darkthirty

Five years after I posted this, I'm still getting rude comments on that entry, which will remain screened. I have to move, so I'm scanning all my old papers (don't feel like lugging them around) and since I had photocopied some of my letters to Brenda - they frequently, usually, in fact, included little prose and poetry works, and even some of my poor art - I decided to include those in the scanning, and trash the originals. I have in fact written to her a couple times since then, and she has replied, but the connection is tenuous anymore. A lot of people asked for her address (freely available, if you know where to look) and some even offered me her inmate number, which is weird. How could I be writing to her for 27 years without knowing that?

But, here's the thing - scanning all these papers from 1980 to 2000, I have to admit - I'm really quite a strange person. I only drew 6 or 7 of these things, but perhaps I might have improved with practise.

This movie Bright Star came out on DVD today (in Canada, last week in the US) (the Blu-ray, stupidly, was cancelled). It is an achingly beautiful film, and I can't take my eyes off it. The Oscars and the BAFTAs are idiots not to have honoured this film. The earth in Campion's film, through Fraser's lens, is more beautiful than any of the "stuff" in Avatar's Pandora, and it's real. Plus, there's a whack of Keats' poetry. I love this film. Also, the soundtrack is very well done.
A room full of butterflies
Perhaps there is less and less room in the  world for negative capability.

Check out the list with lots of comments here

Good
HP6 and The White Ribbon for cinematography
A Serious Man for best pic
The entire foreign language film category (including The Milk of Sorrow!)

Bad
The Blind Side
Nothing for The Road
Nothing but costume for Bright Star (Cornish in Actress, Campion in Director - fat chance of that over Daniels' histrionic, pointless film)
No Agnes Varda in documentary feature
The art direction category - I'd have picked HP6, A Single Man, A Serious Man, The Road, and then Avatar
District 9 for best pic and screenplay - doesn't anyone else notice how illogical and silly the script is, while at the same time the "alien" ship is a very poor analogy for apartheit?

 The right result - and some well-deserved criticism of the idiotic gender stuff around Bigelow's win.

Not just that there is no snow, that's it's actually warm, but that everything in this article is true, and even moreso - it's tame compared to the reality, but more honest than one would expect from such a publication. The annual Women's Memorial March has run from my worksite for a long time, and one of it's main organizers works here. This is not going to be any fun at all.

Here's an excellent article on Michael Haneke's Cache (#5 on my best of decade list) by Roger Ebert. If you haven't seen the movie yet, well, why the hell not? It's amazing. But why is Roger writing about Cache now? Because Martin Scorcese, leading proponent of American Gothic Moralism, is going to remake it. FFS!

Martin is ultimately going to remove any trace of what speshul snowflake (auteur) critics like Andrew Sarris (who apparently saw the utterly meaningless Gone with the Wind 48 times at the theatre) found so irritating about Haneke's film, and the rest of us found utterly compelling. Listen to Sarris huff about Cache:  "Too much of the plot's machinery turns out to be a metaphorical mechanism by which to pin the tail of colonial guilt on Georges and the rest of us smug bourgeois donkeys." In fact, if you look at Sarris' ridiculous  best of the year lists, you'll see the man has an absolute aversion to cinema that means, well, anything at all. The Dark Night, that overblown exercise in fatalism as rationalization for pounding someone out, apparently, convinced him that Nolan was approaching "worthy" status. What a smug, bourgeois donkey!

Of course, Sarris, whose writing never fails to sound slightly whiny and more than slightly silly, has the inferior Scorcese remake of Infernal Affairs, The Departed, at the top of his 2006 film  list. So, there you have it. Remove the meaning, the sense of the film Cache, and you'll have a movie about guilt that everyone can watch without feeling put upon - a movie simply about some wacko sending videos of the street where you live. Maybe you don't cut the lawn often enough, or you leave the lid slightly off the garbage can. Perhaps you stole someone's Rolling Stones record long long ago. Yippee! Pure genius. More popcorn please!

