Near our new house is an arthouse theater* that plays morbid stuff like the overrated Winter's Bone and sugar-free French bubblegum along the lines of Coco and Igor. For some reason, this theater has a sister theater in Northhampton playing equally unadventurous fare. The Cinemark is the only non-arthouse cinema accessible to us in the Pioneer Valley. I'll say this for it; it was a common punishment when I was a child to be made to sit in a far corner, silently and out of the way, and The Cinemark sits in the same way, like an abashed giant, behind The Hampshire Mall. It's almost difficult to find.
I had natural reservations about Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. The Brian O'Malley comic series never appealed to me at first glance--something about them seemed too big-eyed and pre-sexually dimorphic. Same goes for Michael Cera. But we really wanted to see a movie and were squeezed between the deadly Scyllia and Charbydis of The Expendables and The Kids Are All Right and right into Scott Pilgrim's seemingly weak arms.
We loved it! I can't think of any recent movie that better weds the play-sense of games and movies, or which evokes more honest interaction between the audience and the gimmick-packed toolbox accessible to modern filmmaking. Yet I'm not surprised by the bad box-office for this movie. The trailer is brain-meltingly generic. The movie itself is full of catchy, authentic-sounding garage rock and Nintendo Entertainment System references, both of which register strongly with my generation but which probably seem corny to an 18 year old. Edgar Wright, the director, seems genuinely to love these things-- the spatter of shiny coins against the ground, the swing of a flaming sword around a protagonist's head, the murky sound waves one wants to see pulse from a Marshall Stack. All of this equals Big Joy, which is anathema to the Neanderthal-browed Tarkovskian aesthetic dourness of your average teenager, and has been for decades. This movie is strictly for adults.
*In our first week in Amherst we went to see a revival print of To Catch A Thief. The audience was full of honor-roll kids and their parents. The projection was murky and off-center throughout. There was a recent ad in Craigslist for a professional projectionist at the theater. I hope they found one.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World Sunday, August 22, 2010
The Iron Dream Monday, August 16, 2010
I also found this beauty at Grey Matter Books last week. Norman Spinrad's take on the Science Fiction book Hitler would have written. From headier days.
Grey Matter Books, lest you get the wrong impression, has phenomenal sections in used poetry, science, literature and philosophy, a great line-up of events, and a pretty decent record selection in the back. It just happens to have the only substantial science fiction collection in The Pioneer Valley, as well. Top marks.
Too Much Fun
The blog strips the teasing, private diary of its context and secures it as public. Believe me, I have no problem pumping out unsupportable opinions. In this respect I'm like a minor-league baseball mascot, blasting t-shirts with an air-gun over the beer-numb fingers of the crowd.
Yet I'm having too much fun in Amherst to notionally bronze its baby booties! Typical day--write some, read some, hop on the bike and do some errand, come home and play or learn some new game*, all the while taking time to make slightly more elaborate meals than normal.
Reading list: a Robert Sheckley omnibus, Michael Schmidt's clumsy but informative The Lives of the Poets (with The Penguin Book of English Verse at close hand), lots of Emily Dickinson.
*Cribbage and two-handed Euchre have re-entered my repertoire, and Ish and I have been circling around the great Amherst gamer's collective at Worlds Apart Games. Of special interest is the intimidatingly rule-heavy but open-ended Gurps role-playing system.
Going Mobile Friday, August 6, 2010
Lift, yoke, spend: the end result being, I live in Amherst, Massachusetts, now, with most of my stuff. It's a state I have yet to spell correctly on the first try (I always want to squeeze a fifth "s" in there), I am almost totally indifferent to the baseball playing on televisions in this city's many collegiate-style bars, and distances are to be judged by long, dull real estate patches of no public interest at all (I used to say we lived near Emily Dickinson's house until I walked there--now I say that Emily Dickinson's house is the nearest thing of interest to us). All that being said, I feel as if I were renting a patch of paradise. Just past the sliding doors of our kitchen are not just trees but a whole, dense woods from which exotic animals sometimes stumble, brace themselves, and retreat. The birds here have strange calls and sound to my dead, urban ears like amusement devices.
I just bought a bike to get around. It's a small bike, designed to fold in half and then in half again, and it fits well in the space between the bookshelf and the front door. Balancing myself on the thing is like balancing a watermelon on top of a moving pineapple, but when it gets going it's a pure joy. I bought a black helmet embossed with a bright green four-leaf clover. I think it suits me. I'm inclined to wear it on my head at all times, even at dinner. The bike will assist me in getting to the area's many record shops and bookstores, where I will attempt not to spend my dwindling resources. About which, more later.