Time for another of Dennis Cozzalio's quizzes - PROFESSOR ARTHUR CHIPPING’S MADDENINGLY DETAILED, PURPOSEFULLY VAGUE, FITFULLY OUT-OF-FOCUS BACK TO SCHOOL MOVIE QUIZ this time. I am, as usual, dreadfully late in this assignment - I offer as my only excuse that I am back to school in the atom world, and have been eye deep in William Butler Yeats this past week... so there is that. Still - sooner or later we'll get there!
1) What is the biggest issue for you in the digital vs. film debate?
A: I am not sure, though I think it is probably the question of which films will make the jump. And - the oft-overlooked question of whether digital films will be worth anything in X years. I am haunted by the erosion of digital storage - I have spent quite a bit of time this year digging through photos, for instance - and it makes you wonder. I have 2 video cameras, both mini-DV cameras - both of them still work fine as cameras, but the motors have died on the tape drives. And so - I have a box full of mini-DV tapes full of video that is as inaccessible to me as if they had been thrown in the trash. Meanwhile, a couple weeks ago my brother found a tintype in an old desk our grandmother used to have. Also, a sheet of paper covered in drawings she made in 1936. Digital is very useful, no question - once you get these things on a computer, and as long as you can keep files and software in synch (the latest version of Word has trouble opening files from - pre-2000? more or less...), all is well - but - unless you keep updating everything you have to the latest formats, it fades, in ways that a piece of paper in an envelope stuffed into a desk drawer will not fade, in 100, 120, 130 years. (We have one at home dated 1887, I believe...) And - film is obviously a more volatile format that paper, but it is still an object and it is there, even when the tools to make it work are not. (I refer you to the recently discovered color film from 1902 - an object that no one could use until someone created a projector to play it. I suppose, as long as you have means to reverse engineer the machines and software to run digital files, not much will be lost... but do I trust that?)
2) Without more than one minute’s consideration, name three great faces from the movies
A: Deitrich - Keaton - Karloff
3) The movie you think could be interesting if remade as a movie musical
A: How about Playtime?
4) The last movie you saw theatrically/on DVD, Blu-ray, streaming
A: Theater - Keep the Lights On...; DVD - Good Morning; Streaming - I haven't streamed a film in a while - other than shorts, for the Wonders in the Dark polls...
5) Favorite movie about work
A: This is a good question - there should be more movies about work. Some candidates? Fallen Angels - Blue Collar - Office Space... Fallen Angels is probably the winner, though - those Takashi Kinoshiro parts do something right.
6) The movie you loved as a child that did not hold up when seen through adult eyes
A: truth is, I didn't see enough films as a child to make any judgements like this. The ones I liked, I still like, even if they do seem less than they used to - Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, something like that. Still holds up fine.
7) Favorite “road” movie
A: Pierrot le Fou, probably. Obviously there are an awful lot of these, all with their own special appeal - O Brother Where Art Thou? Week End? It Happened One Night? etc. But Pierrot is probably the best of the bunch.
8) Does Clint Eastwood’s appearance at the Republican National Convention change or confirm your perspective on him as a filmmaker/movie icon? Is that appearance relevant to his legacy as a filmmaker?
A: It doesn't seem to have much to do with him as a filmmaker. It's almost like a different person - he's always been at least three people - celebrity, filmmaker, actor - the actor and celebrity sometimes seem to blur, just like the filmmaker and actor sometimes seem to blur - but the filmmaker and celebrity have almost nothing to do with one another - and that appearance was completely as a celebrity.
9) Longest-lasting movie or movie-related obsession
A: I don't know; they don't tend to go away...
10) Favorite artifact of movie exploitation
A: My junk obsessions don't run toward movies, really - they run to toys and books and such I liked when I was a kid. I suppose that's normal, and not being a movie watcher as a kid will do that. I do have a nice Marlene Dietrich picture, advertising a retrospective from 20+ years ago...
11) Have you ever fallen asleep in a movie theater? If so, when and why?
A: I don't believe so; it has been a close thing a few times, though I would have to think long and hard to remember those times.
12) Favorite performance by an athlete in a movie
A: It's kind of a tough question - given the week's events, I should say Alex Karras in Blazing Saddles - which is a good answer anyway. Though I have a soft spot for Terry Crews in Idiocracy (and his cool cameo in Inland Empire...)
13) Second favorite Rainer Werner Fassbinder movie
A: I think it is probably The Marriage of Maria Braun, these days...
14) Favorite film of 1931
A: Favorite film period: M. Quite possibly the best year in cinematic history
15) Second favorite Raoul Walsh movie
A: Thief of Baghdad?
16) Favorite film of 1951
A: Early Summer
17) Second favorite Wong Kar-wai movie
A: Happy Together? these days, I think that would be the answer...
18) Favorite film of 1971
A: McCabe and Mrs. Miller - so far my favorites from all three of these years are in my all time top 5.
19) Second favorite Henri-Georges Clouzot movie
A: Mysteries of Picasso
20) Favorite film of 1991
A: A Brighter Summer Day
21) Second favorite John Sturges movie
A: The Magnificent Seven
22) Favorite celebrity biopic
A: Does Che count? Carlos? I'm also incline to say Superstar...
23) Name a good script idea which was let down either by the director or circumstances of production
A: This sort of thing happens all the time - good scripts that just don't do anything... I don't know if that's what you have in mind though - I'm thinking films like Five Year Engagement - clever, well written, well acted, but with nothing to look at. You could close your eyes and get as much out of it...
24) Heaven’s Gate-- yes or no?
A: Haven't seen it; reserve judgment
25) Favorite pairing of movie sex symbols
A: Happy Together? might be, you know...
26) One word that you could say which would instantly evoke images and memories of your favorite movie. (Naming the movie is optional—might be more fun to see if we can guess what it is from the word itself)
A: Well, two - Ich Musst!
27) Name one moment which to you demarcates a significant change, for better or worse, on the landscape of the movies over the last 20 years.
A: Closing of the Harvard Square cinema last summer? it's emblematic of the past 20 years, I know that - this one might be more disturbing, because the theatrical landscape had stabilized - lots of places closed in the 90s, but things had stayed the same for the last 10 years or so. This closing is very ominous... the loss of all those theaters - mostly small, a lot of them either specialist theaters or art cinemas - changes things profoundly. It's hard to see what you want on film - though DVDs have done a pretty good job of supplying the films, you lose all the benefits of theatrical shows, and, obviously, of Film.
28) Favorite pre-Code talkie
A: Duck Soup or Trouble in Paradise
29) Oldest film in your personal collection (Thanks, Peter Nellhaus)
A: Oldest meaning, first one made? That's Fantomas. Oldest meaning, had the longest? VHS of Blue Velvet, I think....
30) Longest film in your personal collection. (Thanks, Brian Darr)
A: That also might be Fantomas, if it counts as one movie. Histoires du Cinema, if it doesn't (and the Godard counts as one movie.) World on A Wire is up there too...
31) Have your movie collection habits changed in the past 10 years? If so, how?
A: I buy a lot more now than I did 10 years ago. The answer to 27 above is probably related.
32) Wackiest, most unlikely “directed by” credit you can name
A: There are probably better answers, but the latter half of David Gordon Green's career would have been very hard to predict (even imagine) from the first half...
