Category Archives: Cinema and Television

Cinema and Television, Feelings

Upstream Color

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Beltane                                                                Early Growth Moon

Saw Shane Carruth’s second movie, Upstream Color, tonight at the Walker.  He made Primer, a film about time traveling geeks who become paranoid in the course of their travels.  It was a huge hit, cost $7,000 to make and got Shane noticed by Hollywood and film buffs.  It won the grand prize at Sundance when it premiered there.

Upstream Color is another dense, need to see it again and perhaps again movie.  According to Shane, who was at the screening tonight and answered questions afterward, this movie began with the idea of a woman stripped of all those things that make her her–house, money, job, self-respect and then follows her as she tries to rebuild herself.  And this movie is about that.

But it gets there through magic worms, pigs in Circe like relationship to a group of human beings, a thief and orchid harvesters.  It also gets there in a circular narrative that has no apparent center, no apparent antagonist and finishes with an ambiguous ending.

Shane is a direct, humble, honest representative of his work.  And when I say his work, both films are his work to an extraordinary degree.  He writes and directs them.  He also composes the score and has a lead role.  He has also taken on the role of distributor, describing in answer to one question a film industry equivalent to the disaggregation of publishing I learned about it in my marketing seminar with Scott Edelstein.

This movie was at Sundance in January and now it’s here in Minneapolis in spite of a limited release distribution schedule.  It was fun to see it so soon after the Festival and to hear Shane talk about his work.

I realized I really enjoy being part of the Walker crowd, seeing and hearing things early in their arc, discovering artists as the world discovers them.  In the same train of thought I realized I’m really having fun translating Ovid, sort of the opposite aesthetic experience, one rooted in the deep classical past.  Then it occurred to me that I must really be enjoying life.

But.  Over the last two or three weeks I’ve been feeling, if not melancholy, at least morose. Triggered by the back pain and Kona’s vet visits, yes, but still, odd for one who’s enjoying so many aspects of his life.  Including writing the novel.  I guess all this means is that we are not one, but many and some of me has a happy life and part of me has a blue life right now.  At the same time.

Cinema and Television

Dystopia

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Beltane                                                                                New (Early Growth) Moon

Dystopian cinema has a long history.  Think back to Mad Max which featured the rise of an unknown, Mel Gibson.   I know it goes further back than that, Planet of the Apes, for example, and Blade Runner and Soylent Green, even Metropolis in the way back, at least as far as cinema goes.  The Road. Minority Report.  Pleasantville. Stepford Wives.

I saw Dredd last night, a remake of a terrible Sylvester Stallone movie, Judge Dredd.  This one posits 800 million people living in an enclosed mega-city stretching from D.C. to Boston, the rest of the US an irradiated wasteland.  Just why the key corridor of power and population remained more or less intact is not explained.

It’s a not unfamiliar story of police trapped inside a high rise controlled by the dark powers, in this case, Ma-Ma, a female maker and distributor of slo-mo, a drug that makes the world slow waaay down, and matriarch of the Ma-Ma gang that runs this 200 story apartment block.  The Raid: Redemption, a recent Indonesian martial arts film, features the same plot line.  This is a much better movie.

It is, in a sense, Vishnu against the dark side of Siva, order trying to rest stability out of chaos.  This type of entertainment might puzzle a viewer who questions the need for this kind of story.  What’s the point?

(Pleasantville)

It can serve a conservative political outlook, highlighting the stakes our contemporary world faces when attempting to maintain order against the forces of social entropy, whether terrorism, drug cartels or low hemlines.  It can serve a liberal political outlook: see what happens if we don’t address social injustice while we have the resources and stability. They remind us of the dark impulses struggling in our own souls, the urges toward incoherence that each of us manages, more or less, each day of our lives.

Darkest of all, of course, they serve notice that the second law of thermodynamics will tear apart everything we love.  Time, that silent executioner, works with it.

(On the Beach)

When we watch these movies, contained in an hour or two of story, of course, we get the pleasant sensation of boundaries to the destruction.  Its story finishes, we turn off the TV or leave the cinema and it’s all over.  In this sense these movies are the opposite of what they seem, a pacifier stuck in the mouth of our infantile desire to live forever.

