before i lose my style

Dimendberg hones in on Johnny One-Eye (1950), in which a criminal hides in a “rundown building on MacDougal Street” bearing the sign “ULTRA MODERN APARTMENT TO BE ERECTED HERE”:

Juxtaposing a dilapidated older structure in a low-rise neighborhood with the promise of an architectural clean sweep to be realized in a temporally indeterminate future, the film reveals a key characteristic of the post-1939 American centripetal metropolis: the psychic hazards of dwelling in an urban space whose historical mutation yields real spatial gaps and temporal voids between the modern as “yet-to-come” and the urban past as “yet-to-be-destroyed.”

abbyjean:

this morning, a friend emailed me a video of a kitten eating broccoli with this comment:

So, at some point, I think forwarding videos/pictures of cute animals went from (1) something annoying that one’s parents did, to (2) something that was funny because it related to an ironic meme, to (3) something that I did because I started liking watching videos/pictures of cute animals. Does that mean I have become one’s parents? [sic] I don’t know.

Your friend has a pretty strong intuitive grasp of how people navigate the social politics of aesthetics, and how that relates to one’s taste and, subsequently, class standing.

(For those who don’t follow, here’s a slightly modified version:)

So, at some point, I think listening to Journey went from (1) something annoying that one’s parents did, to (2) something that was funny because it related to an ironic meme, to (3) something that I did because I started liking listening to Journey. Does that mean I have become one’s parents? [sic] I don’t know.

For the record, the movie was a disappointment. Christopher Honoré has some real talent, but (other than making his pretty cast look even more attractive) he’s been squandering it by slipping further and further down his particular stylistic rabbit hole. Populating his melodramas with a teen and early-twenties cast is smart because it seems more natural and less ridiculous that the emotions of characters of that milieu are felt so strongly, but his attempt at classic-lit-in-high-school falls completely flat. Partly it’s that he fails to consider how his New Wave free-love approach (Jules and Jim visual quote and all) might not be as easily accepted in the context of a high school teacher-student relationship.

But partly it was just too French for me. The source material is apparently a common French high school text, but I didn’t even know the film was adapted from anything until the closing credits. I’m not suggesting I should be expected to read a book before I see the movie, but if I’m just not the audience Honoré was considering, can I hold him responsible as an artist for that? On the other hand, if I were familiar with the novel I probably would have been more forgiving of some more contrived exchanges (and laughed at the in-jokes), but if emotional subtlety is what draws me to his work, maybe his style was just not well-suited to this kind of adaptation.