Category Archives: Cinema and Television

Cinema and Television, Family, Literature, Writing

Sensuality Awakened in a Hindu Temple

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47  bar steep rise 30.04 6mph N dew-point 38  Beltane

            Waning Gibbous Hare Moon

There are frost warnings not 75 miles north of us.  Frost.  On Memorial Day.  OMG.

Kate came home after a busy holiday clinic, today and yesterday were both very busy.  I cooked walleye, pasta with morels I found in our woods with a sauce Kate made earlier and asparagus.  We ate it while watching Passage to India.  This is an old movie, so you probably saw it long before I did, but it’s a stunner visually.  David Lean and Merchant Ivory, goes without saying.  The plot worked well in exposing the basic contradictions in the colonial exploitation of India by the British Raj.  The major plot point, however, an incident in the caves of Marabara still eludes me. 

It seems that Adela, played by Judy Davis, awakened to her sensuality while visiting a Hindu temple in ruins.  It seems further that her on again/off again marriage to the City Magistrate created a level of cognitive dissonance with this awakened sensuality.   It all came to a head when she fled a wonderful day organized by a Muslim doctor.  She made an accusation of attempted rape, or, was manipulated into making one.  Then she recanted.  Puzzling.

Kate’s off to bed.  I plan to finish Lush Life by Richard Price tonight.  A wonderful novel in many ways, though it is so thick in its content that I become weary of it and need a rest.  It is a tour de force of urban conflict, parsed out on the shockwaves of a brutal murder on the lower east side.  If you want to read a genuine American voice on a quintessential American topic, I recommend it.

No writing by me yesterday or today on Superior Wolf.  In a bit of a general funk, the dream surfacing some of it.  Not sure where it’s going, doesn’t seem so oppressive tonight.

Cinema and Television, Family

It Will End as a Novel Ends

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55  bar steep rise 0mph E dew-point 39  Beltane

           Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

Kate cleared a bunch of dogwood canes, pulled up weeds, pruned out a juniper (yesterday), deadheaded the daffodils and generally worked herself into a stupor. (In Norwegian, this is a good thing.)  She’s been on vacation this week and has enjoyed herself immensely planting, pruning, carrying.  (Again, in Norwegian, this constitutes a vacation.)  I admire and appreciate her doggedness, but it doesn’t count as a vacation attitude in my Celtic/Germanic perspective.   Whatever turns your crank.

Battlestar Galactica is the most nuanced and unpredictable show on television, bar none.  It is a good science fiction novel brought to the screen and that is so rare as to be a marvel, a marvel that continues week after week.  There no good guys and bad guys, no bad robots and good robots.  No, there are humans and robots who, in some situations, act for the common good and, in other situations, act out of selfish or malicious motives. 

The Science Fiction channel will finish the Battlestar Galactica series this season, but it will not tail off into the land of unfinished television shows. It will end as a novel ends, with an ending that ties together various plotlines and provides a final surprise and aha.  How do I know?  Because that’s how good writing works, and this is good writing.  I would like to see this as a precedent for TV shows where the story has a trajectory, a climax and a denouement, not the eternal extension of the storyline in a cynical attempt to exploit viewer interest for every last drop of advertiser revenue.  Viewers will return if the fiction has characters with complex lives, difficult hurdles to overcome and a convincing fate.

More work outside tomorrow.  This may be the last big push for a while since Kate goes back to work on Tuesday and I have MIA and a docent class luncheon on Monday with Woolly’s in the evening.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television

Deerslayer

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56  bar steady 29.85  9mph N dewpoint 31  Beltane  sunny

               First Quarter of the Hare Moon

3 hours at the museum today answering questions, instigating conversations about Chinese bronzes.  It was a fun time with children and adults, variously interested.  I set out at the beginning, before people started showing up, to learn the vessel shapes.  I looked at the shape, memorized the name and then scanned the collection for examples.  I kept that up until I’d been through all the vessel shapes.  While doing it, it struck me that it would be useful to put these shapes and their names into SuperMemo.  A perfect fit.

I did go through the Supermemo cycle this morning while waiting for the steamroom to heat up.  It will take awhile to become facile with it, but once I do, it will become an important part of my learning environment.

Finished Last of the Mohicans.  I love costume dramas, especially early American and this one hits the bullseye on all fronts.  It has stimulated me to order the whole Deerslayer series, five novels. 

Cinema and Television

A Clever Take on the Horror Flick

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29!  bar steady  30.17 0mph NNW dewpoint 22  Spring?

                Last Quarter Moon of Growing

Just finished watching Cloverfield.  This was a clever take on the horror flick.  It used Blair Witch hand-held camera and concealment with high production values off in the distance.  The affect is a sense of immediacy and immersion in the experience.  In this case we don’t know much about the monster, in fact nothing outside its destructiveness at first.  If we didn’t know we were watching a horror movie, we might think that New York had experienced a multiplied terrorist attack on the scale of many 9/11’s.  

