mountain sounds: a sort of autobiography

All of us were born to create. It’s as natural as breath, as necessary as food, as comforting as sleep. We grew up drawing pictures, singing songs, staging plays, but we kept growing, and we found ourselves working in banks, managing retail shops, selling insurance. The only singing we do now is in cars piddling along in rush hour traffic. We sleep less, and eat on the run; we forget to breathe.

Mountain Sounds is both a rejection and a reversal. It’s a step away from what we’ve become and back towards who we were. It could never have existed with anything less.

are we voting with our dollars or just lying to ourselves?

I think it’s safe to say that the feel-good pseudo-activism of informed purchasing has gotten entirely out of hand. I’m not casting stones; I’m guilty of patting myself on the back for picking the right bananas and brand of shampoo too. I’m just saying that it’s time we stop convincing ourselves we’re doing “our part” when we buy from companies we agree with and shun the ones we don’t, because, simply, we’re not. Doing our part, that is. We’re maybe doing a teensy, tiny, modicum of a fraction of the first percent of our part, but that’s about it, and we need to recognize and accept that fact.

We should be uncomfortable about it. We should pretty much be uncomfortable all the time. I believe that. Things aren’t good, life’s not fair, people are being taken advantage of and hurt, people are starving, people are sick. More than half the people in Guatemala live on less than $1.52 a day, but I’m sitting on my 86″ mid-century modern sofa in boxers, belly full of sushi, typing on a Macbook, listening to Spotify through headphones with micro-fleece-lined memory foam earcups. That, strictly speaking, ain’t right, and I shouldn’t feel okay about it just because the fish I ate were sustainably harvested and my delicious rye lager was brewed locally.

natural selection – micro review

Flawed but thoroughly enjoyable, Natural Selection spices up the standard buddy road trip genre with a pair of strange, broken, and truly original characters that I positively adored. Rachael Harris plays Linda, the sweetly innocent, deeply religious yet caring and open-minded middle-aged woman trying to reunite her hospitalized husband with the son she never knew he had, while Matt O’Leary plays the son Raymond, a drug addict escaped convict on the lam. Both actors do positively amazing work, showing tremendous range as they handle comedy and heartbreak with equal aplomb.

what in the world are YOU doing at the movies?

You. Yes, you, Miss, with the phone. What are you doing here? Why are you at this movie? You got here twenty minutes late. You sat down and watched the movie for five minutes before you got out your Blackberry and started typing furiously on its antiquated (and noisy) physical keyboard. You got up half an hour later in the middle of some intense and very-necessary-to-the-plot dialogue only to come back after ten minutes with a pile of popcorn and no idea what you missed. That’s cool, though; just ask me, the stranger six seats over, to summarize it for you! While you’re eating and texting and ignoring everything about the movie you paid money to see!

Seriously, what are you DOING here? It’s Thursday afternoon, not Friday night when your loneliness typically compels you to do something, anything outside of the house. And we’re seeing – well, I’m seeing, you’re mostly just in the general vicinity of Jeff, Who Lives at Home, the quiet, introspective little indie dramedy literally no one is talking about, not The Hunger Games or Spiderman or Explosion of the CGI World 2: The 3Dequel. This isn’t exactly water cooler material, here. You won’t be horribly out of the loop on Twitter if you don’t catch this one, and you’re obviously not here to actually watch the movie, so why, why, WHY in the world are you sitting next to me in this theater right now?

hell hath no fury: revisiting the ‘star wars’ prequels

“I have a bad feeling about this.” – Obi-Wan Kenobi in The Phantom Menace & Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker in Attack of the Clones, Luke Skywalker in A New Hope, Han Solo in A New Hope & Return of the Jedi, Princess Leia in The Empire Strikes Back, C-3PO in Return of the Jedi, and me, Tim Hoyt, before re-watching the Star Wars prequels for the first time since their initial theatrical runs.

I watch a lot of really good movies, some pretty good movies, and even the occasional just okay movie, but very rarely do I willingly subject myself to an actually bad movie unless it’s a so-bad-it’s-good kind of a thing. Recently, however, that’s changed, as I just finished watching three really bad movies in as many days. If you’re wondering why I would do such a thing to myself, you’re not alone, so I’ll just tell you: I was feeling guilty about the possibly baseless ridicule I had been heaping on that bane of movie geeks everywhere, the Star Wars trilogy… of prequels. Not that I seriously doubted the validity of such trash talk, mind you, but as nearly thirteen years had passed since I’d seen the first installment as a fifteen-year-old kid, I figured my vitriol might be in need of a refresher just in case. It had also been almost ten years since I’d seen Episode II and seven since Episode III, and while I was confident that they were unquestionably bad movies, I was no longer able to say just how bad with any certainty. After all, I’ve changed a lot in those long, prequel-less years: my tastes have changed, I’ve been exposed to more films and more diverse styles of filmmaking, and my once dull critical senses have (hopefully) sharpened a bit.

