An insightful look at the life of DFW, a discussion of over-and-under-rated directors, and a movie download battle continues.

Something sad happened last month while I wasn’t posting much here, and I won’t bother with much comment on the matter itself since it’s no longer news, and my words would be inadequate.

For an outstanding look back at the life and work of an amazing talent, I urge you to read the Rolling Stone piece, The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace.

As an article, it deals less with the sordid details than Wallace’s lifelong struggle with himself and what it means to be a ‘genius’. The intimate friends and family accounts are particularly eye-opening, as he’d always been a mysterious figure who produced strange, brilliant work. Reading about the difficulties he faced makes his achievements even more humbling.

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But no more being somber, let’s get nerdy. Two articles I read in short succession over at Film School Rejects set off an interesting thought.

The first was a take-down of a ‘most overrated directors’ list posted to Spike.

The original numbered off the easy suspects you’d probably expect (Smith, Tarantino, Burton, Shyamyalyaman, etc), but the FSR writer correctly blasted the former for mistaking ‘overrated’ for ‘entirely aptly rated’, and picking on a bunch of directors who either make great movies for very specific audiences, or have floundered and rightfully lost respect. None of the mis-steps by those listed were blindly adored, and discounting their achievements because of later flops is a little cheap. Either way, it’s a good debate topic and his response brings up some much better candidates for discussion (listing Welles, Hitchcock, Kubrick et al, to which I’d add Michael Bay, Ridley Scott, maybe Michel Gondry just for fun). Any film buff could go on for hours on this topic.

The next story that grabbed my attention was the recently released trailer for The Wrestler.

In a few short minutes you can imagine yourself both cheering and crying at this movie, despite the fact that it could easily be renamed White Trash Heartbreak without totally missing the mark. If anyone had asked me before this year if I could see myself looking forward to a movie about a washed up wrestler, I would have laughed at them, but now here I am marking my calendar for the January release.

Rourke will get a lot of the credit for this film, and deservedly so by the look of it. But the previous article really made me think about how Aronofsky stands up as a director. He can’t be called overrated, probably because he’s flown pretty under the radar over the course of his handful of movies. But really looking at his body of work, he might be one of the most interesting people making movies. Going from paranoid math/Kabbalah noir, to intense addiction tragedy, to epic time-traveling sci-fi love story, to triumph of the athlete’s heart — you certainly can’t fault him for being a one trick pony. Can’t wait to catch this one.

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This week also saw the debut of the new Xbox dashboard, with the excellent added feature of Netflix streaming for those of us who are game and movie nerds. I’ve only played around with it briefly to sample video quality and make sure it was set up for when I get the chance to really dive in later — at which point we may have further thoughts on the upgraded service here.
The excitement was quickly tainted thanks to rivals at Sony Pictures, who conveniently pulled their content this week.

On the one hand, this isn’t surprising or even unreasonable in business terms, and some statements indicate it may only be temporary while ‘licensing agreements’ are dealt with. On the other hand, the timing is a little suspect to suggest these are just discussions naturally taking place while big corporations negotiate digital distribution. It comes off more as one kid getting angry when another kid gets a bigger slice of the birthday cake. Let’s hope the parties involved can be a bit more adult so we, too, can enjoy an Evening with Kevin Smith, Part 2 in the near future.