364: Millennium

Made it to a movie theater for the first time since June to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  It's a faithful adaptation of the book, and at least as good (if not a little better) than the original Swedish version with Noomi Rapace in the title role.  This English-language version actually seems to be more faithful to the original novel in some ways -- though I could be wrong, since I read the book a while ago.  I really enjoyed Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander and Daniel Craig was good (if very, very British) as Mikael Blomkvist.  I actually had trouble looking away from Mara whenever she was on the screen, which is saying something when she's acting opposite Daniel Craig.

Perhaps the best thing to come out of this adaptation, though, is the Trent Reznor-Karen O cover of "Immigrant Song" that ran over the teaser trailer and plays during the title sequence:

Speaking of the title sequence, it reminded me very strongly of the titles for Quantum of Solace, which might be why the whole movie sort of seemed like it could be an alternate-universe James Bond flick.  Also, Daniel Craig.

All told, Dragon Tattoo gets a thumbs-up from me, and I'd highly recommend it (to those old enough to see R-rated films, of course).

363: Things I missed in 2011

Pete Campbell and his bitchface

(delayed; due 2012)

The crew of the Enterprise

(endlessly delayed; due 2013)

Jack McCoy and the 27th precinct

(cancelled)

Snow.

359: Come on and let it snow

My favorite terrible Christmas song comes from the movie Love Actually, and it's the only holiday song I keep on my iPod year-round.  Enjoy the awful, really inappropriate music video for "Christmas is All Around" by Billy Mack (AKA Bill Nighy):

Merry Christmas!

347: Tributes

If it's nerdy to be excited about nail polish based on The Hunger Games, then LET'S NERD IT UP:

Each color corresponds (or at least seems to correspond) to one of the Districts in the series.  Via The Hob, they are:

Luxe and Lush – District 1 (Luxury)
Stone Cold – District 2 (Masonry)
Riveting – District 3 (Technology)
Hook and Line – District 4 (Fishing)
Electrify – District 5 (Power)
Fast Track – District 6 (Transportation)
Mahogany Magic – District 7 (Lumber)
Dress Me Up – District 8 (Textiles)
Harvest Moon – District 9 (Grain)
Foie Gras – District 10 (Livestock)
Agro – District 11 (Agriculture)
Smoke and Ashes – District 12 (Mining)

Don't mind me over here, I'll just be saving up my pennies.

318: May the odds be ever in your favor

Everything is The Hunger Games and there is nothing wrong with that.

285: Hemingway

Yes, as a matter of fact, Hemingway is the best thing about Midnight in Paris.

248: Have we got news for you

In honor of Labor Day, here's the musical number with the most uses of the word "union" from the best/worst movie about labor strikes ever made, Newsies.

That little Christian Bale, he sure has spirit, yes he does.

(My sincere apologies to actual union members everywhere.)

203: Allons-y, Alonzo!

I shredded some old papers today, and came across the receipt for my copy of Pierrot le Fou, my favorite film from the French and Italian New-Wave film class I took in college.  Also, I had forgotten that "Allons-y, Alonso" is repeated several times in the movie.  Directed by Jean-Luc Godard and starring Jean Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, it's a wacky crime caper with musical interludes and some existential contemplation.  It's also very, very French.  I feel a little pretentious when I watch it, but it does make me happy.

all photos via We Heart It

196: Harry

via We Heart It

It's a little strange, thinking that the whole Harry Potter experience is (for the most part) over now.  I got the first three books for my thirteenth birthday, so when Goblet of Fire (the book) came out, Harry and I were the same age.  (Of course, by the time Deathly Hallows was published, I had outpaced Harry and was in college, while the boy wizard was only seventeen.)  I think reading the series was a bonding experience for my generation.  I remember being at a family reunion the day Order of the Phoenix came out, and my cousin Kaylyn and I were both sitting on the couch, voraciously reading while everyone else socialized and ate.  We weren't interacting, but we were sharing the Potter experience.

When I got to college, my very first class on my very first day was a freshman seminar called "Harry Potter and the French Connection."  The professor was essentially a real-life Dumbledore for the eighteen of us in that class; he led us through early modern alchemical texts and gave us an assignment that essentially amounted to writing Potter fanfiction.  We all went to the Goblet of Fire midnight movie screening together, with matching homemade T-shirts that were only funny to us.  Also, I met two of my best friends in that class.

