This 13 minute short is a prologue to The Darjeeling Limited movie ( watch that trailer here ), point being to add some backstory to the Jason Schwartzman character in said movie.
The doomed romance has Natalie Portman as well, which leads him to take the journey to India with his brothers.
It’s available on iTunes for free for a short while, Hotel Chevalier .
Susanna Moore is a great writer I’ve recently discovered–her novel, In the Cut, was made into a film by Jane Campion in 2003 with Meg Ryan. It’s a dark movie about a reserved teacher and her erotic relationship with a cop whose investigating a possible serial killer, slightly controversial at the time because Ryan shows a lot of nudity in the film. Moore is keenly apt at portraying transformation, her characters, who appear comfortable in wholesome skins, seem to molt recklessly revealing rough underbellies that had seemingly always been there–almost a necessary seediness for their newer, grittier lives. One wonders if the author’s past as an original playboy bunny at the Hefner clubs has any part of this.
The Big Girls, set in women’s prison follows four characters, focusing mostly on an Andrea Yates type character, who has killed her children and the psychiatrist who treats her. Moore creates a subjective, sensory view of the prison, it like reading the prison diaries of Sylvia Plath if there were such a thing. Moore’s not looking for sympathy from the reader, more like palpable apathy-the killer isn’t vile but mentally ill, broken from an abused childhood–cliché, yes but so skilled in the rendering of the character and her past/present life, one forgives easily. The psychiatrist is equally a mess, with a sporadic, distant childhood, mother dead at an early age, low self esteem, broken marriage, etc .
Moore has a remarkable way of turning the subversive into something ordinary or rather expected-something less repulsive than one thought initially, she shakes your morals and throws them about, leaving one or two behind in the process.
One Last Look is an amazing novel, set in India in the mid 19th century; it’s based on the diaries of Emily Eden–a writer and artist traveling with her sister and brother–appointed Governor-General to India at the time. Sure, the Raj is a depleted subject, squeezed to death at this point by Merchant Ivory films or by nostalgic English novelists itching to portray a sliver of that age. But Moore is sly; much of the beginning of the book is Eleanor’s (as she’s called in the novel) and family, guarded disdain of the culture they see around them, their staff, customs, the land etc. Eleanor’s perspective is a sort of feigned acknowledgment of her world, not necessarily good, not necessarily bad, an underhanded nod at the strangeness then slowly we see changes in her outlook. Moore is so skilled and subtle, it’s not a blatant awakening but a steady, cloying rebirth that allows the reader to imbue the character and change perspective along with her. Perhaps I’m partial as I lived in India before so at once I am aware of the odors, colors, people she is describing but if I had never been before, I would be at one repelled and intrigued–a common reaction to a new culture, we are entranced and enthralled one minute, the next utterly repulsed.
Moore is great at bathing scenery and character over you like a light rainfall, you’ve not aware it’s there but soon you’re soaked, seeping in it’s wondrous clarity. Her language is sparse but not terse, there’s nothing flowery here, no flowing abundance of heavy words or cleverness yet each paragraph in its simplicity is of a startlingly weight, a deep thickness to push through. Eleanor begins to comment widely on the insular, supercilious habits of the English, shows alliance with her servants, her sister has gone “native”, smoking hookahs and wrapping herself in silken robes yet her brother remains indifferent, not cruel just weary and dissapointed by his surrounding. Eleanor’s relationship with him hints strongly at incest, which doesn’t seem subversive but more oddly acceptable as their relationship is warm with mutual respect. Eventually the trio is sent out of India, back to England and Lady Eleanor becomes a displaced person, her world neither here nor there.
Is it my imagination or do bonobos seem to be very popular these days? They’re the chimpanzee’s first cousin–a branch of apes that evolved from the gorilla about 7 million years ago, the other two branches being humans and chimps. Native to the north of the congo, these apes have only really been “discovered” and studied only in the last 100 years.
Their popularity has to do with their good nature, non aggressive behavior and their active sexual life. Watching a documentary of bonobos is a little disconcerting, it’s like watching a “Mr Peepers” skit from SNL, where Chris Kattan jumps frantically from table to chair, spitting out fruit and humping everything in site (though this may exaggerated in a zoo environment, seemingly from boredom, a few have speculated).