The monster convinces because it’s alien in form, though it most closely resembles a bat with a long tail and ferocious teeth.  It also convinces because we see it from a distance and are most aware of its presence as the army races believably into action against it.  Unlike most monster movies where the army seems called into shoot guns because that’s what we know how to do, in this instance it appears desparate, almost hopeless.  This makes it seem real.

Matt Reeves, the director, wanted to give America a monster as iconic as Godzilla is to the Japanese.  I don’t think he succeeded on that score.  Besides, we have King Kong.  Who is more iconic than that giant gorilla?

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Friends

Deeply Skeptical of Industrializaton and Technology

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42  bar falls 30.10 3mph WNW dewpoint 22 Spring

             Last quarter Moon of Growing

Into St. Paul today.  Preached (sort 0f) at Groveland.  I say sort of because the presentation consisted of me telling jokes about Unitarian-Universalists and the group discussing their meaning as it relates to UU identity.  This comes from a technique dredged up from those long ago years in anthropology.  Joking behavior, according to anthropologists, helps determine group boundaries.  And so it did.

The discussion that ensued was better than I could have hoped.  It was heartfelt, honest, sometimes bordering on painful.  The latter emerged during a discussion of UU discomfort with faith, with the act of vulnerability.  This leaves UU’s, as the discussion went, with a blank spot when confronted with grief, crisis. 

On the way home I stopped at Cheapo on Snelling and loaded up on mindless action films, the kind I prefer to watch when I’m working out. 

During lunch I finished Princess Mononoke again.  It is a wonderful, complex and beautiful work that gives pause.  It would be perfect to show at the same as Lord of the Rings because both Tolkein and Mizasashi are deeply skeptical of industrialization and technology, yet also unflinching in representing the contradictions and trade-offs as not black or white.  Tolkein seems more either/or than Mizasashi, so I prefer Mizasashi’s take on thing.

Cinema and Television, Family, Garden, Travel

Really Creepy Vampires

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42 bar rises 29.73 0mph W  dewpoint 28 Spring

         Waning Crescent Moon of Winds

OK.  I’m taking off my hair shirt and hanging up my cilici.

Today is Ruth’s second birthday.  Ruth is our first granddaughter.  The thought of another life, connected to your own, just starting out, makes the world seem a more congenial and more precious place.  Her blue eyes, mischievous quality and alertness augur an interesting and bright future.  She feeds the dogs, carrying their bowls with that peculiar toddler rolling gate.  She also crawls in the dog crate and closes the door to go night/night. (She’s just pretending.)  Jon and Jen are good parents, another fact that makes the world more congenial and more precious.

A quiet evening after the workout.  Started watching 30 Days of Night.  Vampires attack Point Barrow, Alaska just after it heads into 30 days with no sun.  One of the vampires says, “We should have come here a long time ago.”  A bit of Draculian humor.  A good movie so far.  Great production values, interesting actors and really creepy vampires.

Kate leaves tomorrow morning at 6:15 AM (with me as taxi driver) for Denver to celebrate Ruth’s birthday, then onto San Francisco for a family practice CME.  I plan to do some garden work tomorrow, like put down weed preventer and remove some mulch, maybe rake a bit.  It’s still too early to do much, but I’ll be able to get started.

Cinema and Television

The Mourning Forest

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25  bar rises 30.14 0mph N dewpoint 10

          Waning Gibbous Moon of Winds

Naomi Kawase is a 37 year old Japanese filmmaker.  This was the first film of hers that I have seen and it’s powerful.  It won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year.

The film approaches the question of mourning with delicacy, but directness.  A young woman, newly hired as a caregiver at a nursing home, develops a relationship with a difficult man, Shigeki-san.  Their relationships proceeds through many levels, but reaches its climax after her car breaks down while she has him on a day trip.  She leaves to get help and he wanders off. 

She finds him in a watermelon patch and he runs away from her into the forest.  He will not turn back and she becomes desparate, responsible for him, but unable to turn him back toward the car.  Over a day and a half he leads her on his quest to find his wife’s grave.  When he does find it, both have a revelation about their own mourning.  He digs a hole and says he is “going to sleep in the earth.”

She lost her son not long before and has been enclosed in her grief, but her experience with Shigeki-san forces her out of her shell and back into the sensations of life. 

Worth seeing if you can catch it.

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Memories

Cheesy Sci-Fi Movies

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21  bar steady  1mph W dewpoint 15   Spring (yeah, right!)

              Full Moon of Winds

Spent this afternoon and evening watching NCAA basketball and movies.  Watched a medium bad Sci-Fi movie about a blackhole created in a lab in St. Louis.  It’s bad in part because of the acting.  Cheesy sci-fi movies only seem to have enough budget for one take.  It’s also bad because I read the hard sci-fi book from which the concept came and this movie bore no relationship to the very good book at all.  Which is a shame since that book had real science behind it and would have made a good movie.  This one had a beast that came out of the black hole and ate energy.  Hmmm.  So much wrong with that premise, you’d think I’d stop watching, but, no.  I have a low threshold for quality when I want entertainment.

