Listen the Snow is Falling...

I'm here to admit - I have almost nothing. Boston gets a foot or more of snow - that's nice. But between that and nothing new in the theaters to see, I barely left the house... I did watch 9 Songs on DVD - I don't quite know what to make of it. It is admirable for trying to make a sex film that's not only not pornography, but isn't the kind of politicized provocation that the usual high-brow smut films are - not that there's anything wrong with politicized provocation (I'm thinking of Last Tango in Paris, In the Rhealm of the Senses, Catherine Breillat's films, even things like The Brown Bunny), but it's nice to see an attempt to make a movie with explicit sex, that isn't a moralizing lecture.... 9 Songs is a bit of a strange film, though - it has a story - characters - but these things are elided. It is quick and minimalist - sex and music - though quite a bit of other stuff creeps in. Actually, the problem might be that more stuff creeps into the sex parts than the music parts. Nothing happens at the concerts - we see band footage, we sometimes see quick shots of the lovers - nothing else - no dancing, waiting in line to get into the pisser, no contact with other people, good bad or indifferent... Still - it does linger in the mind. It's cool the way the sex scenes work - the way they get the mix of routine, habit, and occasional moments of revelation that sex is really like... It's also kind of cool for telling this story, a fairly common, undramatic seeming one, and not insisting on finding some big ending for it. 2 people meet, fuck, fall in love kinda, but not so much, and then part. And then...

I did see Why We Fight in the theaters. It's okay. About the military industrial complex. It was okay, but nothing revelatory. So - that's all there is tonight. That and Yoko, by way of Galaxie 500.

It's that time of year - nothing going on in the movie world. Next week, though - Tristram Shandy opens (speaking of Michael Winterbottom - who's kind of the English version of Steven Soderburgh, isn't he? skipping around from style to style?) - Manderlay opens - the Neil Young movie opens... things should get better.