Random Observations from A Tale of Ice And Fire

Observations on A Song of Ice and Fire - massive, careless spoilers. As in literally, I just talk liberally about all four books, so yeah, stay away if you haven't read the books.

#1. Is Arya a "psychotic?" (No)

"'Is there gold in the village?' she shouted as she drove the blade up through his back. 'Is there silver? Gems?' She stabbed twice more. 'Is there food? Where is Lord Beric?' She was on top of him by then, still stabbing. 'Where did he go? How many men were with him? How many knights? How many bowmen? How many? How many? How many? How many? How many? How many? Is there gold in the village?'" - A Storm of Swords

Weirdly enough, I always connect Arya's journey to two Christian Bale movies: Empire of the Sun and Batman Begins.

Arya is a hardened, devastated, bitter, vengeful 11-year-old girl who has killed more people than most people twice her age, but she's not a psychopath; psychopathic tendencies are mostly innate, but she's purely a product of her environment. She isn't Sansa, who's coping with her best attributes - charm, tractability, meekness - she's discovered the power of brute force, and she's made the journey from willful little girl to a brutal, realistic war survivor. Complete with John Malkovich character.

And as someone whose world has been destroyed through murder and injustice - her father executed with a lie, her mother and brother slaughtered without honor or mercy - she's the classic self-appointed vigilante who regards the world around her as a place without honor or justice. The justice system is broken in her eyes, and it can no longer be relied on after failing her and her family so utterly. Naturally, she pursues her own unique brand of justice instead. She still has honor, certainly, but it fits the dog-eat-dog style of her environment, more anarchic than the genteel form of honor that undid her family. She learns this lesson much more quickly than Cat, who if you notice, also turns to a ruthless style of justice after her world collapses. In fact, Catelyn has arguably further gone than Arya, considering the fact that Catelyn is a fully-grown woman and has rejected a lifetime of principles. Arya can also be compared to Sansa, who is also learning to survive the hard way, albeit with different skills suited to her environment. Arya's irrevocably changed by her experiences, as any war survivor may be, perhaps damaged, but she isn't lost, by a long shot. I can't wait to see how her story turns out.

#2: Why are all the Tully children so inept?

Catelyn is a well-intentioned and intelligent, but she is the mother of all trainwrecks, being truly her husband's wife. She seizes Tyrion Lannister on the road without giving a modicum to the thought that it's not the best idea to kidnap the son of the oh, MOST POWERFUL HOUSE in the seven kingdoms. I know you're pissed off about your son, but how about a little consulting or even restraining oneself from making spur-of-the-moment decisions that will obviously have powerful reverberations? Ultimately, Catelyn does everything out of love for her children, but these acts have a habit of having a worse effect on her family than anything else. Also frees her worst enemy, Jaime Lannister, during a moment of extreme vulnerability, which is the dumbest fucking idea in the entire world, even for a woman who is mourning for her murdered sons. Did she honestly, honestly believe that he would even have it in his power to return her girls to her? I respect Catelyn and her late fate in the books is kind of awesome, but she is such a naive and reckless dumbass. Seriously.

Lysa is in plain terms, utterly batshit. She's a simpering, inept, deluded weakling who is arguably much to blame for the War of the Five Kings, and all for a man who has clearly only loved her sister, and does not give a flying fuck for her. Lysa's many notable acts, all of them crazier than the last, include, 1) being infatuated with said man and persisting in the facade of his love, though she has always known that he doesn't care for her. Evidence: When Robert Baratheon accidentally uttered the name of his true love "Lyanna" while lying with Cersei, it killed any possibility of love or affection in their relationship. The same thing happened to Lysa, more or less, only it had the opposite effect. 2) poisoning her husband on the command of her lover, and pinning the blame on others, planting suspicions that trigger a freaking war 3) continuing to breastfeed her child even though he's already EIGHT FUCKING YEARS OLD 4) refusing to aid her own family despite the immense resources and arsenal at her command, for pretty much no reason at all. This one pissed me off the most, because it doesn't really matter what deranged crap she gets up to in her home, but this had the most dire impact. It is really not okay to stay neutral and stay lalalalala when your only sister's children are lost, missing, captured or dead, and the rest of your family is getting massacred and their cause going the same way. What the fuck do you do in your spare time, anyway? Oh yeah, 5) stalking your loveless husband and trying to push your 13-year-old niece, who is as far as you know, possibly the only remaining blood relative you have in the world - off a castle because you saw your husband give her a kiss in the garden.

