A Brie Grows in Brooklyn

The Orphan Master’s Son: A Review

Kim Jong Il used to be my #1 favorite dictator to make fun of, but then he died. And his son, Kim Jon Un, just doesn’t have the same appeal. I don’t know if it’s because he smiles more, or has a hipster Hitler Youth Haircut, or does photo ops on roller coasters.

Or maybe it’s because he always has this look on his face like, “I know I only got this job because my smarter older brother got caught using a fake Japanese passport on his way to Disneyland Tokyo.” Unlike Kim Il Jong, his next expression is never like, “And I will fucking blow you up with an atomic bomb.”

It’s more like, “Would you like to have another piece of cake with me?” 

After reading “The Orphan Master’s Son” by Adam Johnson, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2013, I realize that making fun of either of them is in pretty poor taste. Because as hilarious as Kim Jong Il is for loving waterslides, and kidnapping short people by luring them into traps, and proclaiming that he did not defecate, he was also a brutal despot who made life in North Korea an ongoing apocalypse.

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Interiors (1978) by Woody Allen: Some Thoughts

Before I watched Interiors, a 1978 film by Woody Allen, last night, I read that it was very Bergman-esque. I don’t really know what that means.

What I could say about the movie was that it was very beautiful.

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The Great Gatsby: A Review

I feel profoundly sad after watching The Great Gatsby; both because the story itself is so sad, and because the movie is such an epic failure. It’s not a bad movie, per se — it’s just not nearly good enough. I continue to be shocked by how high the film industry reaches, and how weak its grasp is — films see where they can go, but they’re just too lazy to get there.

I’m not going to write anything about the book in comparison to the movie because I don’t remember it that well. I remember reading it when I was in middle school, and not understanding it, and then reading it again during the epic, unnecessary, two-week long reading period between the end of classes and finals during my sophomore year of college. I also read “Tender Is the Night,” because I liked the title so much. I read them, and I cried that my boyfriend at the time would ever love me enough to either build me a mansion in Long Island, or stay by my side during a sojourn in a sanatorium in Europe. 

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Top of the Lake: A Review

One of the things that you can always count on about a Jane Campion production — “Bright Star” or “The Piano,” say, or even “An Angel At My Table” — is that there is going to be some element of the storyline that involves a devastatingly unrequited love that cannot be, but must be, because it consumes both parties involved. I fucking love that shit so much.

Watching her films feels like sitting in front of the guy you had a crush on in ninth grade, and imagining his gaze heating up the back of your neck while you try to concentrate on class. Or running into the guy you’re in love with randomly a party with another girl, and ending up with him in the bathroom, whispering desperate things while you clutch at each other. I don’t know how she fucking manages to capture the fire of it, but it’s brilliant.

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Where’d You Go, Bernadette?: A Review

Caleb’s in Asia for two weeks, and to fill the time, I’m fully indulging in pleasures that will keep me distracted from missing him. These pleasures include sleeping with the window wide open (Caleb hates that), having dance parties to Solange’s new album with DEH, obsessively watching new television programs like “Top of the Lake” (which is fantastic) and The Vikings (not fantastic, but those Vikings will make it to America, I’m sure of it!), and reading expensive hardcover books lent to me by other people because I can’t afford them.

One of these books is “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” by Maria Semple. It was given to me by a couple, Jon and Juliet, who said that it was “medium” quality. I was going to write a story about how I trust their taste completely, especially after spending Friday night with Jon glued to his television, waiting for them to pull Dzhokhar Tsarnaev out of that fucking boat in Watertown. But I’ll spare you the boring details of our obsessive compulsive Irish cop personalities. 

“Where’d You Go, Bernadette” is the story of a family in Seattle. The father, Elgie, is a top executive at Microsoft. The daughter, Bee, is an outstanding and beloved student with a heart condition. And Bernadette is like how I imagine my best self would be without medication— she’s a hilarious, witty, obsessive compulsive malcontent who hates people (in a big-hearted way), and her hatred of them drives her to isolate herself completely. She actually reminds me a lot of my mother, but that’s a different story. (Wait, did I just say I’m like my mother? Shit.) A real life equivalent of Bernadette is Julie Hecht, a humor writer whose work should be read much more widely.

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The Dog Stars: A Review

When I picked up “The Dog Stars,” a novel by adventure writer and NPR contributor Peter Heller, the man behind the cash register started gushing effusively about it. “One of my top two favorite books of the past year,” he said. 

It had received similarly positive reviews from Matt Dreyer™, who had recommended it to me in the first place. I almost universally like anything Matt Dreyer™ likes — he has introduced me, among many other things, to the show “Justified” — although I still refuse to read one of his favorite things, which is the Aubrey Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian. Set on a ship in the Royal British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, the series is twenty fucking books long. Serious time commitment. Anyway, I digress.

“The Dog Stars” is a post-apocalyptic novel about a man named Hig, his dog Jasper, and the survivalist Bangley with whom he shares his fort. This particular apocalypse was brought about by a flu epidemic, and then a blood disease, which killed all but a few humans left on earth. These humans, it goes without saying, are cannibals and thieves and blood thirsty to kill any survivors. In other words, this is an apocalypse novel that, if you’re a fan of this sort of thing, covers all of the tropes.

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Nine 1/2 Weeks: A Review

I don’t know why I downloaded 9 1/2 Weeks. I think it’s because I’ve always been interested in what Mickey Rourke was like before he destroyed his face and went bonkers nuts. He starred in another movie, based on Charles Bukowski, but I can never remember the name of it when it comes time to download something.

