Category Archives: Cinema and Television

Asia, Cinema and Television, Family, Humanities, Literature, Weather +Climate, World History

Still Reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms

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Summer                                   Waxing Strawberry Moon

Hot today.  At least by our standards.  85.  Plus a dewpoint of 70.  Not outside weather for this gardener.  I did work outside this morning, weeding in the orchard and checking the trees.  I’m going to need a consultation with Ecological Gardens because some of the stuff they planted, I don’t recognize and I don’t want to remove friendlies out of ignorance.

Kate’s off getting a pre-op physical, having dental work done and nails and hair.  A sort of clean up, paint up, fix up day for her.  Her surgery is a week from tomorrow and can’t come a day too soon for her.  The pain in her hip gives her fits during the day when she walks and at night when she sleeps.  She looks forward to having more than two sleeping positions.  So would I.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms has held me for several weeks now, though I’m not reading in large chunks.  It’s a three-volume work about the end of the Han Dynasty and the emergence of the three kingdoms of Wu, Wei and Shu.  This period only last for about 45 years, but it holds a position of particular importance in Chinese culture, with many of its figures like Liu Bei, Cao Cao, Zhuge Liang and the three brothers:  Guan Yu, Zhang Fei and Liu Bei attaining iconic and archetypal significance.

(Liu Bei, Zhang Fei and Guan Yu)

It’s not an exact analogy at all, but it resembles the mythos of the American West, a time when men were men and some men were very good and others were very bad.

If you enjoy political and military tales or have an interest in the logic of other cultures, then the Three Kingdoms may enthrall you as it has me.  If you’re not sure, I recommend seeing the Red Cliffs, the two disc version.  The movie showcases all the main characters and records a pivotal battle, one that has ongoing importance in Chinese culture.  Not to mention that it’s great fun.  Again, if political and military intrigue fascinate you.

Cinema and Television

Goya’s Ghosts

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Beltane                                 Full Planting Moon

I often see movies well past their sell-by date.  Tonight, for instance, I got around to seeing Goya’s Ghosts, a Milo Foreman piece from 2006.  This has Javier Bardem, Natalie Portman and Stellan Skarsgaard as Goya.  It must have been so named because the character Goya seems to have a very slight role in the movie, a go-between role between the church and the daughter of a wealthy family arrested by the Holy Office, aka the Inquistion, aka the predecessor office to the last job held by the current Pope, Benedict.

How dangerous it is to have dogmatic or ideological people in power.  With no need for evidence or facts, with no system of truth seeking committed to verifiability the church, the monarchy and the aristocracy can be confident in their decisions with no checks or balances.  Goya’s Ghosts shows that much better than it shows much about Goya either as a man or an artist.

It does show the suffocating nature of unchecked, self-righteous power as it also shows the dramatic political and military events through which Goya lived, again without illuminating Goya’s life.  A strange set of choices.

As a costume drama focused on the turmoil of Europe in the late 18th and early 19th century, the movie worked for me.  As anything about Goya, it did not.

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Cinema and Television, Great Wheel, Humanities, Literature, World History

Cry the Beloved Country

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Spring                                                      Waxing Flower Moon

The crescent flower moon slung itself just beneath the tree to the west, over Round Lake.  A thin cloud passed across it, perhaps a cloud like the one Muhammad rode through on his way to Jerusalem and the Holy Mount.  These crescent moons have South Carolina and the Arab world in their wake, calling to mind on the one hand a new meaning to hiking the Appalachian trail and on the other lakes and rivers of sand, desert nights with stars so numerous no Caliph could count them all and tents raised near a palm filled caravan serai.

Kate and I watched Cry, the Beloved Country, only about 15 years after it made it to the screen.  I’ve never read this book though it’s one I’ve had on my list a long time.   Richard Harris and James Earl Jones are titans as far as I’m concerned, able to bring gravitas, authenticity and depth to movies in which they appear.  In one of the more memorable scenes in the movies, James Earl Jones and Richard Harris, the father of a murderer and the father of the victim, unknown to each other, yet coming from home ground close to each other, speak about the murder.  If you can watch this scene unmoved, you’ve lost touch with something important.  Four stars.

On a less elevated note I’ve begun watching Spartacus:  Blood and Sand.  It’s on the instant play feature Netflix has available through the wii.  It’s compelling tv, not as good as Cry, the Beloved Country but as a sand and sandal adventure yarn, it’s pretty damn good.

Cinema and Television, Politics

Movin’ On

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Spring                                    Awakening Moon

Kate and I watched Precious tonight.  Kate found it an uplifting story.  I found it tragic.  Whichever view you take, this is a fine movie, capturing the fantasy that can keep us alive, the brutality physical and emotional that can keep us down and the complex network that captures each one of us, shapes us and spits us out whole. This was a bitter, intimate, too close look at a world so many do not even know exists.  It is a strange celebration of the often maligned networks that buttress our countries most neglected and abused.  A social worker looks good here.  A halfway house has a positive impact as does an alternative school and a teacher in it.

Precious gets up, falls down, gets kicked, kicked again, yet keeps moving forward.  That’s the positive note, the uplifting part.  The tragic part is the vast sea of girls and boys in similar circumstances who stop moving forward, who never get past the street, the labyrinth.

Kate works tomorrow, as a Jew she tries to work the Christian holydays.  I plan to dig into the declutter project yet one more time.  Again.  Still more to do, more places to clear.  Also, some Latin.  Maybe a bit of outside time.  Maybe a bit more on Romanticism.  We’ll see after the decluttering.