Edmure Tully

Also a royal screw-up. A screwup in the battlefield (you know you can't do anything right when you end up apologizing to your sixteen-year-old nephew and promising to make amends), whines entirely way too much in a period of warfare (nobody gives a shit who you marry), complains about everyone else, makes inept threats (next time for starters, try NOT being in a bathtub when you threaten to kill a dude), falls for Jamie Lannister's entirely raw deal. Edmure, do you really think that your worthless life is worth your family's ancient stronghold and the sacrifice of your badass uncle, who is one of the greatest characters in the series as well as the only Tully that's not a complete inept fool? Use your brains. They can't kill your unborn child because it's half-Frey and the only heir to a powerful house, and it would serve the Freys better off alive than dead, and you'll have to spend the rest of your life as a Lannister servant anyway. YOU WITLESS COWARD. Even some of the things he does that's entirely not his fault - like bedding your new bride while her brothers are butchering your relatives downstairs - is indicative of his general cluelessness and futility.

So Edmure is more or less slave to his greatest enemy, Catelyn is undead, Lysa is murdered by her own husband, and justifiably so. Brindyn "Blackfish" Tully, their aged, formidable uncle who is possibly the only character in the series that possesses both deadly good sense and unshakeable loyalty and honor, is on the run thanks to his useless nephew.

Forget it. I was all for the Starks/Tullys but the latter house really doesn't deserve to survive, to an extent. There's the good-hearted loveable fool, like an 11-year-old Neville Longbottom, and then there's the really really exasperatingly stupid gobsmacking incompetent fool of questionable morality that makes you go, "eh, probably would be more beneficial to evolution if they're just all wiped out, anyway."

Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire

I've seen all episodes so far in Game of Thrones and I've read three of the books and spoiled all of them beforehand on Wikipedia. I couldn't resist.

I love it. It's everything I've always loved in big, sprawling epics; the political intrigue and machinery and intricate plotting and ruthless scheming, huge battles without the boring details, exhilarating twists and breathless tension and a mad, mad pace.

I read somewhere that George RR Martin used to be a tv writer, and it certainly seems like that in his books - he's no Tolkien, whose painstaking and near-obsessive attention to detail has so far derailed me from finishing the The Two Towers (I promised myself to read all three LOTR books this summer, but it's just....difficult to get through without my eyes glazing over, to be perfectly honest). The suspense and building up of scenes are perfect, and though the writing is occasionally cheesy and inelegant, it's just such a good story.

Martin based the stories off the War of Roses (Lancasters and Yorks = Lannisters and Starks, though the similarities mostly end there) and other major feuds in English history. And it certainly feels like it. The absolutely fascinating dynamics between the different noble houses and the scheming towards the throne is uncannily representative of medieval English politics - the persistent threat of rebellion and chaos always hanging overhead; the (at times literal) backstabbing and allegiances switching in the blink of an eye, an entire war ended by a single sword or orchestrated by a few letters, the power struggles, the greed and inevitable desperation - I just love it.

And the characters! I wouldn't say that the characters are especially outstanding - sometimes they seem to meld with one another - but the humanity is so present and the drama so compelling that you're glued to the characters at all times. I became emotionally invested in most of the characters' fates - and boy, are there many of them - it took me a long time to actually put everything together and remember everyone's names, even - and the emotional stakes feel real and utterly convincing. The backstories and flashbacks are as fascinating as the present, and everything intertwines - weaving past, present, characters a thousand leagues apart to predecessors a century before - beautifully. Even reading the thing on Wikipedia was enthralling and exhilarating.

And Christ, is Martin BRUTAL with them. This isn't Harry Potter or LOTR or Narnia, where aside from a few token minor characters' death, everyone else's safety is pretty much guaranteed and you basically have to root for them. It's a war, plain and simple, and a POV character may be wiped out ruthlessly without warning. They're the source of most of the WTF moments in the books, and have simultaneously pushed away and attracted readers. One of my favorite bloggers stopped halfway through the third book after one after reading one particularly infamous chapter, claiming that said part was nothing short of a "violent act against the reader". It's pretty incredible testament to Martin's emotional efficiency, though, to have readers to be so affected by a fictional character's fate that countless readers have either set aside the books or at least paused, either because they needed to recover from the emotional toll or were disenchanted. No death is senseless or gratuitous, in my opinion. You always, always see the core of it - you can trace the origin of the character's downfall, you see cause and consequence reverberate and the clues are right there, mapped out in the chapters. You understand why this person died, and how it will impact others or shift the course of the game. It's brilliant, really.

