When the only way you can really humanize your main characters is to have all of their acquaintances be horrendous monsters or living saints, I’d say you might have a problem with your characters. But I suppose clueless is preferable to maliciousness in the particular socio-political memeplex of the intended audience.
This is an unfair characterization, but I attended the film under a kind of duress. The duress of love that has lead me to things like ballets and opera and other pasttimes of people of high birth and those who aspire to be as such also leads to things like this. It was neither good nor horrible; neither believable nor unbelievable; neither pain nor pleasure. It was a null state. As someone who is experiencing a small part of the film’s topic at the moment, I was surprised at how removed I feel we are from the questions raised in the film. I don’t think this is due to overconfidence – I am utterly and completely terrifed, with a smattering of excitement and joy peaking through the horror haze – but rather that the ParkSlopeian/Eggarian/manchild current can utterly and completely fuck itself to death.
To be truly fair, I have neither the emotional distance or desire to really be able to review film, much less a film related to Mr. Eggars. He is to written comedy what Chuck Klosterman* is to music criticism; an abbatoir of the human spirit. That’s a complicated way of saying “Man I totally don’t get McSweeney’s” and not as in “I don’t get their references” but more like “I don’t fucking understand why they don’t kill themselves for the betterment of mankind and of the mental landscape of this once great United States.” It’s just not funny, and a symptom of a sickness that allows the children of the mids and up – the target audience – to feed their self-regard.
Rather than seeing the film, I would recommend reading reviews of it online; Feministing had an interesting (if a bit vicious) dogfight in the comments section concerning it; oddly enough, Townhall.com loved it. Pick sources at random and read away, and absorb their biases and interests as cultural research. It’s far more interesting than the movie was. I would personally agree most wholeheartedly with the ever entertaining Armond White; I know so little about film that I can often follow only a small part of his writing, but I can say with all confidence and sincerity that he is most certainly the anti-Eggars, the Anti-Klosterman.
On a positive note, I must once again recommend Cobble Hill Cinema as a place to see movies where people do not narrate, explicate or cell phone conversate during the movie.
* As I’ve been saying for years, he is a bottle of puke.
Tascam M-2600 32×8x2 mixing console. Used in a smoke free home, never gigged. Was installed a pro studio before I owned it. Needs a good internal cleaning, as some of the channels are occasionally scratchy, though they clear up when the channel faders are swept back and forth. Six aux sends, sweepable mids on the EQ section (sounds VERY nice), phantom power for mics and xlr inputs on all channels.
Waldorf MicroQ: This 2U rackmount VA synth has deep programming potential far beyond the glimpse seen with it’s trance-matic presets. Filters and FX can be routed against all sorts of parameters to modulate the output and then sent to multiple outputs. Will be missed. — $350
This collection of folksy post-rock is something of a paint-by-numbers affair, but well-crafted and engaging enough as a background soundtrack that its more obvious faults can be overlooked. All Is Wild, All Is Silent isn’t a terrible album, but it does put one mind of a distillation of ideas rather than something more fresh. Much like Explosions in the Sky condensed the untamed bombast of Godspeed You Black Emperor into more digestible five minute chunks of crescendo and release, Balmorhea pulls from the currents of instrumental post-rock landscapes and whatever we’re calling this “new folk” thing.
The highlight of this evening was a deeply intimate version of “Blood Embrace” for which Matt Sweeney came out to play some guitar and sing a bit. Mr. Oldham paced, gestured, scowled and delivered in full a deeply moving performance, looking like a cross between a street preacher touched by the hand of god and a cro-magnon, what with his prominent brow and less prominent hairline. It almost felt like the audience was intruding upon a very private conversation of betrayal and bafflement, despite the spoken word portion being a performed excerpt from the film Rolling Thunder.
Having no investment in the lo-fi noisey pop thing I can’t tell you where the authentic stuff begins and inauthentic stuff ends. Authenticity is a great game for idiots to play but those of us outside of the kiddie pool have a completely different set of needs. Out of the pile of stuff I’ve heard, this is pretty decent, some group on SubPop with a real short name was ok for a bit, and the rest gives an overall impression of “you have to be there to get it”. I don’t get why you’d necessarily bother with this stuff when 
Whether intended to be a cute reimagining of the mid-90s intersection of acid and jungle or merely a nostalgia trip, Numbers Lucent is unfortunately another documentation of how the mighty have fallen into less-mighty ways. For all of the bright coloring (the cover art is amazing) in many ways this is merely a retread of Squarepusher’s own work, especially Burningn’n Tree, itself a serviceable and enjoyable romp of straightforward bleepy drill n’ bass. While certainly not terrible nor badly-produced, this six song EP is also not very interesting for very long, though it helps that each track ducks out at around the four minute mark.
“I will be all right if you hold me” repeats Jhon Balance in “Sex With Sun Ra”. One dead man singing about another dead man.
Though I am indeed big into 
