Category Archives: Cinema and Television

Bees, Cinema and Television

Movies

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Summer                                                           First Harvest Moon

More Than Honey, a movie by a Markus Imhoff, is a cinematic marvel.  He worked with special cameras and slowed speeds down so bee activity could be seen in a human time frame.  He also followed bees with mini-helicopters and high speed cameras fitted to endoscopic lenses.  As a result, you can clearly see the bee put out a rear leg as a rudder.  You can see the telescoping proboscis that feeds the honey into the cell for storage.  You can see the drone mate with a queen in mid-air, then fall to earth, dead.

Imhoff gives, in my opinion, the right answer to colony collapse disorder:  insecticides, habitat loss, disease, mites, stress and inbreeding.  It’s multi-factorial and therefore difficult to resolve.  He also introduces us to two Americans who show two different sides of bee-keeping, one a North Dakota migratory bee-keeper, who trucks his bees in a circle summering in North Dakota for honey, then, for example, to California for the almond crops and after that Washington for the apples and apricots.  The other is a Tucson bee-keeper who has begun to keep Africanized bees because their immune systems are stronger, they make great honey and they can live in harsh conditions.

Well worth seeing but only at the Lagoon for one week starting today.

When we came home, we watched another movie: Redemption.  This is the story of Stan (Tookie) Williams, founder of the Crips.  It follows his life in prison as he gradually changes from hardened thug to anti-gang activist through the medium, at first, of children’s books.  A good movie, not a great movie.  What it does do well is give a context for the rise of the Crips and the difficulty in reversing a life of unrelenting savagery.

Cinema and Television, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Third Phase Work: Wit

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Summer                                                            New (First Harvest) Moon

An HBO movie that went DVD on Sept. 11, 2001, Wit, directed by Mike Nichols, is many things.  It is first a fine drama showcasing the talents of Emma Thompson and Audra McDonald with a very touching and important moment featuring Eileen Watkins.  Wit is the story of a middle aged (48) professor of English literature, Thompson, and an expert in the metaphysical poetry of John Donne, diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic ovarian cancer.

The storyline takes her from the moment of the diagnosis through all her 8 cycles of full dose chemotherapy to death.  She only has one visitor, Watkins, her Ph.D. advisor, who is with her when she dies.

There is a fine and I suspect very tight interplay between the poetry of John Donne, especially his well known work, Death Be Not Proud, and the dramatic arc of the movie.  There is also a damning portrait of professionals so focused on their work, saving humans, that they can’t see the humans in front of them:  Thompson’s two oncologists and, ironically, Thompson herself.  Another storyline depicts with damning specificity the increasing powerlessness and dehumanizing of hospital patients.

(Marble funeral effigy of John Donne, 1631,
at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, where he
is buried)

The poignant, and they are heart wrenching, moments come in the interaction between Audra McDonald, an oncology nurse, and Thompson.  It is not maudlin even in its build up, but the nurse sees Thompson, listens to her, empathizes with her, touches her compassionately and finally initiates a conversation about whether she wants to be a DNR, that is, do not resuscitate.

This is third phase work, viewing this movie.  Relative to the theme that I’ve given for my Woolly meeting on July 15th, home and what does that mean to you, it shows the hospital as the anti-home:  a place cleansed of personal belongings, choice, simple comforts like, as Thompson says at one point, “…shoes.”

However it may come to us, “gluttonous death” (a Donne phrase) will come and I hope that it can come for each of us surrounded by loved ones, in a place we choose to be.

Cinema and Television, Garden, Health

Old Movies and Herbs

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Summer                                                            Solstice Moon

Kate and I watched an old Sherlock Holmes movie, Murder by Decree, with a young Christopher Plummer as Holmes and James Mason as Watson.  Mason yes.  Plummer, unfortunately, no.  Not brooding or angular enough.  Basil Rathbone is better.

While watching we plucked oregano leaves for the dryer.  Kate has already frozen rhubarb and several cups of strawberries.  The harvest is well underway and will continue at one level or another through the latter part of September.

In the aches and pains department:  knee, bad last year, much improved, rarely gives problems.  back, normal now, after a very painful late April and May.  left shoulder, vast improvement, not better, but I can see return to normalcy.  and now, ta dah, just as the left shoulder has begun to heal, the right elbow.  Ouch.  Some form of tendinitis, I’m sure.  It seems as if there is a rhythmic pattern here: knee, back, shoulder, elbow.  A concrete, perhaps a skeletal poem.

Cinema and Television, Literature

chicken and waffles

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Beltane                                                                                    Solstice Moon

Finished the HBO version of Mildred Pierce with Kate Winslet.  We saw the original movie a month or two ago and wanted to see this one, too.  What a shocker.  The HBO version has an almost entirely different last third.  The original, I imagine, took elements from the book and created a fine movie, one I liked a lot.  But, the HBO version, which I imagine is closer to the book, created a fine work, too.  Very, very different.  That’s one of the things I love about art, it can take the same subject matter and wring so many different perspectives from it.

