Barack Obama is the leader we can believe in. I cannot think of a political candidate I've ever wanted in office more; a person whose integrity stands heads and shoulders above the rest; and a man whose choice of words reflects not only a thoughtful individual but one who understands the ripple effects of his choices, both large and small.

I have always been proud of my country. But I am prouder tonight than I've been in a long while.

Undiscovered Country

One of my favorite end-of-year/beginning-of-year features anywhere is Slate's Annual Movie Club. Although writing under the auspices of a well-trafficked web magazine can always be hedged by the knowledge of (critical) readers, SAMC seems to have a freshness, a gentle banter that always helps put movie-going in perspective. (This being said, though I heartily empathize with Dana Stevens's kick-off "war movies conundrum," I found it less enticing than subsequent discussions the group has had over the past few days. Also, even though he shuffled over to New York Magazine last year, where is my beloved Edelstein?!) With Slate's round-up of critics, there's always a sense, too, that optimism is at stake. The hope of seeing a great movie is precisely that which makes us go back to the blackbox theater, or even slush through piles of VHS tapes in the one dollar bin. To find a great movie, we must bear through the rest, or at least have critics tell us which things films worth shelling out greenbacks for. Let it also be noted that there's always the occasional critic whose ideas about movie-making are the complete and total opposite of one's own that we know to love a movie when he/she has slaughtered it.

My point is that there are few great movies of yore (and present) that we encounter nowadays that we haven't had some previous exposure to, or at least some semi-consciousness about. There are so many movies on my list of must-sees -- derived from the lists of hard-core cinephiles -- that I hardly know where to begin. But my parents aren't as bedraggled by the lists of others, and are much more the cinematic risk-takers than I am: so much so that they will walk to our local public library every week to borrow three DVDs, all dependent on what's on the shelves and, they admit, the cover sleeve. Now that I'm on vacation and much of my entertainment is theirs, I was delighted when they came back recently with "Two For the Road". Though a self-proclaimed Audrey Hepburn fan, I had no idea what the movie was or what I was in for. (Then again, how could I pride myself on my personal movie watching cred? I only just saw -- and certainly enjoyed -- the first Indiana Jones this past year!)

But "Two for the Road" is the one movie I watched in 2006 with which I thoroughly fell in love. And not the kind of whimpering, self-effacing love of adolescence, but, rather, the adult version. This year was not so amorous in terms of movie-going for me: I was riveted by "The Queen" and I have yet to see "Children of Men." But traipsing -- and sometimes plundering -- down memory lane with the Wallaces was the best time I'd had since "Eternal Sunshine," not least because of its similar jogs of memory and candor about love. The framework for the film is the French country roads that Joanna (Hepburn) and Mark Wallace (Albert Finney) have traveled together--and the movie is lively and full enough that we can suspend our disbelief about their having taken the same route every time--but their scattered memories of being on the road are interwoven, quite seamlessly. First we see the couple on contemporary, embattled terms, in a plane, about to touch down on France. Then we have the pleasure of seeing them attempt to start their sad sloppy junk of a roadster; and later we see the two, fresh and naive, as they first meet, de-boarding a boat. All the while, we see moments of what was, what is, and an object lesson in how the past can never predict the future, even when the future is already here. (Indeed, such is the case for William Daniels, the man who plays efficiency consultant Howard Manchester, and then later turned out performances every week as Principle Feeny on "Boy Meets World.")

The running gag between them is also the cause of their first meeting -- when Mark loses his passport, Joanna finds it. But what makes this lost-and-found scenario symbolize bumpily married life all too well -- even better than the distraught, mute couples found so often in restaurants (and also refered toby Joel Barish in "Eternal Sunshine" as "the dining dead") -- is the trickery Joanna deploys and Mark's willing forgetfulness. On the plane or in the car Joanna will ask Mark if he has her passport, he'll search frantically when he can't find it, and, a few beats later, Joanna will fish it out of her bag or the glove compartment and hand it to him. Perhaps she does know him better than he knows himself -- such is the moral conveyed -- but it all feels like a set-up in which they both knowingly participate with each other, for each other. She waits just long enough and he is just forgetful enough to make this central metaphor for their relationship so central: she's seriously playful and he absent-mindedly bullish, but they somehow, together, form a unit. They can't live without each other. Perhaps this would be the case of Henry Mancini developed the soundtrack for all of our lives...

