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Where The Wild Things Aren't

Check out the comments below this review for my heated discussion with 13-year film critic Glenn Kenny on “Wild Things”.

The Sixth Borough

by Jonathan Safran Foer Once upon a time, New York City had a Sixth Borough. You won’t read about it in any of the history books, because there’s nothing — save for the circumstantial evidence in Central Park — to prove that it was there at all. Which makes its existence very easy to dismiss. Especially in a time like this one, when the world is so unpredictable, and it takes all of one’s resources just to get by in the present tense. But even though most people will say they have no time or reason to believe in the Sixth Borough, and don’t believe in the Sixth Borough, they will still use the word ”believe.” The Sixth Borough was an island, separated from Manhattan by a thin body of water, whose narrowest crossing happened to equal the world’s long jump record, such that exactly one person on earth could go from Manhattan to the Sixth Borough without getting wet. A huge party was made of the yearly leap. Bagels were strung from island to island on special spaghetti, samosas were bowled at baguettes, Greek salads were thrown like confetti. The children of New York captured fireflies in glass jars, which they floated between the boroughs. The bugs would slowly asphyxiate, flickering rapidly for their last few minutes of life. If it was timed right, the river shimmered as the jumper crossed it. When the time finally came, the long jumper would run the entire width of Manhattan. New Yorkers rooted him on from opposite sides of the street, from the windows of their apartments and offices, from the branches of the trees. And when he leapt, New Yorkers cheered from the banks of both Manhattan and the Sixth Borough, cheering on the jumper, and cheering on each other. For those few moments that the jumper was in the air, every New Yorker felt capable of flight. Or perhaps ”suspension” is a better word. Because what was so inspiring about the leap was not how the jumper got from one borough to the other, but how he stayed between them for so long. One year — many, many years ago — the end of the jumper’s big toe touched the surface of the water and caused a little ripple. People gasped, as the ripple traveled out from the Sixth Borough back toward Manhattan, knocking the jars of fireflies against one another like wind chimes. ”You must have gotten a bad start!” a Manhattan councilman hollered from across the water. The jumper nodded no, more confused than ashamed. ”You had the wind in your face,” a Sixth Borough councilman suggested, offering a towel for the jumper’s foot. The jumper shook his head. ”Perhaps he ate too much for lunch,” said one onlooker to another. ”Or maybe he’s past his prime,” said another, who’d brought his kids to watch the leap. ”I bet his heart wasn’t in it,” said another. ”You just can’t expect to jump that far without some serious feeling.” ”No,” the jumper said to all of the speculation. ”None of that’s right. I jumped just fine.” The revelation traveled across the onlookers like the ripple caused by the toe, and when the mayor of New York City spoke it aloud, everyone sighed in agreement: ”The Sixth Borough is moving.” Each year after, a few inches at a time, the Sixth Borough receded from New York. One year, the long jumper’s entire foot got wet, and after a number of years, his shin, and after many, many years — so many years that no one could even remember what it was like to celebrate without anxiety — the jumper had to reach out his arms and grab at the Sixth Borough fully extended, and then, sadly, he couldn’t touch it at all. The eight bridges between Manhattan and the Sixth Borough strained and finally crumbled, one at a time, into the water. The tunnels were pulled too thin to hold anything at all. The phone and electrical lines snapped, requiring Sixth Boroughers to revert to old-fashioned technologies, most of which resembled children’s toys: they used magnifying glasses to reheat their carry-out; they folded important documents into paper airplanes and threw them from one office building window into another; those fireflies in glass jars, which had once been used merely for decorative purposes during the festivals of the leap, were now found in every room of every apartment, taking the place of artificial light. The very same engineers who dealt with the Leaning Tower of Pisa were brought over to assess the situation. ”It wants to go,” they said. ”Well, what can you say about that?” the mayor of New York asked. To which they replied, ”There’s nothing to say about that.” Of course they tried to save it. Although ”save” might not be the right word, as it did seem to want to go. Maybe ”detain” is the right word. Chains were moored to the banks of the islands, but the links soon snapped. Concrete pilings were poured around the perimeter of the Sixth Borough, but they, too, failed. Harnesses failed, magnets failed, even prayer failed. Young friends, whose string-and-tin-can phone extended from island to island, had to pay out more and more string, as if letting kites go higher and higher. ”It’s getting almost impossible to hear you,” said the young girl from her bedroom in Manhattan, as she squinted through a pair of her father’s binoculars, trying to find her friend’s window. ”I’ll holler if I have to,” said her friend from his bedroom in the Sixth Borough, aiming last birthday’s telescope at her apartment. The string between them grew incredibly long, so long it had to be extended with many other strings tied together: the wind of his yo-yo, the pull from her talking doll, the twine that had fastened his father’s diary, the waxy string that had