Is Rose MacGowan's performance more or less just an excuse to be topless and say fuck 15,000 times? Yep. What saves the film and elevates it above most "check-me-out-I'm-edgy" art-house fare is the sense that the film doesn't give a fuck about itself. Things just happen throughout the story, for no reason, with no context, just because. In any other film, this kind of haphazard "and now here's something else that is totally irrelevant" sensibility would be infuriating. In The Doom Generation, it fits perfectly with the slacker characters, disconnected from everything going on around them. Like all rebels-on-the-road movie, there's a bleak ending, and its filmed in a very disorientating fashion, but it works. The Doom Generation is definitely a film that isn't for everyone; frankly, I can't think of anyone I know that I would recommend it to without any reservations. In spite of that, I liked it, and like SLC Punk, I don't regret spending the $$$ for the DVDs. Now if only I can find a copy of Nowhere (which is out of print and unavailable on every freakin' used DVD store on the Net... grrr....).
And now: web surfing and sleep!
Your response in the 'Would you date me?' thread was uproariously funny. Well done.