The tagline for "Two for the Road," as I discovered from watching the special feature trailers and IMDB, is "They make something wonderful out of being alive!" (as opposed to the imperative of the movie poster above.) It's sad to see the genuine joys of the film be so woefully, so exuberantly mischaracterized. It's not that the Wallaces don't have high highs and adorable affection for one another; it's that all these come in realistic doses wrought by their situations and not, apparently, by the script. Their wonderfulness is not a pre-determined deal, and that's what makes the film so electric -- we do wonder honestly about the couple for there are moments when it seems it just won't work out. Frederic Raphael, who also adapted "Eyes Wide Shut," seems to know something about relationships. He won't let their most precious, most silly moments be drenched in sap. And he seems to understand something that many others do not: there is a difference between living and making, and, in convincing us of love, the former outdoes the latter every time.

Kelis, "Bossy" - Correction

A close and trusty informant just told me that the line in Bossy isn't "I told John Sterling he should switch debate." In fact, the lyrics are: "I told young stunna he should switch to Bape," Bape being the Japanese fashion label "A Bathing Ape." I like the idea that Kelis bosses people around, telling them what clothes to wear. I wish I could collapse my former interpretation with this corrected one so that the line would be "I told John Sterling he should switch to Bape", which would mean that he would be a blinged out 58 year old sports guy, all the while enjoying numerous Broadway shows!

Here is another LA Weekly piece I wrote. It's about this homeless man named Robert who sells water on the corner of Fairfax and 3rd. He was fantastic to speak with, and he had lots and lots to say in our seven minutes together!

Elliott Hundley @ The Hammer

He had been a press darling, and such an astounding up-and-comer that galleries were warring over the right to claim him as their own. But earlier this year, I saw a group show at Peres Projects in which Elliott Hundley failed to live up to the hype. (Truth be told, I felt as though he contributed somethign that looked like a high school stoner's arts and crafts project.) But I'm happy to report that my feelings have changed. Gallery or no gallery, Elliott Hundley's sculptures/installations at the Hammer Museum look mighty incredible. From afar, they swirl with psychadelic yet learned formal gumption, popping the gallery space in and out of itself with an elegance that is relentless, organic, and delicate. In detail, they prick with the tiny pins that keep choice magazine cut-outs in their rightful, fully edited place, and illuminate miniature, mythological maps full of people, places, things culled from the real world. The Rauschenbergian lineage is clear, but there's something of Sarah Sze, Matthew Ritchie, and maybe even some Frank Stella crazy cut-out paintings/Elizabeth Murray 3D paintings; and, better than all of that, Hundley has a massive store of material and whimsy all his own. Sometimes, it's just fantastic to be proved wrong.



Hammer Projects: Elliott Hundley; through September 3rd at the UCLA Hammer Museum.

She's the Boss

Music Video Review
Artist: Kelis
Song: "Bossy"
Album: Kelis Was Here
Director: Chris Robinson


Kelis came into my life one lazy night during my senior year of college. One of my roommates was hanging around our living room, scanning the annals of pop culture, and, shocked, exclaimed, "This is what America is listening to!" He turned up the volume on Windows Media Player, and out poured "Milkshake." Kelis's voice had a tone that embodied shrill adolescence, and the song's content reinforced as much. At the time, I couldn't much stand "Milkshake." Slashed jeans, suggestive lollipops, and rhythmic breast-shaking make not for a lady prim and proper.

But thanks to the real world, my prudish days are over, and Kelis, now a married woman, a bit better coiffed and more stylishly refined, will be releasing her new album, "Kelis Was Here," tomorrow. "Bossy" is the first single, and it's nothing short of fantastic. The synthetic keyboard -- over which Kelis initially reasons for her dear listeners, "You don't even have to like me, but you will respect me" -- taps a morse code of sinister cool, and the promise of more narcissistic pronouncements to come.

And the video makes the case that Kelis isn't just out to conquer those who fell under the spell of "Milkshake", but that she's fit to be a queen of pop cool. The first scene features Kelis cutting her kinky curls, and we find out very quickly that she's traded them in for a sleek bob, several pairs of wrap-around shades, diamond-studded grills, an electric blue-dyed poodle, and a hot red Ferrari. It's not as though she does all of this in a vacuum either. Blinged out during the whole of the video, we track Kelis from her outdoor boudoir to a pool party ripped with (male) hotties; from which we get the opportunity to oogle as she splays out on a diamond-and-ruby-encrusted floor. Soon, she's less scantily clothed and sporting sunglasses while driving through late-night Downtown Los Angeles. And it's not long before she's alternately partying and rolling around the floor of a lush carpeted bar, replete with Veuve Cliquot, oysters and a unicorn ice sculpture, and, later, spotlit in front of a concrete wall. Ridiculous, excessive, and unruly as this all may sound, every single cut contributes to Kelis's uncanny now-ness.