Me, I'm a sucker for anything that draws me emotionally, and it's most impressive of all when it can hurt me. This is particularly hard with fantasy. Not even the deaths in Harry Potter affected me or surprised me; I loved all the characters, but they were still so removed. Usually, when a major character is wiped out, I actually don't care that much, but Martin is so vivid and sick that I consider it a great privilege to actually feel so much over a character's death.

But IMO, I think the first thing to understand in the books is that death is one of the major characters in the book. I think Martin effectively conjures up the atmosphere of the Middle Ages - why the fleeting chance of glory is so sweet, why anyone would welcome the chance to go to war to certain death. Death is always around the corner for every character, whether it's a peasant boy senselessly executed for no purpose at all, a musician who becomes a nobleman's scapegoat, a king's throat slit. The knowledge that "winter is coming" - the grim, endlessly repeated motto of the Starks - is a given. Living in constant fear is the only rational state of being. Whenever my mind drifted away from the books (and that happened very rarely), all I could think of was Hobbes' "life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". That's the essence of this cold, cruel, epic world of Martin's. You can't figure out what's worse, battling the wild elements in the bleak and solitary, ice-strewn land of the North, or caught in the political webs of the South. Each is just as unpredictable and unfeeling, and murderous as the other.

Still, I got to the certain part where my blogger stopped reading, though, and I almost cried. I had known about it beforehand, but when I read it, I was so affected that I actually fell into a deep melancholic state afterwards. The nature of the tragedy echoed the deaths of other historical characters that had possessed me as a kid, like the story of Lady Jane Grey or Richard III - the themes and details of their downfalls were beyond the average deaths; the way they died, and why, is simply unforgettable. I couldn't get it out of my mind, and it broke my heart. I'll talk about it in some other post. Oh, and the rest of the time I was just consumed with the desire for all-out revenge for certain characters.

The fifth book comes on July 12th. Can't wait.

Oh, and the series are badass too. The actors are sublime and everything feels in-place and nothing cheesy. Tasteful - not emotionally absent like Boardwalk Empire or silly and exasperating like True Blood. Unlike True Blood, GOT actually reveals answers (Martin's also great at that - the answers are often unexpected and surprise you, but you actually get real, concrete answers to the plots and whodunnits. No existential angst here). Speaking of which, I'll probably start watching True Blood again, but if someone asked me what had happened in the last three seasons, I'd have to admit that I don't have a fucking clue. That show is SO incoherent.

Summer Movie Schedule

First, two notes: 1) it is my female and cinephilic duty to go see Bridesmaids. Am already behind. 2) I am boycotting Pirates 4 and Transformers 3.

May 20 - Midnight in Paris (Even more behind!)

May 27 - The Tree of Life (#omygawedddddabahahahaazomggfuckyeah)

June 3 - X-Men: First Class. (Wait. Realistically speaking, I'll probably end up catching it online.)

June 10 - Super 8

June 21 + 28 - I got tickets to see the extended versions of Lord of the Rings (The Two Towers and Return of the King, respectively) in theaters this summer! booyah

July 15 - CANNOT. DEAL.

......And then, um, I don't see anything particularly interesting until October. That's ok. The summer's more interesting than I initially imagined, even with all the unspeakable sequels.

No Oscar predictions on the horizon. Last year continually surprised everyone with the onslaught of pretty good/great movies that started in summer (The Kids Are All Right, Inceptions), but it feels like slim pickings this year. The movies that have dominated the conversation aren't the usual Oscar fare. And the releases of November/December (peak Oscar season) are somewhat worrying, as they're all family adventures or thrillers (Tintin, Happy Feet 2, Mission Impossible, the Muppets movie). Hopefully the announcement of more releases will assuage these concerns.

Alexander McQueen Exhibit at the Met

Mesmerizing, humbling, transporting, spooky.

See it.

Critics are agonizing

......over the Tree of Life and I love it. Well, not really flipping out, but the reactions are extremely divided (oh, like no one was expecting that….). The movie premiered early Monday morning in Cannes and ended to dramatic boos and scattered applause, and while there’s a general consensus that why yes, this movie is a visual orgasm because did you not realize that this is Terrence Malick and there are dinosaurs and visions of primordial Earth and God knows what else in the movie, everyone seems to either hate it or worship it in equal measure.

