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It is too bad that Swimming Pool wasn’t made in Hollywood, because I can perfectly imagine the pitch: ‘It’s a Showtime soft-porn adaptation of Murder, She Wrote set where they filmed Amélie twisted like The Usual Suspects‘. Then again, that probably would have guarantee that the movie hadn’t been made.

Swimming Pool is a pretty movie with pretty people in pretty rural France. The characters are fun, but by the end I didn’t care much about them or the story. Nevertheless, it was clearly made by some talented people, and apparently some of François Ozon’s other movies are pretty good, so I am eager to check more of them out.

Rating: 6/10

Warning: moderate geekout ahead.

I used to use a VPN at my old job to check my email/voicemail and use other parts of our network from my home. I always hated it. The VPN did a good job of letting me get to work resources from home, but the problem was that it routed all of my traffic over a slow, laggy encrypted tunnel. This made doing other downloads painful, and gave the IS department the ability to snoop on anything I did. So I would end up turning on the VPN, checking mail, and then immediately turning it off.

Recently, UNC installed a new firewall that keeps me from getting to the business school’s Exchange server over the web. (Why is the business school on Exchange, when the rest of the school uses sturdy, industrial-strength IMAP? I don’t know.) So I reluctantly installed another VPN client on my computer. After a little tracerouting, I discovered an amazing thing. This VPN only routes traffic going from my computer to school, and it leaves everything else alone to be routed normally through the cable modem. This lovely advance means I am happy running it all the time, and not thinking about it.

Wow, are my kids not going to be sympathetic to problems like this.

I remember mediocre reading reviews for The Virgin Suicides, that described it as being ‘moody, atmospheric and pointless’. To which my reaction was: ‘Count Me In’. I went to the film and adored it, but when friends I mentioned it to didn’t, I had no easy way to justify my feelings.

About a month ago I got this email from Aram in New York:

I saw Northfork. I think you guys will like it. It’s kind of weird. Like a David Lynch movie but without the sex and violence. But it’s visually stunning. Really. Very cool flick.

There is quite a lag between when movies appear in the Big Apple and in Chapel Hill, so Northfork just opened here.

I can see why Aram’s would have thought that I would like it. Visually the movie is gorgeous and quite unlike anything I have seen before. The same could be said for the story, which is full of clever twists and takes place in a fantasy world that is self-contained and somehow logical. (Both of these facts also inform the comparison to Lynch that Aram and a number of other people make, although I would not have thought of it myself. I don’t see Lynch films as allegories, and it is hard to think of Northfork as anything else. The film that I would compare, Picnic at Hanging Rock, it to was not mentioned in any of the reviews I read.) Were a filmmaker to use me as a one-person focus group in producing a new film, they would probably end up with something resembling this one.

Which is why I am surprised at how little I like it. Despite its interesting elements and great intentions, I am quite reluctant to call it a good film.

I can think of many reasons for this. The biggest being the script, which is oddly paced, serves little real purpose, and is filled with banal dialog that the actors read with all the emotion of a press secretary (think of Tom Hanks in Road to Predition). Much of the clever imagery seems purposeless, and the key images are dwelled on so many times that one is forced to notice exactly what the director wants. There is little opportunity or motivation for the audience to identify with any of the characters. And yet, I feel disingenuous giving any of them, because they were all faults others identified in films I loved and I defended for ‘working’ as a cohesive piece of art. For me, Northfork just doesn’t work. (A number of glowing reviews show that I have some company here but am probably in the minority.) The good parts make it worth seeing, but I don’t feel any lasting impact.

When it comes to a film as distinctive as this, I can simply gasp at the ones that I identify with and puzzle about the ones which I don’t. I am equally inarticulate in both cases. That probably means I would make a bad critic. I can live with that.

Rating: 5/10

Much to write, not enough time. I should quickly note two things the indie-rocker who remains in me have found cool.

The first is that the one and only songwriter Stephin Merritt, the man behind the 69 Love Songs has composed the music for an English adaptation of a traditional Chinese opera. It sounds exceptionally interesting. And it sounds like he is going to be doing more theater work in the future. This is detailed in a good New York Times article, but since I read it the times put it into abstract-mode, so you will need to shell out $2.95 for it, and the article is probably not good enough to justify that.

Secondly, Cal and I were discussing the other day how many musicians cover Velvet Underground songs, but they generally favor the quieter and more songlike ones to the loud and weird ones. This is demonstrated by the fact that the Covers Project lists two dozen versions of All Tomorrow’s Parties, yet only six of the far more interesting White Light / White Heat (and only one cover of Black Angel’s Death Song). So I was thrilled to find a link on elephant6.com to the Olivia Tremor Control’s fun version of European Son. They cut out the lyrics and added a base part that sounds like Moby Octopad by Yo La Tengo, but they still did a nice job of capturing the spirit of the song.