I would never have finished 9 1/2 Weeks if I had not been on a four hour flight with nothing else to do. (PS newsflash to failing airlines: I will like you a lot better if you install mini-televisions in your seats so that I can watch Bravo TV. Thank you.)

Because 9 1/2 weeks is like “Fifty Shades of Gray” for the 1980s. When it’s sexual, it’s not sexual enough to make up for the fact that it’s a kitschy piece of crap occasionally dramatized by a soundtrack heavily laden with wooden flutes. Watching it was kind of like hearing my sister read “Fifty Shades of Gray” out loud while stuck on the Major Deegan, which actually did happen to me. I feel minorly intrigued by the interesting sexual acts, but then I get disgusted on behalf of women universally.

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Mad Men Season 6 Premiere: Some Thoughts

I’m sure that anything that needs to be written about the Season 6 premiere of Mad Men has been written already. But I watched it last night, and it really moved me, so I thought I’d write a few words. As a warning, some spoilers are below.

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Justified, I Love You: 21 Reasons

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On David Foster Wallace, and Maybe You Shouldn’t Read This Because I’m a Lunatic

I thought I’d write a little something about “Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story” by D.T. Max, if only because as a writer, I found a lot within the pages I could relate to. “A lot within the pages I could relate to?” What am I, in fucking middle school? In defense of the following shitty writing, I’ve written two other reviews already today, so my critical writing skills are a little depleted. 

“Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story” is a biography of David Foster Wallace whom I, before I read the book, was pretty sure I hated. He seemed to be one of those literary cult figures whom everyone talked about being so brilliant, but no one had ever read. Like James Joyce. Or Derrida. Derrida is admittedly not a literary figure, but fuck you, whatever. Even yesterday, while getting my nails done with a friend, I asked her if she had ever read any fiction by DFW, and when she said yes, she had read “Infinite Jest,” and when I asked her if she had finished it, she admitted that she had only read half of it. 

I one time tried to read a story by DFW in the New Yorker — it was an excerpt from “The Pale King” — and found, without even knowing that it was by DFW, that it was unreadable. And I will read almost any short story in the New Yorker, just because I’m usually on the subway, and if I don’t read anything, I’ll run out of things to do, and have to listen to Beyonce on my iPhone. Then, I realized that the story was by DFW, and that he was trying to write a novel about the bliss of boredom told through the eyes of a low-level office worker at the IRS. At the time, I thought that DFW was one of those academic rich kid types, the one who never had to work but really idealized the process of working because he could essentialize it in order to fit some sort of solipsistic idea. Which is kind of true. And I felt like some kind of wronged victim of my own circumstances, which were not so dissimilar to his, minus the fact that I couldn’t concentrate entirely on graduate school ostensibly because I had to work for money, but secretly because I felt like I wasn’t smart enough to be there. I thought I knew what hard work was, because I worked hard, and hated every second of it. In actuality, I was a privileged little bitch myself. The point of this is that after reading DFW’s biography, I have a lot more sympathy for him.

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In The Realm of the Senses: A Review

I just recently got Hulu Plus so that I could watch the second season of Scandal without ripping it off the Internet. It was a success in the sense that I finished the entire show less than a week after subscribing. Scandal is a junky political thriller that I am completely addicted to — on quality level, it falls above Revenge but below House of Cards. The good news is that there are a lot of hot sex scenes in, like, the fucking Oval Office, and in, like, a security closet, all of which kind of changed my mind about monogamy. Scandal is a show about the woman having an affair with the president of the United States. Whenever she says to him, “I want to fall asleep in bed with you every night and be your partner,” I’m like “no you don’t, stick with sex outdoors with your tweed skirt pulled up to your hip bone, relationships are fucking boring, be quiet.” That’s an American message.

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Like Someone In Love: A Review

A lot of the reviews of Like Someone In Love, a new film by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, speak of uncertain identities, as if the viewer is purposely being deceived. Kiarostami’s last film, the excellent Certified Copy (2010), followed a couple through the streets of Tuscany as they talked about life and art; the whole time, the viewer was left confused about whether or not the couple had known each other for many years, or if they had just met, and formed a very powerful connection.  Like Someone In Love didn’t remind me much of the earlier film — the connections critics are making seem wishful, a way of trying to understand a movie that still, three days after I’ve seen it, eludes me.

What it reminds me of more is Ten, a film Kiarostami made in 2002, in which the camera is placed on the dashboard of an enlightened Iranian woman’s car as she drives around Tehran. During the course of the story, she has conversations with ten characters (hence the name), including her son, a prostitute, and a woman who, like her, has recently re-discovered her faith in Islam. Her story is never made explicit — the viewer is left to piece together an understanding of her place in society through the lens of her passengers questions, indictments, and own pleas for help.

Throughout, she is constantly moving through the city. The dialogue is punctured by the staccato of the turn signal, the sound of traffic on the freeway, the clicking of people opening and closing doors. When the car is in transit, there is a visceral sense that the narrative is moving forward — when it comes to a halt in traffic, say, or when the woman stops to give alms to a beggar on her way to the temple, the viewer is left frustrated, like they’ve metaphorically hit a wall. For me, the effect of the movement was powerful — I am somebody who finds relief from my own troubles in the act of propelling myself, however pointlessly, through space. Driving in my car nowhere, riding my bicycle over bridges, walking instead of waiting for the subway. Watching that very private method of coping with life expressed on film moved me deeply — it also reminded me very much of Joan Didion.

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