Rushfield Babylon

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Reunion Symposium Edition

A very special episode in which we survey the downfall of civilization from the perspective of the conclusion of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills second season.  Joining the podcast for a freewheeling, no-holds-barred, core issues discussion of the issues raised by this episode are:

• Leslie Grossman: Actress, personality, reality television expert.
• Stacey Grenrock Woods: Author and Real Housewives essayist

And with a special report from Sur, journalist Nicole LaPorte, on her lunch with Lisa Vanderpump 

Download direct here or shortly from iTunes here.

Judge down!  Victory!

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THE WAYS IN WHICH TINY FURNITURE IS BETTER THAN MOST INDIE MOVIES ABOUT 20’SOMETHING HIPSTERS

We were supposed to have seen Tiny Furniture when it came out, but somehow it got away from me so I just caught it finally this weekend on Netflix.

On paper, it is exactly the same movie as 40,000 other low budget movies about 20’somethings struggling to adjust to life in New York City.  But instead of completely hating it, I really enjoyed it.   Much to my shock.

I’ve been trying to break down the reasons why, and here is what I’ve got:

• The whole movie was carried by a genuine awkwardness, not the faux manufactured awkwardness that you usually get in these movies which is generally Zany + Thriftstore + marijuana = awkward.

• The characters for instance are genuinely awkward and unpolished types, not supermodels wearing knit caps, fitted t-shirts and giant glasses playing adorkable.

• There is a real ambiguity to the film’s message and perspective. The tone of these films is generally: we’re screw-ups but come on, we’re so much cooler than anyone else on the screen.  There is none of that smugness here. Aura is lost and slightly out of control and there is nothing attractively outlaw about her struggle.  She’s not actually “right” in her flailing, she is just finding herself.

• The other films of this genre tend to tip their hands with their directing style, adding in every possible shakycam moment, goofy angle, blurry naturalistic lighting.  The result is that it feels like a movie not just about the lost artist character but actually made by that character, so that whatever lip service the film may give to pretending to see through the character’s self-justifications and entitlement, you always know where the film really stands. It is hipster filmmaking about hipsters, for hipsters that never lets you forget there are hipsters at the helm here.  And ultimately the effect of all that is to keep you from looking too close at the thinness of the story or the vacuity of the characters.  Pay no attention to the man in front of the curtain, those films say.

• Tiny Furniture instead plays it stylisitically straight.  No jigglycam. No weird lighting or Antonioni-homaging silent vignettes.  Just tells the story and lets you get to know the characters, just like the good old days, and let’s you decide for yourself what you think of them.

• The supporting cast is perfectly cast and totally believable in their roles and again, don’t just look like a bunch of slumming catalog models.  They are uniformly hilarious while completely believable and recognizable, without a single true caricature in the bunch.

The Rushfield Babylon Recommendation: Definitely worth a Netflix stream 

In the lower lefthand corner, I have mapped out America's Road To Woody Allen National Treasure for you →

THE TEN LEAST ANTICIPATED FILMS OF 2012

10. The Phantom Menace in 3D: Go visit  a dumpster behind your nearest Subway.  Pick out a half-eaten Turkey and Jalepeno Melt.  Leave the maggots in place. Take the sandwich home and blowtorch a crust of cane sugar over it and then smother it in a bowl of beef gravy.  Put a post-it note on it that says “Enhanced!”  and take it to your neighbor’s house and at gunpoint, force your neighbor to give you 40 dollars to watch his children eat it.  This will be the experience of the release of The Phantom Menace in 3D.

9. Outrun.  Directed by Dax Shepard and David Palmer. Starring Kristen Bell and Bradley Cooper.
This movie is flashing more warning signs than the highway into Chernobyl.  Just a few of them as quoted here:
• Dax Shepard “pulled triple duty for ‘Outrun,’ acting, writing and co-directing.” 
• The film is about a couple played by Shepard and real-life fiance Kristin Bell on the run across America during which, “ the duo meet a variety of zany characters along the way.”
• [W]e asked all of our friends to be involved, all of our actor friends,” Bell said. 
• “it’s like ‘Smokey and the Bandit,’ Sundance Style.” 
• “Shepard and Palmer also co-directed the 2010 spoof film ‘Brother’s Justice.’”

