Song of a Reformed Headhunter

On Sunday, celebrated New York Pride by having brunch with WL, CC, DM, and PB at Philip Marie. After brunch we watched the parade and saw the Resist and Gays Against Guns contingents. GH left for Standard Hotel's Pool Party, and DM and PB left soon after. WL, CC and I had drinks at French Roast and then watched more of the parade along 5th Ave, after which we had dinner at Rasa. Good day. I still think it's important to support the parade. At night, GH and I watched Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King (1991).  Jeff Bridges was very good at a suicidal radio DJ and so was Robin Williams as a deranged homeless man. Today I've been reading Elie Wiesel's memoir The Sea Is Never Full . In its absolute uniqueness, the Holocaust, which Wiesel prefers to call the Event, cannot be described or shown. It is on the other side of language and image. Also, the tension between Jews living in Israel and those living in the Diaspora.

Watched a slew of movies during Thanksgiving stay with Ty and Di. On Wednesday, when we arrived, we watched an hour of the stand-up comedian Louis C. K., before turning in.  Across the Universe  (2007), directed by Julie Taymor, is visually entrancing, although the boy-meets-girl story is all too predictable. The fun here is hearing the Beatles songs mesh with the loosey-goosey plot. Evan Rachel Wood plays upper-class American Lucy and Jim Sturgess plays the working class Liverpudlian Jude. Another visual entertainer, but in a very different way, Getting Go, the Go Doc Project  (2013) is framed as a video documentary by a college student named Doc (Tanner Cohen), of his crush on NYC go-go dancer Go (Matthew Camp). Written and directed by Cory Krueckeberg, this is a better gay movie than most. The acting is believable. I love all the split-screens and frames-within-frames that convey the multiplicity and simultaneity of on-line life. After this, I'm off to stalk Matthew...

Less than impressed by this re-make of a John Wayne classic, both adapted from a Charles Portis novel of the same name. Good acting from Jeff Bridges (Rooster Cogburn), Hailee Steinfeld (Mattie Ross), Matt Damon (LaBouef), and Josh Brolin (Tom Chaney). Beautiful cinematography by Roger Deakins. Sympathetic score by Carter Burwell. But the story is just so-so. Young girl hunts for her father's killer with the reluctant help of a drunken U.S. Marshal and an insecure Texas Ranger. As was expected of me, I admired Mattie's gumption, appreciated Rooster's dishonorable honor, and liked LaBouef's show-off. And I was mildly bored, because these characters did not surprise me or themselves. If this is a Western classic, no wonder the genre has never had much appeal for me. I have read reviews that try to see the film as a postmodernist take on the genre, but that interpretation does not persuade me. What is left in me is a couple of surrealistic, non-essential scenes. The man ha...