33) Best documentary you’ve seen in 2012 (made in 2012 or any other year)
A: I am faced with the shocking fact that I have seen exactly one documentary in a movie theater all year, and I saw it just last weekend - How to Survive a Plague.
34) What’s your favorite “(this star) was almost cast in (this movie)” anecdote?
A: Cary Grant in Bicycle Thieves?
35) Program three nights of double bills at a revival theater that might best illuminate your love of the movies
A: It's a Wonderful Life/Early Summer
Playtime/Nashville
Celine and Julie Go Boating/Inland Empire (gonna be a long night, that one)
36) You have been granted permission to invite any three people, alive or dead, to your house to watch the Oscars. Who are they?
A: James Joyce, Frank Capra and Jean-Luc Godard?
37) Favorite Mr. Chips. (Careful...)
A: Um -
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Friday, October 12, 2012
Music For Friday
Randomly selected through the miracle of iTunes!
1. Public Enemy - DOn't Believe the Hype
2. Liars - Brats [from an actual new record I bought this year - very rare breed, these days, I am sorry to say]
3. Mission of Burma - Fame and Fortune
4. Pavement - Transport is Arranged
5. PJ Harvey - No Girl So Sweet [surprised how long it's been since I listened to this record... listened to it a lot back in the late 90s for a while...]
6. Minutemen - Cohesion
7. The Pogues - Wild Cats of Kilkenny
8. Fugazi - Styrofoam
9. Dr. Nerve - Three Curiously insubstantial Duets
10. Yo La Tengo - Everyday
and video? Public Enemy live on MTV? sounds good...
And why not another 80s icon (well, they were for me), still at it in 2012?
1. Public Enemy - DOn't Believe the Hype
2. Liars - Brats [from an actual new record I bought this year - very rare breed, these days, I am sorry to say]
3. Mission of Burma - Fame and Fortune
4. Pavement - Transport is Arranged
5. PJ Harvey - No Girl So Sweet [surprised how long it's been since I listened to this record... listened to it a lot back in the late 90s for a while...]
6. Minutemen - Cohesion
7. The Pogues - Wild Cats of Kilkenny
8. Fugazi - Styrofoam
9. Dr. Nerve - Three Curiously insubstantial Duets
10. Yo La Tengo - Everyday
and video? Public Enemy live on MTV? sounds good...
And why not another 80s icon (well, they were for me), still at it in 2012?
Monday, October 08, 2012
Perryville, Kentucky
To day is the 150th anniversary today of the Battle of Perryville - the western theater's answer to Antietam, in some ways. Just as Antietam halted the Rebel's movements into Maryland, Perryville stopped their adventuring in Kentucky, an invasion that could have caused almost as much mischief if things had gone a bit better. It's an odd battle - the Union army outnumbered the confederates 3 to 1, but during the battle itself, only about a third of the Union men got involved, the rest all within reach of the battle, but not involved. The results were a savage stalemate, both sides gunning down about a fourth of the other with little actual result. At the end of it, Bragg and the confederates left, to rejoin Kirby Smith, also in Kentucky, with as many men again - but rather than renew the fight on roughly equal terms (which they could have), Bragg chose to retreat. It would not be the first time he would fight a battle, sort of win, but abandon the field at the end - something similar happened at Stones River...
I've gone on a bit about generalship in some of these battles - Bragg is a reminder that it wasn't just the north that had trouble finding adequate commanders. In fact, in a lot of ways (going well beyond generalship, actually) the eastern and western theaters of the war are opposite one another. In the east, Lee and Jackson, and a host of strong underlings fought a series of incompetents, or competents who lost their nerve at the crucial moment (Fighting Joe Hooker comes to mind.) There were good generals in the Army of the Potomac, but they were always somehow just off - tangled up in the politics of the army (Porter and Franklin might have been good men, but were infected with McClellanism from the start); brave, but in over their heads (Sumner, particularly); or they took a couple years to rise to positions of true authority (Sedgewick, Reynolds, Meade, Hancock - the best, really, of the corps level officers). And even when they did get better generalship at the corps level, there were always men who had no business being there - Dan Sickles the most notable and unfortunate example.
In the west it was almost the opposite. Grant and Thomas were in important positions almost from the start - though both tended to stall for months at a time. Sherman and Sheridan and MacPherson all rose to some authority in 1862 - and even more dubious characters, like Rosecrans, had good moments. And the South - may have had talent, but it was always flawed. Bragg was as good an organizer as McClellan, but was hated almost as much as McClellan was loved - and though unlike McClellan he was willing to fight, like McClellan, he tended to back off before the fight was over. He made enemies quickly and kept them throughout the war - but none of the generals under him ever did anything to show they deserved his position. And they maintained a mediocre record throughout the war. (There were outstanding cavalry men in the west, fighting for the south - but the Forests and Wheelers and Shelby's never rose to command the larger armies, and weren't able to do much more than cause trouble for the north. Getting th best men in command was not a southern strength in the west.)
And, as usual when generals underperformed in war, the men in the ranks paid the price. The west featured some of the bloodiest toe to toe fighting in the war - Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga were all bloodbaths, at least relative to the size of the forces - all of them concentrated straight up fights that sooner or later involved head on attacks on strong positions.... That described Shiloh - you can put Corinth in that category too - and of course at the end of the war, you would get the carnage of Franklin and Nashville as well. Bad, unimaginative generalship got lots of men killed - though to be fair, inspired, audacious generalship got lots of people killed as well - Lee had as bloody a record as you could ask.
And so - 150 years ago - they fought at Perryville, fought to draw, with one side never committing their significant manpower advantages, and the other side moving off, then retreating after reuniting with another army.... and Kentucky was safe for the Union, and whatever chance the south might have had to force the north to negotiate or convince the European powers to stick their noses in, was gone. And the war went on.
I've gone on a bit about generalship in some of these battles - Bragg is a reminder that it wasn't just the north that had trouble finding adequate commanders. In fact, in a lot of ways (going well beyond generalship, actually) the eastern and western theaters of the war are opposite one another. In the east, Lee and Jackson, and a host of strong underlings fought a series of incompetents, or competents who lost their nerve at the crucial moment (Fighting Joe Hooker comes to mind.) There were good generals in the Army of the Potomac, but they were always somehow just off - tangled up in the politics of the army (Porter and Franklin might have been good men, but were infected with McClellanism from the start); brave, but in over their heads (Sumner, particularly); or they took a couple years to rise to positions of true authority (Sedgewick, Reynolds, Meade, Hancock - the best, really, of the corps level officers). And even when they did get better generalship at the corps level, there were always men who had no business being there - Dan Sickles the most notable and unfortunate example.
In the west it was almost the opposite. Grant and Thomas were in important positions almost from the start - though both tended to stall for months at a time. Sherman and Sheridan and MacPherson all rose to some authority in 1862 - and even more dubious characters, like Rosecrans, had good moments. And the South - may have had talent, but it was always flawed. Bragg was as good an organizer as McClellan, but was hated almost as much as McClellan was loved - and though unlike McClellan he was willing to fight, like McClellan, he tended to back off before the fight was over. He made enemies quickly and kept them throughout the war - but none of the generals under him ever did anything to show they deserved his position. And they maintained a mediocre record throughout the war. (There were outstanding cavalry men in the west, fighting for the south - but the Forests and Wheelers and Shelby's never rose to command the larger armies, and weren't able to do much more than cause trouble for the north. Getting th best men in command was not a southern strength in the west.)
