Too long, too loud, too sterile, and not a lot of magic.

I have to say, however, that I buy Henry Cavill in the Clark Kent/Superman, and I love, love, love Michael Shannon as General Zod.  Shannon is such a terrific actor.  Regardless of what role he plays (and plenty of them are unlikeable or weird), I am mesmerized by him on screen.

The idea of focusing on backstory and aliens is fresh, and there are moments and scenes that I enjoyed, but overall Man of Steel was not very engaging for me.

This detachment (to the point of finding entire sequences tedious) is a problem I have with many Zach Snyder films.  You would have to bind me to a chair and force my eyes open (yes, picture A Clockwork Orange) to make me watch 300 or Sucker Punch again.

Hmmmm…I am reminded now that I wouldn’t mind seeing Synder’s film Watchmen again.  While I think it is flawed, it works the best for me of all of his films that I’ve seen.

I loved the use of music and how the choices reinforced the idea of a parallel world.  Any film with Leonard Cohen’s music on the soundtrack has something going for it!

Before Frances Ha, Noah Baumbach’s signature films for me are Margot at the Wedding and The Squid and the Whale.

I particularly admire The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach’s blistering portrait of a literary couple (Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels) whose marital battles damage their two sons.  Although that film was so emotionally searing that it was difficult to watch, I thought it was extremely good.

Margot at the Wedding also deals with a dysfunctional family but does not seem quite as compelling and narratively cohesive as The Squid and the Whale.  Margot at the Wedding stars Jennifer Jason Leigh (then Baumbach’s wife), an actor who deserves to be better known to audiences than she is, along Nicole Kidman and Jack Black, who are well enough known without any commentary from me.

Perhaps because Greta Gerwig, who stars as Frances, co-wrote this screenplay with Baumbach, there is a bit of lightness to Frances Ha that replaces the cruelty of characters in the other two films.

Gerwig is an indie film darling, and she co-stars in another of Baumbach’s films, one which didn’t work very well for me.  In Greenberg, Ben Stiller plays a troubled man who housesits for his brother and falls for his brother’s personal assistant, played by Gerwig.

Compared to Greenberg (the character and the film), Frances is a breath of fresh air.

Basically, this is the story of a 27-year-old aspiring dancer on the pathway to adulthood.  Though some may be tempted to compare the characters and scenarios to Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls (and Adam Driver who plays Hannah’s boyfriend in the series does have a supporting role here), I think any similarities are cursory.

Sure, both are set in New York and include some privileged kids playing at becoming adults, but Frances is likeable and the film’s references to classics of French New Wave cinema (in style, tone, music) are irresistible.

Greta is socially and physically awkward, which is troublesome for a dancer.  She is all of these things:  vulnerable, sweet, myopic, stubborn, impulsive, selectively smart, demure, bold, optimistic, engaging, maddening, trusting, dateable, undateable, and lots of other things, too, that well-educated, emerging men and women in their 20s are as they try to find a career that is worthy of their image of themselves.

But, most of all, she is watchable and believable so that every moment in the film feels real. 

Highly recommended.

 

Part of PBS’s “Independent Lens” series last season, Soul Food Junkies is Byron Hurt’s personal journal to learn more about the soul food tradition and his family’s connection to it.  Multiple perspectives are represented – historical, medical, family – and Bryon does try to mesh entrenched food preferences with healthier options in ways that are helpful.

A consortium of Winston-Salem organizations will sponsor a free screening of the documentary.  Here are the details:

When:       Tuesday, June 18 at 7:30 p.m.

Where:      The Enterprise Conference Center

Address:    1922 Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive in Winston-Salem.

Following the screening, there will be a Q & A session with John Card, a physician with Winston Salem Healthcare, and N’Gai Dickerson of The Urban Culinarian. 

Soul Food Junkies is the first of three films in the Foodways & Roadways Documentary Film Series, a joint effort between the Translational Science Institute (TSI) and the Wake Forest University Documentary Film Program (DFP).  In a larger project of TSI and the DFP, Margaret Savoca and Jessica Pic chronicled the changing food environment in Winston-Salem over the last few decades.  

The remaining two films in the Foodways & Roadways Documentary Film Series will be A Community of Gardeners, which examines the impact of community gardening in Washington, D.C., and Edible City: Grow the Revolution, a film about the food justice movement that is emerging across the nation and around the world.  A Community of Gardeners will be screened on July 16, and Edible City:  Grow the Revolution will be screened on August 13.

Sponsors of the June 18 screening of Soul Food Junkies include the TSI Program in Community Engagement, SG Atkins CDC, WSSU School of Health Sciences, and Psi Phi Chapter of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.  Soul Food Junkies won the 2012 CNN Best Documentary Award at the Award at the American Black Film Festival.

This event is free and open to the public.

I’ve read the Pew Research Reports and other sources that indicate young people are leaving Facebook (since adults have moved into the virtual neighborhood) and are using Twitter and Instagram more heavily.

Tumblr is falling out of favor with younger demographics, too, because YAHOO! has purchased the company, and devotees fear that everything will change making what is cool into something corporate.

Everything always changes.  I’ve been around long enough to witness (and sort of adapt to) that truth.

Since I’m neither an early adopter nor a late adopter (I did get on Twitter before Hillary Clinton), I have recently added Instagram and Twitter to my social networking sites.

I’m going to skip Tumblr for now until I see how it trends, and besides, how much change does any one person need?

Maybe less than you think.  I have noticed already that many people (like me) tend to integrate their social media by posting the best of the Instagram photos on Facebook and Tweeting quips and links to Facebook.

