On Staring at Goats

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ 1 Comment

Men-Who-Stare-at-Goats“The Men Who Stare at Goats“ is a fun, if deranged, movie. It succeeds by takings its derangement seriously, to its logical conclusion. The story is a (allegedly, partially true) history of psychic operations in the US army told through a crazy Ewan McGregor/George Clooney jaunt through Iraq. It also stars Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges.

The casting is crucial– the psychic army men call themselves Jedi, which makes Obi Wan McGregor an especially fun casting decision. And Jeff Bridges plays a version of Lebowski. Everyone plays it straight, and that’s crucial– it makes sure the movie remains campy fun. The movie starts with a notice: More of this is true than you would believe. With an opening like that, you have to play it straight and hope it works. Continue reading →

Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ Leave a comment

Chuck Palahniuk's booksChoke was my first audiobook. I finished it last week (now I’m on to A Scanner Darkly).

The book is good– not great– but you can decide if you want to read it or not based on this: it’s a book about a sex addict who fakes choking in restaurants by the author of Fight Club. It’s deliberately subversive, like other Palahniuk stuff, and it’s fun. It’s better than his Lullaby, but not as good as Fight Club.

Choke was made in to a movie last year with Sam Rockwell, but I haven’t seen that yet.

∞

Listening to a book as opposed to reading it was a new experience, but not as different as I had imagined. You’re forced to pay more attention to nuance, and even now I can hear Palahniuk’s voice in my head when I think about the book. I’ll write my thoughts about that in the future. I wonder if my impression of the book would have been better, worse or different if I had actually read it– words on page or words on Kindle screen.

Yeah, the Kindle-like devices are worth a lot of thought too. Doubly so, if I actually owned one. Continue reading →

and already we have an archive

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ 1 Comment

As the 2 people who have read this blog today may have noticed, this blog now has an archive that goes back a few years. Like a Tarantino movie, it has history without having age.

All the pre-2009 posts come from a movie blog I used to run called widescreenglory.com. It has a lot of short reviews, some film notes that I wrote for a local indie theatre and other random stuff. Like the summer I tried to document 100 days, 100 movies. I got to 55. Enjoy.

Decade’s Most Important Music

~ Devanshu Mehta ~ Leave a comment

So it’s that time of the decade, when we put together best-of lists. NPR Music contributors have put together their list of 50 most important recordings of the past decade. It’s a good-ish list– betraying their indie bias– but as Bob Boilen says:

We make these lists not to exclude certain recordings, but to turn people on to music that we feel stands out the most in an unimaginably crowded field. We also make these lists so you can tell us about the music you are passionate about. […] None of the many people who helped put this list together agreed on all the selections. We all had our favorites and, of course, many never made it into the final 50. Regardless, there’s a ton of amazing music to spend time with, and probably some things you never heard of just waiting to be discovered.

Continue reading →