And, as usual when generals underperformed in war, the men in the ranks paid the price. The west featured some of the bloodiest toe to toe fighting in the war - Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga were all bloodbaths, at least relative to the size of the forces - all of them concentrated straight up fights that sooner or later involved head on attacks on strong positions.... That described Shiloh - you can put Corinth in that category too - and of course at the end of the war, you would get the carnage of Franklin and Nashville as well. Bad, unimaginative generalship got lots of men killed - though to be fair, inspired, audacious generalship got lots of people killed as well - Lee had as bloody a record as you could ask.
And so - 150 years ago - they fought at Perryville, fought to draw, with one side never committing their significant manpower advantages, and the other side moving off, then retreating after reuniting with another army.... and Kentucky was safe for the Union, and whatever chance the south might have had to force the north to negotiate or convince the European powers to stick their noses in, was gone. And the war went on.
Friday, October 05, 2012
A Friday Music Post this Friday.
This should probably be something else - I have a new toy:
It is a great joy, and a distraction - still can't get my yahoo mail working on it. Hours, days of distraction! Fun fun.... actually, I have a couple new toys - rather more than I should, if I'm honest - it's been an eventful summer on the technology front. Therein may lie a post...
But not today - today is Friday, and today is a day for music. And - being distracted by the iPhone is as good an excuse as any for sticking tot he basics, as usual.
1. Bill Frisell - Ron Carter
2. Young Marble Giants - Brand New Life
3. Television - Torn Curtain
4. Carter Family - Church in the Wildwood
5. Madvillain - Do Not Fire!
6. Descendents - Wendy (live)
7. Fugazi - Merchandise
8. The Slits - So Tough
9. fIREHOSE - 4.29.92
10. Elton John - Tower of Babel
and video? Quietly lovely Carter family song, though with the usual cool stuff going on with the instruments - guitar and autoharp always seem to be trying to jump straight to the 60s...
Or maybe the Slits?
It is a great joy, and a distraction - still can't get my yahoo mail working on it. Hours, days of distraction! Fun fun.... actually, I have a couple new toys - rather more than I should, if I'm honest - it's been an eventful summer on the technology front. Therein may lie a post...
But not today - today is Friday, and today is a day for music. And - being distracted by the iPhone is as good an excuse as any for sticking tot he basics, as usual.
1. Bill Frisell - Ron Carter
2. Young Marble Giants - Brand New Life
3. Television - Torn Curtain
4. Carter Family - Church in the Wildwood
5. Madvillain - Do Not Fire!
6. Descendents - Wendy (live)
7. Fugazi - Merchandise
8. The Slits - So Tough
9. fIREHOSE - 4.29.92
10. Elton John - Tower of Babel
and video? Quietly lovely Carter family song, though with the usual cool stuff going on with the instruments - guitar and autoharp always seem to be trying to jump straight to the 60s...
Or maybe the Slits?
Thursday, October 04, 2012
Baseball Postseason
This has been an odd year - I must have known something, not posting my usual beginning of the year predictions. I would have done something insane, like picked the Red Sox to finish out of the cellar - I got lucky there! In any case, it is a shame that the sox have been so awful - I pay less attention, and the game punished me by mounting what really is a fantastic year. Washington winning their division - A's and O's in the playoffs (A's winning the division, by sweeping the Rangers on the last series - amazing!) And individual brilliance everywhere - a Triple Crown winner? who might not win MVP (and probably doesn't deserve to win MVP?) A knuckle balling Cy Young? a bunch of 20 game winners, in both leagues? Mike Trout and Bryce Harper? Yes.
And here in Boston, we get Bobby V handing the division to the Yankees and bitching his coaches. What a guy. The front office seems to have noticed his failures, a couple months too late, so off he goes. Go Liverpool!
Enough of that - the rest of the baseball world deserves some attention. So let's go on record with some post-season predictions:
AL: So Texas and Baltimore play the play in game. All right - I like this system. I like how it expands the playoffs, and makes winning the division that much more important, at the same time - that is how you should do this sort of thing! Anyway - I think Texas has to be considered the better bet - though - same record; the Orioles have even played up to their record lately (though still 11 games ahead of their pythagorean record.) Rangers should win, though. They should be the best team in the league - they have been coasting for awhile.
Now then - after that - who plays who? Apparently, division rivals aren't protected anymore - so Detroit will play Oakland, and the wild card will play the Yankees. That still makes predictions a bit tentative - but that's what they should be anyway. I get another shot at this in a week or so anyway, if I care... So:
Detroit-Oakland: I think Detroit will win this. Too much pitching at the top; too much Cabrera and Fielder.
NY-Wild Card: I think Texas will take the Yankees out without much trouble. I'm less confidant in the O's. I think if Texas beats Baltimore tomorrow night, they will make it to the world series, and probably win - which puts them in a very odd position tomorrow I guess... If Baltimore wins tomorrow, I suspect Detroit will be in the series.
NL: I hate to admit it, but suspect St. Louis will beat the Braves - I hope not, though. I don't hate SL now that LaRussa is gone, but....
San Francisco vs. Cincinnati: Cincy has a very nice team there, but I suspect San Francisco will take them out. Better track record and all that.
Washington vs. Wild Card: Nats should win this, though I always fear the worst with St. Louis around.
In the end - logic says Washington, I think - they have the most balanced team of the bunch. But it's hard to know what will happen with teams that have just arrived at the top - sometimes they do well (Tampa in 2008?) - often, they crack (Tampa in the world series in 2008? Detroit 06?) Still - the truth is, there aren't any bad options really - other than the Yankees, and especially a Yankees St. Louis world series. The Yanks, thankfully, have played the part of the bloated has been for most of the last decade and I expect they will again. I certainly know the world series I want: Washington - Texas! Washington vs. (Ron) Washington!! Nationals vs. Senators!!! How can you not?
As for individuals, a topic that might be even more fascinating this year than the pennant races:
AL MVP: I vote Trout over Cabrera, though - there's not much to pick. The triple crown is a big deal - very cool - but the fact is, it's a pretty arbitrary set of numbers. Trout has had almost the same year at the bat as Cabrera - batting leadoff, so he has the runs scored and stolen bases in place of Cabrera's HR and RBI. Which comes close to being a wash - but then, Mike Trout is having what appears to be a very good year with the glove - Cabrera is a first baseman playing third base like a first baseman. And - while that might actually help the team, letting them get that much more offense into the lineup - Trout's defense is helping his team directly, by, you know, catching the ball and stuff. There will be those, meanwhile, who will say, Cabrera got his team to the playoffs, Trout did not - they forget - the Angels had a better record than the Tigers, in a tougher division - I vote Trout.
AL ROY: I wonder who should win this? is Trout having the best rookie season ever?
AL Cy Young: This comes down to an interesting choice - Weaver has 20 wins, is at or close to the top in ERA and WHIP - but has pitched 50 fewer innings than Justin Verlander - who has very similar numbers, a little lower - in 50 more innings. Verlander has to win.
NL MVP: This is also a pretty good contest, Posey vs. Braun I think. Braun's got somewhat better counting stats, but Posey is close, and he's a catcher - and he's in the playoffs, on a team that is notoriously short of offense - so - he probably should win, though there's no disgrace in Braun winning.
NL ROY: He was supposed to be the greatest thing to hit baseball since, at least, A Rod - instead, he turned out to be the second best outfielder below drinking age. But Bryce Harper seems like a pretty clear choice.
