Not much today. I went to Bourne Ultimatum yesterday. I'd give it a 7. The sure-eyed Greydanus raves about it, but I was a bit less impressed, though I thoroughly enjoyed it (note: trust Greydanus, not me).
The current issue of The Atlantic Monthly has an article on 20 years of "quirk" that I found interesting. Here's the link. TAL recently re-designed their website, and one of their editors wrote to me awhile back, saying they were in the process of revamping their website to provide more free content. Please let me know if the link works for you (assuming you are a non-subscriber). Email or comments box is fine. Excerpt from quirk article:
Quirk is odd, but not too odd. That would take us all the way to weird, and there someone might get hurt. Napoleon Dynamite became a quirk classic by making heroes of Napoleon and Pedro, boy-men without qualities who team up against an alpha blonde to elect Mexican- immigrant Pedro class president at an Idaho high school. Napoleon seals the deal with a dance so transfixingly, transportingly wrong that it becomes a kind of deus ex machina. Pedro wins. (Indeed, inappropriate dancing is a big quirk trope, inasmuch as it provides a dramatic moment at which value systems can collide. See, for example, 7-year-old Olive's unwittingly hypersexualized routine to Rick James's “Super Freak” that brings the dysfunctional family together in last year's Little Miss Sunshine. This itself called out to the unwittingly only-slightly-less-hypersexualized preteen dance troupe Sparkle Motion in the 2001 quirk-noir Donnie Darko, a movie in which Jake Gyllenhaal takes orders from a giant rabbit.)
