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Nerve Retro: Visions of Lolita
by Various Photographers
A visual tribute to the original nymphet.
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Best of Dating Confessions
by You
This week, the award for "Most Likely To Have Been Assaulted By A Giant Spider."
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True Stories: The Worst Photo Shoot of All Time
by Jennifer Albany
In retrospect, I should've stayed away from Craigslist's "Creative" section.
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Miss Information
by Erin Bradley
Help! Suddenly my boyfriend's the most annoying man in the world. /advice/
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Red Hot Chili Peppers: Me and My Friends
by Tony Woolliscroft
Twenty years of intimate photos, onstage and off.
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20 Ways to Get Your Arrested Development Movie Fix*
by Phil Nugent
*Until they actually make the movie.
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Sex Advice From . . . Mike White
by James Brady Ryan
Q: What has screenwriting taught you about dating? A: I write about awkwardness. Dating is the perfect inspiration. /advice/
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The Men Who Stare at Goats
by Scott Von Doviak
George Clooney & co. get political, psychic, and really weird. /entertainment/
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Painted Love
by Samantha West
Shooting as if with brushes and oil.
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Culture Wars: Debating Mad Men's Marriage
by James Brady Ryan and Isabella Notti
Spoiler Alert: Should Betty [redacted] Don [redacted] or [redacted]?
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Ten Revelations on the Road to Love
by Jack Harrison
Seduction is easier than you think.
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My Parents Were Awesome
by Eliot Glazer
Before fanny packs and Yanni concerts, your parents were free-wheeling, fashion-forward, and super-awesome.
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Awesome Advice, Way to Go!
by Erin Bradley
The Washington Post forgets that vampires aren't real. /advice/
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New Releases: DVD
by Scott Von Doviak
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 plus three. /entertainment/
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The Nerve Debate: Marriage
by Elizabeth Wurtzel and Jack Harrison
A tie that binds — or chokes?
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Savage Love
by Dan Savage
Should I marry the only guy I've ever slept with? /advice/
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My First Time
by You
"I was surprisingly adventurous, and he was surprisingly shy..."
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Cinema Sutra: Showgirls
by Jack Harrison
Elizabeth Berkley teaches us how (not) to have sex underwater. /advice/
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Ten Inappropriate Relationships We Love
by James Brady Ryan
Would Harold and Maude be cute in real life? /entertainment/
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Nerve Retro: Modern Olympias
by Peter J. Gorman
The photographer borrows from Manet to capture the tiny movements that emerge from bored stillness.
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Best of Dating Confessions
by You
This week: The "Your Reasons For Joining PETA Are Suspect" Award.
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Everything I Know About Love I Learned From... Weezer
by Jakob Dorof
Insights on romance from the original geek-rockers. /entertainment/
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Miss Information
by Erin Bradley
How can I tell if he's toying with me, or actually interested? /advice/
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Talking to Strangers
by Briana E. Heard and Meghan Pleticha
Nerve asks deeply personal questions to people we just met.
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Forget Jennifer Aniston — the woman who really ought to be pissed off by Mr. &
Mrs. Smith is Kathleen Turner, who starred in both of this action-comedy's primary inspirations but wasn't offered so much
as a quick, memory-jogging cameo. Like Prizzi's Honor, Smith concerns a
romance between two professional assassins who are assigned to kill
each other; like The War of the Roses, it takes a broadly satirical view
of matrimony, culminating in an ultraviolent cage match in which the
superficial symbols of suburban harmony — immaculate home, snazzy cars,
state-of-the-art-gadgets — are methodically and gleefully pulverized.
Neither as slyly corrosive as the former nor as boldly uncompromising as
the latter, Mr. & Mrs. Smith (no relation to the Hitchcock film) suffers
both from a lack of nerve and from Angelina Jolie's imperious Teflon
regard. Nonetheless, it manages to put a reasonably fresh spin on the
notion of "till death do us part."
As you just might possibly know, Monsieur is played by Brad Pitt, awkwardly
trapped here between the slick, supercool badass demanded by the
screenplay and the amiable, frazzled goofball that he actually excels at
playing. He and Madame are first seen in couples counseling,
fielding embarrassing questions about their lackluster sex life. The
rest of the film, as in classic screwball comedies, posits full-scale warfare as
the ultimate aphrodisiac, this time with knives as well as gibes.