NL Cy Young: Gotta be Dickey - top 3 in wins, ERA, WHIP, top in Ks and IP? Easy choice.
And there you go.
And here in Boston, we get Bobby V handing the division to the Yankees and bitching his coaches. What a guy. The front office seems to have noticed his failures, a couple months too late, so off he goes. Go Liverpool!
Enough of that - the rest of the baseball world deserves some attention. So let's go on record with some post-season predictions:
AL: So Texas and Baltimore play the play in game. All right - I like this system. I like how it expands the playoffs, and makes winning the division that much more important, at the same time - that is how you should do this sort of thing! Anyway - I think Texas has to be considered the better bet - though - same record; the Orioles have even played up to their record lately (though still 11 games ahead of their pythagorean record.) Rangers should win, though. They should be the best team in the league - they have been coasting for awhile.
Now then - after that - who plays who? Apparently, division rivals aren't protected anymore - so Detroit will play Oakland, and the wild card will play the Yankees. That still makes predictions a bit tentative - but that's what they should be anyway. I get another shot at this in a week or so anyway, if I care... So:
Detroit-Oakland: I think Detroit will win this. Too much pitching at the top; too much Cabrera and Fielder.
NY-Wild Card: I think Texas will take the Yankees out without much trouble. I'm less confidant in the O's. I think if Texas beats Baltimore tomorrow night, they will make it to the world series, and probably win - which puts them in a very odd position tomorrow I guess... If Baltimore wins tomorrow, I suspect Detroit will be in the series.
NL: I hate to admit it, but suspect St. Louis will beat the Braves - I hope not, though. I don't hate SL now that LaRussa is gone, but....
San Francisco vs. Cincinnati: Cincy has a very nice team there, but I suspect San Francisco will take them out. Better track record and all that.
Washington vs. Wild Card: Nats should win this, though I always fear the worst with St. Louis around.
In the end - logic says Washington, I think - they have the most balanced team of the bunch. But it's hard to know what will happen with teams that have just arrived at the top - sometimes they do well (Tampa in 2008?) - often, they crack (Tampa in the world series in 2008? Detroit 06?) Still - the truth is, there aren't any bad options really - other than the Yankees, and especially a Yankees St. Louis world series. The Yanks, thankfully, have played the part of the bloated has been for most of the last decade and I expect they will again. I certainly know the world series I want: Washington - Texas! Washington vs. (Ron) Washington!! Nationals vs. Senators!!! How can you not?
As for individuals, a topic that might be even more fascinating this year than the pennant races:
AL MVP: I vote Trout over Cabrera, though - there's not much to pick. The triple crown is a big deal - very cool - but the fact is, it's a pretty arbitrary set of numbers. Trout has had almost the same year at the bat as Cabrera - batting leadoff, so he has the runs scored and stolen bases in place of Cabrera's HR and RBI. Which comes close to being a wash - but then, Mike Trout is having what appears to be a very good year with the glove - Cabrera is a first baseman playing third base like a first baseman. And - while that might actually help the team, letting them get that much more offense into the lineup - Trout's defense is helping his team directly, by, you know, catching the ball and stuff. There will be those, meanwhile, who will say, Cabrera got his team to the playoffs, Trout did not - they forget - the Angels had a better record than the Tigers, in a tougher division - I vote Trout.
AL ROY: I wonder who should win this? is Trout having the best rookie season ever?
AL Cy Young: This comes down to an interesting choice - Weaver has 20 wins, is at or close to the top in ERA and WHIP - but has pitched 50 fewer innings than Justin Verlander - who has very similar numbers, a little lower - in 50 more innings. Verlander has to win.
NL MVP: This is also a pretty good contest, Posey vs. Braun I think. Braun's got somewhat better counting stats, but Posey is close, and he's a catcher - and he's in the playoffs, on a team that is notoriously short of offense - so - he probably should win, though there's no disgrace in Braun winning.
NL ROY: He was supposed to be the greatest thing to hit baseball since, at least, A Rod - instead, he turned out to be the second best outfielder below drinking age. But Bryce Harper seems like a pretty clear choice.
NL Cy Young: Gotta be Dickey - top 3 in wins, ERA, WHIP, top in Ks and IP? Easy choice.
And there you go.
Friday, September 28, 2012
Rainy Friday Music
Watch September come to an end in a nasty rainy day. Great, just great. Well, it is a Friday, and one has ones rituals, so here goes....
1. Pere Ubu - Stormy Weather [well, that was appropriate!]
2. Jackie-O-Motherfucker - Newcastle, UK Oct 29
3. Miho Hatori - Barracuda
4. Koushik - Be With
5. Soft Machine - Why Am I So Short?
6. Carter Family - There'll be Joy Joy Joy
7. Yo La Tengo - Superstar Watcher
8. X - Back 2 the Base
9. Don Byron - Frailich Jamboree
10. Paul McCartney - Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey
Well, they are defying my efforts to find videos for the day - though it looks like we can turn up some Soft Machine, which can't be bad:
And I suppose Sir Paul is a good thing - especially the weather the way it is... live a little, get around...
1. Pere Ubu - Stormy Weather [well, that was appropriate!]
2. Jackie-O-Motherfucker - Newcastle, UK Oct 29
3. Miho Hatori - Barracuda
4. Koushik - Be With
5. Soft Machine - Why Am I So Short?
6. Carter Family - There'll be Joy Joy Joy
7. Yo La Tengo - Superstar Watcher
8. X - Back 2 the Base
9. Don Byron - Frailich Jamboree
10. Paul McCartney - Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey
Well, they are defying my efforts to find videos for the day - though it looks like we can turn up some Soft Machine, which can't be bad:
And I suppose Sir Paul is a good thing - especially the weather the way it is... live a little, get around...
Thursday, September 27, 2012
The Master and Such
The Master arrives, like all the PT Anderson films before it, on waves of hype and praise and some complaint - I suppose I could review it, but the world abounds in reviews, and I have other things on the mind, so I think I will just make a list of things that caught my attention...
1) My first impression of the film is of how perfect Joaquin Phoenix looks for 1950 USA. That lean, hard body, skinny, strong, but with no definition - I look at old pictures of my father and uncles in the 40s and 50s and they look exactly like that. It goes a long way toward selling the character. Freddy looks right. Now, his behavior, his movements, ways of standing, and so on, are mannered, sometimes to the extreme - though I doubt they are as extreme as they look to 2012's eyes - but his body, face (and hair, clothes, and so on) are uncanny. He looks like 1950 come to life.
2) I saw two films last weekend, The Master and For Ellen. I liked For Ellen - a carefully observed character study, a quiet acting tour de force for Paul Dano - a nice little film, though that's all. (It's enough, of course, though perhaps underwhelming against the competition. Like all those perfectly acceptable little indie films in the spring that disappeared on contact with Moonrise Kingdom.) But reading through the reviews, I find For Ellen described as "poetic" - probably more than once. And this is something that bothers me.