For the record, I think Andrew Sarris and his snitty reviews have been a negative influence on cinema for the entire course of his forsaken, endless career.

The Hurt Locker!

Oh yeah. Kathryn Bigelow's wonderful film made just $12 million at the cinema, thought it is doing well in the home video market. But who thought this film would best the behemoth? I am very, very pleased.

Next, the Directors Guild (which Kathryn should win), and then the Oscars - the Best Director one is the only one I care about - who cares if Avatar wins BP? It's not like a win there is going to make MORE people go to see it. Go Kathryn!

This is the only play that amazing poet Randall Jarrell (d. 1965) ever translated  - Chekhov's The Three Sisters, which was filmed at some point in 1966, but is quite rare. This production from The Actors Studio includes some very famous  "method" actors - Shelley Winters, Geraldine Page, Kim Stanley and Sandy Dennis. Some lovely human being has uploaded it to youtube, and though I haven't watched it yet,  I have seen bits while I downloaded it in the background. It's a bit odd, yes, but it's not really a bad production at all - surreal certainly, but then,  I'm not a Chekhov fan, and have never been one.

There's never too much Sandy Dennis as far as I am concerned. This production  was severely panned in London when it moved there, although "the method" itself seems to have been on trial in West End at the time.

Kathryn Bigelow should win the Best Director Oscar, hands down, for The Hurt Locker. I'd love the truly great Agnes Varda to be recognized in the Documentary Film catagory for The Beaches of Agnes (which doesn't preach or pontificate, but makes it's points so effortlessly you hardly notice you're being subtly subverted), and for the wonderful Peruvian film The Milk of Sorrow, directed by Claudia Llosa, to make the Foreign Language Film short list at the end of the month. (It probably won't win the Oscar, though.) Bright Star by Jane Campion is a great film that even the BAFTA's, in a particularly unsage, and kind of cheap gesture, saw fit only to throw a Costume Design nod to - but it is a better film than that, trust me - it will age well. It's about Fanny Brawne and John Keats, for goodness sake!. And though I wasn't bowled over by An Education, Lone Scherfig's film is more balanced, nuanced, and charming than Up in the Air, in a way that isn't cute at all. These 5 films are among the very best of 2009. I am rooting for all these directors, particularly Bigelow, who really deserves all the accolades she's getting, Varda, who would just be the most wonderful person to see on that stage (the award will go to some loud, certain-it's-absolutely-right film), and Llosa, whose film is just not getting seen by enough people. I hope these women are recognized so that the next "year of women directors" is sooner than later.

The director of Solaris (perhaps the most underrated movie of the last 10 years, aside from Godard's Notre Musique), Steven Soderbergh, had this to say about the current state of cinema

"I certainly get the sensation that we've kind of hit a wall in the last 20 years. Obviously, people are pushing the technical side of it - and when Avatar (2009) comes out that'll be a game-changer for sure - but in terms of the grammar of cinema, I haven't seen anything made since the late '70s or early '80s that I felt was really pushing the ball forward. That doesn't mean I haven't seen some good movies, but I don't feel like there's been a new wave of of how stories are told cinematically. Some of the recent Godard stuff is pretty extraordinary, Notre musique (2004) was really, really beautiful and he got at something at the end of that movie that I wasn't sure you could get at in a movie. But what's the audience for that? How many people are interested in watching somebody make that attempt? I'm frustrated by what's going on in the business, in terms of what's getting made, and I'm frustrated by my own inability to break through to something else."

I was very pleasently surprised to read this, considering I put Notre Musique on my own best of the decade list.

(Of course, the soundtrack to Solaris by Cliff Martinez is possibly my favourite soundtrack ever.)

Thinking about Moon, and how much I enjoyed that movie, I think the defining difference is simply this - Solaris has a super literate pedigree - Stanislaw Lem who wrote the novel, and Andrei Tarkovsky, who co-wrote the script for the first 1972 Solaris, and both are credited in the titles to 2002 Solaris. If Moon doesn't quite reach the loftiest heights, it's really that the story hasn't such a pedigree.

