Movies
This movie is pretty dumb, but if in the twenty-seventh century, some archaeology grad student is scraping the bottom of the barrel for a thesis topic and arrives at the like seven-year window during which the highly corporatized "American indie" aesthetic was ascendant, that student really wouldn't need to look much further than Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist for a complete facsimile of that whole moment's most obvious signifiers: iPods and Brooklyn and cool needle drops and blog-rock mixtapes positioned as the well-kept secret keys to the center of the universe and a sad boy's problems solved with cute sex and vaguely misogynist characterizations of "popular girls" who Just Don't Get It—it's all here to an embarrassingly exhaustive degree. There's a scene in which Michael Cera brags about having known a band before they were cool; this same character has sex with with Kat Dennings in literally the real Electric Lady Studios. It's just so comically, absurdly Indie. It's like the most itself version of this kind of filmmaking—let's call it "The Shins Changed My Life" Cinema. It makes sense that the genre kind of hit its logical conclusion the year following Nick and Norah's release, with the release of (500) Days of Summer, a movie that's both a bitter indulgence in and a sly rebuttal of these very tropes, and a movie I have no idea of how well it's aged—if Nick and Norah is any indication, I'm probably better off leaving that one preserved in amber. Man, I loved this stuff in high school/early college. What was I thinking? Grade: C-
A lot of politicians are at their most compelling when they're fighting on the ground level as scrappy underdogs. This is absolutely true of Cory Booker, a man whose presidential candidacy hasn't grabbed me much but whose first (unsuccessful) run for mayor of Newark is pretty riveting, at least as depicted in this documentary. It's pretty unapologetically an advertisement for Booker's second mayoral campaign (the one he would ultimately win in 2006), and the movie assiduously avoids the issues, making a case for Booker based on his tenacity and response to opposition rather than on policy proposals, which in a sense makes this a lightweight doc of political theater more than it is a comprehensive portrait of Booker himself. But it's great theater, and I found it hard not to get swept up in the drama of it all. Grade: B
I had no concept of what this was other than "that Ramones movie," so I was pleasantly surprised to find out that this completely rules. It's roughly divided into thirds, and each third makes perfect sense for a Ramones musical and that band's crazed Americana: the first a high-camp bizarro-world high school in which the football players are all dweebs and the popular kids all listen to the Velvet Underground and Devo; the second a long sequence that is virtually nothing more than a Ramones concert video; the final a climax of total and cathartic anarchy. I am but a humble English teacher, but I'd like to think that I, too, would be on the right side of history and embrace the violent occupation of my school building by a bunch of kids who just want to dance to rock records and have a good time. Grade: A-
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