the newspaper wasn't delivered this morning. this happens every once in a while here. it's worse when the college where i live is on break. many of my neighbors in faculty housing go away and suspend their newspapers. sometimes, i guess the paper delivery person gets confused about who suspended and who didn't. fall break began on friday.
because there is no paper today, i have not worked myself into my usual sunday morning tizzy of outrage. unlike most weeks, i feel no burning urge to vent about anything political here. sure, i have browsed news sites online, n.p.r. was on all morning as i gazed in vain out the window waiting for my beloved paper to come. so i know what is going on in the world. but for some reason, nothing really tizzifies me like reading an article with the physical newspaper in my hands. i guess i'm old fashioned that way.
without politics, i will fall back on film.
on friday, we saw raising victor vargas. my parents saw it at the sundance film festival last year and it was one of the two films they highly recommended to me when they came back. it really was worth seeing. for some reason i have seen a small handful of movies about dominicans in new york lately (two others were washington heights and manito), and all three were films were first films by new film makers. vargas, however, felt the most polished and had the best acting of the bunch. it was by far the best.
yesterday morning, i saw les triplettes de belleville through talk cinema (a film series that shows me art house or foreign films before they are released). triplettes was an unusual film, very difficult to explain without leaving out the wonderful weirdness of it. i guess the simple explanation is that it is a french silent animated feature length film. (is it still french if there really is no french dialogue?) the film is filled with cultural critiques and jokes about france and america (the statue of liberty is an overweight woman holding a handburger, french people slurp down half dead frogs). the animation was gorgeous, mostly traditional line drawings (though they used computers for some of the other bits of the screen). although i called it "silent" there is lots of sound, both the sound effects of the action on film and a blend of 1930s guitar-style jazz. there just was no dialogue.
because it made it to talk cinema, that means that this film will be released in the u.s., where i expect it to soundly bomb at the box office. it is worth seeing if you like less traditional films. for some reason, i thought it was just okay when the film ended. but i like it more and more as i think about it afterwards. there is one weird bit at the beginning that possibly raises some racial issues (a black woman comes out on stage topless wearing only a skirt of bananas and dances around). apparently, the scene is meant to be a references to a famous performance by josephine baker in which she actually did dance around stage wearing only a skirt made of bananas. no doubt there were many other references that went right over my head.