I am taking a class on poetry just now, Modern Poetry at that, so it is in my head. I've written about it here before - I have theories, which I confess are a bit idiosyncratic. I think, for example, that film resembles poetry more than any other written form - I think its basic structure, the compilation of shots, as discreet units, arranged in a sequence, and building meaning out of their sequence, their arrangement, and out of a host of connections from shot to shot, sequence to sequence - is a process that is much closer to poetry than to prose. Film is poetic by its nature. But I think its poetry lies in its construction - poetry itself is defined, I think, by the heightened language - and by the structures patterns of language. By line breaks I am tempted to say.... And if a poem itself can be more poetic by being more explicit about its ambition, and its derangement of language, then so can a film, by highlighting its construction, its derangement of images. And so - how is The Master not poetic?
Why do people call For Ellen "poetic" but not The Master? I suppose it's obvious - it's the slow pace; it's those long the long held closeups of faces, of people alone, mostly Dano alone, thinking, waiting, holding the screen. It's the inserted symbolic shots - the sky, trees, the roads, motels, and so on. Those are the things that signify poetry in films. The Terence Malick stuff, I suppose. The lyricism, the contemplation.
But there's a lot more to poetry than lyricism. We are reading Ezra Pound just now in that class, and soon will be reading T. S. Eliot, and when you read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock or the Wasteland, or you read Hugh Selwyn Mauberley - what do they have to do with films like For Ellen? And how are they not almost perfect prefigurations of a film like The Master? Look at what it is - a film that follows a man, his passage through life, through a period of time - but impressionistically, discontinuously. It is large and sprawling, but so is Whitman - so are Pound and Eliot - Milton, Dante. And look at how it works - dense, allusive, built around patterns, rhymes and rhythms, condensed to hard, specific images, arranged to play off the images around them. How is it not poetic?
As it clips along, Freddy on a beach, Freddy at sea, Freddy insane, Freddy trying to work in a store, Freddy fucking a store model, after half poisoning her with his concoction of photography chemicals and whatnot), Freddy fighting with a complacent bourgeois, Freddy among the migrant workers, Freddy running across a field, Freddy on the waterfront - the scenes come, without connective tissue to the last, a device you will find, I say, in Pound and company, in Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, to name a name. Not just as ellipse - but with even sequential moments (as Freddy's fight with the workers, and flight from them across the field), the scenes can be constructed as if they were completely unconnected. And it continues, and like poetry, it builds patterns across scenes - runs multiple patterns: as simple as the way Jonny Greenwood's music seems to run separately from the scenes - layered over them rather than sculpted to match them. It's in the ways individual images can overpower the flow of images - Freddy running across a field; Freddy trashing a jail cell - or just Freddy's way of standing, walking, the way he seems placed against the grain of every scene he's in. It shifts tone, between scenes, within scenes. It repeats images - moments, images, memories? or just the way an alcoholics' life falls into dreadful repetition - though the film never announces anything like that, anything like a clear meaning to the images it gives you.
3) I love it without loving it. I am in awe of it, without feeling the overpowering sense of its rightness I feel, for example, with Moonrise Kingdom. Is P.T. Anderson the equal of Wes Anderson as a filmmaker? He might be, to tell the truth - but Wes is more to my tastes. But - it's hard to ignore the coincidence of the names (I can ignore the coincidence of the two Paul Andersons, however) - but it really comes down to the fact that they have separated themselves from the other (American) filmmakers of their generation. No others match them - some may get there (Kelly Riechardt? Ira Sachs? etc.) - but none have yet. But the two Andersons have, I say, lifted themselves into the ranks of their forebears - Scorsese, Lynch, The Coens. They are in the ranks of the best world wide, the filmmakers whose works I wait for years between - Costa, Denis, Kurosawa, Apitchipong, older filmmakers like Hou and Kiarostami. I don't think it's an unjustified comparison. It took me a while to get there with PT (while I was with Wes from the go) - but this and There Will Be Blood seem to me to deliver what they promise, and what he has been promising - utter mastery of the medium, put in service of stories that show you things in the world you might miss. So yes: I can't say I have taken the measure of this film, not by a half, but I think I can say it is a great one.
1) My first impression of the film is of how perfect Joaquin Phoenix looks for 1950 USA. That lean, hard body, skinny, strong, but with no definition - I look at old pictures of my father and uncles in the 40s and 50s and they look exactly like that. It goes a long way toward selling the character. Freddy looks right. Now, his behavior, his movements, ways of standing, and so on, are mannered, sometimes to the extreme - though I doubt they are as extreme as they look to 2012's eyes - but his body, face (and hair, clothes, and so on) are uncanny. He looks like 1950 come to life.
2) I saw two films last weekend, The Master and For Ellen. I liked For Ellen - a carefully observed character study, a quiet acting tour de force for Paul Dano - a nice little film, though that's all. (It's enough, of course, though perhaps underwhelming against the competition. Like all those perfectly acceptable little indie films in the spring that disappeared on contact with Moonrise Kingdom.) But reading through the reviews, I find For Ellen described as "poetic" - probably more than once. And this is something that bothers me.
I am taking a class on poetry just now, Modern Poetry at that, so it is in my head. I've written about it here before - I have theories, which I confess are a bit idiosyncratic. I think, for example, that film resembles poetry more than any other written form - I think its basic structure, the compilation of shots, as discreet units, arranged in a sequence, and building meaning out of their sequence, their arrangement, and out of a host of connections from shot to shot, sequence to sequence - is a process that is much closer to poetry than to prose. Film is poetic by its nature. But I think its poetry lies in its construction - poetry itself is defined, I think, by the heightened language - and by the structures patterns of language. By line breaks I am tempted to say.... And if a poem itself can be more poetic by being more explicit about its ambition, and its derangement of language, then so can a film, by highlighting its construction, its derangement of images. And so - how is The Master not poetic?
Why do people call For Ellen "poetic" but not The Master? I suppose it's obvious - it's the slow pace; it's those long the long held closeups of faces, of people alone, mostly Dano alone, thinking, waiting, holding the screen. It's the inserted symbolic shots - the sky, trees, the roads, motels, and so on. Those are the things that signify poetry in films. The Terence Malick stuff, I suppose. The lyricism, the contemplation.
But there's a lot more to poetry than lyricism. We are reading Ezra Pound just now in that class, and soon will be reading T. S. Eliot, and when you read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock or the Wasteland, or you read Hugh Selwyn Mauberley - what do they have to do with films like For Ellen? And how are they not almost perfect prefigurations of a film like The Master? Look at what it is - a film that follows a man, his passage through life, through a period of time - but impressionistically, discontinuously. It is large and sprawling, but so is Whitman - so are Pound and Eliot - Milton, Dante. And look at how it works - dense, allusive, built around patterns, rhymes and rhythms, condensed to hard, specific images, arranged to play off the images around them. How is it not poetic?
As it clips along, Freddy on a beach, Freddy at sea, Freddy insane, Freddy trying to work in a store, Freddy fucking a store model, after half poisoning her with his concoction of photography chemicals and whatnot), Freddy fighting with a complacent bourgeois, Freddy among the migrant workers, Freddy running across a field, Freddy on the waterfront - the scenes come, without connective tissue to the last, a device you will find, I say, in Pound and company, in Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, to name a name. Not just as ellipse - but with even sequential moments (as Freddy's fight with the workers, and flight from them across the field), the scenes can be constructed as if they were completely unconnected. And it continues, and like poetry, it builds patterns across scenes - runs multiple patterns: as simple as the way Jonny Greenwood's music seems to run separately from the scenes - layered over them rather than sculpted to match them. It's in the ways individual images can overpower the flow of images - Freddy running across a field; Freddy trashing a jail cell - or just Freddy's way of standing, walking, the way he seems placed against the grain of every scene he's in. It shifts tone, between scenes, within scenes. It repeats images - moments, images, memories? or just the way an alcoholics' life falls into dreadful repetition - though the film never announces anything like that, anything like a clear meaning to the images it gives you.
