Where I’m @

20020422

Back in November, after our pseudo-election, some said that the United States had problems. And recently, it seemed that with the appearance of another conservative New York daily newspaper, we had problems from another direction, but O my friends, the French. To sum, if you don’t keep up with elections in France: Jean-Marie Le Pen (think: Pat Buchanan or maybe David Duke), candidate of the far-right Front National party, came in a close second to Jacques Chirac (think Bush Sr.) in the first round of their presidential elections, highly embarrassing the Socialist candidate and forcing a run-off election. Read more about it in the francophone press at Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro, and (surprisingly few) blogs like Emmanuelle, Demain j'arrète, and Connect(i)cut.

If you have a platform for reaching the french, even just one person through a telephone call or an email, please make sure that you communicate your concern. Now is not the time for apathy.

20020419

Sorry to be away for so long. There was actual work to be done, don’tcha know.

The front page of Triptronix.net now has a three-month stable of randomized photos and will only hold 3 x 3 31-day months worth from here on out. So let it be written . . .
Put another way, if you visit once a day for three months, you should basically get a different photo every day from now until time ends. If you want to sit and reload the page in hopes that your pic will pop up, you’re welcome to do that as well.

20020404

Independent Movie of the Day: Jeunesse dorée
It’s cheating, to be sure, but the out is that my review for the day does concern a movie with various spots on the web, most notably at the site for its subsection of the Festival de Film de Cannes. As well, these are the days of New Directors/New Films, the spring film festival jointly presented by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and there’s more film-watching than web-surfing going on ’round these parts.

Zaïda Ghorab-Volta’s Jeunesse dorée is possibly the antithesis of a new genre that we (your author, together with friend and PhD in Media Studies candidate Greg) came up with recently. That new genre or subgenre could be called nonredemptive nihilism and is only represented by two films that we came up with off the tops of our heads, Gaspar Noë’s Seul contre tous and Benoît Pœlverde’s C'Est arrivé près de chez vous, movies that really smack the viewer around a little and do not even offer their characters martyrdom, to say nothing of a redemptive transformation. Jeunesse dorée, however, maintains a sunny disposition throughout its 85 minutes and hardly lets anything untoward happen to its characters. Who needs redemption when you’re already living the good life?

Gwenaëlle and her friend Angéla begin in a drab world of Parisian middle-class projects, but you know they’re special because they get the best lighting. Somewhere along the line (one fault of the film is that it speeds along a little choppily) they get interested in photography and apply for a grant from their local youth center to take pictures throughout France. You won’t be surprised to discover that they earn their grant and take off in a borrowed car for parts unknown. Matt, my moviegoing colleague for last evening, compared Jeunesse dorée with Ghost World in that both are reasonably quiet portrayals of low-level but important moments in adolescence, particularly during key transitional periods.

For the girls of Jeunesse dorée are, whether they like it or not, becoming adults. They’re both 17 going on 18, and they know that they are somewhat naïve. Early on they have a discussion about whether either has ever been naked with a boy (“Naked? You mean like, NAKED?”) and to each’s visible relief, neither has. Neither one has been away from the neighborhood any farther than Paris proper, either. But together they travel the countryside and grow aware of the wider world and of their interior worlds as well. They meet a lot of nice people and see many places not very different from their home. They even spend a few days with some attractive and independent slightly older boys who make their living harvesting and milling lumber without the use of machines (except for a trusty pickup truck).

And that’s really about it. No histrionics, no psychos at the campground, no running from the Beur boys in one development, no seeing traumatic sights. Still and all, it’s the subtlety of the filming and the acting (the two primary characters were discovered in an office of the ANPE, the French national employment agency) that carries the picture. Unfortunately, because of that, it’s highly unlikely to get distributed in the USA.

Independent site review concept by Aortal