Weirdly enough, the initial frenzy of Tweets sent immediately after the screening succinctly summed up the gist of the polarized reactions:

“As beautiful as TREE OF LIFE is, it’s pretentious drivel of the worst Cannes kind.”

“Tree of Life is naive, pretentious, hypnotic, enthralling and absolutely unmissable.”

“Utterly mesmerising first hour, slightly listless second, generally unmissable”

“visually breathtaking and technically masterful, but excruciatingly drawn out and annoyingly pretentious”

“A glorified perfume ad” Ow.

“Tree of Life just ended, and it’s a very sad and beautiful…wank? The ultimate refutation of narrative? An interminable tone poem?”

“Tree of Life is a prayer.”

and my favorite:

“….sad to report that Samuel L. Jackson does not show up after the credits. Unclear as to how Tree of Life fits into The Avengers.”

A month to goooooo.

Authenticity in Acting

Taking a break from my English paper for some rambling thoughts on authenticity and experience. It must be the caffeine in my blood - I'm not a big coffee drinker.

Where was I? Oh yes. Just thinking about what kind of movies I like and it somehow progressed to an internal monologue on actors, as always. I was thinking about the difference between the movies that romanticize and the movies that stir far deeper emotions. Generally, the movies deemed the greatest (Citizen Kane, The Godfather, etc.) have a tendency to leave an romantic impact that leaves the viewer mostly unharmed. Movies are fake, of course, but they can make a genuine and personal connection to the viewer, but the ones that mine the deepest are usually too strange or subjective to be universally praised. All the movies I've truly loved - Bright Star, a random Korean war movie, something else - have left me deeply hurt or vulnerable. And I don't mean "general crying and sorrowful emotions for the character", though that occasionally is the case - but rather something that settles in me and feels much stranger and stronger than conventional reactions. A couple of Jane Campion's movies, for instance, unearths this intangible longing, some sense of beauty and loss that - as strange as it sounds, and I'm not a particularly religious person - brings me closer to something like holiness, and I become so unbearably and inexplicably sad that I have to go distract myself. Other moments from movies of mixed quality stay with me over time and wound me in a way I can't even acknowledge. And most of the time I end up scolding myself, but I feel like I can be so easily seduced by cheaply romantic moments. That's why I love movies so much, and aren't we all? But I think that these rarer moments can count as authentic ones, because they always pass and I can't get quite the same feeling again from watching the movie. Or is that a contradiction? Ugh, it's frustrating.

That was the first part of my thought. Then in a bizarre way, I started transitioning from thinking about authenticity in movies to authenticity in actors. Take Kristen Stewart. She and a host of other young, precocious actors are undeniably good and sensitive, but they seem incapable of mining any deeper force of emotion. And though it's all about "good acting", I truly think that great acting has always been able to draw on genuine experience and emotion. All the great actors - from Brando to Dustin Hoffman and Greta Garbo to Meryl Streep - have in common slightly fucked-up early lives that surely lent authenticity to their performances. And I started thinking about Kristen Stewart's constant moping and angst in movies - and how strange, because isn't angst an emotion that's natural but insubstantial, and in our modern culture, mocked for being increasingly fetishized? She may be a smart, sensitive individual who's generally in tune with her emotions, but my theory is that she doesn't have the requisite pain of true experience. She's had too much of a good life insofar. As much as she defines herself as apart from the celebrity sphere, she's still part of the lifestyle and the inevitable complacency and coddling that irons out any surface-level angst pretty quickly. She, like other child performers, may have experienced a taste of pain and open emotions during childhood, but child emotions are just fundamentally different in expression than adult emotions. That's why, in my opinion, so many child actors are inferior adult actors, even if they are successful. Wisdom can't be cultivated through contrivance, and what was originally deemed precocity becomes a static quality that drags you down if it isn't expanded through natural progress. In my opinion, Anna Paquin has given the same exact "precocious" and child-like performance for the past fifteen years or so, I have a feeling that Dakota Fanning will head the same way.

Well, that was an exquisitely unorganized thought process - I was basically shitting my brains out onto the internet, but oh well, that's what a personal blog is for.

Caroline's Sweater

The NYtimes did a profile on the knitter behind the miraculous mini-garments featured in Coraline. Not sure why, but it was certainly enjoyable. The sea-themed sweater at 1:19 blows my mind.