3) I love it without loving it. I am in awe of it, without feeling the overpowering sense of its rightness I feel, for example, with Moonrise Kingdom. Is P.T. Anderson the equal of Wes Anderson as a filmmaker? He might be, to tell the truth - but Wes is more to my tastes. But - it's hard to ignore the coincidence of the names (I can ignore the coincidence of the two Paul Andersons, however) - but it really comes down to the fact that they have separated themselves from the other (American) filmmakers of their generation. No others match them - some may get there (Kelly Riechardt? Ira Sachs? etc.) - but none have yet. But the two Andersons have, I say, lifted themselves into the ranks of their forebears - Scorsese, Lynch, The Coens. They are in the ranks of the best world wide, the filmmakers whose works I wait for years between - Costa, Denis, Kurosawa, Apitchipong, older filmmakers like Hou and Kiarostami. I don't think it's an unjustified comparison. It took me a while to get there with PT (while I was with Wes from the go) - but this and There Will Be Blood seem to me to deliver what they promise, and what he has been promising - utter mastery of the medium, put in service of stories that show you things in the world you might miss. So yes: I can't say I have taken the measure of this film, not by a half, but I think I can say it is a great one.
Friday, September 21, 2012
Friday, End of Summer
Start, via Lawyer's Guns and Money, with Sandy Denny, and Who Knows Where the Time Goes:
And - because why would I resist? Nina Simone:
I don't have that song on my computer - I was wondering why; I thought I owned all those Fairport Convention records - I have certainly listened to it enough... ah - technology: I have Unhalfbricking only on vinyl - who knows where the time goes indeed?
And so? because time is fleeting this Friday morning, we turn to simplicity, the Random Ten:
1. G.O.N.G - Mystic Sister
2. Keiji Haino - I DOn't Want to Know
3. Badfinger - I Can Love You
4. Kinks - Sittin' on my Sofa
5. Meat Puppets - Rotten Shame
6. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Red Eyes and Tears
7. Neil Diamond - Sweet Caroline
8. The Fall - Telephone Thing
9. The Beatles - The End [guitar solos!]
10. Johnny Cash - Delia's Gone
And one more video - in memory of the Boston Red Sox, a team well on its way to something very wintry and grim....
And - because why would I resist? Nina Simone:
I don't have that song on my computer - I was wondering why; I thought I owned all those Fairport Convention records - I have certainly listened to it enough... ah - technology: I have Unhalfbricking only on vinyl - who knows where the time goes indeed?
And so? because time is fleeting this Friday morning, we turn to simplicity, the Random Ten:
1. G.O.N.G - Mystic Sister
2. Keiji Haino - I DOn't Want to Know
3. Badfinger - I Can Love You
4. Kinks - Sittin' on my Sofa
5. Meat Puppets - Rotten Shame
6. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Red Eyes and Tears
7. Neil Diamond - Sweet Caroline
8. The Fall - Telephone Thing
9. The Beatles - The End [guitar solos!]
10. Johnny Cash - Delia's Gone
And one more video - in memory of the Boston Red Sox, a team well on its way to something very wintry and grim....
Monday, September 17, 2012
Antietam 150
150 years ago today, the battle of Antietam was fought. I wrote about it two years ago - tried writing about it last year, though I didn't post anything - saving it for this year, partly... This is a big anniversary. (For me anyway - I wasn't around for the 100th anniversary, and won't be around for the 200th (unless I am a very old man indeed) - so 150 is it...) Antietam was a fascinating battle, and very important - probably the most important of the war. It's importance goes beyond its military and strategic significance (though those were big) - it is as important politically - the occasion of the definition of the war. The Emancipation Proclamation changed the nature of the war, made it into a revolution of sorts - and it came as a result of Antietam. The war itself changed shape, from something consisting of a series of battles, with both sides hoping to capture the enemy’s flag and win outright, to something like a total war - where the two sides would build and fight and cut each other up.
In military terms, Antietam was important enough. The South could have won the war in the fall of 1862 - by gaining foreign recognition; by swinging Northern elections far enough to break the Republicans' control of the war. Antietam put that to an end (along with Perryville and Corinth in the west.) I spent more time 2 years ago writing about the Union failure at Antietam - Lee's army was wrecked - it could have been finished off, as far as any army could be finished off in the Civil War. That was harder to do than anyone thought; both sides were constantly hoping for a modern Cannae, but it was almost impossible to do it in the 1860s. Killing power had grown, but communication power lagged, and the fact was that both sides were usually wrecked in every battle - one more than the other maybe - but most of the time, when one side chose to leave, the other side had less choice than they thought about whether to let them go. The logistics of the day made it very difficult to sustain battle. (In a couple years, if I keep posting these anniversary posts, we'll get back to that when we get to Grant in Virginia. A bloody mess, but something new, a genuinely sustained campaign... we're a long ways from that in 1862.) But at Antietam, while much of McClellan's army was shot to hell, all of Lee's army was - McClellan had two complete army corps that saw virtually no action. They could have broken the confederates - if they had captured the only ford across the Potomac, they could have finished them off. But they left it where it ended...
And yet - it is a turning point of the war. That's an overused phrase - one that can mean a bunch of different things. You can classify different battles as turning points. Like - Which battles determined who WOULD win the war? Which determined who COULD win the war? Which determined that the side that should win the war, really and truly WOULD? (This is different in subtle ways from #1.) And I suppose, finally - which battles determined what the war was going to be ABOUT?
1) is Vicksburg, basically - that cut the Confederacy in half, forced the east to fend for itself, gave the North access to invade the South from many angles... after that, the north was going to win, as long as it remained a war. (Though there wereways for the politics to play out differently - thus #3.)
2) is Gettysburg, more than anything else - especially alongside Vicksburg. Before Gettysburg, you can imagine the South forcing some kind of peace on the battlefield. Forcing negotiations, something like that - after Gettysburg, that wasn't going to happen. The SOuth might survive to force a peace, but they weren't going to win it.
3) this, I think, is Atlanta - because that was the point where there were no longer any ways for the south to survive. This is different than the other two - you see this a lot in the literature - that even in 1864, the south could still survive. It’s true. What Vicksburg and Gettysburg did was make sure the south could not win the War - but they could still win politically. They could still survive, hang on, create political crisis in the North, etc. But after Atlanta - they could not win. They could still fight it out - costing a lot of people their lives and causing immense suffering and despair - but they were going to lose.
4) and so we're back to Antietam. This stopped the South's best chance, probably, at forcing foreign intervention, some kind of armistice - but more importantly, this is where the war was defined. The freedom of the slaves, the remaking of the republic, into something - to be honest - closer to the ideals of the declaration of independence, to the dream of America, instead of its rather nasty reality. But also (as a consequence) into a total war - a war for the definition of the nation. It’s about the Birth of a Nation - this is pretty much where it was born. The irony of Griffith's title shouldn’t fool us - he was right, that the nation was born out of this war - born out of the freeing of the slaves. And this is where the North accepted that. For the South, from the start, the war was about slavery - don't let 150 years of revisionism fool you. They were fighting for slavery, from the beginning to the end; the North tried to fight for union first, and only came to accept it as a fight for slavery later. Here, basically, or 5 days from now, with the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation. A direct result of Antietam - which makes it quite justified in saying, it's the day the Nation was saved - maybe the day the nation was born. A better nation (though it would take another 100 years to make it stick...)
