Entries tagged with “Self-Involvement”

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To mark the fifth birthday of Culture Snob — born July 10, 2003 — I'll be hosting the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon from Wednesday, July 9, to Sunday, July 13. (Previously, I initiated the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon and latched on to Only the Cinema's Short-Film Week Blog-a-thon.)

Put simply, the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon is about the intersection of movies and life. My hope is that it will serve as a celebration of the power of the moving picture removed from the critical, cultural, and financial contexts in which it is typically considered.

Of course, we bring baggage whenever we talk or write about movies, but this is meant to be more personal — intensely idiosyncratic reactions and analyses, difficult times when movies became more than movies, brushes with movie stars, crushes on movie stars, memories from youthful encounters with film, embarrassing revelations, cinematic epiphanies, meticulous drawings of Darth Vader from your eight-year-old self, ... .

The only rule is that contributions have two central elements: movies and you.

Submissions (or promises of submissions) can be made in comments, through the Culture Snob e-mail form, or at snob@culturesnob.com. New work is encouraged, but moldy links are welcome, too.

And remember: For once, it is all about you.

In the past week, two major movie writers on the Web, Matt Zoller Seitz of The House Next Door and Raymond Young of Flickhead, hung up their stinky blogging shoes. Tim Lucas smells a trend and admits:

"I took a silent vow that I would discontinue this blog if he didn't come out of his nine-hour surgery alive."

So in the spirit of the week ... .

On January 28, Ed Howard at Only the Cinema demanded that I ask somebody to dinner. That's a bit rude, but I had imposed upon Ed last year, so he was well within his rights.

(By the way, this whole have-someone-over-for-dinner business was apparently started by Piper at Lazy Eye Theatre. While I will participate, I shan't perpetuate; socializing shouldn't be forced on anyone.)

I've been otherwise occupied for a while, but I finally got around to inviting Christopher Nolan to dinner. (Not literally, of course. Still, that invitation should be clear.) He hasn't accepted yet, but I hear he's busy, too.

I try to keep Culture Snob focused on things culture-y and snobby, but ... .

If you can't help yourself when it comes to other people's babies, there's lots more at Bad Dog Ginger's Web site.

It was summer 1969, in southern Illinois. The father of Bride of Culture Snob took the mother of Bride of Culture Snob to the movies to escape the heat. She was pregnant, carrying Bride of Culture Snob.

His choice? Rosemary's Baby.

So on Saturday, two days (or four, depending on whom you believe) before her due date, Spawn of Culture Snob was similarly treated to Rosemary's Baby.

(And this followed viewings of Eastern Promises and There Will Be Blood within the previous 24 hours.)

Contact me if you'd like to contribute to Spawn's therapy fund.

This isn't a list of the "best" songs of 2007, or even my favorites. It's a personal 2007 compilation that tries to capture my experience with music over the past 12 months. The songs are meant to play off each other — sometimes in obvious ways, often not — and there's a purpose to the sequencing.

My goal is simple: to give readers some ideas for new listening, or perhaps to spur you to go back to an artist you'd dismissed. There are a lot more familiar names in this year's mix than last year's, and that's because of the accelerating fragmentation of the music market; it seems increasingly difficult for anything to capture the public's imagination for more than a few seconds.

So here are 18 songs that I felt deserve more love than our short cultural attention span typically allows.

Ballots for Ed Hardy Jr.'s 31 Flicks That Give You the Willies are due by the end of October 28. Remember: Your movies can't win if you don't play.

Here's my ballot, sent without consulting my nominations.

(And, as of November 2, the list is fully annotated.)

At Shoot the Projectionist, Ed Hardy Jr. is accepting nominations for "31 Flicks That Give You the Willies." Although he's not explicit about it, we can safely assume that we're naming our favorite horror movies. The deadline for nominations is Saturday, October 13.

Mine follow, and an explanation is probably in order.

First, I excluded from my nominations obvious choices that nearly everybody will choose.

Second, there's an important distinction in my mind between something that "gives me the willies" and something that's a great horror movie. Horror doesn't have to scare me or creep me out to be great in my book. Conversely, something that does give me the willies isn't by definition a great horror movie. I am abiding by the spirit of the prompt rather than the letter.

Last, some of my choices are more comfortably associated with a genre other than horror. But while Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream might be an explicit after-school special on drug addiction, it's still a horrifying experience.

Jeff Ignatius is a journalist who has, at various points in his career, been published as a movie, music, and book critic (in descending order of aptitude) and has interviewed internationally renowned musicians (from David Harrington of Kronos Quartet to...

We've been producing Culture Snob for more than four years now, and I've come to a sad realization: I'm tired of movies.

Not all movies — Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope still reveals new facets of mythic complexity every Sunday — but the whole movie culture: a half-dozen new releases almost every week, the incessant obsession with box office and awards, the flood of contradictory reviews and fiery debate ... . It's no wonder Owen Wilson wanted to escape.

Rather than bitch and moan — or act out in self-destructive ways — I'll offer my suggestions on how to fix the movie industry in a few easy steps.