 

James Cain, author of the novel, Mildred Pierce, also wrote Double Indemnity and the Postman Only Rings Twice.

Cinema and Television

Don’t Watch This Movie

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Beltane                                                                            Solstice Moon

Since Mark is here from Saudi Arabia, I’m sensitized to the differences between a closed society and an open one.  That’s why watching the movie, This Means War*, starring Reese Witherspoon, tonight made me cringe.  Not only was this a poor choice on my part, it’s puerile and mostly non-funny.  We have this powerful tool, freedom of expression, and we use it to produce drivel like this?  We should be ashamed.

Not everything needs to be Citizen Kane or To Kill a Mockingbird, but it should at least exhibit some basic intelligence.   Not only should you avoid this movie, you should question my judgment in first selecting it, then watching it.  Yecccch.

*TOMATOMETER

Reviews Counted: 167
Fresh: 43 | Rotten: 124

 A career lowlight for all three of its likable stars, This Means War is loud, clumsily edited, and neither romantic nor funny.

AUDIENCE

58% liked it

Average Rating: 3.5/5
User Ratings: 84,046

Cinema and Television, Family, Our Land and Home

First Fire

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Beltane                                                                   New (Solstice) Moon

The old moon went to black and the new moon in waiting, the Solstice Moon, has not yet appeared.  The weather stayed on the cool and cloudy side today though it did get a bit warmer later.

Kate and I had first fire in our new fire pit area, dining on a delicious dinner of cowboy caviar, chicken wings and a broccoli, bacon and raisin salad while part of a dead black locust tree burned.  The crushed gravel we had Javier put around it will have to be modified in some way since it tends to slough when walked upon.  Could have foreseen that but didn’t.

We sat there, watching the smoke rise among the ash trees around the border of what used to be a compost pile.  Our woods surrounds the area, in essence a new outdoor room tucked into the front edge of the trees near the grandkids playhouse.  Looking back into the woods I kept wondering what it would have been like, looking into woods like these and not knowing where they ended.  You can’t even see our property line, so the woods could be impenetrable for all that can be seen.

Afterward we watched two more episodes of the Swedish crime drama, Wallander, not the Branagh one, but the original.  I like the Swedish one better.  In it Wallander has more personality in it than the depressive, uncommunicative character portrayed by Branagh.

Cinema and Television, Politics

Girl Rising

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Beltane                                                                         Early Growth Moon

Kate and I went to see Girl Rising at the Stone Arch Cinema in St. Anthony Main.  This movie shows vignettes from the lives of several girls in very different circumstances.  A bonded servant in Nepal, a young girl in Haiti’s earthquake ravaged city of Port Au Prince, a young radio announcer from Sierra Leone’s Freetown, a Peruvian miner’s daughter transformed by poetry, a Calcutta street child who loved to draw, an Egyptian 12-year old who had been raped and a Afghan yearning for education.

The stories are poignant.  The girl who was a kamlari (first on the left in the bottom row) in Nepal, a form of bonded servitude illegal since 2000, but still widely practiced, for example, wrote songs about her experience, then organized other kamlaris who had been freed to visit homes where kamlaris were held.  They rode their on bicycles, then sang her songs, coming back again and again.

The Haitian loved school and before the earthquake her mother could afford it.  After the earthquake she could not.  Wadley, (second from the right on the top) the girl, found her old school teacher teaching in another school.  Told to leave because she had not paid, Wadley refused, saying she would come back the next day and the next day and the next day.  The teacher accepted her.

The cinema was full of young girls, some from girl scouts, some from parochial schools and at least one Muslim mother with her two daughters, Somali or Ethiopian.  We saw these three later after the movie at Pracna.  The two girls were laughing and playing in the hall while their mother prayed in a carpeted office front, head down, hands out toward Mecca.

This is not a great movie, but it is a powerful one and it got my attention about the plight of girls in the developing world.  They are the most vulnerable of the most vulnerable.

Cinema and Television, Poetry, Weather +Climate

The Howdydoody Season: Winterspringsummerfall

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Beltane                                                                          Early Growth Moon

In a long ago time I took a group of youngsters from Brooklyn Center United Methodist Church on an outing.  Wherever it was we ended up, there was a beanbag toss game that featured Howdydoody characters.  The kids, as kids always do, said, “What’s that?”  And I, as unsuspecting aging adults always do, said, “Why, that’s Howdydoody.”  The blank stares gave me my first frisson of growing old though I was only 27 at the time.

On this now very outdated program there was a character whose name describes for me the season we’ve been passing through since, oh, March or so:  Winterspringsummerfall.

