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The other day I watched Funny Ha Ha, this tiny little indie movie about some people wandering around their early twenties. It was pretty good. There were moments that were excruciating, conversations that went nowhere but continued for waaaaay toooo loooong, but it did manage to capture a certain kind of ridiculousness while also pointing out the ridiculousness of the ridiculousness itself. You know? And it was so homemade, it felt like the film was spliced together at the kitchen table. It never felt like anyone was acting, but it also never felt like a documentary… it just kind of felt right, and so the infuriating pieces wouldn’t have made sense if they had been less irritating.

Sometimes when I watch things like this I wonder why it’s even fun to watch stupid scenarios that are really close to your own life acted out on screen. It’s not like I really want to relive awkward conversations or drunken nights or bad dates or crappy jobs, or like I need to sit around watching the eerily similar tedium of someone else’s life on a Friday night. Maybe it is just like watching a train wreck, and you can’t look away. But it’s not, because it’s not actually that horrible. Is it kind of oddly comforting to know that your life can be approximated or portrayed with such accuracy? I don’t know. It’s not that I think we’re always looking for mirrors of ourselves in art, but there’s something satisfying about it when it’s done right.

I felt this way about Jason Schwartzman’s character in Shop Girl… he was so perfect(ly horrific) that it almost hurt, but it made me love the movie. Though that was different from Funny Ha Ha because the people in that movie were glamorous professional actors, so there was a level of detachment where you could just appreciate the artistry of the movie or the accuracy of the imitation. Where it could just be entertainment. In Funny Ha Ha, it just seemed like this is who these people were, that even if they were playing characters, their real lives were really similar to what they were acting out. Though there’s obviously an artistry in that, too. Really, I think it must be hard to do that kind of acting, to know that you’re essentially playing yourself, to carefully pause and scratch your nose and shift your weight and say “I don’t know” a lot, in conscious imitation of yourself and all your dumb tics that your acting job means owning up to.

I’m a little behind in my reading of this weekend’s Times, so I just noticed this piece in “Week in Review.” Using the recent death of actor Vincent Schiavelli (who played Mr. Vargas in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and that really scary subway ghost in Ghost) as a jumping point, Peter Edidin writes sweetly about the memorable faces of Hollywood actors who are not conventionally attractive, and how they enhance our experience of a film: Mostly, of course, movies offer beautiful faces and construct fantasies around them. But other, more idiosyncratic images of humanity have always been present as well, and with them a more expansive vision of what it is to be human. He quotes Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and the author of “Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty”: “Because we can’t fit [these actors] into a mold,” she added, “we have freer range to imagine who they are, so they can embody more complexity. Their features draw us in because we want to make sense of them.”

How lovely. But what Edidin neglects to say (or does he not notice?) is that the actors whose “idiosyncratic” faces have enabled their successful careers in film are almost invariably men. Can you think of the female equivalent of Adam Sandler? Paul Giamatti? Billy Crystal? Michael Showalter? Jimmy Kimmel? Steve Buscemi? Even Nicholas Cage? What about Jack Nicholson, these days (and don’t say Diane Keaton)? Many of these men are attractive, but they are allowed to be attractive by way of their distinctiveness, not after they meet certain standards.

Times film critic Manohla Dargis wrote an essay that ran in that paper about a year ago, called “One Word for What’s Happening to Actors’ Faces Today: Plastics.” She argues that plastic surgery is altering one of the greatest landscapes in cinema: the human face without pretending that this isn’t a gendered problem: Clearly, part of the blame for the spectacle of the post-human lies with the movie industry and its pernicious sexism; after all, Sean Penn wins awards with a face crosshatched with lines. But while it’s easy to blame the industry, the entertainment media, the satellite industries and the stars themselves, let’s face it: the other culprit, the faithful keeper of the cults of beauty and youth, is staring out at us in the mirror.

Plastic surgery preserves women’s faces so that they look younger (and less complex, and therefore less human) sitting pretty across from their male counterparts. So maybe that explains it. Maybe film audiences (or more likely, the people who make and bankroll movies) don’t want their female characters (or their movie-going experience) burdened by things like complexity. Laughing and frowning will both give a girl wrinkles. Better to remain neutral.

Regardless, I’m just sick of pieces like Edidin’s, where the writer is oblivious to the things that influence the phenomenon he gets to lovingly relate. It suggests that his set of observations and experiences are the end of the story.

Birthdays are funny. Today I spent mine in an office all day, but because It Was My Birthday I gave myself permission to slack off and poke around the interweb for interesting things. Since I slack off at work pretty much every day, this didn’t do much to help me feel like this day was different from all other days. But that’s because it’s not.

I’m really into all the reflection that comes along with The New Year, but only if it’s the spontaneous kind. the mandated looking back and resolutions and shit are just gross. I was watching NY1 for a couple of minutes on new years eve, and the anchors were talking about some poll that asked people for their new year’s resolutions, and the top 3 were: 1) make more money, 2) lose weight, and 3) spend more time with their families (that final one coming in a distant third, if I’m remembering right). Not that any of this is surprising. But it was sort of weird to hear it reported like that, against the background of the countdown to 2006. Sometimes that countdown feels like a promise, like a “new leaf” or whatever will be turned over and at least the first few minutes after midnight will be a breath of fresh air. Other times it almost feels threatening, letting you know exactly how long you have to get shit right in the year that’s wrapping up before that book is closed forever, the history of 2005 written and done.

Anyway, I was thinking about this because this year at dinner on new year’s eve the conversation turned at some point to what we were all doing on december 31st in years past. I’m the kind of person who thinks (too much) about that kind of thing anyway, and not just on new year’s. But I like seeing other people do it, having some kind of occassion that makes people remember where they used to be. For a minute there I thought I’d lost 2001, but when I got home later and went through old notebooks trying to piece that time back together, I remembered that I spent that year at alice’s, drinking too many margaritas and regretting it pretty quickly. Still, I just like to know. Even if my love of new year’s is really just out of habit at this point.

So it was my birthday, and I was told offhand, in the annual kind of way, that I must be “older and wiser.” I guess so. Last year on january 3rd I went out with jhon for the second time, and we sat at a little cafe sharing a piece of cake and staring at each other across the table. He bought me a copy of Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, which was so sweet and smart, especially since we didn’t know each other at all yet. I still haven’t read that book, but notice it on my shelf occasionally and then let it nag at me for a little while.

Dorky as it sounds, this blog is kind of my birthday present to myself. I mean, it’s about time. And I really truly will update it often. Promise.

Here’s the monthly(ish) self-promotion segment… I have 3 new reviews online which I somehow managed to pull together while procrastinating about my grad school application. My column at Bookslut is about A Piece of Cake: Recipes for Female Sexual Pleasure and I also reviewed – more favorably – the surprisingly excellent Letters from Young Activists. Over at Grace is my review of Yiyun Li’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Since it was supposed to be a recommendation rather than a real review, I get through the whole thing without mentioning that I didn’t like the book at all. I seem to be the only one on the planet not to. Ah, well.

And go read this: Anne Ishii’s great essay in the Village Voice that pinpoints most of the problems I have with the movie Memoirs of a Geisha, but haven’t really been able to explain. Oh, except for when I yelled at my family: “I just want to see a movie about women’s lives that wasn’t written by a man, and isn’t about women fighting with each other and selling each other out for a man!” Yeah, there was that. So we went to see King Kong instead. And it kicked ass. At least the “man” in that movie was a giant gorilla.