Simon
Kinberg's script, written as his thesis project at Columbia, traffics in
glib, obvious metaphors — jealousy erupts during a confessional involving
not how many people each has slept with but how many each has killed — yet
still scores a fair number of laughs and the occasional rueful nod of
recognition. Too bad it isn't better structured, with a bit less of the
pre-revelatory doldrums and a whole lot less of the post-reconciliatory
hijinks. So long as the Smiths are plotting each other's demise, they're
fine, flinty company; once they fuck and make up, we're ready to return to
the tabloids. — Mike D'Angelo |
 In thrall to the backwards-running rhythms popularized in Memento and pulverized in Irréversible, François Ozon's 5x2 traces the trajectory of a failed marriage, starting with its crack-up. This cinematic autopsy opens in a lawyer's office. Marion (the stunningly good Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, who has the face of a French Gillian Anderson) and Gilles (craggily handsome Stéphane Freiss) hear out their divorce agreement, then inexplicably adjourn to a hotel room and engage in sex that seems to veer from rough to rape. As Marion stumbles out the door, Gilles calls out to her, "Do you want to try again?"
That episode — the first of the five pivotal scenes that make up the film — contains all the shifts and ambiguities that make 5x2 such an intriguing, puzzling movie. At once overture and finale, the hotel scene draws on the language of different encounters. Marion and Gilles seem like shy first-time lovers one second, cheating spouses the next. In subsequent scenes, the reading of the couple's marriage contract recalls that of their divorce; sex in one episode echoes the heartbreak of another.
Ozon owes a lot to the film's structure — his Scenes from a Marriage acquires an insta-wistfulness for being stacked backward. But he also improves on the gimmick by leaving odd, unsettling gaps inside and between his scenes, which have the weighty, epiphanic feel of well-crafted short stories. The momentary loss of control over the couples' wedding, which is marred by too-obvious musical editorializing and a big ol' narrative bomb, is the exception rather than the rule. By acting with a degree of restraint, Ozon pays his respects to the death of this marriage by marking its fleeting beauty, its pain and the mysteries at its core. — Noy Thrupkaew |
 Free of the constraints imposed by the laws of physics, animated movies usually involve a great deal of swooping, zipping, whizzing and va-va-vooming, simply because they can. Howl's Moving Castle, the latest whimsical adventure by acclaimed Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki (who won an Oscar a few years ago for Spirited Away), isn't exactly earthbound, but it's the rare cartoon that demonstrates a healthy respect for the leaden tyranny of gravity. Transformed into an elderly woman by a witch's curse, our formerly young and spirited heroine, Sophie, finds work as a housekeeper in the titular castle, a ramshackle conglomeration of domes and turrets that wanders the verdant landscape on tiny chicken legs, belching smoke. Its movements are anything but fluid and graceful, and the same is true of the film's eccentric gallery of characters — Miyazaki's perverse notion of an action sequence finds the newly wizened Sophie and her corpulent nemesis, the Witch of the Waste, struggling to haul their wheezing carcasses up a seemingly endless flight of stairs, like The Battleship Potemkin's most celebrated sequence in reverse.
So who is Howl, you ask? To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure. A wizard, I believe, with the power to transform himself into a winged warrior (there is some swooping here), but I never did manage to work out what deliberately anachronistic war he was sometimes off fighting, or where (the castle's front door opens onto various universes), or why. Because Howl's Moving Castle was adapted from a novel by English author Diana Wynne Jones, I'd hoped it might be the first Miyazaki film to make some rudimentary kind of sense. No such luck. It's not so much that his films have no internal logic — frequently, they don't even boast the sort of internal illogic that one finds in, say, Lewis Carroll. Subplots are introduced, then quickly abandoned; seemingly momentous events have no consequences to speak of; fully half the details, while charming and memorable, feel utterly arbitrary. All the same, no fan of first-rate animation will want to miss this cavalcade of stunning images.
(NOTE: In at least some markets, Disney is releasing a subtitled print in addition to the English-dubbed version designed for the masses. Bless them. I've only seen the former, but I must say the mere thought of Billy Crystal as the voice of Calcifer, the cute, ornery fire demon, makes me break out in hives.) — Mike D'Angelo |
 All dating begins with a kind of hero worship — the point when pheremones trump logic and flaws can seem endearing, or even sexy. Film can accomplish the same thing: a larger-than-life star's charisma can make you care about some stupid plot, often against your will. Jean Dominique, the rabble-rousing star of Jonathan Demme's documentary The Agronomist, is the latest example.
Few film stars are as seductive as the electrically charming Dominique, and few hero-making documentaries hold up as well as this one. Demme interviews the Haitian activist Dominique around twenty times over the years, mixing fiery, funny interviews with dramatic historic footage. The film tracks his rise from agriculture school to film clubs and an on-air position at Radio Haiti, where he became a firebrand icon and remained so for decades. Demme tracks Dominique's exile, his return, his battles with one regime and another — and finally, the unsolved mystery of his assassination.
All the while, Dominique's extraordinary charm leads the film, even in its darkest moments. Unembarrassed to adore Dominique, Demme scores his doc with a surprisingly good Wyclef Jean soundtrack, and films it with shameless bravado, spinning found footage and sit-downs into a tribute that makes this slight, cunning man look as heroic as a blue-screen action star. Democrats should consider calling Demme before the next presidential ad cycle. — Logan Hill |
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©2005 Nerve.com.
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