kept her grandmother’s pearls around her neck and off the floor, the thread that had separated his great-uncle’s childhood quilt from a pile of rags. Contained within everything they shared with one another were the yo-yo, the doll, the diary, the necklace, and the quilt. They had more and more to tell each other, and less and less string. The boy asked the girl to say ”I love you” into her can, giving her no further explanation. And she didn’t ask for any, or say, ”That’s silly” or ”We’re too young for love” or even suggest that she was saying ”I love you” because he asked her to. Her words traveled the yo-yo, the doll, the diary, the necklace, the quilt, the clothesline, the birthday present, the harp, the tea bag, the table lamp, the tennis racket, the hem of the skirt he one day should have pulled from her body . The boy covered his can with a lid, removed it from the string, and put her love from him on a shelf in his closet. Of course, he could never open the can, because then he would lose its contents. It was enough just to know that it was there. Some, like that boy’s family, wouldn’t leave the Sixth Borough. Some said: ”Why should we? It’s the rest of the world that’s moving. Our borough is fixed. Let them leave Manhattan.” How can you prove someone like that wrong? And who would want to? For most Sixth Boroughers, though, there was no question of refusing to accept the obvious, just as there was no underlying stubbornness, or principle, or bravery. They just didn’t want to go. They liked their lives and didn’t want to change. So they floated away, one inch at a time. All of which brings us to Central Park. Central Park didn’t used to be where it now is. It used to rest squarely in the center of the Sixth Borough; it was the joy of the borough, its heart. But once it was clear that the Sixth Borough was receding for good, that it couldn’t be saved or detained, it was decided, by New York City referendum, to salvage the park. (The vote was unanimous. Even the most obdurate Sixth Boroughers acknowledged what must be done.) Enormous hooks were driven deep into ground, and the park was pulled, by the people of New York, like a rug across a floor, from the Sixth Borough into Manhattan. Children were allowed to lie down on the park as it was being moved. This was considered a concession, although no one knew why a concession was necessary, or why it was to children that this concession must be made. The biggest fireworks show in history lighted the skies of New York City that night, and the Philharmonic played its heart out. The children of New York lay on their backs, body to body, filling every inch of the park as if it had been designed for them and that moment. The fireworks sprinkled down, dissolving in the air just before they reached the ground, and the children were pulled, one inch and one second at a time, into Manhattan and adulthood. By the time the park found its current resting place, every single one of the children had fallen asleep, and the park was a mosaic of their dreams. Some hollered out, some smiled unconsciously, some were perfectly still. Was there really a Sixth Borough? There’s no irrefutable evidence. There’s nothing that could convince someone who doesn’t want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to: in the peculiar fossil record of Central Park, in the incongruous pH level of the reservoir, in the placement of certain tanks at the zoo (which correspond to the holes left by the gigantic hooks that pulled the park from borough to borough). There is a tree — just 24 paces due east from the entrance to the merry-go-round — into whose trunk are carved two names. They don’t appear in any phone book or census. They are absent from all hospital and tax and voting records. There is no evidence whatsoever of their existence, other than the proclamation on the tree. Here’s a fact: no less than 5 percent of the names carved into the trees of Central Park are of unknown origin. As all of the Sixth Borough’s documents floated away with the Sixth Borough, we will never be able to prove that those names belonged to residents of the Sixth Borough, and were carved when Central Park still resided there, instead of in Manhattan. So some believe that they are made-up names and, to take the doubt a step further, that the gestures of love were made-up gestures. Others believe other things. But it’s hard for anyone, even the most cynical of cynics, to spend more than a few minutes in Central Park without feeling that he or she is experiencing some tense in addition to just the present. Maybe it’s our own nostalgia for what’s past, or our own hopes for what’s to come. Or maybe it’s the residue of the dreams from that night the park was moved, when all of the children of New York City exercised their subconsciouses at once. Maybe we miss what they had lost, and yearn for what they wanted. There’s a gigantic hole in the middle of the Sixth Borough where Central Park used to be. As the island moves across the planet, it acts like a frame, displaying what lies beneath it. The Sixth Borough is now in Antarctica. The sidewalks are covered in ice, the stained glass of the public library is straining under the weight of the snow. There are frozen fountains in frozen neighborhood parks, where frozen children are frozen at the peaks of their swings—the frozen ropes holding them in flight. The tzitzit of frozen little Jewish boys are frozen, as are the strands of their frozen mothers’ frozen wigs. Livery horses are frozen mid-trot, flea-market vendors are frozen mid-haggle, middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilty and innocent. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying. On a frozen shelf, in a closet frozen shut, is a can with a voice inside it.