And so, with motivations more clearly defined than those of any character in the entirety of Episodes I – III, I considered the challenge before me:

i implore (most of) you to go see john carter!

Let us first acknowledge a basic conceit: there are those among us who enjoy stories about four-armed green martians, massive airships that float on light, and silver medallions that magically transport people from planet to planet, and those that don’t. Neither of these views is necessarily right, though I’d venture that those who fall into the latter camp might be having a bit less fun than those of us in the former; still, taste is taste. There are people in the world who just plain cannot get into a movie like John Carter, and I won’t begrudge them that.

I will, however, point out that the following paragraphs are written by a person who very much can get into those sorts of stories, who in fact looks forward to being captivated and transported by those kinds of stories, and who therefore will be wasting neither his own time nor anyone else’s by analyzing this film based on the plausibility of things like a ninth ray that is the source of all life. Sometimes there are just ninth rays that are the source of all life, okay? Sometimes there are rings of power and one ring that rules them all. Sometimes there’s a Force that surrounds us and penetrates us and binds the galaxy together. (Which, for the record, can most certainly not be explained by microscopic life forms that reside within the cells of all living things and communicate with said Force. I reject all such deceitful oversimplifications as outright blasphemy more suited to the crappy last season of Lost than this far more nuanced discussion.)

in defense of consumption

All the enlightened people will tell it to you straight: consumerism is bad for the world, man, and I’m inclined to agree. Nearly every good thing has been cheapened by commodification, from art to food to sex, so that our every waking moment is packed, stuffed to the brim, an endless cornucopia of imitation rubbish cynically made to serve no purpose besides profit. But that story’s been told, and told, and told, and I’ve got nothing to add to it. So I’m here for something completely different. I’m here to defend consumption. Not the colloquial term for tuberculosis, mind you; that consumption can go straight to hell. As can the consumption that requires going to malls – real ones made of bricks, or internet ones made of zeros and ones and lowercase i’s – and swiping credit cards and filling bags and always accumulating, accumulating, accumulating. That consumption, though it may be inexorably linked to our modern way of life, warrants no defense, and all but the economists among us would probably agree that less of it would be a pretty cool thing for the world.

friends with kids

As young adults become just regular adults, inevitably picking up spouses and kids along the way, they, um, become kind of lame. Would that still happen if two really close but 100% platonic friends decided to have and raise a child together while still living (and dating) apart? That’s the central question of writer/director/star Jennifer Westfeldt’s Friends With Kids, a pleasant but frustrating romantic comedy also starring Adam Scott and a bunch of people from Bridesmaids. The high concept is fertile ground for comedy, and both Westfeldt’s snappy screenplay and her excellent cast of fellow comedic actors deliver more than enough laughs. Unfortunately, the film struggles under the weight of having heart, as it simply leaves way too much unaddressed to truly succeed in that regard. 

tolkien on art, violence, the human condition, and much, much more

The following is an excerpt from J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Foreword to the Second Edition’ of The Fellowship of the Ring. I find it to be a truly stunning morsel worth reading and re-reading again and again in order to allow ample time for all its wisdom to sink in. In a few simple paragraphs he deals with several topics worthy of many lengthy discussions I’d love to have, so please, read on.

As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical. As the story grew it put down roots (into the past) and threw out unexpected branches: but its main theme was settled from the outset by the inevitable choice of the Ring as the link between it and The Hobbit. The crucial chapter, ‘The Shadow of the Past’, is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted. Its sources are things long before in mind, or in some cases already written, and little or nothing in it was modified by the war that began in 1939 or its sequels.

‘The Artist’ and the real best picture

Months before it picked up Academy Awards for Best Direction and Best Picture, a strange sort of backlash for The Artist was already well underway. We pretty much all enjoyed the film, but in retrospect, it felt a bit too meaningless, a bit too much like empty cotton candy fun for us to be okay with it taking home such serious awards, which is actually kind of a stupid way to feel when you consider what other movies have – and more importantly, have not – won these awards in the past. And yet, in a relatively weird movie year, nobody was quite sure what should’ve been winning the awards in its place, so come Oscar night, win it did. We were all kind of annoyed, but not really, because, whatever.