8. This Means War: Letting McG direct a comedy is like letting  Tickle Me Elmo lead the American forces to war in Afganistan.

7. W.E.   Holy Duke of Wellington.  Madonna not only thinks she is British now, she thinks she is a countess too.

6. Scary Movie 5.  The Weinstein Company is apparently telling people with a straight face that this installment is a “reboot” of the Scary Movie francise.  The Reboot concept has now officially jumped over the shark, water-skiied straight out to sea, got swallowed by a whale and coughed up on Pleasure Island.

5. The Avengers. Take all of the loudest, most bloated, portentous action franchises, put them together and what have you got?  A year of leaked costume photos, first looks at the villans, character one sheets and Burger King tie-ins.

4. Total Recall:  What is not bad about this?  The director of several Underworld films remaking a Paul Verhoeven movie?   I’m sure they will tell us it’s not a remake, they went to the original Philip K Dick source material for a new imagineering of the tale.  

3. Dark Shadows. When can we stop pretending that one of these Tim Burton movies might be good ever again?    Johnny Depp mugging. Spooky Elfman carnival music.  People with white faces and their hair standing up.  Will you ever be able to fall asleep in the dark again?

2. Battleship.  So we’ve got this board game we gotta turn into a movie, but once we get the battleships floating around in the ocean part down, what the hell are we going to do with them?  
- I got it! How about aliens invading the Earth and wanting to kill all of humanity?
- Hmmm…I like it, but it just sounds a little…familiar?
- What do you mean?
- Aliens wanting to destroy the Earth?  Haven’t we seen that before?
- I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
- Wasn’t there Battle: Los Angeles?
- In 2012?
- I think it was maybe last year…
- Last year?
- 2011?
- What the hell does that have to do with a movie for the summer of 2012?  Do you think our audience is going to be filled with Jeopardy champions who remember what they saw in 2011?
- And V…Falling Skies, War of the Worlds, Transformers,  Independence Day… 
- It’s apples and oranges.
- How is that?
- Because none of those fought a board game.
- You got me there.
- You mean I sunk your battleship?
- Yes, exactly. 

1. Titanic 3D.  The sum of all fears.  Think of all the subtleties you missed in two hours of Jack and Rose and two hours of drowning death snuff film.  All the little moments of torture we didn’t catch the first time around.  Now with this extra third dimension, every square millimeter of wooden acting, excruciating dialoge and human suffering will be drilled to the back of your eyeballs from where no force known to man shall ever dislodge it.  Actually, playing with dimensions on this might not be the worst idea; if they could figure out how to show Titanic in 1D it might not be half bad.  A decent compromise at least with the Titanic ideal of No D.

0. Moonrise Kingdom, but I have no words left for this one.

Honorable mentions: Rock of Ages, Men in Black 3,  What to Expect When You’re Expecting,  Red Dawn, 

BOOK REPORT: SPIES OF THE BALKANS by Alan Furst

No one captures the melancholy loneliness of life during wartime like Furst.  The worth heir to Graham Greene and Le Carre.  This is my third Furst and they are all great, thrilling and heartbreaking - if always a bit more meandering then either of his two predecessors.  This depiction of the outbreak of WW2 in Greece brings to life a mostly forgotten front of the great conflict.

The Rushfield Babylon Recommendation: Very solid 

BOOK REPORT: DEFEAT by Phillipe-Paul De Segur

It shouldn’t be sad to see tyrants stumble, but still it kind of is. As much as you know that conquering Europe is a bad thing, the rise of Bonaparte from obscure Corsican foot soldier, to head of the French army, to ruler of the whole nation, to conquerer of all the ancient crowned dynasties still ranks as a singular ascent.  In European history only Joseph Stalin can claim to have come from so little to so much, not only taking over his country but leading a beaten down ramshackle country to conquer a good portion of the world.  Hitler overran a lot but his conquest was only stable for the merest blink of the eye before the decline began; it was more like a rabid dog running amok than a true stable ascent. 