Cinema and Television

The Movies

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Spring                                                                         Planting Moon

Last night, Water for Elephants.  Tonight, Mildred Pierce.  Wisely held back from the Walker last night, resting my still aching back.  While doing that we watched Water for Elephants.  Loved the 1930’s circus, the cinematography.  Rosie the elephant.  Christoph Walz as the Benzini Circuses’ cruel dictator/savior chewed up crew and spat out hatred.

Reese Witherspoon and vampire Robert Pattison were to rise above it all with the purity of true love.  Except their relationship wasn’t believable.  Pattison had no depth, no fire.  Witherspoon, better, still didn’t fill this role as ably as she has so many others I’ve seen.

It was about half a movie.

Mildred Pierce on the other hand.  Wow.  1945.  Manages to cram a self-reliant mother rising above a gray marriage to start a successful restaurant business into dramatic bed with a daughter who represents the conniving, manipulating greedy woman who only takes.  Throw in three male supporting cast.  A first husband stuck in the 40’s male role of bread winner with no job.  Wally, the blowsy real estate salesman who wants a relationship with Mildred and the playboy, Monte, who ends up two-timing Mildred with her daughter, Veda.

Eva Gardner, of Our Miss Brooks, plays a tough, funny dame who works with Mildred (Joan Crawford) as she builds her business.  The adult women are tough and hard-working. Successful.

Monte, the playboy, and the husband, Bert, are caricatures of the weak male and the wealthy lay-about.  Wally, the hick who seems corny, “I am corny.” is the only one of the three who acts honorably with Mildred.

A murder mystery wrapped in a war time story of female self-empowerment with a side dish of ungrateful daughter.  If you haven’t already seen this classic, pick it up.

Cinema and Television, Family, Latin, Letters, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate

Rainy, Gray, Blah

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Spring                                                                      Planting Moon

Moved books and sorted files.  Finishing up that long study and file reorganization, clean out begun some weeks ago.  Went out for dog food and got a hamburger at Culver’s.  They make a good burger.

Read some more Robert Jordan, now in the second volume of the Wheel of Time.  Watched three Supernaturals and one Danish show, The Eagle.  A lazy Sunday.

Did get started on Book I of Metamorphoses.  Not far.  Verbs pulled out and conjugated.  I checked the Perseus (classics website) text with the most scholarly text available right now and there was one small difference in the first four verses.  Started a word list which will feed into the commentary.

Needed a psychic bump today and Kate provided it.  What would I do without her?  I know it’s a canard; but, with buddy William Schmidt losing his wife Regina last year, it’s no longer something that has happened to others.

This gray, cold weather has many Minnesotans in a bit of a grumpy place, all of us waiting for daffodils and sun.  As Garrison Keillor said today, “The snow will melt.”  You betcha.

Cinema and Television, Dogs, News of the Strange, Politics, Travel, US History, World History

All in a Morning’s Jaunt

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Spring                                                      Bloodroot Moon

Today is the much nicer day of the next three.  Tomorrow the high will be 46 and windy, Monday 41 with ice and snow. Today it is 53 and sunny. I chose walking over museums today.

Before leaving I ate my first and last breakfast at the hotel.  Their main breakfast is a buffet, served for the  many students staying here.  The coffee was weak and served in tired blue plastic mugs.  Jack Reacher would have scored the coffee very low.  A group of 18 students from Germany didn’t seem to mind the coffee though.

Outside the wind was mild, though the temperature in the morning was in the high 30’s.  I saw people in shirt sleeves but I stuck with my hat, Chilean fjord special muffler and my Ecuadorian coat.  There were a number of people out enjoying the sunshine when I passed the Willard Hotel.

(apparently my Android takes self-portraits.  This one showed up in my pics today.)

Those of you who watched House of Cards would recognize the Willard from the scene where Clean Water held its fund-raiser on the steps, then crossed the streets with trays of food for the striking teachers.  Up close it looks like money and power compressed into architecture.

About a block from the Willard and right next to the Whitehouse–how did I not remember this?–is the department of the Treasury.  Keep the nation’s finances right close by the Oval Office, I guess.

Michelle’s garden is on the south lawn and visible from the fence where we all gathered, gobsmacked by the presence of this icon of politics and American might.  The Whitehouse has been the home of all U.S. presidents except for George Washington though Truman vacated for four years while it got a top to bottom rebuilding.

Onward to the Mall, entering the green west of the still not open Washington Monument.  It’s having repairs and rejiggering of its foundations due to a 2011 5.8 earthquake whose epicenter was in Virginia.

Walking along the reflecting pool on my way to the Lincoln Monument I saw a very large Irish Wolfhound, gray and stately, walking its people, unfortunately too far away to meet.

At the monument there were a lot of people though not the crush I’ve  experienced at other times.  This is a moving place as I’m sure you already know.  It is, as it says right over Lincoln’s head, a temple.  Immersed as I am right now in Greek and Roman mythology it’s easy to see the architect and sculptor’s reach back to those ancient worlds for adequate ceremonial features.  He was and is a giant in our history and this haunting building makes that place clear.

A brief thought passed through my head that this was a monument for the ages, then Ozymandias came in its wake and I realized I was a citizen of Rome at Rome’s peak.  London at the height of the British Empire.  Xi’an during the T’ang empire.  Edo during the Tokugawa era.  And the glory of those cities now lies in the past, a memory, not a present fact.  So it will be with Lincoln and Washington, D.C. itself.

After the Lincoln Monument I went by the additions to the Vietnam Memorial, two statuary groups, one three men, the other three women, and wandered on to come upon what must be the most jingoistic of all our monuments and one built under the reign of George II, George W. Bush.  Nothing against the vets of WWII, among them were both my parents and an uncle, but this monument reeks of American exceptionalism and the projection of US power.  With George W.’s name on it it will forever be linked, as I’m sure he intended, with his misguided efforts in Iraq.

This is an example of the unintended consequences of the use of power.  No one can or should compare the US WWII effort, the last ‘good’ war’, with the ill-advised and deceitfully sold war against the Iraqi people.  This monument will itself stand as stone and metal irony on just this point.

In case, though, all these monumental treatments of liberty and freedom seem ill-advised, I found this on the back of a truck parked on the corner of Constitution and 15th, just two blocks from the Whitehouse.  There is always someone who would take freedoms away.

By the time I trudged my way back–I figure 4 to 5 miles round trip–this guy had exhausted himself.  A lunch at the Elephant and Castle then a long nap.  Woke up refreshed and ready to go back to the PRB show tomorrow.

Cinema and Television, Cooking

Salmon, Chess, Homeland

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Imbolc                                                                  Bloodroot Moon

Kate cooked salmon with a wonderful glaze, cut green beans and a salad with orange, feta cheese, cubed cucumber, lettuce.  All excellent.

We discussed the first, basic aspects of chess tonight.  How to position the board, white on the right, and line up the pieces.  Then a brief lesson in how each piece moves.  The chess set is now on the end of the dining room table.  Kate’s never played.

I like chess because after determining who gets white nothing else involves chance.  It’s complexity appeals to me, too, but because it is complexity contained in space and time, complexity of a finite duration.  It defines well time devoted to the game and time outside the game.  Plus, no tee times.  No golf carts and no slices or hooks.

And, like good video streamers of the second decade of the third millennium we binge watched Homeland, finishing the thirteenth episode tonight with Clair Danes strapped down, medicated and receiving shock treatment–just as she remembers a key clue in the case of Sgt. Brody.  The downside of binge watching current programs is that after you finish you have to wait a year or more for the continuation.

 

Cinema and Television

Defining Moments of Our Time

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Imbolc                                                                        Bloodroot Moon

Watching Margin Call while I workout.  This 2011 movie with Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci and Jeremy Irons and a wonderful supporting cast gives me chills.  It sets

itself in 2008 in a company that sounds a lot like AIG or Lehman Brothers.  A rising young analyst, really a rocket scientist gone over to finance for the money, discovers the company  has already passed its margins of safety.  A coldly calculated retreat then follows.

