On the Fold

Wes Anderson’s first animated film, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, will be in theaters November 13. Sadly, or perhaps not, this is probably what I will be thankful for on Thanksgiving.

Although I really don’t understand how it could be entertaining to watch shitty graphics for 90 minutes. Is the power of nostalgia strong enough to convince people to pay today’s movie ticket prices simply for the sake of revisiting a childhood fascination? Oh wait, it is.

Scars, Basement Jaxx’s first worthwhile album since 2001, was due out early this summer, but has since been postponed until September. Maybe it’s been delayed because during their hiatus from the public consciousness, the club music duo went a little overboard with the psychedelic drugs as this music video for the extremely danceable single ‘Raindrops’ clearly shows:

Industrial strength pasties? What? Ok, so I don’t really know if Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton are on drugs, but it is a catastrophically strange music video. Although I guess it’s not all that different from their earlier work:

I needed to have a good cry today, so I watched this. Don’t judge.

Last night, I finished off a bottle of three buck chuck along with the rest of Ingmar Bergman’s epic Fanny and Alexander. It was a beautiful and haunting film, which, viewed through the haze of cheap (but respectable) wine, left me feeling thoughtful and dreamy. I searched through the commentary for explanations as to the strange turns taken by the plot (too complex to summarize here, though hallucinatory projections, androgyny and house fires are involved) and found that one of Bergman’s influences was the German author E.T.A. Hoffmann. Hoffmann wrote in the veins of fantasy and horror, and being both a lover of fantasy as well as a sleepy drunk looking for a bedtime story, I dove into his short story The Sandman. It’s a worthwhile read not only for its dark peculiarity, but also for its clear ties to Euripides’ Alcestis and Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Being a student of classics, I was primarily intrigued by the ‘living doll’ element common to each of these tales. (Incidentally, the comic book series, The Sandman, written by Neil Gaiman was published by the DC Comics imprint Vertigo. Coincidence?) However, Freud’s famous essay,  ‘The Uncanny’ provides an interesting psychoanalysis in terms of the relationship between the loss of sight and castration.