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Friday, April 25th, 2008
Many thanks, to whomever it was that recommended The Man Without a Past to me! I have forgotten who you were and in what forum you made the recommendation, though something tells me it was in a blog post. Ellen and I loved the movie and are wondering if the soundtrack is available.
 ...Yep, it's just a click away.
posted evening of April 25th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
 Two very cinematic items in the news today -- the search for the Rev. Adelir Antonio di Carli, who tried to cross the Pacific strapped to helium balloons in an effort to raise money for a spiritual rest-stop for Brazilian truckers, continues. (Every element of that sentence adds another tint to the rainbow of absurdity -- I am thinking David Lynch could have a lot of fun with this one. Or -- Fellini!)  And, the dismissal of charges against James O'Hare and David Daloia, who wheeled their possibly-already-dead friend Virgilio "Fox" Cintron to the Pay-O-Matic at 9th Ave. and 52nd to cash his Social Security check -- John Waters material, or maybe the Coen Brothers in their Big Lebowski mode.
 (Also in today's paper, this story about a pretty amazing-sounding teacher and his high-school geography class.)
posted morning of April 23rd, 2008: Respond
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Monday, April 14th, 2008
This evening I saw the first James Bond movie I have ever seen: From Russia with Love. How did I like it? Well, I liked it. It seemed extremely similar to North by Northwest, which is a great movie to resemble. Didn't have Hitchcock's genius, maybe, so a lot of the attempts at wit came off as corny and a lot of the dialog was flat; but the photography was lovely, the action exciting, the plot twists not always expected. Why did I watch the movie? I saw a reference to Goldfinger in Pamuk's Other Colors, and then read this letter in the NY Times, pointing out that Pamuk had the wrong movie in mind. Thought, I've never seen a Bond movie, maybe I'll see about it, added it to my Netflix queue.
posted evening of April 14th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, April 4th, 2008
Hm. Response to No Country For Old Men is ultimately similar to my response to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which is namely that the acting and direction are beautiful but not, finally, worth sitting through all that shooting for without a story. (And that's not to say that movies with shooting are necessarily bad, or not as good as they would be with less of it: I thought Once Upon a Time in the West was fantastic.) The minimalism and creepiness seem a little studied.
posted evening of April 4th, 2008: Respond
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I just heard Martin Scorsese give an interview to NPR about his new movie -- I was interested to learn the title is "Shine a Light", since that's one of my favorite Stones songs (and gets fairly little play); but Ellen thinks it is a different song with "shine a light" in the chorus.* I'm looking forward to the movie -- it is probably as close as I will ever get to seeing the Stones live; but Scorsese was kind of grating on my nerves as he described it. You know whose concert films I love? Jonathan Demme's, is whose. The focus is on the music and you get this pretty elemental, raw passion of artistry -- whereas Scorsese was making it sound kind of like his focus was on making the film and on the personalities involved. Hopefully I am misreading the interview, because I'd really love to see a film crystallizing the Stones' music.
 *Update: No, looking at the track list of the soundtrack album now, and "Shine a Light" is indeed present, and is the closing track! Sweet.
posted morning of April 4th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, March 21st, 2008
No need to read Ibn Khaldun; those charged with this task would quickly guess that the only way forward was to rip away our memories, our past, our history, leaving us with nothing but our misfortunes.... But later on, the Western bloc's "humanitarian wing" had declared this reckless initiative too dangerous...and switched to a gentler approach that promised longer-lasting results: the new plan was to erode our collective memory with movie music.Church organs, pounding out chords of a fearful symmetry, women as beautiful as icons, the hymnlike repetition of images, and those arresting scenes sparkling with drinks, weapons, airplanes, designer clothes -- put all these together and it was clear that the movie method proved far more radical and effective than anything missionaries had attempted in Africa and Latin America. (These long sentences of his were well-rehearsed, Galip decided. Who else had had to hear them, his neighbors? His colleagues at work? His mother-in-law? The people sitting next to him in a dolmuş?) It was in the Şehzadebaşı and Beyoğlu movie theaters that they set their plan into action; before long, hundreds of people had gone utterly blind. Viewers who sensed the terrible plot that was being perpetrated on them and rebelled with angry cries were quickly silenced by policemen and mad doctors. When the children of today showed a similar reaction -- when they were blinded by the proliferation of new images -- they were fobbed off with new prescription glasses. But there were always a few who refused to go away quietly. A while ago, he'd been walking through another neighborhood not far from here around midnight when he'd seen a sixteen-year-old boy pumping futile bullets into a movie billboard -- and immediately he'd understood why. Another time, he'd seen a man at the entrance to a theater with two cans of gasoline swinging from his hands; as the bouncers roughed him up, he kept demanding that they give him his eyes back -- yes, the eyes that could see the old images.... We'd all been blinded, every last one of us, every last one...