"Well then, I must be King Kong."

Quentin Tarantino’s main strength is not his visual style, his knowledge of films, or even his dialogue, as intelligent and razor sharp as it is. His most accomplished talent as a film maker is his understanding of the audience.

Consider the scene in Inglourious Basterds that takes place in the tavern basement.

(WARNING: Spoilers ahead. If you didn’t see the movie yet, don’t read on! It will ruin one of the best scenes in it).

You have at least 20 to 30 minutes of long, drawn out conversation punctuated by a meager 10 seconds of action at the end. Now, in any other movie, the audience would feel shortchanged. Why the hell sit through all that boring crap for not even a decent minute of great action? And the action is definitely great. That one tiny sequence is better than every single fighting scene from both Transformers combined, visual effects and all. But as you watch the scene end, you don’t feel jipped, you feel satisfied, like you just witnessed a great scene that will undoubtedly become a milestone of great movie scenes. How did he do it?

Let’s break it down: There are the two German-speaking Basterds pretending to be Nazis, the British agent pretending to be a Nazi with a weird accent, and the German actress/spy relaying them the info. Then, a wrench is thrown in the gears of their plan when an actual Nazi officer unexpectedly joins them and finds something fishy with the British dude’s unplaceable accent. The tension has begun. The Nazi plays it cool and they have a friendly game of 20 questions while the frustration, impatience, and questions of “does he know what i know and does he know that i know that he knows” underneath just builds and builds. Finally, the British officer has had enough and he outright tries to kick the Nazi out of their table. The Nazi counters and still plays it cool and calm. All the while, the tension is being tightened like a guitar string, ready to burst at any moment. Then, finally, the guns are drawn and that beautiful sequence of 1 second cuts are blasted in rapid succession.

Now, what Tarantino displays here is not his love for the spectacle. What he practices is an incredible amount of restraint. He’s constantly messing with the audience’s expections. In Resoivoir Dogs, he never shows the heist and yet, there’s still so much excitement and twists that come with great heist movies. In Death Proof, he makes the first half long, boring, and introduces characters that you immediately hate, only to brutally kill them in what should be a refreshing and relieving scene but is suddenly too grotesque to really feel all that good about. In Basterds, he deliberately holds back what the audience wants, which is a great action sequence, knowing FULL WELL that by keeping it from them, they know to expect it. And despite this, he holds it back further and refuses to give it prematurely or even on time. Most directors will simply build the adequate amount of tension and then deliver the goods, which would not be some measly 10 second sequence. Most directors would build the tension for about 5 minutes just so they could release all the stops and have a blast choreographing a glorious 20 minute shoot out. But Tarantino does the exact opposite. He relishes the half hour of tension pulling and feasts on the build up. Rather than focusing his attention on the shootout, he choreographs every single nuance and intricacy of the conversation and puts it together like it’s the most important part… because it is! The richness of the dialogue is the actual meal that you can chew on; the small bite-sized action at the end is merely an after-dinner snack. Most action is junk food anyway. What he knows that most directors don’t is that audiences don’t want to be catered to, they want to be challenged.

It takes balls to pull off a scene like that. And that’s what he does pretty much all throughout the movie. He knows the audience so well because he HIMSELF is the audience. He’s been watching movies his whole life and he knows the filmic language fowards, backwards, sideways, and upside down. So many films just pander to you, like giving a dog a bone. Tarantino treats his audience with intelligence and respect and treats them to a well thought out, well planned, well executed, full course meal.

