Darjeeling Limited and Hotel Cavalier

Darjeeling Limited

Hotel Cavalier

I watched Hotel Cavalier when it was first released on iTunes sometime in the middle of last year, on the urging of a friend who was amused by the dialogue between Natalie Portman and Luke Wilson’s characters:

Nat: Whatever happens in the end, I don’t wanna lose you as my friend.
Luke: I promise, I will never be your friend. No matter what. Ever.

He likened the scene to a particularly destructive relationship in his past. And who hasn’t felt that pull – whether or not it’s been acted upon? You care about someone… but they make you feel good and shitty at the same time?

In short, I really liked it. It’s short, poignant, the soundtrack is beautiful. The interplay between characters is both familiar and distant, punctuated by watching the sun from the balcony with the curtains billowing around them.

Darjeeling Limited

Darjeeling Limited unravels, like a thread pulled from a knit sweater. It’s a story about three brothers traveling on a train called “Darjeeling Limited”. Their father (Bill Murray) is killed by a taxi on the way to the train. Francis (Owen Wilson), injured in a motorcycle accident attempts to bring the family closer together persuades his brothers Peter (Adrian Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) to embark on a spiritual quest.

Francis puts together an entire itinerary of the most spiritual places in India. Like most journeys with a “plan”, things never turn out quite as expected. Unfortunately, they get kicked off the train. They meet and accidentally kill an Indian boy. They find their estranged mother, who skips off after they meet her at the convent where she was living.

Peter is running from his wife and unborn child. Jack is running from his ex-girlfriend. But somehow, their shared experiences allow them to establish a relationship beyond “family”. The journey itself and the search for a spiritual connection being the catalysis. The metaphor is pretty obvious, but established well – sentimental without being sappy, true to the Wes Anderson form.

I think the most compelling thing about Anderson’s work is his expression of the details that actually make up true to life interactions, the real and the mundane. Much in the same way that I appreciate about Murakami, he goes beyond the broad strokes of The Story into the components that make up The Story.

Fighting about petty things like who their father loved more. An affair on the train. Sharing prescription drugs procured in the Indian pharmacies. The special drink served to them on the train. The eldest choosing food for the others.

In short this is another gem from Wes Anderson. Like Hotel Cavalier, the soundtrack is beautiful, tying the movie together with the tunes introduced in Hotel Cavalier. My favorite is “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” by Peter Sarstedt.

I give it a solid – I like it. Go watch it. Enjoy. Damn it.

Trailer
Wikipedia
IMDB

Points on Plurk.

Plurk.

Touted as an alternative to Twitter and gained a degree of popularity during a particularly horrendous Twitter-flakeage (along with friendfeed), and HOW can I blame people for pursuing alternatives?

The Interesting:
Plurk appears to take the “timeline” seriously, there is a scrolling hour display across the bottom edge of the plurkstream. The UI updates posts in a stream that spans the browser window places various individual’s updates in a left (older) to right (newer) fashion. In a way, it’s like stepping into the stream of someone’s updates.

The short “140 character” limit and a UI that taps into the expression of emotional state attached to an action give Plurk it’s micro-blog distinction.

However, there are some problematic elements:
a) The span is less than a day wide. You have to page back to see farther than 3-4 hours between posts.

b) User’s posts seem to be placed haphazardly in the “flow” – someone updates; and there’s no rhyme or reason as to where (vertically) it shows up in the plurkstream.

c) User responses attach to the original post – two things that are annoying about this… 1) you have to go back to the original post to find out what’s been said since the last post/comment… 2) you can tell *if* things have been updated, but “when” – since the overall “design” seems to convey ‘things in order’ – this does not make sense.

d) In order to update your plurkstream or see responses, you have to actually click an “update” link.

Intuitive UI improvements:
Complex or simple. It seems that Plurk has decided to take the “middle road” by making some features less accessible.

a) Just update the plurkstream. The backend is smart enough to figure out that there has been an update, so why not just post it?