So, I could say more, but I think I'll let the found graphic speak for itself:

via We Heart It

(Thanks, Jo, for everything.)

176: Who wants to fight?!

Finally saw Midnight in Paris with my friend E tonight.  Utterly charming, witty, and a lovely tour of the streets of Paris.  Also, guess who played Ernest Hemingway?

Yes, hello, Corey Stoll, AKA Det. Jaruszalski from Law & Order: LA.  As though I needed another reason to be deeply fond of him.  He was fantastic as Hemingway (and really ought to get a side gig reading audiobooks), and I also enjoyed Alison Pill and Tom Hiddleston as Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali (crazy eyes and all) really stole the show.  When it hits the second-run theater, I might see it again with my mother.

Definite recommend.

173: I don't speak Italian.

via We Heart It

Humpday movie: Inglourious Basterds.  I liked it, but didn't love it, the first time I saw it.  Recently, I got an itch to see it again, and discovered that Eli Roth creeps me out even more the second time around.  However, Mélanie Laurent is fantastic, and Brad Pitt's accent is even more ridiculous this time, which I love.

Still, though, I'll take Reservoir Dogs over the Basterds any day.  Sorry, guys.

159: Lizzy

When I first saw the Joe Wright-directed Pride & Prejudice, there was only one thing I really wanted.

That coat.

I'm re-reading Austenland by Shannon Hale during breaks at work, and all I can picture is the heroine in this (anachronistic, but totally awesome) coat.  Incidentally, I recommend the book for Austen fans or anyone who's ever worn out the section of the VHS or DVD where Colin Firth wanders around in a wet shirt.  It's very, very funny.

141: Favorites XVII

There's booming, bass-heavy music coming from the park across the way, so: five favorite soundtracks in my iTunes library this week.

Pirates of the Caribbean
Sure, it gets overused during TV golf coverage (why? I don't know) but don't try to tell me you didn't walk out of the theater humming the now-familiar "He's a Pirate."  There's something very sweeping and adventurous about Hans Zimmer's score for the first Pirates film.  The music in the sequels wasn't quite as good, perhaps because it was very reminiscent of what we heard in the first, but there were some really good pieces to come out of the whole series -- I particularly enjoyed "The Kraken" from Dead Man's Chest.

Beauty & the Beast
Angela Lansbury singing that title song is intrinsic to my childhood.  Also, "Gaston" came on my iPod while I was in the car the other day, and I had forgotten how utterly ridiculous the lyrics are.  Best of all is "Be Our Guest," sung by the late, great Jerry Orbach.

Amélie
The music, like the film, is delicate and pretty and just a little bit odd.  For fans of the piano, it's happy listening.  It was my daydreamy summer driving music for a while, and it's basically the perfect background study/work music. 

North & South
I don't think the BBC ever released the soundtrack for its TV miniseries adaptation of the Elizabeth Gaskell novel, but that's okay.  I don't mind having to watch Richard Armitage mope around every time I want to listen to the music.

Star Trek, or anything else by Michael Giacchino
Nothing makes you feel like you're in an iconic film quite like "Enterprising Young Men" from J.J. Abrams' Star Trek (enjoy the song and long, slow pans across the Enterprise in the video below).  Michael Giacchino is my favorite film and television composer in recent years, having scored Lost for the full run of the series, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Up (and won an Academy Award for the latter) for Disney/Pixar, and almost everything J.J. Abrams has done since Alias.  There's a fun quality to his compositions, most of which are beautiful, and some utterly inspired (e.g. using bits of plane wreckage as percussion instruments for Lost), and I enjoy his often tongue-in-cheek song titles.  Best of all, it's not music that takes me out of the scene when I'm watching (like, say, some of the more bombastic music from Doctor Who), but something I enjoy going back and paying attention to when I realize I'm humming it hours later.

135: Two weeks from everywhere

After tomorrow, I have a couple of weeks off before I go back to test-scoring.  Naturally, when faced with two weeks of anything, I think about this clip from the brilliant O Brother, Where Art Thou?

