Overfamiliar

Life as a familiar is sometimes tough for my permakitten Grace. I thought I’d sensed a funny energy in the house tonight (not bad, just funny) and then realized Gracie was likely sensing it too, as she was bobbing her head like she was watching a tennis match. After 30 minutes of chasing seemingly nothing with the fervor she’d normally reserve for a fly or a piece of string, she is now scowling at the corner where I’d originally sensed the energy, her paws crossed protectively upon my leg. It’s hard out there for a pimp, er, witch’s kitty.

Love’s in Need of Love Today

All week my heart has been breaking–and, really, it should be. Every news headline is hard and sad and a call for international reckoning. It’s these kind of times when we not only shouldn’t but really can’t shut the door on the rain outside our own lives. And in my head I keep hearing this Stevie song because yes o yes: “Love’s in need of love today.”

‘Mood Indigo’ Needs ‘Eternal Sunshine’

The following review originally appeared in Word and Film.

Let’s get one thing straight: Michel Gondry directed the best movie of the last decade. Fantastically original and unsentimentally tender-footed, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind will likely go down in history as one of the greatest romances ever to grace the silver screen. Of course, some of its brilliance can be chalked up to screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. But unlike the Kaufman scripts directed by other filmmakers (including Kaufman himself), Sunshine boasts a heart rather than a navel – and its long-faced, metaphysical interrogation of the plausibility of long-term love is uplifted by a ramshackle, lo-fi sci-fi aesthetic that’s pure Gondry.

But – and we knew there had to be a “but” after a set-up like that, right? – the French director’s work has proven an uneven lot since then. Be Kind Rewind, his 2008 paean to video stores and working-class neighborhoods starring Yasiin “Mos Def” Bey and Jack Black, is a minor delight that’s most noteworthy for its introduction of “Sweding,” a remaking of something with any available materials. And The We and the I, Gondry’s 2011 experimental drama about New York City teenagers that evolved from workshops with real NYC teenagers in an afterschool arts program, makes admirable use of his sympathetic fancies. But 2006’s The Science of Sleep, about a man enthralled by his own unconscious, is about as appealing as listening to someone else describe their dream for two hours, and Gondry’s documentaries The Thorn in the Heart and Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? suffer from the very navel-gazing that he sidestepped in SunshineBlock Party, his 2005 doc mixing Dave Chappelle’s comedy with 1990s hip hop interludes, may be pure pleasure but it is also pure Chappelle. The truth is our French friend’s high-octane whimsy is more effective when he’s working from someone else’s material.

So Mood Indigo, Gondry’s latest, seemed a no-brainer. Adapted from Boris Vian’s feverishly creative eponymous 1947 novel, it stars Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou, the reigning king and queen of Pretty French Quirk, as newlyweds who live in a wonderland of their own devise until he is bankrupted by her mortal illness. It’s a perfect match of actors, material, and director – or at least one would think. Alas, the match is too perfect. It’s so much of a piece that the result is whimsy layered upon whimsy upon whimsy. With a little whimsy thrown in for good measure. Vian’s bio reads like a real-life version of Gondry’s characters, or, for that matter, one of his own: a novelist, poet, jazz trumpeter, singer, critic, engineer, critic, and inventor, he died of cardiac arrest at age thirty-nine while watching a Hollywood adaptation of his novel entitled (wait for it) I Spit on Your Graves. Forget about Death by Chocolate. This is, at the risk of sounding terribly flippant, Death by Whimsy. Which, equally flippantly, could also be the name of this film. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy