My New York Diary

I'm a fan of Julie Doucet, a French-Canadian underground comix artist, whose My New York Diary I picked up on a whim one day and promptly came home and devoured. It's a short graphic novel in which she recounts a brief period when she was living in New York City. She depicts her time in art school, deals with two kind of crazy boyfriends, and suffers from seizures at one point to name just a few of the personal moments in her life she chronicles with a wonderful humor and frankness.

I'm also a fan of Michel Gondry's. I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in particular, but I'll watch anything he does. So I was delighted to find that Doucet and Gondry collaborated recently on a sort of mini-movie and book titled My New New York Diary. Gondry apparently contacted Doucet and asked if she wanted to collaborate on making a movie and the process of them working together essentially becomes the (20 minute) movie. The DVD is in the back of the book which is a collection of sketches Doucet did for the movie. The result? A magic little film that is funny and sweet and a really cool merge of two distinct artistic styles. If you're a fan of either Doucet or Gondry, you just like autobiographical comics/graphic novels, and/or you finally want to see a bit of Gondry's famed style, I think you'll want to check it out.

Austin Public Library has a bunch of Doucet's other books and, of course, many of Gondry's films:

BOOKS (Doucet):

365 Days

This is a collection of collage, diary, and comic drawings from a year in the life of Doucet.

Elle-humour
A visual book filled with drawings, collages, and paintings. A sort of work of art infused with Doucet's humor.

My Most Secret Desire
This is a highly entertaining book in which Doucet recounts some of what I would assume are her more bizarre dreams. Some are a bit grizzly, so consider yourself forewarned.

MOVIES (Gondry)

Be Kind Rewind

Dave Chappelle's Block Party

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Blu-ray!)
Did you know that APL has a small, but excellent collection of Blu-ray movies? Search FindIt, the library catalog, by typing "blu-ray" into the search box and you can browse the collection.

The Green Hornet

I haven't felt very motivated to see this movie, but I did not know until writing this post that Gondry directed it, so my mind has changed...

Tokyo!
This is a sort of 3-in-1 movie with three different directors each directing their own segment all set in Tokyo.

The Work of Director Michel Gondry: A Collection of Music Videos, Short Films, Documentaries, and Stories

Gondry does some amazing music videos and here's an excellent collection of them and a few other gems.