What struck me, more than the historical period piece about the biggest financial disaster of our time, were some simple shots.  Demi Moore and the CEO of the local branch walking down a darkened corridor to a meeting with the chairman of the board.  They’re serious.  Their world is about to come apart, a world they’ve worked their lives to achieve.

And I thought.  Gee, step outside that darkened corridor.  Go down and walk on the sidewalks of New York or the trails of Yosemite.  Wander the blue highways of Minnesota or board a boat on Lake Superior.  The world in that corridor does not matter.  It’s not existentially important.  It’s a constructed, artificial world no different from an amusement park or a video game.  Everybody agrees to treat it with gravitas, putting it in a movie with serious music in the background and tension building.  That’s all it is, another way this animal lives its life, and not a particularly significant part of that life.

Kate and I got the first disc of Homeland a couple of days ago and we’ve watched the first four episodes of this Showtime series about the CIA and the war against terror.  Claire Danes, a favorite of mine among young actors, and Mandy Patikin, a wonderful and sensitive actor, give the series bite.  It’s an interesting peak into the world of spies and terror and contemporary events.  In that regard it’s similar to Margin Call.

The two works together summarize defining moments of this very young millennium, moments that have had a huge impact on all of our lives and will continue to effect us for years to come.  They will be historical documents a hundred years from now, a Rorschach on our hopes and fears, mostly our fears.  They’re both high caliber, sophisticated presentations worth your time.

 

 

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Family, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

And Jazz Saxophone after it all

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Imbolc                                                              Valentine Moon

Here we go.  A perfect day.  Revising Missing before 11:00 am.  A sentence from Ovid before lunch.  Nap.  Working with pre-Raphaelites until 4:00.  Some chess until 5.  Workout.  A movie with Kate.  As I said.

Cinema and Television, Family, Politics, Travel

the quiet american

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

In the spirit of catching up on the films of the last few decades Kate and I watched the Quiet American, a 2002 adaptation of Graham Green’s 1955(!) novel.  It depicts, through the eyes of a British journalist, the early activity of the CIA in creating the South Vietnamese army and government.  Astoundingly prescient.

Raised many different feelings.  Yearning for Southeast Asia, a wonderful, yet strangely far away part of the world.  A place I feel intimately tied to through my sister and brother’s long tenancy there and my 2004 visit.  Disgust at the role of the American government in its most banal anti-communist clothing.  Memories of the 60’s as the dark fruit of the 1950’s seeds began to ripen, then rot.  Kate’s distaste for war.  “Killing doesn’t solve anything.”

A period for my generation that defined us as young adults.  Either for or against, little middle ground.  Those division persist among us.  Even in my high school class there are only a few of us who were anti-war.  The rest, the blue collar middle-class of those days, patriotic in a militaristic, flag-waving way.  Long ago but not far away.

Asia, Cinema and Television, Literature, Politics

Politics

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Imbolc                                                                 Valentine Moon

Kate and I continue to watch House of Cards on Netflix.  We’re on episode 11 of 13.  I’ve enjoyed it though the cringe factor of reducing opponents to relapse and the casual, I use you-you use me attitudes speak of a world in which humans have only instrumental value, rather than intrinsic.

Still, when the stakes are high, the tactics get messy; I have no doubt of that; but, the world of political intrigue that resorts to the more extreme tactics represented in  House of Cards has not been part of my political experience.  Of course, I’ve never really left state level politics, so my range is narrow.

Civil Servant’s Notebook, the novel I mentioned a couple of posts ago, has very similar content, though in a Chinese metropolitan context.  I promised when I mentioned it excerpts, but they’ll have to wait.

The world view presented in many of the characters is bleak, a sort of aimless grasping propelling many of these bright, capable people.  There is also a strange dance between the hardest of hard core realism, e.g. life is absurd and a keen yearning for the pure political actor, impossible to corrupt and acting with the best interests of the people always in mind.  At various points the characters come off as actors in a dark political thriller, only later seeking love and friendship, even spiritual salvation.  It is, I believe, an important book.