• Tag Archives Cinema and Television

  • The Mourning Forest

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television 📎and tagged

  • Double Checking Enlightenment

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    38  bar falls 30.06 5mph NNE dewpoint 9 Spring

                Waning Gibbous Moon of Winds

    a clip from the Groveland e-wire 

    E-Wire, Vol. 13, March 27, 2008    Last Sunday’s Service    Groveland UU:  St. Paul 

    It’s always a treat to hear our old friend, the Rev. Charles Ellis. Last Sunday, Charlie offered a wide-ranging, in-depth presentation on transcendentalism.

    While focusing on Emerson, Charlie interwove threads from Des Cartes, Kant, Freud, Jung, Thoreau, Channing, Parker, and other intellectual and spiritual leaders who have influenced Unitarian-Universalism.

    The discussion that followed touched on important topics of interest such as the interplay between individualism and community.

    We’re grateful to Charlie for deepening our understanding of both transcendentalism and our UU heritage.

    Continue to knock items off my list.  The generator folks will come out on Tuesday at 10:00 AM to give us a bid on a natural gas generator.  Finalized information for the Headwater’s UU bulletin.  Reviewed my tour outline for the two Weber public tours I have tomorrow.  I also read the relevant chapters in the Tale of Genji, the one’s that relate to the two screen painting that I will use.  In addition I double-checked on the meaning of enlightenment and found that I had it right after all.  Never hurts to look one more time.

    Tonight I’m going into the Walker for a movie, “The Mourning.”  I made a pledge to myself a year ago that I would get to more of the Walker events since that’s a place where they shine.  Got tickets to 4 movies this month and April. It’s a start.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Faith and Spirituality General 📎and tagged

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

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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. 


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television Politics 📎and tagged

  • A Chingis Khan Red Water Buffalo Wallet

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    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.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Cinema and Television Family World History 📎and tagged

  • The Only Place Our Intelligence Community Looks Good

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    24  81% 23%  omph EEN bar29.94 steady windchill24  Imbolc

               Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    Movies move slowly across the 694 pick-up line.  I just watched Breach, the story of the capture of Robert Hanssen, the mole in the FBI.  It’s well done, written by the young agent hopeful who worked as Hanssen’s assistant and put the last pieces together to bring Hanssen down.  After reading some of Legacy of Ashes, a history of the CIA, it became clear to me the role these movies play in the national psyche.  Playing up the clever strategies and cunning skill of guys like Hanssen puffs up the image of the FBI when they finally corner him; but, consider, he worked 22 years inside the FBI and even headed the Task Force looking for the mole. 

    Legacy of Ashes shows that when it comes to matters of subterfuge, we don’t get it.  The CIA failed at most of its chaotically designed missions, blundering around in the affairs of other nations like a giant child, flailing and hiding behind parking meter posts.  The only place the intelligence community gets to look good is in movies and books.  I don’t know whether the books and movies are intentional propaganda or if the material that gets a greenlight passes a certain screening.  Or, it may be that we need, as a nation, to believe that in the world of the shadows we can play as well as anybody.  Those who’ve looked into it suggest we can’t.  Thought all the way through movies like Breach show the same conclusion.

    Demonstrating the frail line between happiness and horror our neighbor, 55 or so, went to the hospital two weeks ago.  They thought he’d had a stroke.  It would have been a better thing.  He has a demyelinating process at work in patches inside his brain.  A process at the root of M.S. demyelination strips the insulation off nerve fibers and creates electrical storms.  He has some aphasia. It’s not clear how bad the damage is, nor whether it will persist.  He’s at home now, sleeping 44 minutes at a time which keeps his wife and daughter, who just graduated from college, up as he wanders when not asleep.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television Politics 📎and tagged

  • The Confederate States of America

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    -7  57%  17%  0mph WWN bar30.33  steep rise windchill-7  Winter

                 Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    Watched a strange and disturbing, but also funny, movie on the Independent Film Channel, “The Confederate States of America.”   Produced by Spike Lee this is a satirical take on American history if the south had won the Civil War.  I’ve not read much alternate history and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie version of alternate history either.  This movie manages to do several things at once.  It does show the value of the North having won the Civil War.  At the same time it shows that much of our post-civil war history does have its roots in slavery.  For example, the urban riots of the sixties have a parallel reality in this movie as slave rebellions.  During the rise of Hitler the movie positions the US as the friend of Hitler and the Nazis since both have a race based science at the heart of their politics.