127: Lazy Favorites XV

I'm reading Tim Gunn's book, Gunn's Golden Rules at the moment, and he put together several top-five movie lists.  Inspired by Mr. Gunn's lists, here's my five fictional hangouts I wish were real:

The Pie Hole
Pushing Daisies was candy-colored fun, and I still miss it dearly.  Most of all, I miss Ned's pie shop.

The Old Haunt
Sure, they only featured the bar on Castle once, but anywhere Castle, Esposito, Ryan, and Beckett hang out is A-OK by me.  Besides, (if I recall correctly) it has a secret exit in the basement that connects to a tunnel system.  What more do you want from your bar?

The library
Otherwise known as the place all of my friends and I wanted to hang out.  The Beast's gift to Belle in Beauty and the Beast, I think it's the one thing that all little readers wish they could be given one day.

Merlotte's
I'll take a pass on the world with vampires and werewolves, but the only bar and grill in Bon Temps, Louisiana is one of the home bases for the insanity on True Blood.  Between Lafayette's infamous "AIDS burger," the handsome proprietor, and the cast of colorful locals, I'd pick it over Fangtasia any day (sorry, Eric and Pam).

The holodeck
Every vacation ever, all in one.  Best invention for Star Trek: The Next Generation, hands down.  Why, you ask?  Because with a holodeck, you could simulate every other location on this list, populate it with the appropriate characters, and have your own little adventures in the safety of virtual reality.  When do we get this technology for real?

Photos via We Heart It.

058: The Kid is All Right

From across time, Teenage Me approves of these shoes.

While the red-carpet commentators are critiquing Natalie Portman's maternity dress and the livebloggers are stretching their fingers in preparation for a long evening, I'll be keeping an eye on that young lady over there, Hailee Steinfeld. She's been getting a lot of attention this awards season for her performance as Mattie Ross in True Grit, and she's handled it remarkably well for any actress, let alone a fourteen-year-old. Among all the dour looks on the red carpet, she's been cheerful and well-dressed, not to mention age-appropriate.  Just look at that picture (from the cover of this week's Parade) -- she's just delightful, and she looks her age, which is impressive in itself when you look at the likes of Miley Cyrus.

She's a long shot to win the supporting-actress Oscar tonight (Melissa Leo being the presumed winner for The Fighter), but I'll still be rooting for her, not just because I thought she was fantastic in True Grit, but because she seems to have her head on straight -- a rarity for teen stars -- and seems to be taking the whole celebrity experience one step at a time (the Parade feature is a good read, by the by). My opinion is this: if more of the famous young folks in Hollywood were this down-to-earth, we wouldn't have to put up with thing like Lindsay Lohan's continual legal drama.

(Also? I'm joining the internet chorus championing Steinfeld for Katniss Everdeen in the inevitable Hunger Games movie. Cast a teenager to play a teenager, Hollywood, please!)

025: Silver screen prognostication

Nominations for the 83rd Academy Awards were announced today, but for a person who spends a lot of time immersed in TV and movies, I couldn't muster up much enthusiasm.  I did muster sufficient enthusiasm to watch the president of the Academy and Mo'nique announce the noms live at 7:30am local time, but that was mostly because I was already awake and getting dressed for work at the time anyway.  Still, though, I find award-show season fascinating, particularly this year, the first after AMPAS changed the rules in order to nominate ten films for Best Picture.  Of those ten, I've seen four (Toy Story 3, The King's Speech, The Social Network, and Inception), and have plans to see Black Swan, True Grit, and 127 Hours.  If I wanted to be a Serious Movie Person, I would go whole hog and check out Winter's Bone, The Fighter, and The Kids Are All Right, too, but I just don't have the time, energy, money, or, indeed, inclination.  I hope The King's Speech takes the big prize, but I could see The Social Network repeating its Golden Globes performance.

Overall, there weren't many surprises, to my eye, although I'm quite pleased to see John Hawkes nominated as a supporting actor in Winter's Bone, even though I haven't seen it, since he played Sol Star on Deadwood and was consistently one of my favorite parts of the show (also, he's a fellow Minnesotan, so I feel a sort of reserved fondness for him that befits the mild-mannered stereotype).  I've been a Natalie Portman fan for ages -- and through many years of substandard movies -- so I'm glad she's finally found a role that give her a decent shot at the Oscar (although she was nominated for Closer), and I loved Helena Bonham Carter in The King's Speech, therefore they are my picks for their respective categories.

