DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN

An article about the creation of Grand Theft Auto. I've never really played it - instead mostly played crazy taxi - but the development process is a cool read.

I want to watch this movie. I know it's gotten some poor reviews, but the two write ups I read are designed to catch the attention of film geeks:

nytimes:

One of the knots that Ms. Dunham requires you to untie while you’re watching “Tiny Furniture” is the extent to which she is playing with ideas about fiction and the real, originals and copies... One hint, though, might be the character’s unusual first name, which suggests that Ms. Dunham, at the age of 24 and herself a recent graduate, has read the social theorist Walter Benjamin’s 1930s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” one of the most influential (and commonly classroom-assigned) inquiries into aesthetic production and the mass reproduction of art...Cinema, in other words, might spark critical thinking.
Certainly the character of Aura encourages critical thinking about female representations. American movies are filled with cruelly unlovable, unloved women, usually ugly caricatures. For her part, Aura can be a drag, self-indulgent, whiny and passively, aggressively irritating. But it is Ms. Dunham’s refusal to put on a pretty show, to doll herself up, that is the movie’s boldest stroke. In her rejection of visual pleasure (the unlovely, unadorned, badly lighted digital images add to the anti-aesthetic) you can see a feminist argument about narrative cinema in bold action. Classical Hollywood films, this argument goes, turn desirable female images into fetish objects for male pleasure, which among other things tames women. Female stars are created to be looked at; Aura invites your gaze, and troubles it.

n+1

In The Art of Fiction, Henry James explains that in the English novel “there is a traditional difference between that which people know and that which they agree to admit that they know, that which they see and that which they speak of, that which they feel to be a part of life and that which they allow to enter into literature.” The same applies to film today, here, in America. Because we speak about “body issues,” Dunham was made to speak about them, too. But what actually makes Tiny Furniture a daring film is that it talks about class and privilege. What makes this boldness radical is that it treats privilege positively: instead of implying privilege’s existence via its absence, Dunham makes it present, as a material experience that offers specific pleasures and advantages. She doesn’t speak truth to power, but from it, which these days is as rare, and as necessary.

both articles are great to read together - the n+1 one realllllllly does not like the focus that other newspapers like the times have put into the appearance of the young woman:

Even positive reviews noted Dunham’s appearance—a fact over which she has slightly more control than who her parents are, but less, say, than the actual content of her film. Fans praised Dunham’s radical frankness, her fearless telling of the truth...In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis classified Dunham as a “body-based artist”... That leaves Dunham with very little time to say anything else. Taken together, the responses to Tiny Furniture spelled out a single message: if a young woman wants to talk about her life, she better be talking about her looks. Having a body is the only experience she is allowed to take seriously.

amen to that, n+1, one of my recent fav magazines.