A Brie Grows in Brooklyn

Cloud Atlas: A Review

A lot of lip service was given to how difficult Cloud Atlas, a novel by David Mitchell, was to adapt into a film. It was the hook that drove publicity. Unlike most people in the film industry, however, I read the book, which from my memory, lent itself well to the cinema. It’s very episodic. It’s also not that long—400 pages or so. Let’s just say that Mitchell is no fucking George R.R. Martin, and George R.R. Martin got a fucking 10 episode television series. This introduction sucks, but I don’t feel like re-writing the post to make it better, so you’re going to have to deal with it.

What I mean to say is that I don’t think the book could have been THAT difficult to make into a film. But I’m probably wrong. To save you from the agony of having to make the decision for yourself, I’m going to start by describing the book, and then give an idiotic synopsis of the film. Let us begin.

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Broken Harbor By Tana French: A Review

I allowed myself the luxury of reading an entire book this week, mostly in my bed, eschewing obligation in favor of pure joy. This afternoon, rather than working, I lay all curled up with an iced coffee and a bowl of candy corn, and finished it.

The book was Broken Harbor, the fourth mystery novel by Tana French, an Irish writer whom I much admire. I first heard about her from Cathy Isaacson, the wife of Walter Isaacson, the biographer of Steve Jobs, and the CEO of the Aspen Institute. “What are you reading right now?” I asked her a few years ago, at a New Year’s Eve party at the aforementioned institute, for lack of anything more interesting to say. I won’t get into the specifics of why I was there, but I certainly didn’t belong.

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Wuthering Heights (2011): A Review

When I was younger, Wuthering Heights was my favorite novel, and I often dreamed of being obsessively loved just as Heathcliff yearned for Catherine Earnshaw. The man whom I one day married, I supposed, would be so enamored with me that he would sit outside of my window, and watch me all day long. He would gaze at me fitfully, his eyes full of meaning. We would have plenty of long make-out sessions, with him lying on top of me in the mud, grinding against me.

But he would probably never take my virginity. I would probably marry someone else just to make things more difficult. When I died young—of some tragic circumstance, which no one anticipated, but everyone regretted terribly—he would fling himself in my grave, and threaten to be buried alongside of me. In other words, he would be my soul mate, impossibly connected to me from birth to death.

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The Master: A Review

I was having trouble formulating an opinion on The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest epic, which I saw this past weekend with my brother, my sister, Caleb, and about 4 pounds of gummy candy. Then I read Anthony Lane’s review of it in this past week’s New Yorker, and in disagreeing with him, found something to say.

Because he seems to think that The Master is a character study of what it means to be master, and what it means to be servant. But I saw it as a map of human weakness.

As I’m sure you cinephiles have already heard, The Master is a finely wrought film, employing all sorts of cinematic techniques that I cannot name—sort of in the same way that before I became a writer, I never paid any attention to writing, I just read stories—that is tightly wound, cleanly executed, and perhaps, depending on who you’re talking to, brilliant.

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The Queen of Versaille: A Review

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Ted: A Semi-Belated Review

By Bianca Ozeri

You’ll like Ted if you’re a chunky seventeen year-old boy, a middle aged man with a blue collar job, or if you resemble my brother, Superbad, because those are the people whom I derogatorily imagine worship the situational comedy. And Ted is a two-hour sitcom that I was over by minute 30, the duration that a sitcom should be. 

(Actually, Superbad, a talented filmmaker, found Ted as mediocre as I did.)

At Superbad’s behest, we arrived a half hour early to the theater. And it paid off because I sat center row in those get-to-put-your-feet-up-on-that-weird-barrier-separating-the-stadium-seats-from-the-shitty-seats seats for this awesomely unexceptional film! Superbad bought Air Heads. But only because I begged him to get something healthier than nachos. 

