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Friday, March 6th, 2009
 Ellen has organized a film series at the local library, movies about adoption. The series kicks off on Sunday afternoon, with Barbara Lee's documentary Adopted; Ellen has an interview with Lee at Patch.com.
 And another piece by Ellen, in The Motherhood: What this movie has to offer to people who are not in adoptive families.
posted morning of March 6th, 2009: 2 responses
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Thursday, March 5th, 2009
Thanks to a recommendation from SEK, Ellen and I have taken up watching The Wire -- we're starting in on Season Two this weekend. Season One was really riveting. Anyway I notice Aaron of Zunguzungu has started writing some posts about The Wire as a "post-colonial western," pursuant to a paper he's working on -- intriguing! First post is here.
posted morning of March 5th, 2009: 3 responses
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Sunday, February 8th, 2009
I watched Waltz with Bashir with clinical detachment, and without understanding that this detachment was an authentic response to how the film was composed -- that the intent was to push the audience away from the events being narrated rather than to pull us in. I was not failing to get into the movie but was understanding Folman's approach to his own lost experience -- wondering about the motivations and reactions of the people talking, "as if watching a movie" as Folman's psychiatrist friend puts it; and  was completely surprised, at the end of the film, to find myself sobbing -- this brought me full circle to the very beginning of the movie, where I had been pretty choked up over Boaz' description of the dogs he had to shoot. I was a little confused by the psychiatrist's assertion early in the film, to the effect that memory can only take us "where we want to go," that there is a human mechanism which prevents us from remembering things that will damage us. This seems wrong to me as a general statement, and counter to my experience. But maybe he had intended it only in the context of the conversation they were having.
posted morning of February 8th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, February second, 2009
A really intriguing experience as I was reading The Amber Spyglass with Sylvia this evening -- we were reading about the deliberations of the Consistorial Court of Discipline, and my internal picture of it was based on the Magisterium scene from the movie of The Golden Compass; and it was dragging. Then I remembered what I had been thinking about last week, and re-imagined the scene as animated, in the style of Studio Ghibli. And the reading picked right up!  The internal imagery got a lot more interesting, the story seemed more real. Maggie's note in comments that His Dark Materials is based on Paradise Lost has me really intrigued over the past week. I'm dying to find out which of the details of plot are in Milton, and how Pullman has transformed them.
 (The Authority's Clouded Mountain fortress totally makes me think of Laputa: The Castle in the Sky.)
posted evening of February second, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009
YepRoc Records has posted video of Robyn and friends singing "Up to Our Nex", from the November 22nd show at Symphony Space -- presumably this is part of the documentary film they're making of that tour.
On stage with Mr. Hitchcock are (from left to right) Amir El Saffar, Terry Edwards, Gaida Hinnawi, and Tim Keegan. The song will be released on Goodnight Oslo. Thanks for the link, Woj!
posted afternoon of January 31st, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 24th, 2009
 MacMurray is just the perfect actor for playing Walter Neff in Double Indemnity. His is the voice I've been hearing all this time whenever I read Chandler. This movie is such a gem! I'm really happy now because I've been operating for a while under the misconception that I had seen all the important movies of film noir -- but I had never even heard of this one, which seems to be an absolutely critical piece of the genre.  So presumably there's more stuff out there for me to discover. Nice!
Lots of other great things about this film. The interplay between the different actors absolutely sparkles. It took me a little while to get used to the dialogue, for it not to sound stilted, but once I could get past that it was a lot of fun to follow the twists and turns of what people are saying and what they mean.
posted evening of January 24th, 2009: 2 responses
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Monday, January 19th, 2009
The excellent movie we watched yesterday evening was The Crime of Padre Amaro -- not much to say about it other than it was a great movie, I recommend it highly -- I am thinking about it right now while reading Of Love and Other Demons's description* of a highly religious (and seemingly to me, sincerely so) bishop, and contrasting this with the hideous portrait of the bishop who appoints and conspires with Amaro:
"Come in, Ygnacio," he said. "My house is yours."The Marquis wiped his perspiring hands on his trousers, walked through the door, and found himself under a canopy of yellow bellflowers... The Bishop extended his soldier's hand in a meaningful way, and the Marquis kissed his ring. Asthma made his breathing heavy and stony, and his phrases were interrupted by inopportune sighs and a harsh, brief cough, but nothing could affect his elopuence. He established an immediate, easy exchange of trivial commonplaces. Sitting across from him, the Marquis was grateful for this consolatory preamble, so rich and protracted that they were taken aback when the bells tolled five. More than a sound, it was a vibration that made the afternoon light tremble and filled the sky with startled pigeons. "It is horrible," said the Bishop. "Each hour resonates deep inside me like an earthquake. The phrase surprised the Marquis, for he had responded with the same thought at four o'clock. It seemed a natural coincidence to the Bishop. "Ideas do not belong to anyone," he said. With his index finger he sketched a series of continuous circles in the air and concluded: "They fly around up there like angels."
So -- in a sense he seems detached in a monklike way (or a way that I think of in association with monks and ascetics) from ownership of the world around him -- and earlier he was described as "sincere in his poverty." My initial reaction to that is wait, but he's not poor, he lives in a mansion with his needs attended to, and to think about the Church in a villainous context. But then I find a very sympathetic portrait of the Bishop. (Initially at any rate -- the character has just been introduced. Who knows, what the story will bring -- and see update below.)
A line in the movie that gave me pause was when Padre Benito said to Amaro, in regards to its being unimaginable that the Vatican would ever drop the requirement of celibacy from the priesthood, that "there will sooner be a Mexican Pope." Huh! Well I can't offhand think of a non-European Pope and I reckon there probably has never been one from Mexico or Latin America. I would not have thought of it as a basis for comparison -- of course I am neither Latin American nor Catholic. Is this exclusion a common point of reference? Or is it being used as a common point of reference among Churchmen -- to emphasize that Benito and Amaro are priests and are concerned with Church politics? (Here is an article from Pacific News Service on the need for a non-European Pope, dated 2005.)
(Update: Hm, well García Márquez' depiction of the Bishop very quickly takes on a negative cast -- a few pages after we meet him he is proposing exorcism of a rabies patient and implying it's all down to the Jews. This is at least a different failing from greed or hypocrisy...)
* And besides this: the number and frequency of points of similarity between the movie and the book are making me wonder if there was conscious imitation going on, either on the part of the movie makers or on García Márquez' part with reference to the novel that was source for the film, which dates from 1875.
posted afternoon of January 19th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, January 8th, 2009
I watched Innocent Voices Tuesday night, and again tonight. I want to write a post about it but am having a hard time getting my thoughts about it into any kind of postable order. So: maybe I will write about my reaction to it later on. But for now I just wanted to let you know about it; it's very much worth your while and I had not heard about it until just recently. Here is an interview with the screenwriter Oscar Torres, whose childhood is the subject of the film.
posted evening of January 8th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, January 6th, 2009
 I've seen a few references to Horacio Castellanos Moya's newly translated Senselessness -- sounded interesting and worth checking out. Chad Post of 3% posts about it today as part of his Best Translated Books of 2008 series, with links to reviews and to interviews with Castellanos Moya and translator Katherine Silver. I'm much more interested now after reading these -- and by coincidence I have the movie Innocent Voices currently checked out from Netflix, also about victims of the civil war in El Salvador.
New Directions has an excerpt from the first chapter up on the book's home page. l am not complete in the mind, I repeated to myself, stunned by the extent of mental perturbation experienced by this Cakchiquel man who had witnessed his family's murder, by the fact that this indigenous man was aware of the breakdown of his own psychic apparatus as a result of having watched, albeit wounded and powerless, as soldiers of his country's army scornfully and in cold blood chopped each of his four small children to pieces with machetes, then turned on his wife, the poor woman already in shock because she too had been forced to watch as the soldiers turned her small children into palpitating pieces of human flesh. Nobody can be complete in the mind after having survived such an ordeal, I said to myself, morbidly mulling it over, trying to imagine what waking up must have been like for this indigenous man, whom they had left for dead among chunks of the flesh of his wife and children and who then, many years later, had the opportunity to give his testimony so that I could read it and make stylistic corrections, a testimony that began, in fact, with the sentence I am not complete in the mind that so moved me because it summed up in the most concise manner possible the mental state tens of thousands of people who have suffered experiences similar to the ones recounted by this Cakchiquel man found themselves in, and also summed up the mental state of thousands of soldiers and paramilitary men who had with relish cut to pieces their so-called compatriots, though I must admit that it's not the same to be incomplete in the mind after watching your own children drawn and quartered as after drawing and quartering other peoples' children, I told myself before reaching the overwhelming conclusion that it was the entire population of this country that was not complete in the mind, which led me to an even worse conclusion, even more perturbing, and this was that only somebody completely out of his mind would be willing to move to a foreign country whose population was not complete in the mind to perform a task that consisted precisely of copyediting an extensive report of one thousand one hundred pages that documents the hundreds of massacres and proves the general perturbation.
posted evening of January 6th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, January 4th, 2009
Saw a report today that Studio Ghibli is moving towards a North American release of Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea later this year, on the big screen. Nice, something to look forward to! (While we wait, you can watch some footage of the Japanese-language film at DailyMotion.)
posted afternoon of January 4th, 2009: Respond
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Kate Beaton is cleaning up her office. She's put up a lot of her hilarious 