In the week that marks the fourth anniversary of Culture Snob, Adam Ross at DVD Panache has featured this site as his Friday Screen Test. It's a great opportunity to indulge your insatiable curiosity about me.

Many thanks for the invitation and the virtual ink!

Edward Copeland at Edward Copeland on Film has tagged me, which must mean he doesn't like me. Join the club, buddy!

People who have been tagged are required to reveal eight facts about themselves and to post and obey the following rules, which I'm copying from Edward's site and to which I'll add my own anal-retentive commentary, because somebody really needs to revise them for clarity and elegance.

Somebody entered the following search query and eventually found Culture Snob:

talent OR skill OR intelligence "rupert grint"

By the time the searcher found this page on Culture Snob, he or she was on the seventh page of search results. Apparently, it's quite challenging to find talent or skill or intelligence in the kid who plays Ron Weasley.

It's important to misunderstand movies.

Put another way: If we limit ourselves to straightforward readings of plot or themes in film, we're denying ourselves the multifaceted nature of the medium. As the most inclusive of all the arts, cinema comprises narrative storytelling, photography, acting, sound, music, speech, movement, costume, montage, and architecture. Even the dumbest, most-crass summer blockbuster is a dense, nearly infinite trove of material to explore and analyze.

When we consider a movie "misunderstood," we're not latching on to plot points or obvious themes or even subtext. We're grabbing at those oddball moments that don't seem to fit: isolated images, tonal incongruities, digressions in dialogue, striking juxtapositions, narrative detours that seem to dead-end, camera angles.

We're detecting latent patterns, and we're crafting interpretations that never cross the minds of most people. We do this with the assumption that every scene, every sound, and every frame might matter. The joy of building a case for an unconventional reading is mining those peripheral moments or sights and finding meaning in them. We are watching closely.

That's the premise of the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon, which I announced last month and which runs through Sunday, May 20.

Follow this link to Misunderstood Blog-a-thon Central, and check back for updates daily.

Have you ever read or heard a discussion of a movie that made you think, They just don't get it? Have you ever wondered, Am I the only person who saw the movie that way?

Culture Snob is hosting a forum for essays, arguments, and provocations on misunderstood movies. The blog-a-thon will run Wednesday, May 16, through Sunday, May 20, although I won't turn my nose up at contributions that arrive before then.

The premise is that movies are marketed and evaluated coarsely and simplistically, and that they often contain a richness that's never mined by critics and casual audiences. Films operate on many levels, and subtle motifs, buried symbols, and seemingly awkward filmmaking choices are sometimes the keys that unlock new meanings. Is E.T. really a sophisticated exploration of diaspora? If "Rosebud" is both a sled and a clitoris, what does Citizen Kane say about sexual development among boys? How does the story of Pinocchio inform The Fisher King?

Give me your rigorous readings, your idiosyncratic analysis, and your silly, half-baked ideas.

• How ignorant are you? Cinemarati recently asked its readers:

  "What's your big, embarrassing, Never-Seen-It movie?"

  To help you out, you can use this tool to track your viewing history against the Internet Movie Database's "top 250" list. (My list.) My guilty admission is that I've yet to see Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) despite its reputation.
• At Slate, rather than mocking people for movies they haven't seen, Sam Anderson judges his friends by what they want to see. What does your Netflix queue say about you?

The list of my favorite movies has been updated and moved here. You can always find it in the sidebar to the right. Feel free to use the comments section here to include your own list of favorite movies. I'm looking for anything more sophisticated than these.

For reasons that few should care about, I've shifted the "Favorite Songs" feature from the main Culture Snob content-management system to the Culture Snob Wiki. The list can now be found here. The link in the sidebar has also been updated. (In case you do care: It allows for easier editing and adding, and it makes it easy for me and readers to see what's new.)

More importantly, I've also updated the list for the first time in roughly two years. It's still not comprehensive, but I've added about 100 tracks. There are now approximately 850 songs — close to my original target of 1,000.

While the wiki doesn't have a standard "comments" feature, it does have a "discuss" tab in which you are free to make fun of me and my musical tastes.

The lists of favorite movies and favorite albums will also be shifted to the Wiki eventually.

I've begun to use the "tagging" capabilities of this site's content-management system.

That should make Culture Snob easier to navigate by adding a tool that's more intuitive. Until now, you were limited by the site's search function and its tables of contents. Tags allow readers to find related material more easily, both within entries and in a site-encompassing "tag cloud."

It was with great horror (okay, mild annoyance at myself) that I returned to comments by Dan Jardine at Cinemarati and saw a striking resemblance to some ideas I expressed on Superman Returns. While I doubt I'd be accused of plagiarism, it's clear that Dan planted a seed in my brain, and I should have cited him in my essay. He wrote:

"I wonder about his purpose on this planet. Is his raison d'etre really to save people whose breaks [sic] have failed? Are there no larger problems he could tackle? Also, ... the film gives some lip service to the notion that Superman's heroics will act as inspiration to humans, who might then improve their own lot by upgrading their behavior to match Superman's. Yet, can you point to a single character who makes any significant step forward toward heroic levels of greatness other than Superman?"

So if you disagree with my assessment of the movie, blame him.

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