 Bonobo |
 Chimp |
It’s interesting to compare bonobos to chimpanzees, the bonobos have smaller skulls and less of a brow, although their bodies are slightly smaller, they’re more elongated than chimps and they stand upright fairly often. The bonobo’s eyes seem more expressive and intelligent. and they’re also far less aggressive then chimps and ruled by a matriarchal society. A recent story in the New Yorker has an interesting article about them. Along with a nice photo spread by James Mollison.
In the article there’s a funny anecdote about a man named Yearkes who compares two species he had in captivity, a chimp, called Panzee and Chim, a bonobo. – the chimp Panzee was timid, dumb, and foul-tempered. “Her resentment and anger were readily aroused and she was quick to give them expression with hands and teeth,” Yerkes wrote. Chim (the bononbo) was a joy: equable and eager for new experiences. “Seldom daunted, he treated the mysteries of life as philosophically as any man.” Moreover, he was a “genius.
Some insane experiments were done in the 20s, where human sperm was injected into chimpanzees’ uteruses, needless to say it didn’t work but the result would be a “Humanzee , Chuman, or Manpanzee”, the latter sounds too much like marzipan, I tend to favor “Chuman” it sounds like a Victorian disease. Chumans might evolve like this if we’re lucky.
I found this photo recently online and decided this about summed up every creepy boyfriend my friends, sisters, and I have ever had. It’s a summation in two parts; the guy in the background is the quirky, geeky boyfriend–the one you meet at a thrift store or animation festival, the one you think at first, is intriguing and eccentric, full of dry humor and colorful original thoughts. He wears ugly winter hats even in the summer (like the fellow in the photo) and carries random objects around with him like leaky pens, bottles, sandwiches or old musty books he’s reading. He likes to state bizarre ideas out loud; use obscures references and has odd facial tics you find amusing.
I had the perfect archetype of such a boyfriend; when we first met he wore white sport socks pulled up to his knees – this was not the seventies – and small white tennis shorts. He was thin–not quite junkyesque, but still an annoying thinness, his thighs seemingly barely larger then my forearms. His hair was tousled, loose curls falling everywhere; large brown glasses perched over a rather simple, strong face. One friend later said he was a young Mick Jagger, she was right, his lips were full, sensuous even, his face smooth and verging on handsome but he was the typical nerd, his physicality foreign to him–disposable, a body he threw on every day, carelessly draped over his frame as an afterthought.
The night I met him he brought a crystal garden with him-those glass tanks where miniature colored stalagmite grow–we weren’t sure why but it provided a shrewd forewarning of his character to come–unseen quirks that would spring out from nowhere, creep out like slow weeds burrowing out from cement cracks. The terrible habits–peeing in the kitchen sink or arguing with himself–yes himself, the showers he seldom took, the collection of bugs covered in latex he kept in his basement, the photograph of the seventies star taped to his ceiling over his bed. Later after he left that night, my friend said, You’re going to go out with him, Yeah right, I said, and I did of course, it lasted for a few years, a sporadic strange relationship that had no real definition.
The other guy, the guy in the foreground, is the guy who you are at once repelled and attracted to, he’s a creep, you know it but don’t care. And underneath the layer of oil, swarm and polyester there’s that stiff layer of raw sexiness that exudes its terrible odor. He’s the guy in Dazed and Confused, the Linklater film–the older guy that hangs around your high school and dates the younger girls, he’s Eric Roberts, the stalker and eventual killer in Star 80, he’s a boy my sister dated when she was fourteen, an older slick, red neck boy with long, oily black hair, shiny eyes and curled lips who harassed her on the school bus in the wild confines of the Virginia countryside. The guy who does the peace sign with his fingers then out comes the tongue and he wiggles it between his two Fingers. This is the guy with the fingernails that are a little too long, with the smile that hints at a surplus of hidden tooth decay, with the perpetual outline of his penis pushing through his pants. He’s your best friend’s brother who hooks his thumbs in his jeans, leans back and stares at you at her dinner table. The guy that whispers perverted, crass things he wants to do to you in your ear when you walk by him in the hall. This is the guy you eventually sleep with, then later wonder why but do it again.
Where are these guys now?
The trailer for the newest Wes Anderson (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) Movie has just been released. The movie features Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson who are all brothers taking a trip across India.
Click the image below to view the movie trailer:
This was good.