Sigh......Coraline, what an outstanding movie. One of my best friends and I love that movie so much, and we especially love Coraline's rocking star-spangled sweater. Evil Mother sure has good taste. I've even desperately scoured the internet to find a life-size version of it - surely a knitter somewhere saw the movie and decided to capitalize on it????

But no luck. But I love my friend and the sweater enough that I've decided that sometime in the future, I'm going to get that sweater custom-made, and give it to her as a gift. She'd be absolutely bonkers about it.

Older = Sentimental?

Saw Jane Eyre for the second time today and it was thankfully quiet the whole way through, though I did miss the raucous enthusiasm of the first screening. No one burst into applause or cheering when Jane and Rochester kissed, and no one said "YOU GO GIRL!" A bit disappointing, I must admit.

There were a lot of elderly couples here, and I noticed after the screening that about a third of them remained in their seats, and I was intensely curious to find out what they were thinking. Did they just usually sit there because they usually liked to ponder the movie they had just watched, or had the movie touched them so intensely that that they were having some serious flashbacks and rushes of sentimentalism?

I'm growing more sentimental as I'm getting older, and it's worrying me a lot. And not just "more sensitive to the cares of the world" or anything productive. I'm listening to the Phantom of the Opera, something I once couldn't abide for its unbearable cheesiness, a LOT recently. I can't stop feeling touched when I listen to "That's All I Ask of You" or "The Music of the Night". I sigh when Christine sings "Say you love me" and Raoul passionately bellows (but tenderly!) "you know I do.....". I cried the other night when I re-read Wuthering Heights. I'm afraid that I'm becoming an incurable romantic, something I disdained from my younger days as a tomboy to high school, when I advised my English class to pick husbands that could provide them with alimony. I think I need help.

Most Anticipated Performances of 2011

Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender in a "A Dangerous Method"

Michelle Williams in "My Week With Marilyn"

Rooney Mara in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"

Kirsten Dunst in "Melancholia" (just the thought of Dunst paired with Lars Von Trier is so surreal. I gotta see what happens)

Jessica Chastain in "The Tree of Life"

Marion Cotillard and Rachel McAdams in "Midnight in Paris"

Greta Gerwig in "Arthur"

Remembering A Beloved Class

Sometimes I look back at my AP Art History class and miss it like crazy. I love college and this semester's classes are great, but there are 2-3 certain classes I took in high school that were simply unmatched in their brilliance and vibrancy. AP Art History was one of them. I may not have always enjoyed (okay, mostly I resented) memorizing fifty pieces of art in one night for a test the next day, but how wonderful the discussions were, how amazing it was to literally see your perspective of an art piece morph before your eyes as the teacher described its qualities and altered the way you saw art forever. I actually even enjoyed taking the AP test *cough nerd*.

It's amazing how much I still reference the lessons and the art pieces we learned. My psych professor talked about modern art in our last lecture, and I brought up the Venus of Willendorf to make a point about culture in my english seminar the other day. A very close friend and fellow art-lover (we sat in AP Art History together) is coming in April and the first thing we shall do, certainly, is hit up some art museums and argue about Rococo (she adores it, I find it nauseating) and obsess over our old art history teacher. Can't wait.

From top to bottom: "Mrs Fiske Warren and Her Daughter'", John Singer Sargent. "Venus of Willendorf", unknown. "Nighthawks", Edward Hopper. "Judith Slaying Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileshi

*For instance, my teacher would be absolutely ashamed by the fact that I've cited the paintings without their full information, something I always got points off in our tests. I just can't do dates for art, okay?

But everyone should take an art history class at one point in their lives or another. It's one of the best things you can do.

Jezebel: Mad Men Won't Be Coming Back Anytime Soon

Jezebel reports:

There's good news and bad news for Mad Men fans. Creator Matt Weiner is working on a deal that would extend the show through a fifth and sixth season, but negations are taking so long that we won't be spending Sundays with Don and Joan this summer. In fact, production may be so delayed that the program won't come back until 2012.

However, the drama surrounding the show is already in full swing, as rumors have been flying about the state of negotiations for weeks. From Weiner's perspective, he deserves a hefty sum because the show is a massive critical hit that's responsible for reviving AMC. Yet, since the network has been able to develop other original series like Breaking Bad andThe Walking Dead, it's now less reliant onMad Men. (And due to the fact that Americans are more interested in the zombie apocalypse than a '60s advertising agency, The Walking Dead already has twice as many viewers as Mad Men.)

