James Cameron’s new movie Avatar is a visual feast, a compelling, glorious bursting-at-the-seams exploration of the boundaries of computer-generated imagery.  It reportedly cost $250 million to make.  One can see why – an entire army of software nerds must have been working full time for a year to create the kind of graphical wizardry that we end up seeing on the screen.

Part of the wonder of the movie – and I only realized it after the movie was over – is the seamless way that real actors intermingled with the CGI actors.  The CGI is so good that there are no moments where you brain switches over and says “hey, that’s fake!”.

I won’t review the plot here – suffice it to say that Smurfahontas is not too far off the mark.  But the movie gets tons of man points for the military / combat scenes, the man-eating wildlife, the adrenaline-rush cinematography, and let’s just say that Sigourney Weaver, reincarnated after a fashion into an alien body, has still got it, 30 years after her performance in Alien made her every geek’s dream girl.

I’ve heard a couple people complain that the movie isn’t as “sharp” in 3-D as it is in 2-D.  And, for my only complaint about the movie: it doesn’t fully leverage the 3-D technology.  Coraline, released earlier this year, was breathtaking in its use of 3-D, and when stuff flew out of the screen, you cringed, because you thought it would poke your eye out.  Same thing with Beowulf, from the year before.  Avatar?  For whatever reason, the 3-D is more subtle. Perhaps that was a directorial decision, to try to prevent the visuals from overtaking the film.  At any rate, I still fell into the story, unquestioningly, and loved the experience.  This is one of the few movies I’ve seen in the last couple years that I would happily see again in the the theater.

Are you stuck?  Stuck as in stymied, can’t move, can’t move forward, can’t move back, trapped in a web of your own making?  Anneli Rufs gives a sort of pop-psych tour through the landscape of stuckness in her recent book “Stuck: Why We Can’t (Or Won’t) Move On”.

It’s a personal journey for Rufs, who sprinkles anecdotes from her own life throughout the text, as well as examples from friends, family, and people she’s interviewed.  This gives the book a sort of emotional relevance – other people are stuck, too – and keeps it from becoming a dry thesis.

I have to admit I found this book wanting on a couple fronts.  First, there is the amount of time that Rufs spends on trauma and what she calls “trauma narratives” – childhood abuse, PTSD, victimhood, and the like.  Perhaps that’s just not where I am, personally, or perhaps I instinctively cringe when people trot out their long suffering at the hands of others (real or imagined), as excuses for where they are today, but those long sections were not particularly helpful or relevant.

Second, towards the end of the book Rufs flips us around and asks us to consider whether we think we’re stuck when, in fact, we may not be.  Is society telling us we’re stuck when in reality, absent any external measures, we could be happy, fulfilled, and content?  To my way of thinking, this is a sort of authorial double-cross.  It reduces the volume of the wake-up call just as the alarm is about to ring.  It waffles when it should be direct, blunt, and clear-eyed.  Sure, you’re stuck.  We all are, to some extent and about some topics.  Let’s not equivocate and leave the reader wondering if all of this angst – this why am I here, and what do I do next? self-questioning – go wanting in the face of uncertainty about its reality.  If you feel stuck, are you deluding yourself?  Or is it more likely that you ARE stuck?

I suppose in the end, this is not exactly the book I was looking for.  I wanted the book that’s subtitled “How To Get Unstuck.”  Instead, this is an explanatory treatise on why we get stuck in the first place.

So my personal lessons on getting unstuck remain my guide: Make a clear goal.  Commit yourself to it.  Then do it.

I’ll leave you with a wonderful quote I read this morning:

“Only a fool gets what he wants, because only the foolish keep on trying.”

David Denby, perhaps the preeminent film critic of our time (although I love Anthony Lane also), reviewed the Coen brothers’ new film A Serious Man in a recent New Yorker and wrote:

The Coen brothers in the black, bleak, belittling mode, and, except for a few moments, it’s hell to sit through […] As a work of film craftsmanship, the movie is fascinating; in every other way it’s insufferable.

I wish I’d read his review before I shelled out the $10 to see the movie, because my review was right in line with his. On the other hand, a night out at the movies is a treat no matter what the outcome.

Whip It is the story of a seventeen-year old girl, a square peg in a round hole, who is stuck in small-town Texas and longs for escape.  So many movies, especially those made by Fox Searchlight Pictures, could start out that way.  The girl, Bliss (played by Ellen Page, in a role that seemed written especially for her) finds her particular outlet in the high-velocity world of women’s roller derby.  While working at the Oink Joint BBQ restaurant and finishing out high school, she spends her evenings with her skates laced up, and the movie revolves around her efforts to find her dreams in the face of parental disapproval and small-town peer pressure.