 

This is not a new phenomenon, though, as James Russell Lowell’s poem shows:

Under the Willows [May is a pious fraud of the almanac]

by James Russell Lowell

May is a pious fraud of the almanac,
A ghastly parody of real Spring
Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind;
Or if, o'er-confident, she trust the date,
And, with her handful of anemones,
Herself as shivery, steal into the sun,
The season need but turn his hourglass round,
And Winter suddenly, like crazy Lear,
Reels back, and brings the dead May in his arms,
Her budding breasts and wan dislustred front
With frosty streaks and drifts of his white beard
All overblown. Then, warmly walled with books,
While my wood-fire supplies the sun's defect,
Whispering old forest-sagas in its dreams,
I take my May down from the happy shelf
Where perch the world's rare song-birds in a row,
Waiting my choice to open with full breast,
And beg an alms of springtime, ne'er denied
Indoors by vernal Chaucer, whose fresh woods
Throb thick with merle and mavis all the year.

– See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22956?utm_source=PAD%3A+Spring+Song+by+Sherwood+Anderson&utm_campaign=poemaday_051813&utm_medium=email#sthash.6TuB0x7D.dpuf

Cinema and Television, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality

Po-Mo and Kids

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Beltane                                                                            Early Growth Moon

Po-mo shows up where you least expect it.  This time post-modernism reared its torqued and twisted head in the form of a children’s movie from Dreamworks, The Rise of the Guardians.  Now, this is old news since this is a 2012 release, but I don’t stay au courant in movies, especially movies for kids.

Still.  I did see it tonight.  It’s quite a head-bender if you look at from a theological point of view.  Two key for instances:  Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.  In the movie Santa and the Easter Bunny are part of a team of four known as the guardians.  The notion is that they guard childhood as a place of innocence, fun, imaginative thought and belief.  Here’s a theological kicker not unfamiliar in Christmas movies, Santa Claus stands in for Christmas, not the baby Jesus.  That is, it is the consumer driven toy and present extravaganza that gets billed as the reason for the season, not the incarnation.  You’ve seen it before.

But here the Easter Bunny represents Easter.  Which is about, he says, in Hugh Jackman’s Aussie Bunny accent, “Hope, new life.”  Gee, those sound like the themes of the passion without the gory stuff.

OK, at one level this is kid’s fare meant for multi-cultural audiences, many of whom are not Christian, so, maybe.

However, the real dramatic driver in the movie is the addition of a new guardian to the old group of four:  Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Sandman.  The Man in the Moon, who picked all of the guardians, has now chosen Jack Frost as a new guardian.  A fifth.

Bear with me here.  The going gets a little theoretical, but I think the pay-off is interesting.

Jack comes into the story when the Boogeyman has gone on a campaign to stamp out belief in first the Tooth Fairy, then the Easter Bunny, aiming to get all four including the sandman who brings sleep and pleasant dreams to children.  Both the Boogeyman and Jack face the same problem, nobody believes in them so they are insubstantial, real but not seen as real because the belief meter doesn’t spike among the younger set at the sound of their names.

So the movie takes on the task of finding Jack a place in the believing hearts of children while simultaneously beating back their belief in fear’s ability to hurt them.  The battleground is children’s hearts.  First the tooth fairy loses her powers as child after child falls victim to the boogeyman’s nightmares, then the Easter Bunny.  Sandman gets disappeared by the boogeyman and eventually even Santa’s sleigh weaves and bobs and crashes to the ground, a no longer believed in Santa barely strong enough to stand.

Jack Frost, as you might expect, wins back the hearts of the children with his joyful, fun loving snowball fights and loop-the-loop kid’s sleds rides.  The children begin to believe again and the guardians grow strong, defeating the boogeyman as the children step forward to defend the guardians.  Jack Frost points at the boy leader’s chest and says, “The real guardians are in here.”

This, in other words, is a movie about the magical thinking of children and their charming, wonder-full beliefs, a movie that equates belief with that world and uses the characters dreamed up by American capitalist culture as the agents of restoring children’s beliefs in their existence.  Po-mo.  In a children’s movie.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Writing

The Veiled Narrative

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Beltane                                                                       Early Growth Moon

Shane Carruth, Upstream Color (see below), was also the cinematographer.  Forgot that last night.

In answering questions, in particular about the density of his works, he made two points, both interesting.  First, he said he makes a narrative as it needs to be to tell his story.  That means it may take  more than one pass to take in all  the narrative has to offer.  Just like reading a book or seeing a painting.  Made sense to me.

(Barrias, French, 1893)

Second, all narratives, he believes, are veiled, which he emphasized in answers to more than one question.  In this he means the viewer or reader never knows the whole story and often knows a very limited portion of it.  I took from his overall answers that this conviction comes from life, where the future veils the narrative in every instance and, too, I suppose, since we never know the interiority of the other, veiled in that sense as well.

While I agree intellectually with this latter point, as an intention in a work of art, I’m suspicious.  It can too easily serve as an excuse for careless ambiguity and might enforce an aterminus approach to story telling; which, though it is true as Carruth said last night, that all film narratives must end (and by implication in that way deviate from the truly veiled nature of the narrative future) that departure from reality should not encourage pointless realism.

There may be some of that in this film.  Until I’ve had longer to consider it, and until I’ve seen it at least a second time, I’ll reserve my opinion on that.