    Made for a fictional TV broadcast, this movie also has faux commercials for products like Niggerhair Tobacco, Sambo Motor Oil, and Darkie Toothpaste.  At the end the movie documents these as real American products (Niggerhair was made in Milwaukee.) and their origins.  The movie worked for me.  It reminded me of where we are and how much further we still have to go.  Made me think of the conversation the Woolly Mammoths had at Paul Stricklands, vis a vis MLK day.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television 📎and tagged

  • Yearning for a Time Already Lost

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    1 71%  17%  0mph SW bar30.36  falls  windchill1  Winter

                Full Winter Moon

    Bill Schmidt commented on the last post, asking how I interpret the data in the box.

    My reading of this data is that enactment of stimulus packages can be taken as somewhat reliable indicators that a recession is over, not starting.  I say somewhat because, though I see no data here that contradicts that statement, attaching cause and effect stretches the data.  Even so, it seems to me that history teaches us that recessions strike before any can diagnose them (see my late post on January 17th) and that this data suggests that by the time national concern, especially at the legislative and executive levels of government, reaches an ignition point for action that the recession is either behind us or on its last legs.  That said, everything I can see for 2008 suggests a rocky road, but that is not inconsistent with a recession troughing and beginning to ease into a recovery.  As Captain Piccard used to say, Let it be so.

    Watched Rambo II tonight.  Yes, it’s my shadow side, or the side of me that doesn’t get enough real life action, whatever, but I did get a wonderful metaphor from it near the end.  Rambo, of course, gets routinely shafted by the gubberment and this movie is no exception.  Before he leaves on his mission, he’s shown the very latest in technology that exists just to back him up.  At the end, after defeating everybody (Russians, Viet Cong, American Bureaucrats), he goes into the room with a 50 caliber machine gun on one arm, a magazine of shells draped over his other and blasts all the technology.  We could call it rage against the machine or, the man of action versus the man at the computer console, a not unfamiliar theme in today’s movies.  I read it as a contemporary John Henry fable, much the same as Gary Kasparov against Big Blue.  The common thread in all three is that they yearn for a time when particular human skills had not been mechanized or programmed.  The most important point of all three is that they yearn for a time already acknowledged as lost.

    Also, Rambo says, I don’t know whether it’s original though I doubt it, “To win at war you must become war.”  Or, was that the Italian Stallion?


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • The Buddhist After-Life and the Killing Fields

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    25  93%  27%  omph NNW bar 29.77 windchill25  Winter

                      New Moon

    Had a summary of our gathering (Woollies) at the Istanbul Bistro, but lost in a multiple cascading of Internet Explorer browser pages.  Probably a sign I should go back to Firefox.  I used to use it, then I abandoned it, used it again, and abandoned it again.  Just like Darth Vader I keep coming back to the evil empire.

    Mark, Warren, Paul, Tom, Frank, Bill and Stefan showed up.  We spoke of politics and Rome, of Green Knights present and long dead. A brief comment was made about the Istanbul not being a sportsbar, a positive.  It’s quiet and it has a round table around which this latter day collection of Knights Errant can sit.  That does mean knights in error, doesn’t it?

    Mark has a gig in Bangkok designing teen sex exhibitions for Unesco/Thailand.  It’s a campaign to promote safe sex in a nation where AIDS among youngsters has become a problem again.  After that he will return to the US, then go back to Cambodia to construct an exhibit near the killing fields, one dealing with the Buddhist afterlife.  To continue the international theme Paul Strickland will host a trip to Syria in November and his organization will co-host a trip with the Hindu Temple of Maple Grove to Southern India.  Stefan chimed in with the fact that he’s taking his kids to Rome to visit a person he knows who works in the American Embassy there.  Makes for good dinner table conversation.  Those who’d been to Rome all agreed the most memorable moment was the first coffee. 

    We discussed the political scene.  All of us were happy with the real choices represented by the candidates.  Of course, SuperTuesday will eliminate any chance for us to pariticipate in candidate selection and after we will have 7 months of attack ads, but right now it is glorious.  Tom wondered if any of us had supported any candidates financially.  Frank said, yes, he and Mary had sent money to Obama.

    Warren reported good news about his mom and dad.    

     The retreat and a theme came up, but we put it off until Paul’s.  Mark will not attend since he’s got to be in Thailand the first week of February.  I’m leaving early for Hawai’i.  One of those years.

     Forgot to mention here I watched Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast the other night. It’s one of the Janus Films collection I got for my 60th birthday, 50 films from 50 years of their distribution of foreign films in the US.  This movie floats across the mind like a dream, a fairy tale given form and substance.  It’s images have remained with me.  It sat in my DVD player for a long time because I didn’t want to watch it; but, like each one of the films from the collection I’ve watched it had its own unique charm.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Politics Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged