Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience Blu-ray

The blu-ray transfer is gorgeous. The plot structure of the film, set in New York, is far more interesting than its theme (vapid, narcissistic call girl played by a real life porn star and self-pitying Wall Streeters in the dumps after the 2008 Crash), but the real standout is the cinematography. The lighting often verges on overexposure, the compositions are original, and the look of the film alone makes it worth watching. The music is really good and makes what might otherwise have been a downbeat film into an uptown ride on the A train fueled by cocaine.

Revanche Criterion Blu-Ray review

The blu-ray is excllent. the film is great for the first thirty minutes but then goes totally South into a totally contrived plot and increasingly derivative formal structure (stationary camera and longer takes). It's as if it starts shouting this is a European art film, but you get to feel good in this one! Feel good movies always make me feel worse. And Revanche left me feeling sick. This film is perhaps at the opposite end of Michael Hanenke's Cache, White Ribbon, and Funny Games (both versions). Oesterich macht sauber! To be fair, there's no ethnic cleansing in this film. But there is a lot of bad faith. We start off with two working stiff in the sex trade trying to escape from the bad pimp, but the "redemption" of the "illegal immigrants" (a younger prostitute from the Ukraine and an older pimp's assistant, from somewhere in in rural Austria) comes at the expense of the women--how predictable (one is shot dead and the other's a housewife whore). Lots of gorgeous shots in the film, but the composition and editing are so unoriginal that they just flush this film down the drain even faster. Another weird Criterion choice.

Make the call!

Decide to get over your resistance and phone it in.

The Condition of Connection

is interference, static, and other kinds of disruption.

Befriendship--a LOST thought

While watching Season Three of Lost (on DVD) it occurred to me that the show is about telefriendship as a form of bereavement. You can befriend anyone but never really be friends because everyone is permanently estranged from everyone else. The Others / Them are Us. They / We are the good guys. "Live," face-to-face friendship, as we should have always already known, involves its own kinds of distancings. if you can only befriend on LOST, you no get to die whenever you want and as many times as you want, and there's no banishment, no voting off the island. There's no conclusion, no generic telos (Sci-fi--X-files or Western or thriller), no final destination (despite the episode with Desmond with the actress from the Others basically rehearsing a final destination serialization formula). The dead don't die in LOST. But the living don't live either. Life is a serial, a formula, that keeps repeating with small variations, like porn, but with reverse and replay the tape inversions.

Burt's Bumpersitcker Wizdumb: Be Mindless

To try to be "mindful" as New Age Yuppies think they (or you) should be is a big mistake. The idea of mindfulness forgets the ever present process of brain drain. Be Mindless. Put that on your bumpersticker. Or at least remember that your mind is only half full.

More Burt's Bumpersitcker Wizdumb

Don't"Be there." Design your Dasein for living out--lost in what is called thinking. Absent thyself from thyself awhile.