Review in a Dream

BY LYDIA CHAI

I'm at a party and Wes Anderson is sitting in a corner by himself. I walk up to him and we start talking about his latest film that has just opened in the cinemas, Darjeeling Limited.

Overall, I think it is better, slightly less emotionally detached, than his previous films. Less production geekiness.

Not a very convincing story arc, though. Two brothers are duped by their elder brother into a spiritual journey in India because he wishes to bridge the silence between them; they have been estranged from each other ever since their father's funeral. Somehow, I don't buy into the cathartic effect of their clumsy journey.

Anderson appears bored and looks elsewhere for a friend or nearby bar to save himself. I hammer on with my drunken commentary.

"And the colours of India, you just like the colours," I blurt out, but this isn't what I mean. I have to do some backtracking.

My listener is tiring of my diatribe, expecting me like any other to accuse him of exoticism. But his interest is piqued when I suggest that his portrayal of India is not one-dimensional. It doesn't do what Sofia's Lost In Translation does to Japan. In fact, he completely repackages his impressions of the country, so that it isn't even India that we are seeing. Not even a mythical India. Just colours.

I wonder if he is just enamoured with the colours of India, that's what I meant earlier. It's not offensive, it's just boring, I say.

I am sinking deeper into my own acidic nonsense.

"All your characters in all your movies are the same!"

At this point, he tells me off by pointing out that Darjeeling Limited was written by three different people, so of course the characters can't all be identical, and walks off to someone who has offered to buy him a drink. I feel like a fool. I could've put it better.



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Black Jeans Okay. Running Shoes No Longer Real.

BY TAHI MOORE

2 things.

BLACK JEANS>

They seem to be just black jeans now. Not a whole lot of people wear them it's just another colour less different from dark blue than acid washed light blue. Maybe I've been bothered with the the colour of my shrink to fits which I think are slightly not dark blue enough. No. They don't have a very good cut. But anyway now I think black jeans have stopped being a bit funny or past it and they're not a sketchy colour any more, which is nice.

SHOPPING FOR SOMETHING>

I don't think there's enough of everything to decide you want a particular kind of pants or shoes or anything and hope to find it from a week of shopping. You'll probably find something that kind of looks like what you want but isn't any good and you buy it anyway and it's a super mistake. Almost everything works by chance because almost nobody who makes clothes has any idea, or they do and make people what they want. That Simpsons episode where Homer designs his dream car which brakrupts the car company looks wrong to me. It'd probably be a huge hit. Walk into any sports shoe shop and look the array of clown shoes on sale and people actually wear them everywhere. It's a true story.

I went to Sole in Vicky Park Market and they had some nice New Balance retro style running shoes, except they had gaint Ns on the sides. I don't want to know who contracted the same shoe gluers, who make all the other shoes, to put these out. I have this intuitive feeling that shoes are no longer made by the company that owns the name. It feels like imitation shoes that just happen to be legally liscenced. It's like buying fan merchandise. It doesn't feel real.



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