I won’t give away any plot details that might ruin the movie, but instead I’ll talk about what I liked.  First of all, it’s got a true-to-life, indie feel to it – no big-budget Hollywood over-exuberance here.  Second, just like a few other sleeper indie films over the past few years (Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite, and Juno, which also starred Ms. Page), the movie is charming, disarming, and ultimately uplifting.  There are no huge surprises here – it’s not a whodunit – but part of the allure of this genre of film is being able to root for the hero, the misunderstood rebel, and cheer as things turn their way.

The actors – especially the ladies of the roller derby teams – were chosen well.  Drew Barrymore, the director, also makes a supporting appearance as Smashley Simpson, a girl with anger management issues who just wants to have fun.  Juliette Lewis, at least the 90 pounds of her that are left to ogle, plays the bitchy Iron Maven, the antihero, and she swaggers and hisses and purrs wonderfully.  I LOVED Andrew Wilson’s turn as the coach of the Hurl Scouts.  “Run the plays, people!” lol.

My biggest acting surprise was Daniel Stern, who plays Bliss’s Longhorn-loving father.  After years of watching Stern play the lanky goofball in films like Home Alone and City Slickers, it was a surprise to see him in a more weighty role, emotionally speaking.  I think he did very well.

There’s a very cool make-out scene underwater in a pool that brought to mind the same scene in Children of a Lesser God, although this one had much less va-va-voom going on.  The song they played during that scene has stuck in my head – must find it on iTunes.

The highlight of the film?  The roller-derby scenes were trés über, but the best part for me was watching Bliss realize over time that she could do what was best for her and still be OK.  We’re all bound up in convention, expectation, inertia, habit, and rules – but those bonds can be unwound, and new paths cleared as we move on with our lives.  That really spoke to me.

About a month ago, Zoka opened a new store in Kirkland, right at the junction of Central Way and Lake Street. The new Zoka in Kirkland shares a name and a coffee heritage with the two Zoka stores in Seattle, but the interior designer obviously has been born with, or acquired, an “Eastside aesthetic” because the store looks nothing like its Seattle counterparts.

Lots of stainless steel, tile, dimmed light fixtures, and black leather.  They have this awesome hardwood table right in the middle of the lobby – it looks like it was cut out of a single huge tree, but it’s actually four pieces, joined together.  I like the communal aspect of the seating – it’s similar to the large wooden table at the University Zoka store.  Not that I’m up on design lingo, but I might say that the interior exhibits a sort of Asian-Northwest fusion.

How is the coffee?  I drink cappuccinos, which tend to be very sensitive to brewing problems, and my palate can’t detect any difference from the excellent stores across the lake. And, unlike some other coffee shops that I frequent, the baristas at Zoka are all very consistent and it’s difficult to tell one’s output from another’s.

They also have this interesting thing called a “pourover bar” – it’s how they make all their drip coffees at this Zoka.  According to the barista, it results in a cleaner, more full-bodied cup.

Their food selection is similar to, but much more limited than, the Seattle stores.  Whether that’s by design or accident, you won’t see all the awesome selection of pastries that you might be used to.  Since I’m off pastries for a while, I wasn’t too put out.

A few notes for the laptop warrior:

• Outlets are few and far between.  Directly beneath the large wooden table are some floor outlets, but I can’t find a single wall outlet anywhere.
• The WiFi network appears to be adequate, even though I laugh that they misspelled “Kirkland” in their network name.

You can see the full set of photos of the interior by viewing my Whrrl story.

Americana

Don DeLillo

1971

Americana is a tough book to review.  I finished it a few days ago and have been mulling it over and over in my mind.  I’m not sure that there is a single theme that one can pull out of the novel around which to frame a review – but let’s try.

The novel revolves around a period in the life of early-middle-age David Bell in which he embarks on a road trip.  He’s a network executive, brilliantly positioned, but filled with confusion and more than a bit of self-loathing.  He’s divorced, but good-looking and eligible, and has several relationships underway at the same time in that early-70’s sort of swinger way.  Yet he’s unhappy, unfulfilled, stifled perhaps.   I’ve read other reviews that talk about the narrator’s alienation – and that rings true.  He’s in the system, of the system (his father is an ad man), and yet he finds himself outside the system.  He dwells on the origin and meaning of anonymous, semi-subversive memos that are circulated around the office.  He’s obsessed with who’s in and who’s out.  He’s concerned with his own place in the system, and analyzes all the subtle office-political cues for signs of his in-ness or out-ness.

So, a third of the way through the book, he sets out on a road trip, ostensibly to film the Navajo in Arizona, but his plans go (unintentionally?) awry.  He and his friends stop in a small town called Fort Curtis and Bell becomes obsessed with making a personal film, a subversive film, a work of art that is intended to defy all convention, using local townspeople as his actors.

DeLillo writes, in Bell’s voice:

The movie functions best as a sort of ultimate schizogram, an exercise in diametrics which attempts to unmake meaning.  I like to touch the film.  I like to watch it move through the projector.  This is my success.

He tarries too long in making this film and eventually supposes that the network has fired him; which brings us to the last section of the book, the conclusion of his road trip with a new wildcat businessman named Clevenger.  They double to Arizona, where Clevenger operates a test track, and he offers Bell a job.  Then comes one of the strangest scenes in fiction, where the test track crew, including Clevenger and Bell, get drunk and have a surreal orgy with some local women that stop by the garage.  Bell is pulled in several directions – he attempts to fight the humiliation forced on the women, while simultaneously fighting his own urges.  The better half of his nature wins out, and the end of the book sees him setting out on a return trip to New York.

What’s to love?  The prose – tight, descriptive, fluid.  The characters – all of whom have a fully-fleshed out third dimension; their own secrets, worries, cares, enthusiasms.

When I first got done with this book, I thought of two other books: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, which I just got done reading a couple months ago.  It’s obvious that DFW was influenced by Americana, especially the idea of “The Entertainment”.  The second book that came to mind was Falconer, by John Cheever.  The style of the prose reminds me of Cheever, and DeLillo’s weary-but-affectionate handling of his main characters, warts and all, is very similar.

I’m tempted to re-read Americana again, soon, because some important part of me believes that I really didn’t “get it”.  Some books are like that – you read them once, and come away with a furrowed brow; you read it again, and the puzzle pieces start to fall into place.   Sometimes a third reading is in order.  It’s certainly well-written enough to make a second read an enjoyable experience; and I really want to get past that feeling that I Just Don’t Know Everything DeLillo Intended To Express.

Of course, that general feeling – that I’m just not seeing things correctly – could be more properly attributed to my general personal sense of ennui, the sense that I’m not in the place I want to be, that there are things out in the world that I should be doing and people that I should be spending time with.  Given that context, maybe it makes sense that I’m struggling a bit interpreting a novel about a disaffected young professional.

Last part of the review – this book has whetted my appetite for the two other DeLillo novels I’ve just recently purchased – White Noise and Underworld.  I’ve heard spectacular things about both.

I’m curious – if you’ve read the book, what did you make of it?  Love it?  Hate it? Other?

This is a classic Tarantino film; the only odd note was that there wasn’t a single samurai sword or chop-socky fight scene to be found.  But in the classic QT tradition we have lots of in-your-face violence; a woman gets strangled, another woman gets shot, point-blank, in the abdomen and chest, several hapless extras get machine-gunned; a score or more of German soldiers get scalped (yes, you read that right); a British agent and a Gestapo goon shoot off each other’s testicles; and in the most gruesome scene, the “Bear Jew” beats a German sergeant to death with a baseball bat.  Lovely.

Tarantino loves filming violence, but he also loves filming women, and the close-up scenes involving the cinema proprietress Shoshanna  Dreyfus and the fading German film star Bridget von Hammersmark are cinematographic lovemaking of the first order.    He’s able to bring out the full range of emotion in his women leads that he’s just not able to with his male leads.  Case in point: Brad Pitt, playing Lt. Aldo “Apache” Raine, a good ol’ boy whose one goal in life is to “kill me some Nazis”.  Pitt’s a good actor, but here he plays the same note over and over again, with the same throat-bouldery accent, and it gets a little tiring.

Of course the movie couldn’t have been released without a good helping of humor; for example, the side-story about Hugo Stiglitz flashes in with the signature QT Comic Sans labeling superimposed on the screen.  Hitler himself makes an appearance, slamming tables and showing an introspective side consistent with the state of the war in late 1944; Sylvester Groth, playing a simpering, weak Joseph Goebbels, gives a performance that simultaneously make one’s skin crawl and fists clench.

Despite the title’s focus on Pitt and his motley crew of underground Jewish-American butchers, the movie really revolves around – and is owned by – the performance of Christoph Waltz as Colonel Hans Landa, the “Jew Hunter”, a detective, a man of immense talents at his assigned task.  In the first scene of the movie, he purrs and cajoles and eventually persuades a French dairy owner to give up the Jewish family hiding under his floorboards, and in happy coincidences, is able to stalk and thwart the Basterds through the remainder of the film.  The final scene of the film involves a visual of Colonel Landa that one isn’t likely to forget – a signature QT fetishistic violence-fuck involving a Very Large Knife.