Waiting for previews, we kicked our feet up and answered those outdated, multiple choice show business questions. I kicked myself for getting them wrong and then I kicked Superbad for getting them right. My brother, to his dismay, is often the victim of my slapstick comedy (secretly, we all know he loves it though). I sparked up a conversation about our great seats with the lifeguard-kind-of-sexy man next to me, but made it quick because Superbad gets jealous when I don’t pay attention to him.  

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The Moonrise Kingdom Is Not In West Savannah

When I was little, I lived in a lot of different fantasy worlds. The best one could be accessed through a portal in a tree in my friend’s backyard. I never actually went there, but I dreamed of it often. It was a castle with hundreds of rooms, all catered to my desires. Closets full of the most beautiful dresses. Shaded pools lined with waterfalls. Banquet halls full of all kinds of sweets. Hand maidens that followed me around, and obeyed my every command. A boy, strange and handsome, who would give me my first kiss. 

I’m pretty sure my friend with the tree had autism, but I would beg my parents to go to his house anyway. There, we would sit on his tire swing, and construct elaborate plans to get to the top of the tree, where we were sure that we could find the doorway to our enchanted kingdom.

Looking back, it’s pretty clear that my favorite fantasy was actually just an elaboration of the song, “There Is a Castle In A Cloud,” from Les Misérable. Nevertheless, it was so real to me that to this day, I can still taste what it smells like. I can still feel myself opening the carved wooden entrance.

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GIRLS Season 1: A Review

By Bianca Ozeri

When Brie asked me to write a post on GIRLS, I got nervous because she hates the show and I love the show and sometimes I mistake disagreeing with Brie for cultural ineptitude. Which, she tells me, really is a mistake given that she still listens to Lana Del Rey. So, yes, I love GIRLS. Lena Dunham has, to me, hit the proverbial nail right on the head.

More than a voluntary choice, this adoration feels the only option in order to maintain my dignity. For every Sunday, during HBO’s shit slot, I watch a simulation of my life. I have three primary girlfriends who compositely exhibit qualities of comical ignorance, serious priggishness, and chic wisdom (myself included). We’ve had dance parties to Robyn. We’ve lived together when we shouldn’t. Virginity still looms for one of us. We’ve dealt with death together (not that of an unborn fetus, but still). And now that I’ve written out what I thought an uncanny likeness, I realize that it’s pretty cookie-cutter, and you, if you’re a girl, probably (hopefully!) draw the same parallels. 

(Clara, absent, takes a brilliant photo) 

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Girls: The Last Episode

It was posed to me, last week, that the reason why I don’t like Girls is because I’m jealous of Lena Dunham, who, unlike me, is a successful writer who makes real money. “That is definitely part of it,” I admitted outright.

But it’s not the only reason, I tried to argue, to a chorus of people proclaiming that it directly mirrors their own lives. “I can relate to it,” they intoned. “I am LenaDunham. Her best friends. I know the dudes they date. I live in her apartment in Greenpoint. I have HPV. Do you like my tattoos? My generation.”

“Does no one else watch this tv show?” I asked them. “Because it’s really not that good.”

But my protests fell on deaf ears. After the backlash that ensued after the first episode, which was as ridiculous as the florid praise that came before it, anyone who watches it is weary of having an individual opinion. If you hate it, you might disagree with real cultural critics. And if you love it, then you encounter people like me, who want to argue with you about it until you cry.

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Terriers and El Bulli: Watching Recommendations

I’ve basically run out of things to watch on Netflix, and our DVR isn’t working, so I’m getting kind of desperate. I’ve already watched all of the “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” episodes on Entertainment On Demand (Channel 1012, bitches), as well as ‘Don’t Be Late For the Wedding.” What a miserable woman that bitch with a weave seems to be. I would start watching Community, or Fringe, but I get really tired of clicking through ad pages to find shows illegally online. 

In an attempt to have some good television karma come my way, I’m going to suggest two things that I recently watched that I really enjoyed. 

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Prometheus: A Review

I’m going to preface this review by saying that I haven’t watched Alien (or Aliens), don’t know what it’s about, and am not that interested in finding out. Which obviously taints my opinion of Prometheus, which I viewed entirely as a separate entity. 