Been kicking around the idea, for a few years, of writing some original theology/atheology, a ge-ology, or something.  The woman who complimented my learning this morning, Lois Hamilton, got me thinking about all this again.  I’ve spent since 1965 getting seriously educated.  In a lot of fields.  I’ve had interesting real world experience in politics, the church, development and working with developmentally delayed adults.  I’ve traveled some, read a lot and learned a good deal about gardening and art.  Maybe I don’t need to anything, but I feel like a bad steward of the work I’ve done and the knowledge I’ve gained if I can’t set it down in some form for others.

Not sure what I want to do, or if I want/need to do anything.  Just pondering, for now.

Cinema and Television, Politics

OK, So Spitzer Is a Hypocrite and an Unfaithful Husband.

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34  bar falls 29.57  0mph WSW windchill 34

   Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

“The World” is a Chinese movie, a recent one about a theme park in Beijing.  “Give us a day and we’ll show you the world.”  It has smaller versions of such landmarks as the Eiffel Tower, Manhattan skyline, Acropolis and St. Peters.  The movie follows Tao, a 20 something dancer, and her off and on boyfriend, Taisheng, through the ups and downs of a love affair.

This is a slice of life film most interesting to me in its depiction of rural folks who’ve come to the Capital to make a life.  The rural to urban story is a global story, retold time and time again in Bogota, Rio, Paris, Athens, Lagos, Shanghai and Minneapolis.  The tentativeness of relationships, particularly among the young, is also a global story, especially among young, recently emigrated urban folk.

Not a thrilling movie, but moving.

OK, so Spitzer is a hypocrite and an unfaithful husband.  And, yes, he drug his wife along to his confession.  The Daily Show did a great piece on that last night, showing several governors with their wives by their side as they confess sexual dalliance.  They could have added evangelical preachers and congressman.  They did include Bill Clinton.

The implication I don’t find helpful is that because he paid money for sex he was not a good prosecutor.  The guilt or innocence of the persons on Wall Street that he prosecuted are not less or more responsible for their crimes because he’s a schmuck.  The quality of his prosecution does not depend on his sexual fidelity any more than it depends on his perfect health.  

Someday, America, we’ve got to get over this fascination with sex and public people.  We need pay much greater attention to the policies they pursue and not so much to their bedrooms.  And, yes, I even believe that’s true of Larry Craig, although his mendacity following his arrest has put him in a different category altogether. 

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Family, World History

A Chingis Khan Red Water Buffalo Wallet

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30  77%  24%  3mph NNW bar30.04 falls windchill28 Imbolc

                Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

Got a package today from Mary in Singapore.  It came with many, many stamps bearing the picture of the large golden tree squirrel.  Looks like a lemur to me.  She sent a wonderful anthology of contemporary Asian art and, as has become her habit, knowing my interest in cinema, the largest grossing Asia movie for 2007.  And a red water buffalo wallet with Chinghis Khan on the front.  The only one in my neighborhood.

Having kin in Southeast Asia makes it feel less foreign, less faraway.  It also means I get a ground level view of events there like the tsunami and the political unrest in Thailand for example.  It is a privilege to have this window on these Asian cultures and one I cherish.

Today I will finish Hero, the Jet Li wu shu feature about the assassin and Qin Shi Huang Di.  It is one of two recent Chinese movies dealing with the king of Qin, Shi Huang Di, who unified the six warring states at the end of the eastern Zhou dynasty.  He has a peculiar position in Chinese history, since he is seen as the father of a unified China, but also as a tyrant and a destroyer of cultural treasures.  In the interest of a common language and culture for a unified China he is said to have burned all the books he could get his hands on at the time. 

He then decreed a common script and common laws, using the political philosophy of Han Fei-Zi.  Han Fei-Zi was a political thinker whose general type of thought became known as Legalism since it elevated a strict system of laws and punishment even above the ruler.  His political philosophy reminded me most of Machiavelli’s Prince, but I may not understand them either of them very well.  In my view they both see themselves as realists, preferring the pragmatic to the ideal, the functional to the just.  In this sense neither of them are as villianous as history has cast them; they might be seen as situational relativists, creating a system of governance that works for the times, not for all time.

Hero and The Emperor and the Assassin both portray Qin Shi Huang Di as a clever, courageous and intelligent ruler. Both also portray him as relentless, paranoid and unyielding.  In Hero the focus is on the Jet Li character, Nameless, the prefect of a Qin ten mile square area.  In the Emperor and the Assassin the focus is on the king himself and his lover from the stater of Zhao, where they both grew up.  They are very different movies with, I think, very different intentions, but both present an interesting take on this controversial man, the first Emperor of China.