There is a certain element of efficiency to this method, and (so far) not too much redundancy.  In fact, thinking back to the advertising dictum about the importance of reach and frequency (how many eyeballs you attract and how often the message is encountered) to successful selling, the strategy is probably a good one.

Of course, it raises the question, what are you selling (or buying)?

The answer to this is easy for me.  I am buying and selling the same things:  connection and ideas.  And, the process of doing so feels authentic to me because those elements are fairly consistent across my various outlets (including this blog).

The union of the personal connectedness and the marketplace of ideas also marks my social media use as both work and social because (as John Fiske describes intertextuality) there are surely “leaky boundaries” among all of the narratives that inform our lived experience and sense of our identities.

Mine is a whole cloth with patterns and textures woven into it instead of assembled swatches, which means that work and social or social and work overlap seamlessly, and I’m cool with that approach because I no longer have the burden of negotiating a bifurcated life where public and private are sharply divided and guarded.

This has nothing to do with how much I work or how much I play but, rather, how I am allowed to “be” in a unified way.  And, social media has proven one site for that unification.

I have also been surprised (for a relatively un-techie person) how easy it has been to establish the integration of my social media.

If you want to follow me on Twitter (mostly links to the blog posts but there may be some surprises coming up), I’m @MaryMDalton.

On Instagram, I’m marymdalton, and I do generally share the nicest photos on Facebook.

On Tumblr, I’m nonexistent until someone or something convinces me there is a reason to weave that network into my social/work tapestry of connection and ideas.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what is parody? 

Flashback.  Here’s what I wrote about the HBO series Girls early in the first season:

These are privileged women in transition who exhibit no recognition of that privilege, which reflects the self-absorption they share with the characters of Sex and the City.

The good thing and the bad thing about Girls is how authentic it all feels.  The show is entertaining and absorbing, frequently funny, and more often than all of that sad.

In the second episode, a physician testing the lead character for STDs says she wouldn’t want to be 24 years old again for anything.  I agree…and will keep watching these girls to see if they become women.

Actually, the series has not grown on me.  Apparently, girls will be girls. 

I still watch it and hope for an evolution in Lena Dunham’s vision (the fairy tale ending of the second season decidedly does not qualify), but more often than not have been disappointed.

This morning I saw the parody “GIRLS Season 38” posted on a friend’s Facebook page and had to take a look. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNCnu66tybY

It’s funny and – believe it or not – spot on in many ways because the short identifies the essential flaws of each character and plays on them in amusing ways.  The real selling point of the piece, however, is that it doesn’t particularly amplify these flaws but shows with greater clarity how exceedingly unattractive the traits are in the senior citizen versions of the “girls.”

A little bit of studied self-absorption goes a long way when it is endemic to every character, and a little bit of parody makes that abundantly clear.

Jacob Hatley’s documentary about Levon Helm, one of the founding members of The Band, is a bit of gritty gossamer.

Sounds like a paradox?

It is.

The film is a warm tribute that gives us glimpses of Helm in his later days working on his first studio album in many years and playing for fans who will pay to see him perform (mostly) at his farm in Woodstock, NY, juxtaposed with interviews and archival elements that suggest his rough and tumble past on the road. 

There are hints at unresolved tensions and regrets, but Helm does not directly address those issues and challenges with collaborators, money, cancer, and addiction. 

The film doesn’t provide many insights into who Levon Helm was beyond a musician who liked to jam and liked to party as long as he could manage both, but the larger issues loom large at the interstices of the film seemingly just off camera or nearly out of earshot, as themes we reach for but never quite grasp. 

There are tender moments, evocative memories, but few insights.  

For diehard fans, the private moments are likely enough.  For the rest of us, it is hard not to want a little more, something that lends deeper context to the grit and a stronger supportive texture than the gossamer.

 I cannot think of another documentary that has had this kind of deep, concrete, and ongoing effect on public discourse; Ruth Marcus likens it to Upton Sinclair’s muckraking book The Jungle, which seems an apt analogy.

Ruth Marcus quotes one of the filmmakers, Kirby Dick, in her column in today’s Washington Post, “I knew it was going to be explosive,” Dick said. “I didn’t know it was going to be transformative.”

It does seem that The Invisible War is transformative at least in terms of giving people who care about this issue a way to make statistics personal and continue to try to force military accountability and change.

Here’s a link to Marcus’s column:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/invisible-war-helps-open-eyes-to-militarys-sexual-assault-problem/2013/06/06/840cfb78-ced9-11e2-8f6b-67f40e176f03_story.html

As the column notes, the news stories and special hearings on Capitol Hill have been around for awhile, but The Invisible War seems to strike a deeper chord and provide a sustained impetus for critics of the military’s unwillingness/inability to tackle the problem of sexual abuse.

More power to the legislators and activists who are not giving up on ending the epidemic of rape in the military.  And, thanks to Kirby Dick and his collaborator Amy Ziering for making this important film

Season five of the Showtime original series Nurse Jackie is off to a promising start.

Some familiar characters have left fictional All Saints Hospital while some new faces have turned up in the New York City emergency room, but the anchor remains Emmy-award-winning Edie Falco in the eponymous role.

Falco’s Jackie, a recovering addict and newly single mom, is making some surprising choices but remains as complex (and authentic) as ever.  Sharp writing and intense performances continue to elevate the series. 

Can’t wait to see what’s going to happen in the next episode.

Unfortunately, the series is not available on most major streaming services, but one free, preview episode is available at Showtime.com where additional episodes are available for a fee.

I was at a professional development retreat most of the week and was reminded anew how great it is to have an iPad and a Netflix streaming account to wind down after several consecutive days of expending brainpower.  

Didn’t turn on the television in my room all week…and didn’t read more than the headlines on my phone.  Refreshing.