And what a meal it is. Inglourious Basterds is a feast from start to finish. There is just so much to go through and think about and discuss. As i was walking out of the theatre and thinking about what i just saw, i immediately wanted to see it again. And i didn’t even mention Christoph Waltz’s masterful, confident, idiosyncratic, and hilarious performance. I wouldn’t say this is Tarantino’s best, my personal favorite is still Kill Bill Volume 2 (for its melding of genres and stunning conclusion), but it is definitely one of the year’s best and should be watched in a dark theatre with a good friend to talk about it afterwards.

'Funny People' review and a 3-Page Original Screenplay

I saw ‘Funny People’ today and enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I didn’t LOVE it as I thought I would. Maybe I put too much expectation on these movies that I spend a year and a half looking forward to. I was so nervous and excited as the Universal Pictures logo came up to finally be seeing this movie and as I heard the lofi audio of Judd Apatow’s old footage of Adam Sandler making crank calls as a 20-something-year-old, I thought, “Brilliant opening.” And the movie went on and the characters were established and the jokes kept coming and of course, I laughed out loud and was having a good time. Then came the tender moments and the conflicted moments and I was way into it. But the story just never really took off for me. I felt like Ira’s character was too flat and I wanted to see more of the supporting guys and the subplots, especially the romance with Daisy (maybe ‘cause I’m just a fan of Aubrey Plaza). It wasn’t a bad film by any means and it was made with a lot of thought, care, and sincerity that I appreciate from Judd Apatow’s movies but I dunno… The more I think about it, the more I feel that it was a really good movie, but like I said, there was never that moment where it really soared. Like for ‘40-Year-Old Virgin’ and ‘Knocked Up’, I absolutely adored the main characters, was rooting for them all the way, and wanted so bad to be a part of the group when they would just hang out and crack crude jokes. But with this one, I didn’t feel so much of that. Maybe that was the point though? Because George Simmons was such a miserable dude, all alone, and self-loathing. That’s one thing the story did really well: paint a picture of a successful guy who has it all but really has nothing. I felt the emptiness and loneliness. But again, I dunno… I’m still working it out with this movie. I want to like it so bad. But it just doesn’t hit that note for me. And why didn’t they include that part with the Rza where Ira says that joke about Grand Theft Auto??? I was really looking forward to that one. In fact, there were a lot of great jokes I’ve seen in trailers and exclusive clips that were taken out. I’ll just have to wait for the DVD.

I definitely enjoyed the stand-up parts. And this movie got me thinking about stand-up comedy and what it takes to stand up in front of a bunch of people armed with nothing more than a microphone and a couple of jokes. If I could pick any other profession, my top three choices would be: chef, slam poet, and stand-up comic. I just have such a deep appreciation for the art of telling jokes. It’s such a simple thing: set-up, punch-line. Yet executing it is the hardest thing in the world. You gotta be confident, you gotta be unique, you gotta have perfect timing, and you have to be quick on your feet. You gotta have the practice and discipline of a classical musician but the improvisational skill of a jazz musician. I really wanna try it at least once. I know I won’t be that great, much less decent, but I’m still so curious what it’s like to do it. It’s such a different animal from performing with a guitar. Such a different dynamic and mindset. Only problem is… I’m scared to death. Bombing a joke and hearing crickets has got to be right up there with getting shot in the stomach or finding out your dog just died. It’s definitely on my Things To Do Before I Die list.

With all that said, my favorite part in ‘Funny People’ is probably when Ira asks Daisy out. “I guess we Wil…CO to the show then.” “Not anymore…” Cute, awkward, and hilarious. I love scenes like that. So much in fact that I got inspired to write my own! It’s actually something I’ve been meaning to do. Here’s a quick sketch, enjoy:

Right now... now... right... now...

I’m learning how to enjoy the present, which is today, which is now, which is now, which is now… For so much of my life I’ve always looked forward to the future. In hopes of what I’ll finally become and achieve and acquire. I never realized how much of today I was missing out on. I feel this will change my life. I feel this is one of those life changing milestone moments. I feel the need to blog about this.

Yesterday is history.
Tomorrow is a mystery.
Today is a gift (that’s why it’s called the present).

That’s really corny, I know, but I like it.

Silent Fly

What is the universal wordless signal for “your fly is open”?