Category Archives: Pop Culture

Minimalism, Michael Mann and Miami Vice

Public Enemies“Public Enemies,” the new film about the notorious bank robber John Dillinger, is an amazing movie. Then again, I freely confess a predisposition to liking the work of its director, Michael Mann. I’ve seen nearly every movie he’s released, and there’s not a single one of them that I’ve found to be less than completely engrossing.

Over the course of his career, Mann has produced a taut, stylistic and often brutally impersonal filmography that seems most interested in the concept of work. His movies are preoccupied with how men (almost always men) of extraordinary skills practice their craft — and the price they must pay for doing so. “Public Enemies” is no exception, and for those who are expecting a florid character portrait set in a bygone era, make no mistake: this movie is about how John Dillinger robbed banks and about how G-men hunted him down, and only that. It is resolutely disinterested in its principal subjects’ family backgrounds, romantic histories or psychological makeups.

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“Up” Is Really Down a Little

UpI saw Disney Pixar’s “Up” last night at New York’s famously outsized Ziegfeld Theater, where the audience was shockingly sparse. Only half of the seats in the house were filled, if that, which I found to be amazing and, for a Saturday evening show at one of the city’s premier cinema houses, somewhat appalling too. To be sure, Pixar films do well, and “Up” is well on its way to a healthy profit. But adjusted for ticket price inflation, the movie’s opening weekend gross makes it only the fifth-best performing of all of Pixar’s theatrical releases.

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Muxtape Pushes Play Again

MuxtapeIn its original form, Muxtape, the still-influential and, at the time, insufficiently legal music sharing site was a service for users to load and share playlists of their own music. Since its demise last year, it’s been greatly missed.

In its latest incarnation, launched last week, Muxtape has been re-imagined as a service for bands, allowing them to assemble and customize promotional pages (including their own playlists) from stock parts. (For now, bands can only participate if invited by other bands.) It’s a radical makeover, but if you were to overhaul the now-iconic Muxtape 1.0, this would be a very sensible way to do it.

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Horsey

This cover for the second record from Swedish chanteuse Frida Hyvönen really shouldn’t work. The comically wild typesetting for the word “wild,” the bland inset layout, the histrionic equine imagery, the leopard print… nearly everything about it offends my sensibilities. And yet I think it’s really something amazing, a piece of design that transcends pretension and slips into ‘art’ without fuss. I want it blown up big and framed on my wall. And the music is good, too.

Frida Hyvönen

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Watchmen in Greater Detail

WatchmenI’m completely unqualified to objectively judge director Zack Snyder’s film adaptation of “Watchmen” because, between the ages of fifteen and sixteen, I formed a lasting and surely prejudicing bond with the original Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons comic books. While most of my schoolmates were preoccupied with less insular pursuits, I paid good teenage cash for each issue of the mini-series as it was published, rapturously devouring each chapter and patiently, faithfully enduring the long publishing delays that beset the series between chapters.

In spite of all the growing up I’ve done since, all the revelations and disillusions that I’ve been through, I’ve never lost an ounce of admiration or affection for the “Watchmen” story or its characters. For twenty-plus years, I’ve considered it one of the most thrilling, satisfying experiences I’ve had with popular art; it’s still among the best things I’ve ever read.

This then predisposed me to an approving regard for the movie before even taking my seat in the theater last night; as long as what followed was minimally half-good, competent and moderately intelligent, I was sure to be pleased. As it turns out, I enjoyed it not just a little but ecstatically, too. I found it utterly engrossing if glaringly imperfect, and surprisingly smart if heavily grandiose.

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The Award for Best Super-hero Movie Goes to…

In keeping with a personal tradition, I’ll once again be sparing myself hours of excruciating boredom by not watching tonight’s 81st Academy Awards on television. If you know me, then you know that I’m an unabashed enthusiast for the movies. But I do everything that I can to keep the Oscars at a distance. I don’t just avoid watching them, though. I also try to avoid paying attention to them as best I can.

Still, it’s been hard not to notice that Christopher Nolan’s epic popcorn blockbuster “The Dark Knight” was somewhat flagrantly stiff-armed in this year’s nominating process. True, the movie received eight nominations — including best art direction and cinematography, and an almost surefire nod to Heath Ledger for best supporting actor — but it was also snubbed for best picture and best director. Here’s a movie that not only broke box office records and earned plaudits from audiences all over the globe, but it was also praised by no shortage of serious critics as a significant elevation of the admittedly limited super-hero genre. In every way that matters for popular entertainment, it was one of the most important — and best — films of 2008. To fail to acknowledge “The Dark Knight” or its director accordingly is, to me, just more evidence that the Academy Awards is a credible measure of nothing other than timid fickleness.

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Live Music Is Dead to Me

As digital media facilitates our increasing disconnection from the old paradigms for how popular music is consumed — physical distribution is on its last legs, ‘albums’ as a concept are less convincing than ever, and the pay model is fitfully molting its old ways — I wonder whether our attitudes towards live performances are changing as well.

A little more than a decade ago (yikes) I was a pretty heavy patron of live music, seeing at least two shows a week in small clubs in Washington, DC, where I lived at the time. Perhaps I watched too many mediocre bands within too short a time span, but it only took me a few years to develop a powerful distaste for the trappings of live performances: the unnecessarily deafening volume levels, the perpetual discomfort of standing on your feet for hours, the juvenile shenanigans of bands who like to keep their audiences waiting interminably — for no apparent reason other than they’re really incredibly immature, insecure pretenders to artistry. Blech. That’s not for me anymore.

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Game On

Back in 2007, during the initial burst of enthusiasm for the Wii, I bought one, thinking that perhaps there was the soul of a gamer lying dormant inside me. After playing with it for several months, though, I essentially got bored, and haven’t much touched it recently. Today it sits in my living room, hooked up but usually forgotten.

In spite of this inability to muster a sustained interest in video games, I’m savvy enough at least to recognize that very interesting things are happening in that world. As a point of reference for interaction design — for design of every kind — I’m convinced that games represent an important new paradigm that people, like me, pay insufficient attention to at our own peril.

Forget design, even. As a subset of our culture, video games are clearly headed to center of the conversation, where it’s not inconceivable that one day they might shoulder aside old media mainstays like television and newspapers, or even eclipse plain-vanilla Interweb browsing. The inherent power of the concept of play shouldn’t be underestimated.

There’s no shortage of intelligent thinking about this field being written in all corners of the Web. For someone like me though, who remains essentially disconnected from gaming, validation still bubbles up through the mainstream media. And lately, I’ve been noticing increasingly thoughtful writing about video games in some of my favorite publications.

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Reading Is Fundamental, Steve

Earlier this year, I quietly set out to prove Steve Jobs wrong. You may remember what I’m talking about: in that inimitably dismissive way that he has, the Apple CEO rejected the idea that the Amazon Kindle held much promise, contending that “Americans don’t read anymore.” It wasn’t that I wanted to prove him wrong on the Kindle (a product for which I find it hard to muster much enthusiasm). Rather, I wanted to disprove at least for myself his statement that “the fact is that people don’t read anymore.”

Jobs argued, “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.” But somewhere along the way I got it in my head that to really prove anything to, well, myself, then I’d have to read a book a month, at least. So it’s two-thirds of the way through the year now. Here’s my progress.

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