Missing the Train

The Subway Crush site might be new, but the experience -- and documentation -- of sudden strong feelings among underground commuters isn't.  This passage from Subwayland by Randy Kennedy describes the work of a man named Neil Goldberg, who would wait on subway platforms with a Sony handheld video camera for the sole purpose of filming the facial expressions of MTA passengers who missed their train:

Most interesting and striking in some of the 17 hours of footage Mr. Goldberg has taken so far is the way that commuters briefly let down their subway masks, allow their faces to register real emotion and then, realizing where they are, quickly bring the masks back up again.

"It makes it almost hard for me to watch sometimes," Mr. Goldberg said in his studio, where he will eventually distill the hours of recorded faces into probably five minutes of pure disappointment.  "Somehow, it's almost sad."

Soggy Pie

I very briefly met Wong Kar-wai earlier this week. He exuded cool and didn't take off his sunglasses; I was not disappointed.  Yesterday I saw My Blueberry Nights. It was awful -- actively, laughably bad. Oh well.  Maybe next year's effort will be better. 

Oh The Things You Will See!

This past weekend marked the birthday of Dr. Seuss, who was writing ad copy ("Standard Oil Company hired him to create monsters that live in the car, and he created the Moto-raspus, the Moto-munchus, and the Karbo-nockus") until 1937, when he published the book that would launch his career: And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street. Though Theodor Geisel's Mulberry Street is in Massachusetts, the strange sights of New York's own Mulberry Street have likewise provided considerable creative inspiration to many -- as evidenced by Mulberry Street, the movie, in which virulent rats turn people into zombies with their bites (Variety definitively named it "a cut above most zero-budget horrors"). I saw it at the Tribeca Film Festival last May, and I can assure you it delivers all the horror it promises. Out on DVD mid-March!

Same Difference

So I finally saw There Will Be Blood. Terrific movie; incredible soundtrack! Hooray! But the real highlight of my cinematic experience took place during the previews -- more specifically, during the trailer for The Duchess (starring Keira Knightley) when Leah cried out in anguish, "Another fucking Natalie Portman movie?" Amen.

Heath Ledger's Death

Yesterday I didn't really feel like writing about Heath Ledger, who was found dead a few blocks from my apartment in the early evening. But here's a quick dispatch: Yes, there was a mob of reporters and fans and rubber-neckers in the vicinty (“because of the way our generation is" one girl told the New York Times, "we sort of feel we’re a part of each other’s lives”). Yes, all the Heath Ledger movies were checked out of Cinema Nolita last night (or so I overheard). Yes, it's tragic.

Say, I Like Farts As Much As the Next Gal

From my email archives. "Alice Wrigley: Gal Reporter," a video by my brother's friend's li'l sis. This one never fails to make me laugh.

One Glass Productions

Just a big congrats to the ladies over at the fledgling One Glass Productions. In August, they treated us all to a $7 open bar and screening of a showcase of shorts to mark the launch of their company.  This morning, Valery writes in an email,  "Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that the music video my company (One Glass Productions) made for DAWN LANDES is being BROADCASTED in the UK! At this very moment!" For those of us stuck on this side of the pond, however, YouTube will have to suffice.  Take a look!

It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's ... Hanuman?

Two related stories about mythology-inspired comic books and cartoons in India come from my Mom; as a kid who grew up devouring classic Amar Chitra Katha titles, I have mixed feelings on some of these new trends (though I get that "It's absurd to be purist about one of pop culture's most pleasingly bastard and vulgar forms," as my former professor Sukhdev Sandhu puts it). This story from NPR features Indian animators at Virgin Comics who are riffing on Hindu mythological tales in their work. Though I don't think Virulents (in which a regenerating rakshasa is discovered by American troops in modern-day Afghanistan) is to my taste, I think it's good news that a country that has long prized (and profited from) rote memorization is seeing the growth of companies that encourage such imaginative originality. I have similar feelings about feature-films like "The Return of Hanuman," in which the title deity "is reborn as a boy who goes to school in khaki shorts, uses a computer, combats pollution and, most important, smashes the bad guys to pulp." Again, yay for creative hybridity (as in this fantastic Indianized Spider-Man comic -- reviewed by Sandhu -- starring one Pavitr Prabhakar in a spider-suit with a dhoti)! And yay for elements of an ancient culture being perpetuated in novel ways (that aren't grossly offensive). But there's also a lot to be said for simply passing on the timeless tales of Hindu lore -- in all their unrevised rich intricacy -- without necessarily trying to "update" them. (Call me old-fashioned? ... ) One way or another, with the Indian animation industry (now said to be worth $285 million) projected to boom to a worth of $1 billion by 2010 (according to the Washington Post), this story may have just started.

Marjane, not Miffy

I had been looking forward to the film adaptation of Persepolis ever since a friend introduced me to Marjane Satrapi's work but Anthony Lane's unimpressed review of the film (he writes, "I was left with the nagging, if ungallant, impression that I had been flipping through a wipe-clean board book entitled 'Miffy and Friends Play with Islamic Fundamentalism") dampened my enthusiasm a bit. That said, I was pretty sure I wanted to see it anyway.  And hey! It was really excellent! Plain and simple.