Due to the nature of plurk-repsonses; requesting to view only plurks with responses makes sense, however, there is also a visual notification of a plurk-response in three ways – 1) comment number next to the plurk is updated, 2) the comment number is highlighted in red, and 3) the link in the lower left corner of the page indicating the number of responses.

b) Give users the ability to view the plurkstream via more than a couple of hours at a stretch. A single day view with an adjusted hour span would be an improvement over having to paginate backwards – even though there is a marker for “Yesterday”.

c) Vertical plurkstream… Make Sense. There does not appear to be a rhyme or reason for the location of various plurks in the vertical view. Not organized by user, not by time posted…

Usability notes:
a) Combine account and profile settings. It’s more intuitive to the user to modify aspects of their “plurk-sionality” in the same place.

b) You can scan all the way forward, but not all the way back in the timeline.

General comments:
It would be great to have more transparency between Plurk developers and the Plurk community. I’ve posted comments to the Plurk GetSatisfaction page.

Overall Plurk is an interesting little web service that allows you to view and post updates in realtime and consolidating responses to posts in a visually unique fashion. It’s got a number of other kitschy features, such as Karma – a unique bend on the Social Networking scene, time will tell if both Plurk and it’s features have sticking power.

The Number 23

I’ve been watching movies lately. The movie “number 23″ intrigued me from the moment I knew that it existed. Having a teenage relationship with numerology and The Principia Discordia. My number on the swim team was 23. Many of my best friend’s email addresses have the number 23 in them somehow. It’s an old obsession come to life… but back to the story.

I never saw it in the theater. It’s been years since movies on the big screen have moved me to actually make the trek out.

number 23 is a dark and bizarre unfolding of a life forgotten. Pulp Noir mixed in with something else, a strange form of quasi realism that seems to actually hold the film together and yet contribute to the pulpy-disjointed psychosis that takes hold of the main character Jim Carrey. Paranoia comes on slowly, noticing connections that evolve into a singular focus on the number.

What happens when who you *were* starts invading who you have become?

Personally, I love the delta between the hard-ass pulp detective and the mild mannered guy in the present. At all times in his narrative, he appears fearful of himself, timid.

His tragedy is that he has both a present and a distant past. Recent past has been forgotten.

How long can you hide the truth from yourself. Especially when you find a book that is your own confession. Yet the fragile reality unravels. The more a vague picture emerges, like astrology coaless into reality. Then, paranoia.

You see what you search for. Everywhere.

Trailer
Wikipedia
IMDB

The Orphanage

If you’ve seen and loved Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro brings you on another trip into the fantastic, the edge between what is possible and what is not. Reality and imagination – in a way that American’s haven’t really been able to portray in film. It doesn’t seem to be “the way”.

My appreciation of Magical Realism was born out of Gabriel Garcia’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, down the rabbit hole of imagery, that small place where your senses might lie to you.

del Toro takes you on a journey of an orphan, who adopts an orphan… then upon returning to her orphanage, perhaps to give back some of the care she received as an orphan herself. But winds up learning terrible truths about events that took place before she could understand them. The Orphanage itself becomes both her obsession and her prison, love for her son leads her on a chase that will change the way she looks at life, death, and the afterlife.

The film itself leaves clues as to the conclusion – as the children have left clues as to truths of their lives and deaths.

Is it possible to be touched and freaked out by the same movie? The truth unravels slowly, like pulling on the thread of crochet… and the finish is filled with love – the sweet and the sour, life and death, both vibrant, as real as the sun and the sea.

It seems that del Toro has a beautiful way of connecting life and death, making the vision whole and fluid, like waves, beating the shore, like the tide, marching in and marching out – like the rhythm of the world, in constant motion.

Edit: Side note – the DVD menu-ing system is awesome. Visuals cycle, but the sound does not. I approve!

Trailer
Wikipedia
IMDB