For actors, we'll go with Colin Firth in a leading role -- because how great was he in The King's Speech? -- and I'll play the odds and pick Christian Bale for the supporting win because I've heard his performance in The Fighter is the best he's ever been (my sentimental pick, though, is Geoffrey Rush, because I love him).

Director?  Anyone's guess, though I'll be rooting for the Minnesota entrants, the Coen Bros.

The nominees for original screenplay were read before those for adapted screenplay, so I had a moment where I thought Aaron Sorkin had been snubbed, but The Social Network was adapted from a book, so no worries there.  I was underwhelmed by the movie on the whole, but Sorkin is such a brilliant writer (see: The West Wing) that you can't not nominate him, especially for a movie so relevant to the millions who use Facebook on an hourly basis.  (Personally, I don't feel comfortable being logged into the site.)  As someone who occasionally struggles with the necessary writerly task of world-building, I would love to see Christopher Nolan win the original screenplay prize for Inception, but I think he'll have a tough time winning voters away from The King's Speech, which is so utterly charming and thoroughly entertaining that it will probably win.  The latter film also has the advantage of not requiring the audience to follow four or five levels of story simultaneously, all moving on different timelines.

The no-contest category: Toy Story 3 will crush the competition in the animated feature race, because 1) Pixar always wins, and 2) everyone liked TS3 because it was even better than the previous two and it made us all cry.

N.B.: Having not seen many of the nominated films, my predictions are hindered by ignorance.

To boldly go

I was fortunate enough to attend a free Paramount-sponsored screening of J.J. Abrams’ rebooted Star Trek a couple weeks ago in the Twin Cities area, and with the film coming out on Thursday/Friday (depending on who you believe), it seems like a good time to share my reactions (now that I’ve stopped bouncing around like a kid on Christmas morning…TWO WEEKS LATER).

Fans of J.J. Abrams’ other work will know that, many times, he likes to jump right into the middle of the action after a deceptively calm opening. On Lost, it was Jack stumbling out of the all-but-silent jungle into the chaos of the plane crash on the beach. Mission: Impossible III opens with an engagement party and then segues into a rescue mission to save Ethan Hunt’s protégé. Similarly, Star Trek opens with the crew of the U.S.S. Kelvin checking out a mysterious outer-space lightning storm, then finding themselves suddenly bombarded by an enormous, seriously freaky-looking ship, the Narada, that turns out to be captained by a bitter, ever-so-slightly unbalanced (read: completely insane) Romulan named Nero (Eric Bana). Long story short, the Kelvin’s captain bites it (sorry, SPOILER), the acting captain, a young man named George Kirk, orders the ship’s crew to evacuate, and sends the Kelvin on a collision course with the Romulan ship. Meanwhile, Winona, George Kirk’s wife, is giving birth to their son in the medical shuttle. The boy is named James Tiberius Kirk after Winona and George’s fathers, respectively, and then George dies when the Kelvin crashes into the Narada.

Welcome to the new Star Trek.

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The thing I like about Abrams’ version of the oft-mocked camp and kitsch of the original Star Trek television series is that he doesn’t take the hard line that so many remakes and “reboots” have been doing lately—Battlestar Galactica went dark and gritty for its makeover (as brilliantly parodied in the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation episode “A Space Oddity” that aired April 16); James Bond, Jason Bourne, and Batman have been reinvented as gritty action heroes, the camp of early Bond and the Batman TV series nowhere to be found; even the revived Doctor Who takes a darker look at its universe than classic Who (I’m still a little terrified by Stephen Moffat’s “Blink”). There are endless remakes coming out on television and at the movies in recent years, and it seems like the majority of them chose to turn the source material into very dark iterations of what came before. This new Star Trek finds the middle ground—not everything is hunky-dory, but it’s not all despair, either. Kirk bleeds when he loses a bar fight—boy, does he bleed—and so does the child-Spock when he’s bullied back on Vulcan, but nobody horrifically loses an arm or gets a compound fracture (like Montand and John Locke on Lost, respectively…and ew). This is a universe where planets can get blown up and people can die, but not one where utter devastation is the status quo. Frankly, I find it refreshing.