Yesterday I found an actual print copy of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's The Snail on the Slope at Pulpfiction Books here in Vancouver. Not only is the book harder to get than most of their printed works in English (it was withdrawn from publication because of an error on the back cover that said they were out of favour in the Soviet Union, and never reprinted), but it is timely because - wait for it - it's about a forest ecology fighting back against those who want to destroy it. Yes, it's just like the forest of Pandora in Avatar. The name of the planet in the reworked story of 1990? Pandora! (Here's a link to a story about a reworking of the original book by the brothers that became Disquiet.) Reading this entry about Disquiet, the book The Snail on the Slope, and then thinking about Avatar's forest and it's native population, I conclude that the Strugatsky brothers live on, albeit in a cheapened form, in Cameron's tale. And yet, the movie is the poorer for not being more direct in it's borrowing, I'd say. Still, if Avatar had the intellect of the Strugatsky's behind it, it wouldn't be making a couple billion dollars at the theatre, would it?

Boris Strugatsky doesn't go so far as to say the ideas are stolen. He notes a likeness, is all.

Someone has created a generative video based on the ideas of The Snail on the Slope.

The Big Steal from 1949 never catches it's breath after it takes off, and while this can be a good thing in movies that actually have a decent script and no horrible continuity problems, in this case the breathlessness is like a race to the "twist" at the end of the movie, as it were, that seems to be the sole point of the proceedings. Why, they might just as well have jumped from the opening to the ending of the film, for all the mad and pointless chasing around the Mexican countryside that went on in between, punctuated by frequent outbursts of rudeness toward "the locals." Much as I like Robert Mitchum in many roles, here his talents are not so much wasted as ignored. An example of how little continuity seemed to matter to the producers - an Inspector General is spoken to, a long high speed car chase between two other characters ensues, and at the end, they arrive at a resort where they are greeted casually by - the same Inspector General. Arrgh. Even worse, the whole movie is a guy chasing the guy who is chasing another guy who has made a deal with the first guy. They might just as easily met him in the middle and shot him, eh? It's a stupid movie, only worth watching for Mitchum and Jane Greer. 3.

Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris from 1975 is the best presentation of Eric Blau's play to date  - the bits and pieces of other, later productions I've seen don't have anything close to the emotive power songs in this filmed version have. Elly Stone in particular achieves that utterly unguarded, straightforwardly emotional way of presenting a song that Brel himself had, but Joe Masiell and Mort Shuman carry their own weight well enough. Lows include the ongoing use of some wandering hippies throughout the film, always distracting, and the Timid Frieda section, which, while the song is perfomed nicely enough, includes rather idiotic background action - Frieda is surrounded by hippies, hugged and kissed by them all, and whisked away on a motorcycle while Elly in Salvation Army garb sings. The song is so much more subtle and interesting at hinting at her future than what is happening on stage, I felt cheated.

( Highlights )

The cumulative power of the second half of this movie is moving, however, and pleasantly (at least I found it so) existential. The film has had some influence on me certainly (I saw it when I was 15) and on others - didn't I see the hovering hand motif used to awe us (literally) in Angelopoulos' Landscape in the Mist? Or the puppet dance in one of Lynch's movies? Or the silent figure watching on in many of the numbers in The Decalogue? These film makers surely know Brel's music - did they see this film? At any rate, the force of Brel's songwriting is not hampered by peculiarities of the production - all the singers do a fine job. Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris gets 8. I've only included links to the actual film, or to Brel's versions, because in almost every case, the youtube videos from other productions vary from ignorant to idiotic to inexcusable. Scott Walker's My Death is notable, but his versions are just songs, not productions of the play.