Hah. Last sentence so true. But does this mean that all I'll have to watch this summer is True Blood? COME ON! By last July, I was looking forward more to Mad Men each week than I was to Alexander Skarsgard's alternately naked glory. True Story.

The Curious Case of Robert Pattinson

Dear Robert Pattinson,

In light of the new much-buzzed agonized spread in Vanity Fair, WE GET IT. You have mixed feelings about the whole Twilight thing. On one hand it's gained you everything most people have ever dreamed of - fame, millions, an undeserved but unquestionably iconic place in movie history, innumerable fans who adore you with all their hearts and would conceivably lie down in the middle of the road if you asked (seriously. ugh). But the role has also "typecast" you and the celebrity limelight is doing weird things to your mind, and all you want is to be taken as a serious actor and also be able to sit down in a pub and toss back a drink without a riot breaking down, amirite.

But seriously. You've always come off as an intelligent, sincere young guy with an appealing and charismatic demeanor, even if I think you're not a very special actor. But seriously, I can't help but scoff when you have five bajillion interviews coming out per year where in each one, you whine to the interviewer about how you want your life to be more private and then spend the rest of the day strolling the streets with the interviewer and basically treating them like your new BFF and granting your rabid fanbase to an exclusive insight into A Day In the Life of Robert Pattinson. Even I admit to being totally riveted when I read your interviews, even though I think you're a terribly bland actor. Therein lies the problem. It's like you are disgusted at all the attention, but in reality all you want to do is show people that you really are a cool human being with a soul who does charming antics and even has a dirty sense of humor to boot, oh how precious of him!

Well, YOU CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS. If you really want to "prove yourself", giving interviews that are more far interesting than any of your performances is not helpful at all. You cannot whine about your privacy when, honestly, we don't need paparazzi or cameras in your situation - you give us all the dirt we need.

It's not exactly private when you present a near goddamn psychological case study of yourself in Vanity Fairy, causing fangirls to boo-hoo over your mental state and Roger Ebert to publicly express his sympathies. You claims to be protective of your life, but I swear there's almost nothing you haven't revealed to magazines, save your romantic life. You're neurotically open to interviewers (that's what a shrink is for, honey), and tells them things I wouldn't tell my casual acquaintances much less international publications, for god's sake. It's like, get a LOAD of this. With this outpouring of intimate and emotional details to millions of readers worldwide, you REALLY don't get why your fans become ever-increasingly obsessed about your life? Let me make it short: YOU SHARE TOO MUCH, DEAR. Stop with the telling. Get with the showing.

Pull your shit together and stop blabbing. As anyone knows, if you pick good movies that people want to see, then they will see it, regardless of whether you appear on that month's Vanity Fair or not. Christian Bale never does late-night talk shows hosts (much to my chagrin back when I was a huge devotee), and he seems to be doing okay. I know you really want to show off your intelligence and sensitivity and humor or whatnot, but no one really gives a shit except for the fangirls, and so it's only adding more fuel to the fire.

Btw, that cover really says "leave me alone, give me my own space" and not "look at me how fine I am with this alligator and smoldering glare". Goodness you are frustrating.

Come Soon, Spring

A few of my favorite spring/summer snapshots from The Sartorialist. It's almost April but it's forty degrees outside. I'm ready again for warm breezes and spring fashion.

Ah, spring!

Favorite Movie Scenes #1: Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)

Favorite Movie Scenes: #1

I’m starting a series of my favorite scenes from movies. First entry: Manhattan (1979, Woody Allen).

The inherent problem with this series, though, is that the moments are best viewed in the context of the movie. Seeing it as stand-alone clip doesn’t do it justice unless you understand its relevance within the story.

In this case however, the opening scene of “Manhattan”, a montage of New York set to the gorgeous swells of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, stands on its own as a masterpiece.

[music: the opening of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Voiceover]
“Chapter One. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion. Eh uh, no, make that he, he romanticized it all out of proportion. Better. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. Uh, no, let me start this over.

Chapter One: He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him, New York meant beautiful women and street smart guys who seemed to know all the angles. Ah, corny, too corny for, you know, my taste. Let me, let me try and make it more profound.

Chapter One: He adored New York City. To him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams in - no, it’s gonna be too preachy, I mean, you know, let’s face it, I wanna sell some books here.

Chapter One: He adored New York City. Although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage - too angry. I don’t want to be angry.

Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. Oh, I love this.

New York was his town, and it always would be.”

Favorite Movies of 2010

Goodness gracious, I'd feel bad about getting out a 2010 wrap-up in the middle of March, but I choose to blame all these film companies that didn't release their prime Oscar-bait until December. I simply haven't had the time to get around to everything! And TBH, I'm not nearly dedicated as some I know to see every movie that comes out, so yes, I rely on the end of the year top-10 lists from all the publications to help me decide what to watch.

So the best movies I've seen of 2010 don't add up to ten overall, but I don't think that reflects less the quality of this year's movie than just my own limited intake.

1. Animal Kingdom

Most people just know it as a vehicle for Jacki Weaver's Oscar-nominated performance, but I didn't expect the rest of the movie or the other performances to be so damn good. You know one of these movies that never makes a single false move, where each moment is perfectly calibrated, and the movie takes you in during the first scene and the slow-burning momentum doesn't cease until the final second, when everything falls into place? Animal Kingdom is one of those. it's almost perfect.

Characters flit in and out of scenes, sometimes lasting for scarcely ten minutes of screentime, others are ruthlessly killed off (it is a crime drama, after all) but the human impact is never lost. You barely know who to turn your sympathies towards but you still feel towards everyone all the same. The violence is key to the story, but never feels desensitized or gratuitous. Oh, it's SO good. I love it.

2. The Social Network

I still have major problems with this movie, most of which have to do with Aaron Sorkin's glib and in many ways cheap stylization of a truly fascinating story, with what the laughable ending and somewhat ignorant/shallow/egotist perspective of the whole thing ("he wants to distinguish himself in a school full of people who got 1600s on their SATs!" "this movie is absolutely true!" "it's about how the internet is alienating a generation!"), but I really don't want to say much else about it because I feel like I've spent the last four or five months expressing the lady-boner I have for the directing/styling work from Fincher and the thrilling performances of the cast, in particular Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield (my massive crushes on those two actors doesn't hurt, either). Despite its major writing flaws, it's still hella memorable, exhilarating, and phenomenally executed.

3. How to Train Your Dragon

It's "one of these movies" where you don't realize how good it is until you've watched it for the fifth or sixth time and realized that it's still so much fun to watch. There are a lot of movies nowadays with a couple magnificent/slick visual scenes and little attention paid to whether the rest of the story sticks, but this isn't one of them. It works on every level, and I love all the details - Hiccup's brainy tech skills, every movement or expression Toothless makes, the perfected Gen-Y dialogue of the side characters ("Oh, I'm hurt! I'm very much hurt!" or "Isn't it weird to think that your hand was inside a dragon, like if your mind was still in control of it, you could have killed the dragon from the inside by crushing its heart or something?"

4. Winter's Bone

On some level, I guess that it could be this year's American equivalent of Animal Kingdom. They're both modern stories that evoke primal, very essential struggles - human survival at its most basic and bleakest. There's something greater at stake here. But there's a really stark beauty and compulsion to the story that makes the movie so pleasurable, and a richness in thematic content that makes it truly epic. And like AK, it's just some very fine storytelling.

5. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I

Loved the slow-burning pace. Loved the overall cohesion, the imposition of thoughtful details, daring sequences (Tale of the Three Brothers, anyone?) and one or two scenes that admittedly should have been cut but added an interesting layer nonetheless. Loved the action scenes and occasionally thrilling/frightening showpieces and the moodiness that in itself was faithful to the spirit of the first half of the 7th book. It means SO much to me that a Harry Potter movie can stand on its own. This is the second HP movie in the series that I've actually loved and respected - the first was the previous Half-Blood Prince.

Apart from those, I really liked True Grit, Fish Tank, Tangled, The Fighter, The Kids Are All Right, and Black Swan.

Favorite Scenes of 2010:

True Grit: Beginning sequence and midnight ride

Black Swan: Last fifteen minutes

The Social Network: hacking sequence, "Do i have your attention?","Lawyer up", meeting Sean Parker, the regatta sequence

How to Train Your Dragon: first flight, toothless and hiccup connect, opening scene,

The Kids Are All Right: Every scene that involves a family meal

The Fighter: Porch scene with Charlene and Dicky

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Beginning sequence, Ministry of Magic infiltration, graveyard, The Tale of the Three Brothers

Underwhelmed of 2010: Eat Pray Love, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, Toy Story 3 (SUE ME), Inception (ditto), Easy A