In my humble opinion, Prometheus sucked, and I attribute it to the fact that the film was born, bred, and sterilized in the Hollywood factory system, which is run by ladder-climbing idiots who approach reading scripts with the same gusto that they do sucking their immediate boss’s dick. Except for my friends who work in the industry, of course, who are all brilliant and talented and I LOVE YOU.

Prometheus opens with an image of an alien looking man, watching a disc of a spaceship riding off into the ether, leaving him alone at the top of a waterfall. With much flourish, he produces a round globe, which he twists apart to reveal a small container of writhing, silver material.

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Dark Shadows: A Review

As the credits started rolling at the end of Dark Shadows (2012), Caleb turned to me, and said: “How could they waste so much money on something like this, and get away with it?”

We had gone to see the movie as a bookend to our Memorial Day weekend, which had basically been a celebration of the newfound freedom afforded to us by our Jeep. 

From a wine bar in Ditmas Park…

to the Ice House in Red Hook…

from the most opulent part of the Jersey Shore…

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Ten (Film): A Review

There’s so much stuff I want to write about that I feel like something’s bottling in my chest, wanting to burst out. But I’m also feeling desultory and lazy. It’s Memorial Day weekend, and I should be lying on the beach with a sugary drink, feeling bad about my body. Not sitting in front of Caleb’s computer, eating baby carrots like a fucking anorexic, writing on this stupid fucking blog. But I went to the beach for fucking 20 minutes today. And if I were concerned with being like everyone else—which I am—the picture above would be enough proof that I did something just as good as you, with your BBQs, and your baseball games, and your beautiful fun fucking American long weekend times.

I’ve become pretty obsessed with Iran this past week. I mean, I was always kind of obsessed with Iran, because it seems so foreign and Persian. And people there make a lot of good movies that make it seem kind of glamorously oppressive. The kind of place where you could have no original ideas, but in expressing difference, come off as a real fucking rebel.

Recently, however, my fascination has become acute. First, I saw those excellent films—“A Separation” and “This Is Not a Film”—which made me very concerned with the Iranian judicial system. And then I read this piece on the Iranian elections by Laura Secor in the New Yorker. It literally made me ache with jealousy that she got to be there, observing it from the perspective of a beautiful white woman.

Like, are you kidding me? How did she even get into Iran, and why am I not this girl?

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Just Kids: A Review

I just finished reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids. Like literally five seconds ago. If I don’t write about it now, I’ll never write about it. It don’t think it made much of an impression on me. Although last night, I had a dream that I was watching Patti Smith give a poetry concert in some kind of long, empty hallway. I’m just kidding about the hallway. I wrote that to sound more dramatic. All that I can remember from the dream is that I was there. She was there. The space we were in, twenty minutes after I’ve woken up, is now empty. That’s how it goes with dreaming for me. 

In any case, Just Kids, in case you haven’t read it (and you probably have, I feel like everyone but me has), is about Patti Smith, and her relationship with Robert Motherwell. I just wrote Motherwell.

But I meant Mapplethorpe.

It’s kind of a sweet slip.

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Submarine: A Review, But More, The Wall That I Keep On Hitting

Yesterday, I spent the day on my front stoop with a few friends, trying to sell off some of Caleb’s things to make room for my own. These things included a fancy cassette player and an ASR drum synthesizer, both outmoded objects that in Williamsburg—where a generation of people raised on Wes Anderson are still trying to figure out ways in which they, too, can appropriate from the past in order to be original in the present—would have sold like wildfire. In Carroll Gardens, adult Brooklyn, people didn’t even know what they were.

“Dude, that’s for the garbage,” my friend’s boyfriend said, pointing to the cassette player.

“People still use cassette players!” Caleb protested. “Bands are starting to release their records on them again.”

“Bands that you should be ashamed of listening to,” I reminded Caleb. 

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