The dialogue doesn’t make me want to cringe—quite an accomplishment, given the scripts from the original series and from the two Trek films I’ve seen that feature the original crew (Wrath of Khan and Search for Spock)—and yes, they work in lines like “I’m a doctor, not a physicist, damn it” and “I’m givin’ her all she’s got” in a way that doesn’t make me roll my eyes. (I saw the movie in a theater full of Trekkies, and they got a genuine kick every time something familiar popped up. It was fun.) The effects are great, the redesigned Enterprise is fabulous inside and out, the Narada is terrifying in the best possible way, and the cast?

The cast is GORGEOUS.

Chris Pine plays Kirk with the right amount of careless charisma and recklessness, and my female and male friends at the screening were big fans by the end (I know him from Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, so I was somewhat prepared for his aesthetically-pleasing face); Zachary Quinto (also known as the reason I watch Heroes) is an amazing Spock, and very believable as the younger Leonard Nimoy—you can definitely see how Quinto’s very controlled Spock grows into Nimoy’s slightly more relaxed Spock through his relationship with Kirk. Rounding out the Enterprise crew are Zoe Saldana as Uhura, John Cho as Sulu, Karl Urban as McCoy, Simon Pegg as Scotty, and Anton Yelchin as Chekov, plus any number of redshirts and women with weird hairdos. (And yes, there’s a green Starfleet cadet who gets up close and personal with Kirk because he is, as always, a total letch.)

The other thing about these actors is that they’re not only easy on the eyes, they’re funny. Really funny. And the whole movie (written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) is surprisingly—but not overwhelmingly or inappropriately—funny. Only twice (maybe three times) did I feel like the comedy could be construed as a little over-the-top, and those moments will be easy for anybody to spot. I think it’s to the credit of everyone involved (from the screenwriters to the actors to the director) that the scenes that could make a purist throw up his/her hands and declare that they’ve made a farce of his/her beloved franchise instead garner laughs from Trekkies and Trek newcomers alike (at least, they did at the screening I attended).

The new Trek makes a few departures from the original series, but I think they work and they make sense for a franchise trying a fresh start in a new century. Even as a relative bystander to the phenomenon for most of my life, I could tell that some of the Star Trek media started to inhabit the uncharted wilds of Ridiculous (oh, I’ve read the plot summaries on Wikipedia), and even though I watched a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation with my mom when I was kid and really liked Voyager and Captain Janeway when I was in junior high, I think this is a well-deserved and well-executed makeover. Kudos to J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (because writers deserve much more credit than they get!), the cast (including a voice cameo by Abrams’ lucky charm, Greg Grunberg!), et al for a job well done.

(I’m not going to lie: I’m probably going to see it in theaters at least three times.)

(And like it more each time.)

(I am such a nerd.)

Such a heavenly way to die

Just the other day, my friend Sasha and I were lamenting the fact that 500 Days of Summer wasn’t going to come out until July. July, ARGH. How could we possibly wait that long to see the adorable Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the “anti-romantic comedy” that’s been getting solidly positive reviews from Sundance and SXSW? Did I mention it’s directed by Marc Webb, my all-time favorite music video director (he did “Helena” and “The Ghost of You,” among others, for My Chemical Romance, Regina Spektor’s “Fidelity,” Evanescence’s “Call Me When You’re Sober” and “Good Enough” and a whole host of other videos amazing three-minute movies). Seriously, if you watch only one of those videos I linked, watch “The Ghost of You.” It’s possibly my favorite music video of all time.

Anyway, this showed up on my Twitter homepage yesterday as the “secret of the day” from Secrets of the City (@secretsday):

Today's Secret: Film Fetish: The MSP International Film Fest http://tinyurl.com/cprc9w

As I said multiple times yesterday, I’m so glad I clicked on that link. Turns out 500 Days of Summer was slated to open the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival last night, some three months before it comes out nationwide. UM, YES PLEASE. (By the by, the fest’s website might be down from time to time if lots of people are using it; I got a “bandwidth exceeded” message when trying to check info before the screening yesterday.)