So am I glad I saw it?  Yes.  It was typical, but not predictable; the film maintains its tension throughout and has some really stunning and blunt scenes.  Was it QT’s best work?  No; but for QT fans it’s definitely worth seeing on the big screen.

Love to hear your review in the comments!

Just finished David Foster Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System.  This read followed hard on the heels of Wallace’s magnificent Infinite Jest, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that Broom suffered in comparison; it’s also true, however, that I thoroughly enjoyed Broom.  It was an entirely different type of work.  Lots of talking; a good chunk of the book’s exposition is given in dialogue form.  Lots of focus on male-female relationships, ambiguously defined and maintained.  A similar investigation of family dynamics that one saw in Infinite Jest. The plot, or pseudo-plot, revolves around a missing great-grandmother and a cohort of her nursing-home acquaintances, but then everything kind of goes off from there in several different directions, and nothing really gets resolved.  In fact, and the book is famous for this, the narration ends in mid-sentence, unfinished.

What was memorable?  The contrast between the nervous, desexualized Rick Vigorous, and his newly met Amherst pal Wang-Dang Lang was priceless.  You can imagine from his nickname on what Andrew Lang’s reputation hangs.  Or is hung. (ba da boom!).  The sex-talking parrot, the industrialist who wants to eat the world, the drug-addict college kid who talks philosophy to his prosthetic leg – all are very well done sketches.  Wallace’s description of the office scenes at Frequent and Vigorous publishing are subtle, coy, and funny.  As a cohesive work, it can be faulted, for sure, but I really enjoyed the sensibility, the language, the imagery, even the imagination behind conceits like the Great Ohio Desert (aka GOD).

What would I have liked more of?  More Wittgenstein – Lenore’s great-grandmother (also named Lenore) was a student, and her philosophy as such got very little airing.

Overall: Excellent work.  If you liked (a) Infinite Jest, (b) Pynchon’s V, or (c) DeLillo’s Americana (which I’m reading now, and from which Broom quite obviously borrows), you’ll enjoy The Broom of the System.

Have you read it?  What did you think?  Leave a comment!

I thought about Yelping this but what the hell; it’s my review so it should probably live on my own blog.  Yelp can link to me if they want.

The good:

• The barista rocks.  She made me a couple dry cappuccinos that were spot-on.  I think her name is “Mora” or “Maura” or perhaps “Moira’” but she knows her stuff.  Both of the baristas working here were friendly and chill.
• The atmosphere is great for coworking.  Lots of plugins, quiet-ish back room, steady chairs and tables, good background music if you’re not the headphone type.
• Lots of free parking on the side streets around Wallingford & 45th.

The not-so-good:

• I had high hopes for the pies, which are a Fuel Coffee specialty.  I’m not sure what they’re called – I’ve seen “handpies”, “flipsides”, and “mezzaluna” in various online reviews.  I think it may be the case that the founder of Fuel Coffee actually got her start making these custom little pie-things, THEN got into the coffee shop business.  Boo hoo for universal karma – I can’t say I loved my pie.  I chose the current special – Mango Raspberry Lemon – and it was a dry and underwhelming.  I was expecting something culinarily orgasmic and what I got instead was a smooch from the great-aunt.
• Unlike the Montlake location, the food selection is not nearly as good.  I had my mind set on a wrap but there are no wraps to be found.  If you’re coming in hungry, be prepared to eat dry pie (see above), or one of the other standard-pastry-fare items they have.

Overall:  This is the second Fuel Coffee I’ve been to; the first was in Montlake and I loved that one too.  I’ll be back for the coffee, back for the coworking environment, and as for the pies, I’ll give them another chance but don’t have especially high hopes.

If you like pretty pictures in substandard iPhone 2MP format, you can go over and see my Whrrl story.

What’s your experience with Fuel Coffee?  Leave your notes in the comments!

I’ve never considered myself a “soup guy”, but in an attempt to eat healthier, I’ve been ordering soup with meals instead of, say, french fries. So this Saturday, for the first time ever, I bought a quart of frozen soup at the Farmers Market in Magnolia.   A local company called Got Soup? has had a booth there for what seems like forever, but I’ve never once stopped for a sample until this weekend.   A nice woman named Celeste Coyner gave me a sample of the Summer Corn with Proscuitto and Arugula Pesto.  It was very delicious!  I had some for dinner last night and have enough for a few more meals this week.