If there is a major problem with Tom Ford's A Single Man, it's a problem with the workings of the cinema of our time - the expensive tickets, the expected run time of an hour and a half at minimum, and so forth. This film could have been a minor classic, had it been 25 minutes shorter, and had someone told Tom Ford how to hold emotion in time rather than frittering and wasting it in an offhand (though delightfully pretty) way. Nevertheless, the film is lovely and moving, and Colin Firth is bloody amazing. I don't understand why people are talking all about Clooney in Up in the Air (he wasn't the best thing about the movie, Anna Kendrick was) over Firth, because there really is no comparison. It reminds me of last year's weird praise for Penn aping and miming his way through Milk, compared to Mickey Rourke's wonderful work in The Wrestler. A Single Man gets 7.5. And Colin Firth is my own choice for the Best Actor Oscar.

A film about depression and its affect on the people around someone who is clinically depressed, Helen, directed by Sandra Nettelbeck, is actually a fairly enjoyable film to watch. There are problems with the script, some tiny bits of unnecessary sensationalism and unrealistic behaviours (minor, though, and obviously in the service of building "tension"), but speaking as someone who was clinically depressed for almost a decade, and institutionalized for at least a year out of that, I found little wrong with the movie in the bigger sense. I know some of these people, I know what it's like not to be able to even communicate what's going on, and I've seen people who responded to nothing short of ECT.

Parts of Vancouver identifiable in the film - Second Beach, Jericho Beach, Point Grey, somewhere near W 4th, plus the North shore, and also the Downtown Eastside (with the community centre where I work, and the alley behind it, appearing in the background at one point). Apparently, Gillian Anderson was tagged for the lead role, but Ashley Judd does a fine job. Helen gets an 7.5 for some stupid script decisions, but I still liked what it did get right a lot.

Pandora is the first woman, motherless and fatherless. Parenthood in James Cameron's films has always been a deeply banal, anti-Freudian (but nonetheless Oedipal)  relationship - just think of Terminator. No wonder he chose this name for the setting of his newest film. And no wonder the hero bodies in this film are grown, not born.

His hero in avatar form in his new movie is "the foreigner," someone who is making a choice, who is more alive than the original inhabitants, or those who remain in human form, like John Dunbar in Dances with Wolves who steps beyond the Union army into real life - who knows more, lives more doing so than either his army compatriots or the Sioux he takes up with - for whom perhaps "a secret wound" (in this case, literally) has driven him to wandering, as Kristeva would have it, accompanied by an aloofness that is also an apartness, where our daily concerns seem paltry, a separation that can at times seem a priviledge, and able to show us how unenlightened we are, whether in the old country or the new. But here, sans Freud, the priviledge is pornographic to no end - you can, you must fuck with those blue beings, you virtual hero! After all, this body is not the body upon which all those forces acted in the past, and through which all life has passed, this is a new, blue, clean body.  Placing this tale on a fictional world in a science fiction setting, and placing the entire thematic stress upon the workings of a corporate entity only serves to exonerate us simple individuals who watch these magical goings on without once feeling challenged, threatened, betrayed - rather like the absence of cars in the garbage heaps in Wall-E saved the majority of viewers from ever thinking about getting rid of their cars. This is not art, this is jubilee. Freud remains anathema. Nothing but simple, rote arguments about the health of the planet remain, and it is not us, it's them that's doing the damage, it's them, those other guys - because they are simply bad - the reductionist Calvinism at the core of our wacky Western world severs them apart. We throw ourselves behind the exile in revolt, we are not of this sad, brutal world, we are the proud and long-lived witnesses, whose superiority, whose professionalism will be the true scribing or our hero's work - upon our survival (and comfort) depends the real story, the telling that means everything, our Na-No-Re-Mo of rightness. Our hero is not entangled, and practises a stubborn clarity, an insistence, that has nothing at all to do with where he is from, with his origins. He has no family anymore (did he ever truly). Who needs Freud? He's made himself,  with no mother or father! Plus, he is among the exotic - a new Orientalism, as it were. I can't help but feel James Cameron's new movie is the last, expensive stab at an iconographic emtombment of the idea absolute freedom. And we are imaginary foreigners, sitting here uncompromised in our seats, witnessing the "$250 million aquamarine lightshow."

Reading about Avatar (8, in 3D, 7 not in 3D) in many, many places has got me thinking about Julia Kristeva and her wonderful book Strangers to Ourselves, which I want to shove into James Cameron's hands and tell him - "Read it!"