Cinema and Television, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

The Sparrow

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Spring                                             A Near Full Awakening Moon

Just saw La Vie En Rose, the story of Edith Piaf. Kate was familiar with the story, I was not.  Her life began in abandonment by both of her parents, one after the other, a childhood in a brothel, her grandmother’s, a life singing on the streets until her discovery at 20.  It went from there to a world career, on stage, in movies, while in her life disaster kept following on disaster.  The love of her life, a boxer, died on a plane flight she had begged to make, so he could be with her instead of his wife and children.  Her frailty, evident in childhood continued throughout her career with exhaustion, then drug dependency and an early death at 47.  Her music has a smoky, nightclub ambiance and strikes the heart fast, often from the first note.  I was glad to make her acquaintance.

My conversation earlier today with Ian Boswell on music as a convergence of rationality and soulfulness has stayed on my mind.  I ordered Beethoven’s piano sonata’s and Chopin’s music, a complete set played by Garrick Olson.  I’m making a commitment to start listening to classical music and jazz here at home until Kate and I can break free, after her retirement and return to the Ordway to hear the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra again.  I miss the music.  The notion of a post-modern world, one where reason and spirit blend, where the critiques of the Enlightenment like Romanticism and environmentalism might converge, may be a world filled with thoughtful, soulful music.

Cinema and Television, Sport

TV, Movies, Sports

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Imbolc                                            Waxing Wild Moon

The moon hangs, almost full, high in the southeastern sky tonight, Orion off to the west, heading toward his fade out from winter, small glints of ancient light on an equally ancientrail through the universe.  He’ll be back next year.

A little bit of short track, a hunk of bobsled and that was all the olympics for me tonight.  I watched State of Play, a not too bad movie with Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Russell Crowe and Helen Mirren.  It had its convolutions, turning around near the end, coming out headed in the reverse direction of its beginning.  That was fun.

I also watched the pilot for Caprica, the show set 58 years before the Cylon destruction of the Colonies, the beginning of the recently ended Battlestar Galactica series.  I was skeptical.  The clever plotting and strong characters of its parent would not be matched in this spinoff.  I was wrong.

In the pilot they show the origin of the Cylon centurions and the “skin-job” robots of which there are many copies. It comes from the arrogation of creative power by a young girl and her charge ahead without thinking Dad.  She’s killed and he wants to be bring her back through use of a software program she designed to replicate a person.  It’s in that process that the Cylon’s begin.  It’s a good, believable and original way to get to the revolution that began Galactica.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Humanities, Letters

Whee!

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Imbolc                                    Waxing Wild Moon

Here’s a revelation it’s strange to have this late in life:  I enjoy learning for its own sake.  Now I knew that at one level or another before, it’s true, but here’s what I’ve just learned.  After I finished my workout this evening, I went back to working on Latin translation.  At first I approached the Latin like school, do the work, get it right, then do more work, get it right.  So on.

But tonight as I sat there puzzling out the meaning of the sentences and the word endings, I realized I was having fun.  This was no longer a goal oriented, hoop-jumping exercise, but something I simply enjoyed.  Like, I don’t know, playing checkers or basketball or chess or dancing.  Strange, huh?

Maybe it’s always been this way for me, I don’t know.  It feels like a secret, something I shouldn’t tell, but there it is anyhow.  At 63.  There’s always something new around the corner.

Kate and I had an African evening.  We finished the first season of the HBO series, The First Ladies Detective Agency.  We read all these quite a while ago.  The casting for the series is spot on and seeing the Botswana setting makes the stories come alive even more strongly than in the books themselves.  After we finished the last episode, we watched Duma, a story of a South African boy and a cheetah he raises from a cub.  It has the usual boy reluctantly returns animal to the wild, the animal comes back for one last hug sort of plot line, but with some unusual depth added by his long journey from Capetown back into the bush with Duma, the cheetah and a man he meets in the bush.  Both of them are well worth  watching.  Not my usual dark fare, but good anyhow.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Family, Great Wheel, Health, Holidays

A Quiet New Year

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Winter                            Full Moon of Long Nights

We have gained back a few minutes since the Winter Solstice, so the New Year will arrive, as it does every year, with a bit more daylight than the grimmer days of mid-winter.

The neighbors have begun to shoot off fireworks.  They are a restrained lot for the most part, but when they perceive an excuse for celebration:  holiday, birthday, new year, they always bring out the fireworks.

(Methuselah Grove
The Methuselah Grove with the world’s oldest living things. The oldest living tree at 4,723 years, Methuselah, is not identified for its own protection.)

Kate and I have clinked glasses of champagne (her) and Fre (me), wished each other a happy new year and not shot off a single firecracker.  We did watch Jules and Julia, a middling movie in my judgment, though it had some interesting observations about cooking.  We also watched a great Nature program on the rise of the dog.  Apparently a Swedish geneticist has pinpointed eastern Asia as the origin of all dogs.

Kate’s neck has begun to bother her again this week and her left hip is now  worse than it was before the operation.  The back, though, has improved markedly.   A day at a time.

Well, a happy new year to you, whoever you are.  Back at you next year.

Cinema and Television, Health

Vertigo Comes Again

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Fall                                          Waning Blood Moon

Vertigo is a famous Hitchcock movie, one of his best the critics say.  Maybe so, but I wish it was something I experienced only in movies.  Unfortunately, it has come to visit me again.  I turned my head yesterday morning just after I woke up and said, “Oh, damn.”

This episode was neither as dramatic (I knew what it was.), nor as intense as the first one.  Kate had an opportunity to take care of me, which she liked.  I will have an opportunity to return the favor very soon.

I suppose vertigo was among the spells that visited my ancestors.  With no explanation this would start out as terrifying then gradual descend to a major nuisance.

This morning I have to go into St. Paul to do an organizational development (or de-development) process for Groveland UU.   It will be important to maintain my balance.  (ha, ha)