To help, Chris Robinson takes care to put Kelis in tantalizing situations, ones in which it is not necessarily Kelis's sexuality that does the enticing, but those which underline the sway she holds over her domain. While there's something down to earth about Kelis -- we see her hanging out with friends, drinking, getting into a one-person food fight, doing a modified bridge pose in fancy silk clothes -- she's clearly the center of attention, and she holds court wherever she goes, her limp, apathetic hands ready to snap into a middle finger at any moment. At one point, Kelis even has the gall to push her boobs up at the bar, as though to assert her ubiquitous title from just a few years ago. And the gesture couldn't be hotter.

But the genius mark of the video is its knowingly hipsterly look. There's bling aplenty in Kelis's world, but she also wears clothes and inhabits spaces that are best described as indie and vintage; certainly not your typical rap/R&B ghetto fabulous feel. It's refreshing, as though Kelis isn't just looking to conquer her Jive demographic, but Pitchforkers and their curmudgeon critics too. Nothing's too exclusive for Kelis; she'll undoubtedly win her way in because she's knowingly, intelligently pan-cool (she even centers her chorus on how she made John Sterling -- presumably the Yankees sportscaster -- "switch debate"). And it's this dead-on confluence of hip that makes "Bossy" one of the best videos in months.

Dramatic Taste

When Malan Breton was kicked off of "Project Runway" this past week, it was a blow to bear. His creepy, burbly laugh had grown on me. His optimism was refreshingly innocent. He also had a mission -- to right a wrong. As you might recall from the "Casting" pre-premiere special, Malan was the one who had actually rejected PR before its second season, and who had come back, tail between his legs, to the Season 3 auditions. Thus, the expectations were quite high for our strange friend.

Alas, the trusty PR editors/producers could have thought of no better way at tugging our heartstrings than by featuring Malan recalling the paler moments of his youth. He recounted that he was still in single digits when he showed his mother his first fashion drawings. She promptly threw them on the floor and reprimanded, "You should never do this again!" Of course, my Project Runway compatriots proceeded to ask the obvious question: Was it the drawings Malan's mom hated, or the fact that he was doing them?... But, no matter. How the history resonated this week!

And such storytelling coupled with the kick-off reinforced for us what Project Runway is: awesomely high tension television. Let's recount some facts: Angela didn't even make a proposal sketch for Miss USA's dress. Instead, she used drawing time to convince her way into Kayne's puissantly pageant-y hands. Angela and Vincent didn't work well together at all--though, granted, Vincent has a bit of the flighty megalomaniac about him. But, was there any way Angela could have actually helped? Could her heated criticisms -- par example, "this looks like something I made in college" -- have been more constructive? I think it's entirely possible. (And, for the record, I agreed with Nina Garcia -- the back of Vincent's dress was beautiful; however, Miss USA, you hit the nail when you described the weird shoulder-ribbons as a bit "space cadet.")

Unfortunately, while Angela fell so far short of all initial challenge requirements and so far from grace in her dealings with Vincent, Malan sketched out the dress, crafted it poorly, and did the gentlemanly thing of taking responsibility for its poor craftesmanship and strange execution. Is Project Runway telling us that they -- or fashion? or TV?! -- are more willing to keep contestants who wittle the nerves, whose strategy is to connive their way onto the better projects, and who refuse to do any work over contestants who do their work, mess up once, and take responsibility for it? I hope Tim Gunn is as disappointed as I am!

For some reason, my friends paused their DVR after the show on the PR disclaimer. In real time, the fine print speeds by, and we never really give the show's regulations a second thought. But in frozen form, there was a sentence that caught my eye: The producers and Bravo are before contestants are Klum-ed "Out!" I've always been tickled by what good television PR is, but this was the first time that I'd noticed that it was a television show that depends on ratings. Drama, in other words, consists of more than designers executing elegant creations within 24 or 48 hours; the insane personalities have forged their way into America's hearts. I guess, that's just reality.

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By the way: Malan fans, take heart! As you can read on his Project Runway bio, Malan's world is certainly not over. He was named by Women's Wear Daily as one of 12 new designers to watch on the New York runway (in Feb. `06), and we can expect to welcome him into our living rooms again, as he does voiceover work for ABC and ESPN. Additionally, here's a follow-up interview with Malan in all his dignity, care of the fabulously addictive Blogging Project Runway.

My pick!