Of course, Stalin died with his crown firmly on his head and his empire at its height, proving that not all gamblers eventually run out of luck.  (It worked out okay for Mao as well). Such was not Napoleon’s fate and this book, written by his aide de camp, tells the story of when fortune suddenly desserted its most beloved child.

Napoleon up close in this book is, if you can forget about the conquering Europe thing, a pretty likable little dictator.  He’s always got a kind word for his troops and can’t stand to see them punished, keeps his head up in the worst crisis.  He’s not even very much of a tyrant and his generals talk back to him constantly and ignore his orders.  I guess that gets to the root of what’s appealing about Napoleon, that in contrast to the old armies and nations of Europe where every inch of your career was determined by your birth, he created the first great hierarchy of the talented and the energetic in his army, with the most fluid structure ever seen in Europe, giving his commanders huge autonomy to press the battle as they saw fit.  Unlike Stalin who was ruled tyrannically over small and and more democratic states, Napoleon’s enemies were no great heroes by and large and much as we can’t approve of that invading stuff, there are no tears shed for the Hapsburgs like there were for the people of occupied Poland for 40 years.

If you are a fan of disaster porn - the horrific details of a great, well laid plan gone horribly wrong this book will not disappoint with its vivid descriptions of the gruesomeness of Napoleon’s retreat and what his men when through as the greatest army Europe had ever seen was flayed to death by the cold, hunger and pillaging cossacks. Any book of history that makes illustrates how easily the fate of the world could have been different is okay by me: if Napoleon’s temper has not been quite so restless, if he had stayed put for a few more months in Poland, he might well have wrung a treaty out of the tsar.  And if the empire had survived…one can easily see ripple effects all the way to the present.  Germany would never have unified. Which would have meant there might not have been a Franco-Prussian war, which produced the lingering resentments on the part of the French over the Alsace which produced the First World War, which produced not only the Bolshevik revolution but the lingering resentments on the part of the Germans which led to the Second World War. Onto the Cold War.  So if Napoleon had just sat tight for a few months, 200 years of peace and harmony would have been ours.  

Of course, just because those wars didn’t happen, doesn’t mean other wars would have, as they surely would have. Napoleon deserves none of your tears but the collapse of such a dynamo is always, somehow poignant as Richard the Third first showed us.

The Rushfield Babylon Recommendation: Highly. 

BRIEF BOOK REPORT: Sacred by Dennis Lehane

This is the third of Lehane’s Kenzie and Gennaro series.  There’s a lot I enjoy about these books.  I like the Gen X realism of the detectives, the plotting also moves forward pretty forcefully and the mysteries are skillfully woven.

But there’s a lot that bugs me about these books too: the plots while well constructed always take a swan dive into heavy gothic territory which is wildly for me at odds with the casual tone of the rest of the books and thus even harder to swallow then it might normally be.  Kenzie also has an annoying habit of dropping literary references as though somebody at the Lehane shop feels the need to remind you that even though it’s a detective novel, he really is smart.  

Also, I’m not sure how I feel about a couple who are romantically involved solving crimes together.  There is going to come a day when you’re going to have to make a hard choice between catching a murderer and letting your partner die in the trap he or she has stumbled into.  That day comes to us all and when it does, we can’t be conflicted about the need to let our partner die; the murderer must be stopped or more will die and if one life has to be lost - particularly the life of someone who should’ve known better than to go into that house without back up - so that several people in the future won’t be killed, that’s how it has to be.

Rushfield Babylon recommendation: Very mildly recommended. Very very mildly.

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Marjorie Hakala Gives You 7 Reasons to Read A Dance to the Music of Time →

millionsmillions:

Reason #1: They are unique.

Reason #2: They’re playfully, livably literary

Reason #3: Do you like England? These books are completely, uniquely, and ineluctably English.

Reason #4: They are wonderfully funny.

Reason #5: There is a judicious amount of world history.

Reason #6: Widmerpool.

Reason #7: The books are both discreet and entertainingly frank.

These books will explain to you everything that ever happens to you in your life.  You should read the series once a decade as a sort of users guide to growing old.  I did it a decade ago with a group, reading a volume a month and we had a DTTMOT costume dinner at the end of the 12 month cycle.  My favorite literary memory of all time.

(I came as Trapnel)