The new Rem documentary has opened in Seattle, and it’s good (at least according to Rem). It might be the best film about himself he’s ever seen—but are we ever going to get to see it? There’s talk of the Sundance Channel picking it up, but nothing definite as yet; meanwhile we have to make due with the Seattle Times’ review, which tells us nothing we didn’t know about Rem already while scrupulously avoiding any hint of an opinion as to the quality of the film. Seattleist ain’t so shy—they’re calling it any art farty bore. Obviously the filmmakers chose Seattle for the debut because of the generally positive reception of Rem’s library there. It doesn’t appear to have worked. Fair or unfair? We’ll just have to wait till we can get a peak at the picture ourselves. (We probably ought to see Koolhaas Houselife first.)

Rem Koolhaas Approves of Documentary on Koolhaas [Seattlest]

We’re going to admit it. We’re going to say it. Just give us a second to gather the courage, remove the self-consciousness, find our convictions to stand behind.

Yesterday, we saw He’s Just Not That Into You.

And we are, in a way, that into it.

Mostly because of the, ahem, Role of Design. The slight strangeness of its Baltimore location aside, the movie plays with architecture and design in a way that bridges the architecture-makes-you-cool overtness of a film like, say, My Super Ex-Girlfriend (Luke Wilson is architect and therefore attractive) and the grittily appealing sets of Addicted to Love. Unfortunately, He’s Just Not That Into You plays houses and their decor as one-to-one metaphor for its characters and their inner lives. A quick run-down:

Jennifer Connelly’s cuckolded housewife of a character is mid-renovation and obsessed with Dwell. An early scene shows her, sitting alone on a half-tarped couch, alone and flipping through the pages and therefore, clearly, lonely and sad. Husband arrives, flings the magazine on the floor. She doesn’t need it. She has him. (Too bad he has Scarlett Johansson.)

Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck split a cool loft that has a painting with the word Should repeated all over it. This is metaphor.

Justin Long lives in a loft that has restaurant fittings in the kitchen. They are spare and steel. This is because he is a spare man of steel emotions, and is, at least until the last three minutes, extremely afraid to let anyone in, lest they hurt him/achieve intimacy/pick-your-garden-variety. So he hides in a labyrinth of “that was fun” and “I’m just not that into you.” A labyrinth exactly like his loft layout!

Stinkin’ hot on the heels of Rizzoli’s high-larious YouTube promo for Greg Lynn Form’s self-titled monograph, here’s another video hit from the Master of Mathematical Disaster, the Jolly Green Geometer himself. Lynn talks calculus and proportion in architecture, using some his own recent projects as examples. Take it away, Hagrid!

3-2-1 Contact breaks it down with the ol’ school raps, comin’ correct on this track for all y’all MArchs, studio suckahs, principalz— get your mind blown, son!

To make sure that a building/Is built with precision/Architects make a lot of decisions!

Starting February 25th at the IFC Film Center in Greenwich Village, filmmaker Astra Taylor’s Examined Life is a mash-up of urbanism and philosophy. Think of it as After-Dinner Walks with Andre: eight great living philosophers hit the streets in search of life, love, and an impersonal pre-individual transcendental field which does not resemble the corresponding empirical fields.

“Slavoj Zizek questions current beliefs about the environment while sifting through a garbage dump… Judith Butler and a friend stroll through San Francisco’s Mission District questioning our culture’s fixation and [sic?] individualism. And while driving through Manhattan, Cornel West—perhaps America’s best-known public intellectual—compares philosophy to jazz and blues, reminding us how intense and invigorating a life of the mind can be.”

Michael Hardt in a rowboat. Now that’s entertainment!