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Here’s the setup: Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a romantic. Summer (Zooey Deschanel) is not—she doesn’t even believe that love exists. So you can imagine how things play out when Tom sees Summer and immediately believes she’s The One (even though she doesn't want to be anybody's girlfriend). We see their relationship play out as we jump forward and backward through the titular five hundred days, with a counter bringing us from awkward elevator chitchat to pancake dinner breakup and up and down again.

The beginning of the film is the middle of the story: immediately following the breakup, we see the emotionally destroyed Tom dispassionately smashing dinner plates while his concerned friends (Geoffrey “Snozzberries” Arend and Matthew “Supervisory Special Agent Doctor Spencer Reid” Gray Gubler) and full-of-legitimately-good-advice little sister coax him down off the metaphorical ledge. Only after Little Sis tells Tom to “start from the beginning” do we get the beginning of the story. The back-and-forth timeline is a dangerous thing and could so easily have backfired and gone horribly wrong, but Webb and the writers (Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber) execute it perfectly. Geoffrey Arend, who was at the screening and did a short Q&A afterward, said that Webb had a huge scroll mapping out the timeline precisely the way it appeared in the screenplay and how it subsequently translated to the screen, which is one of the best behind-the-scenes factoids I've heard.

The interweaving timeline was much more interesting and dynamic than a straight-line narrative would have been and it was a nice way to move between the very heavy emotional weight of the post-breakup days and the light, happy falling-in-love days (including the musical number!) without getting overwhelmed by one or the other.

Speaking of music, I loved the way Webb used it to drive the film. It's not surprising that the guy who directed basically every music video I've loved in the past ten years would incorporate music seamlessly into his first feature film (plus, most of his videos look more like mini-movies than, say, McG's brand of frenetic flash). There's a great soundtrack including Regina Spektor, The Smiths, one of my favorite Feist songs (“Mushaboom”), and even a song by Carla Bruni (yes, First Lady of France Carla Bruni Sarkozy). /Film has the full list here. There's some great drunken karaoke scenes that 1) are hilarious, and 2) make me glad I have yet to get so drunk I'm willing to do karaoke. (And yes, Zooey Deschanel does some singing.)

The acting is uniformly good—Joseph Gordon-Levitt is funny and heartbreaking and all kinds of good things as Tom; Zooey Deschanel conveys the right blend of cute and hesitant and a little sad (and has a touch of the inflection sister Emily Deschanel uses as Dr. Temperance Brennan of Bones when explaining Summer's nickname “Anal Girl”); Arend and Gubler are good as Tom's friends and Chloe Moretz manages to stay on the right side of the precocious/creepily precocious line as little sister Rachel.

On a different note, I want all of Zooey's outfits from this movie. Well, except the high-waisted pants. But everything else was gorgeous.

To make a long story short (all together now: too late), I really, really liked the movie. I may have even loved it. It made me laugh, it made me care about the characters, it made me ooh and ahh over the great art direction and set dressing. Like the narrator says at the beginning: this is not a love story. It's a story about love. That distinction makes it different (the anti-romcom, see?) and interesting: that Hollywood ending almost never happens, but what does happen so much more often is lovely and worthwhile and important all on its own, and that's the story that 500 Days of Summer tells.

Strongly, strongly, strongly recommended.



Some general info about the film festival (MSPIFF) itself: the full catalog of films being shown can be found in PDF format at the website (or here, but it's infinitely easier to read in a hard copy, which you can find at the Oak St. Theater if you're on or near the U of MN campus, or they'll probably have copies at screenings (most of which are at St. Anthony Main in Minneapolis). I'm going to try to hit a couple screenings, if only because it supports Minnesota Film Arts.

I haven't taken a close look at everything, but I know the ridiculously hard-to-track-down How to Be, starring RPattz, is showing on Monday at 7:15pm at St. Anthony Main with the following note: “Cast and Crew Present for Screening and After Party!”

Now, I'm 99% certain that Pattinson is in Canada shooting New Moon/Eclipse (are they shooting simultaneously? I don't know), so I'm also 99% certain he won't be there. Downside: no getting to see The Hair in person. Upside: probably fewer squeeful teenage girls and more tickets available. But the movie looked interesting anyway, so I might go.

Having written all that, I feel a little like a pretentious hipster.
Oh, God, what if I am a pretentious hipster?


I hope not.