(Want to write about this quotation in a minute, but I am being called away by Sylvia to read Pippi Longstocking just at the moment. Back in a little while.)
A few observations: Rüya's ex-husband's (I believe he has not been named, though a few of his aliases surfaced in a previous chapter) sort of anti-semitic rant weaves uncertainly between weird craziness and poetry -- reminds me in a way of the Islamicists in Snow. Galip's parenthetical aside is just masterful. (There is a similar aside a few paragraphs later where Galip describes the man as "sinking into the pages of his encyclopedic metaphor".) I like the coincidence here with Blindness -- I wouldn't necessarily give it a whole lot of weight but I think this passage might be a good one to have in mind when rereading Saramago. Also -- not sure if this is valid but I see vaguely a reflection of the remarks that Jeremiah Wright is being pilloried for these days.
posted evening of March 21st, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, March 15th, 2008
Look, Horton Hears a Who is not Dr. Seuss' best work. It has some nice moments, but if you spend any time thinking about it you quickly realize that 1, Horton is doing the Whos a massive disservice by interfering with their destiny and 2, the whole thing is pretty sappy. But whatever, the pictures are great, the poetry is great, it's a fun book. A really good animated short could probably be made out of it. (My dream of a live-action production with no dialog, probably not something that would ever come to pass.) Expanding it into a feature film was a really bad idea, because it meant that the film-makers had to dwell at great length on the incoherencies of the plot and insert lots new poorly-fitting stuff as well. (The whole plot line about politics in Whoville was totally lame, even though it produced as a happy accident, one interesting moment where the idea that the Whos had to prove their existence to the outside world was inverted; also the plotline about the Mayor's relationship with his son -- lame and tacked-on, no relationship to the rest of the movie.) So, Sylvia is having Kaydi over to spend the night -- as a prelude to they festivities we went over to the South Orange cinema. The girls loved the film and your kids probably will too, but try and get somebody else to take them. Or find a way of bringing some powerful intoxicants along, that would probably make the movie worth while. (OTOH, if you've got powerful intoxicants handy, there are much more interesting ways you could make use of them.) Some of the visuals, particularly the outdoor shots of Whoville, are lovely; though sad to say Horton and the kangaroo, the visual centerpieces of the film, are pretty uninteresting. The Rube Goldberg musical machine the mayor's son builds at the end is totally splendid.
posted evening of March 15th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, March 14th, 2008
We are watching Xiao Cheng Zhi Chun tonight -- I am finding I like the actors and director a lot but without identifying very closely with the movie. It is pleasing to be able to recognize dribs and drabs of the language, even if it is almost all words like "sister", "brother", "I", "you", "he", "thanks"... The lighting is very poorly done, it seems like the worst part of the movie -- it totally does not show that a scene is taking place at midnight, if it is in a darkened room with the windows brightly illuminated.
posted evening of March 14th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, March 7th, 2008
This evening I watched Once Upon a Time in the West, which I think might be the finest thing in its genre that I've ever seen. The things it brought to mind were some of my favorites (and which I think of as similarly superlative) -- the use of cliché made me think of North by Northwest, the long, slow shots and pacing and soundtracking/ambient sound (and sparseness of dialogue) of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the mythic characterizations of Against the Day -- note the overlap between "use of cliché" and "mythic characterizations" -- and also it brought to mind Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid as being a failed imitation. I want to know what woodwind instrument is playing the harmonica solos, and why they did not have a harmonica playing them. (I might be wrong? There was definitely a harmonica towards the very end -- but the earlier iterations really sounded very un-harmonica-like.) Beautiful, haunting music and the oddness of it I guess heightened the sense of cinematic surreality.
posted evening of March 7th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, February 17th, 2008
This afternoon we watched 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, on Scott's recommendation -- gosh what a disturbing film that is. Recommended for sure but make sure you know what you're getting into before you go. A couple of questions: what was the meaning of Otilia taking Dr. Bebe's id card that he had left with the hotel? Was it a fake id, so he had abandoned it? Was she going to use it against him somehow? And it seemed like she left her own id on the desk the last time she left the hotel. (Or, maybe it was his id that she dropped there.)
posted evening of February 17th, 2008: Respond
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