Day: April 28, 2011

LFM Review: Flowers of Evil @ Tribeca 2011

By Joe Bendel. The wave of protests sweeping the Middle East started in Iran, but it was the Islamist government that supplied all the rage. Their crackdown was swift and violent. The almost-revolution was not televised, but it was on YouTube, where a young Iranian expat breathlessly follows the tumultuous events rocking her country from the safety of France in David Dusa’s Flowers of Evil, which screens at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.

Rachid Youcef in "Flowers of Evil."

When the French-Algerian Rachid (a.k.a. Gekko) first meets Anahita, he does not make a strong impression. He is the one carrying her bags when she checks into her upscale hotel. It is not snobbery. The attractive Iranian is understandably preoccupied with the government’s brutal response to the “Green” pro-democracy demonstrations. It is not just political. She has a number of friends and relatives ominously missing. Yet Rachid’s joie de vivre appeals to her, particularly as she faces the reality of Iranian oppression.

Anahita and Rachid initially connect through Facebook, and social media is deeply ingrained in their daily lives. Though both are Muslim, their socio-political backgrounds are radically different. Naturally she is the moderate, though he wisely refrains from judging her occasional glass of wine (much). Initially they appear to be a good match, with Anahita drawing off his energy, while he learns from her to appreciate the French culture he had always taken for granted. She even introduces him to the poetry of Baudelaire (hence the title). Unfortunately, her survivor’s guilt often manifests itself in bouts of depression, which the immature Rachid has little patience for. Continue reading LFM Review: Flowers of Evil @ Tribeca 2011

Tina Fey & Her Wounded Nerd Ego

Tina Fey.

By David Ross. You’ve heard of yo-yo dieters; I’m a yo-yo subscriber to the New Yorker. Some clever piece by Adam Gopnik (solitary throwback to the versatile, stylish intellectualism of the New Yorker’s heyday) will catch my eye in a dentist’s office and I will subscribe once again. I will read the thing for a year, mostly on the toilet; grow increasingly annoyed with its coastal smarminess and inability to interrogate its basic assumptions about the world or even recognize them as assumptions; flush the toilet; cancel in a huff; re-up a year later; etc. This pattern has governed my entire adult life.

With each renewed subscription, I notice changes that are probably invisible to those who read steadily. My latest return leaves me appalled. The old champagne fizz of the New York mind is gone; the metropolitan dandyism embodied by the magazine’s Eustace Tilley mascot is caput. The cartoons are crudely drawn and often just crude. David Remnick, who became The New Yorker’s fifth editor in 1998, began as a dowdy geopolitical journalist for the Washington Post and has lately become a starry-eyed chronicler of the Obama millennium. Presumably in Remnick’s image, The New Yorker has become clunky, earnest, wonkish, didactic, and condescending. Just like the president whom Remnick so much admires, it seems desperate to clarify ‘the big picture,’ to sweep away all those stubborn, uneducated misconceptions that interfere with the progressive renovation of the world.

Even worse, the New Yorker has brought in Tina Fey for comic relief (see here and here). Woody Allen and Steve Martin have long wasted space in The New Yorker, but you could dismiss their pointless little sketches as vanity material designed to gussy up the table of contents and burnish their own idea of themselves as intellectuals. Tina Fey is both a better writer and a more ambitious contributor: she is not merely trading on her name, but attempting to bring her personality to bear, to stage a theatrics of the self. This makes her harder to ignore, while not making her any less cloying. Continue reading Tina Fey & Her Wounded Nerd Ego