Also, VANOC has managed to alienate the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.

Not a Jason Reitman fan here, but this movie is pretty easy to watch, and not without laughs. Of note: Anna Kendrick owns the film Up in the Air, she is wonderful. And Clooney is pretty good too, he manages to make you feel for the character, in spite of everything. The weakness in the film is clearly the script - it's bicameral to a great degree - the serious bits with folks being fired and the romcom don't always balance very well - to the degree that they do, it is Kendrick's Natalie that makes it work. 7.5 for Anna Kendrick, Farmiga, and, in some measure, Clooney. This movie in no way deserves a best picture Oscar, but Kendrick absolutely deserves a supporting actress nod.

1. In Noctem - A deleted scene from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is my favourite single scene of the year. In the scene no Dumbledore, no Harry, no Voldemort, but "other" characters contemplate the moment at hand, and we understand their own sacrifice and willingness to sacrifice - Flitwick, McGonagall, aware something is happening, Snape, knowing that his unwanted, unavoidable task is close at hand, Draco, preparing for his moment, and Ron and Hermione, aware that their friend is gone off with the headmaster, on who knows what kind of errand, all of these characters and their relationship with absent people surrounded by the eerie choral gorgeousness (and I'm a huge fan of choral music) of Nicholas Hooper's In Noctem. I say again, the kind of decision making that ended with this scene being cut surely lost the film an award or two.

( In Noctem lyrics )
2. The gardener talks Fausta into the frame in The Milk of Sorrow.
3. The C- of doom in A Serious Man - everything from the C- on.
4. William defuses the bombs in the car, The Hurt Locker.
5. The final conversation in The Road, between the boy and the rough-looking man on the beach.
6. The dictionary scene in Police, Adj.
7. Ray becomes a star, The Princess and the Frog.
8. Any of a number of squickable scenes from The White Ribbon.
9. The razor scene from A Prophet.
10. Neytiri puts the mask on Jake Sully in Avatar.

The most genuinely fun film I've seen this year, and one of the least glib, The Princess and the Frog is a wonderful movie, with memorable characters, lovely old-school animation, and is highly recommended. A slight slackness in the script, and the less than awesome, but not altogether pedestrian Randy Newman music really doesn't matter - I loved the film and it's simple, beautiful, momentarily sad heart. 8.

I'm thinking of favourite scenes from movies this year, for a post very soon, and this film will be represented.

The best first, from the HBP extras -
Tom Felton: Who's the most famous person you've ever met?
Emma Watson: Evanna Lynch.
LOL

Emma also mentions in the Chamber of Secrets Ultimate Edition that she's a lexicon of HP, second on the set "perhaps" only to Evanna. (I know last year there were some stories about how Emma had become pals of a sort with Rowling. I just imagine there was a point where she said, look, I've invested so much into this character, into the series, how come Evanna gets all the attention? I've always thought Emma has done a pretty good job of making Hermione her own. It may not be the book Hermione, but being a Hermione that has been fashioned by multiple directors, I believe she's done something to ground the role, at least, not too far from book Hermione, from film to film. She surely deserves credit for that. Also, she makes sure to mention Jamie when talking about her 18th birthday card in the HBP extras. He hasn't been completely erased!)

Also, the little bit of the screen test for Evanna that's included in part 2 of the documentary is really fascinating, both the original (watching her describe how "it's okay if they don't pick her, it just means they have a different idea of how Luna would be" is lovely) and the one with Radcliffe. I hope there's more in the Order of the Phoenix extras.

Have I ever mentioned how much I enjoy Jason Isaacs performance as Lucius Malfoy? Of course, he's admitted to being a fan of the books, so it's only natural he's brought something very keen to the role. Actually, it's fascinating that so many of the cast seem to be, to some degree, HP fans.

Well, for a melodrama, it's fine, the acting is fine, and while there's problems with the script, as if it had been knocked onto the floor along with the cups and broken balloons, what the heck - it has Natalie Portman in it. 7.