Friday, September 14, 2012
Friday Random Ten
I am still a bit off my stride here - I hope that improves. Expect another Civil War post coming soon, with Antietam's 150th anniversary 3 days away. And - I guess the rest is up to me. Right now? it's time to fire up shuffle and see what we see:
1. Richard Thompson - Never Again [always a good place to start, Richard Thompson, especially with Linda singing]
2. REM - Hollow Man [decent sounding late REM]
3. Meat Puppets - Nail it Down
4. Mudhoney - If I think (live)
5. ELO - Strange Magic
6. Mono - Halcyon (Beautiful Days)
7. Low - Murderer
8. Tool - Third Eye [long live Bill Hicks!]
9. Smashing Pumpkins - Tristessa
10. Ghost - Oblit 1961 [wait - why does iTunes think this is "reggae"? Ghost is a lot of things, but reggae is not one of them]
Video? What can we find? how about some ELO?
And - speaking of strange magic, here's Tool:
And I suppose - Bill Hicks may be in order here:
"send in Vanilla Ice..."
1. Richard Thompson - Never Again [always a good place to start, Richard Thompson, especially with Linda singing]
2. REM - Hollow Man [decent sounding late REM]
3. Meat Puppets - Nail it Down
4. Mudhoney - If I think (live)
5. ELO - Strange Magic
6. Mono - Halcyon (Beautiful Days)
7. Low - Murderer
8. Tool - Third Eye [long live Bill Hicks!]
9. Smashing Pumpkins - Tristessa
10. Ghost - Oblit 1961 [wait - why does iTunes think this is "reggae"? Ghost is a lot of things, but reggae is not one of them]
Video? What can we find? how about some ELO?
And - speaking of strange magic, here's Tool:
And I suppose - Bill Hicks may be in order here:
"send in Vanilla Ice..."
Friday, September 07, 2012
Friday Songs
Home again this Friday, back from my travels, up into the north country...
...a good time had by all. And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming (such as it is):
1. Melvins Lite - Holy Barbarian [one of the very few records I have bought this year... sad, I suppose... good record though; Melvins are reliable]
2. The Mars Volta - Cicatrix (live)
3. Doctor Nerve - Take Your Ears as the Bones of their Queen
4. Minor Threat - Salad Days
5. Stooges - No Fun
6. DNA - Calling to Phone
7. Pere Ubu -Sentimental Journey
8. The Who - Summertime Blues (Live at Leeds)
9. U2 - 40 [after dwelling in the more challenging corners of my music collection, we suddenly seem to have shifted to much more familiar grounds]
10. Burning Spear - Marcus Garvey
And for video? How about some vintage Stooges footage?
And I suppose - contemporary Pere Ubu footage:
...a good time had by all. And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming (such as it is):
1. Melvins Lite - Holy Barbarian [one of the very few records I have bought this year... sad, I suppose... good record though; Melvins are reliable]
2. The Mars Volta - Cicatrix (live)
3. Doctor Nerve - Take Your Ears as the Bones of their Queen
4. Minor Threat - Salad Days
5. Stooges - No Fun
6. DNA - Calling to Phone
7. Pere Ubu -Sentimental Journey
8. The Who - Summertime Blues (Live at Leeds)
9. U2 - 40 [after dwelling in the more challenging corners of my music collection, we suddenly seem to have shifted to much more familiar grounds]
10. Burning Spear - Marcus Garvey
And for video? How about some vintage Stooges footage?
And I suppose - contemporary Pere Ubu footage:
Friday, August 31, 2012
Friday Music, Keeping it Simple
Keeping it random as well:
1. Dinosaur Jr. - Puke & Cry
2. Pere Ubu - Pushin' too Hard
3. Stooges - Lost in the Future (from Fun House sessions)
4. Volcano Suns - Greasy Spine
5. Little Feat - Oh Atlanta
6. Brian Jonestown Massacre - Monster
7. New Pornographers - All The Old Showstoppers
8. Yo la Tengo - All your Secrets
9. Pretenders - Space Invaders
10. Outkast - Xplosion
And Video? Dino sounds right:
1. Dinosaur Jr. - Puke & Cry
2. Pere Ubu - Pushin' too Hard
3. Stooges - Lost in the Future (from Fun House sessions)
4. Volcano Suns - Greasy Spine
5. Little Feat - Oh Atlanta
6. Brian Jonestown Massacre - Monster
7. New Pornographers - All The Old Showstoppers
8. Yo la Tengo - All your Secrets
9. Pretenders - Space Invaders
10. Outkast - Xplosion
And Video? Dino sounds right:
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Second Bull Run
Today marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Second Battle of Bull Run, one of the most complete defeats of the war, and one of the most thorough jobs of outgeneralling anyone did on anyone else in the war. Though - and this says a great deal about the way the war went in the east - there are other contenders for those dishonors...
I've mentioned before, that Robert E. Lee was the luckiest general of the war - he fought against a series of incompetents, while in the west, his far less talented Confederate fellow officers fought the likes of Grant and Sherman and Thomas. The Union generals, especially in the west, had their share of luck sometimes - but Bragg and Johnston and the like were generally capable, in spite of their limitations, and some of their underlings - Forrest and Wheeler and Cleburne and the like - were quite outstanding. But Lee... Nowhere, probably, more so than at Second Manassas. John Pope was probably the worst general to be put in charge of a large body of men in the war - though I suppose he did have some competition for that... The Second Manassas campaign was a clown show from the start. He invaded Northern Virginia while McClellan was still down on the Peninsular, but Jackson and then Lee came after him and ran him ragged. Stonewall marched rings around him, captured his supply depot, captured his headquarters, and completely eluded him, sending Pope on a wild goose chase throughout the area.
When he finally did find him (with Jackson's help, since old Jack was looking for a fight), he still thought Stonewall was trying to get away. That wasn't it - Jackson was trying to lure him into a fight, to give Lee and Longstreet time to come up and crush Pope between them. So it was - 150 years ago today, toward evening, Jackson attacked the Union army at a place called Brawner's Farm. That fight turned out to be one of those straight up face to face thousands of men in a line blasting away at one another from a hundred yards or less for hours at a time fights that you still found in the Civil War, especially in 1862. The Union side happened to be the Black Hat brigade in its first fight - later known as the Iron Brigade, and one of the elite units of the war, who would end up with the highest casualty rate in the Union army - they got a good start on it there...
So - the next day Pope decided Jackson was trying to get away, and attacked - Jackson was ready and waiting in strong defensive positions, and proceeded to drive the Yankees back. And the next day, after Jackson had moves some of his troops around, Pope decided he was in full retreat and his part was to pursue - no, Jackson was not retreating - another massive battle resulted, and then Longstreet came in on the flank...
The whole affair was a catalogue of incompetence. Not only did Pope completely misconstrue Jackson and Lee's intentions - he wrote badly worded orders that confused his subordinates and left them out of the battle; he ordered men (Porter's corps, specifically) to attack, and refused to listen to Porter when he said that the rest of Lee's army was just out of sight to the left; finally got Porter into the fight on the 30th, just in time for Longstreet to come hammering in on the left - since Longstreet was right where Porter said he was. And just to add some spice, you have McClellan delaying bringing up troops in barely disguised hope that Pope would get thrashed and he would be restored to command...
And that's how it went. The Federals were whipped and retreated in despair; Pope aws relieved and McClellan put back in charge, to the glee of the soldiers; Lee invaded Maryland, McClellan found his orders and - in his timid and incompetent way - tried to cut him off, leading to the battle of Antietam, the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of Little Mac. But that's to come. In August 1862, things were in the balance - the South was on the rise, counterattacking east and west, winning, making things look bad... After things had looked disastrous for the Confederacy in the winter and spring. That was Second Bull Run - one of the series of big battles in the second year of the war that really defined the way it was going to go. The massive bloodletting, and some of the stalemate, as no one could ever quite turn these fights into more than victories and defeats. Lee hoped to crush Pope's army, destroy it - but he just beat it - sending it on a glum retreat, but still functioning. There was a lot of killing left to do after this, and these battles - 7 Days, Bull Run, Antietam, as well as Perryville out west, tended to reset ideas of how the war would be fought.
I've mentioned before, that Robert E. Lee was the luckiest general of the war - he fought against a series of incompetents, while in the west, his far less talented Confederate fellow officers fought the likes of Grant and Sherman and Thomas. The Union generals, especially in the west, had their share of luck sometimes - but Bragg and Johnston and the like were generally capable, in spite of their limitations, and some of their underlings - Forrest and Wheeler and Cleburne and the like - were quite outstanding. But Lee... Nowhere, probably, more so than at Second Manassas. John Pope was probably the worst general to be put in charge of a large body of men in the war - though I suppose he did have some competition for that... The Second Manassas campaign was a clown show from the start. He invaded Northern Virginia while McClellan was still down on the Peninsular, but Jackson and then Lee came after him and ran him ragged. Stonewall marched rings around him, captured his supply depot, captured his headquarters, and completely eluded him, sending Pope on a wild goose chase throughout the area.
When he finally did find him (with Jackson's help, since old Jack was looking for a fight), he still thought Stonewall was trying to get away. That wasn't it - Jackson was trying to lure him into a fight, to give Lee and Longstreet time to come up and crush Pope between them. So it was - 150 years ago today, toward evening, Jackson attacked the Union army at a place called Brawner's Farm. That fight turned out to be one of those straight up face to face thousands of men in a line blasting away at one another from a hundred yards or less for hours at a time fights that you still found in the Civil War, especially in 1862. The Union side happened to be the Black Hat brigade in its first fight - later known as the Iron Brigade, and one of the elite units of the war, who would end up with the highest casualty rate in the Union army - they got a good start on it there...
So - the next day Pope decided Jackson was trying to get away, and attacked - Jackson was ready and waiting in strong defensive positions, and proceeded to drive the Yankees back. And the next day, after Jackson had moves some of his troops around, Pope decided he was in full retreat and his part was to pursue - no, Jackson was not retreating - another massive battle resulted, and then Longstreet came in on the flank...
The whole affair was a catalogue of incompetence. Not only did Pope completely misconstrue Jackson and Lee's intentions - he wrote badly worded orders that confused his subordinates and left them out of the battle; he ordered men (Porter's corps, specifically) to attack, and refused to listen to Porter when he said that the rest of Lee's army was just out of sight to the left; finally got Porter into the fight on the 30th, just in time for Longstreet to come hammering in on the left - since Longstreet was right where Porter said he was. And just to add some spice, you have McClellan delaying bringing up troops in barely disguised hope that Pope would get thrashed and he would be restored to command...
And that's how it went. The Federals were whipped and retreated in despair; Pope aws relieved and McClellan put back in charge, to the glee of the soldiers; Lee invaded Maryland, McClellan found his orders and - in his timid and incompetent way - tried to cut him off, leading to the battle of Antietam, the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of Little Mac. But that's to come. In August 1862, things were in the balance - the South was on the rise, counterattacking east and west, winning, making things look bad... After things had looked disastrous for the Confederacy in the winter and spring. That was Second Bull Run - one of the series of big battles in the second year of the war that really defined the way it was going to go. The massive bloodletting, and some of the stalemate, as no one could ever quite turn these fights into more than victories and defeats. Lee hoped to crush Pope's army, destroy it - but he just beat it - sending it on a glum retreat, but still functioning. There was a lot of killing left to do after this, and these battles - 7 Days, Bull Run, Antietam, as well as Perryville out west, tended to reset ideas of how the war would be fought.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Ad Gon Gone!
Gone? Gone... It's a ballsy move for the hometown nice - trading both last year's big money acquisitions, plus Josh Beckett, for prospects - though probably easier to take then most salaries for prospects deals. Gonzalez hasn't quite been the world beater here he was supposed to be - maybe he's been hurt, maybe he's unhappy, maybe he's wilting under the pressure of the big city, maybe - who knows. Odds are, he's going to earn that contract, here or elsewhere - but he hasn't yet. And Crawford has been a disaster. Maybe nothing you could foresee - he had a bad start, got hurt, came back and stunk, was hurt more than they thought, and has stayed hurt, and is hurt now... all that money... And Beckett has gone off the burn. He's to blame for all the clubhouse dissent, they say. Who knows about that, but they are sure sick of him here.
The point is, the sox have stunk out the joint since the beginning of last September - after being on top of the world this time last year. The decline was precipitous, and the expected recovery never came. They've hit all along - but the pitching has been dreadful. They need to do something about that. Some of it, of course, is that the people who are, in fact, established, front of the rotation starters have to pitch like it. Lester, Buchholz - Beckett - need to pitch like it. Lackey, at least, had the decency to get hurt and go away... but that's just part of it. Looking at the parade of scrubs the Sox have run out there after Lester and company, it's no wonder they have been so bad. Last year's dregs - Andrew Miller, grampa Wakefield after his 80 good innings, Eric Bedard? - were, maybe - well, officially - the worst ever. This year's failures - from Daniel Bard (ruined, for no good reason) to Rockies cast offs Morales and Cook - may not match those depths, but god almighty. What a disaster.
So this deal - full of prospects, young arms, mostly, is what is needed here. The sox are still turning out decent hitters down on the farm - but they have been a while since they have brought up a pitcher who is worth having. The cupboard is bare - it needs to be restocked. The thing is - the team was scoring runs this year without Crawford, and with Ad-Gon hitting like James Loney - so they should keep right on scoring runs. They have some money again - they should be able to turn that into something after the season - pitchers, I hope (and I hope they do a better job of picking them than John Lackey), offense doesn't hurt... If not in free agents, then in those arbitration eligible types that mediocre teams like to get rid of while they can... r the Carlos Gonzalez', with their big contracts on losing teams. hey'll have more to offer anyway...
We'll see. On balance - I am sorry to see Gonzalez go, but if he can take the other two with him, then I guess I won't complain.
The point is, the sox have stunk out the joint since the beginning of last September - after being on top of the world this time last year. The decline was precipitous, and the expected recovery never came. They've hit all along - but the pitching has been dreadful. They need to do something about that. Some of it, of course, is that the people who are, in fact, established, front of the rotation starters have to pitch like it. Lester, Buchholz - Beckett - need to pitch like it. Lackey, at least, had the decency to get hurt and go away... but that's just part of it. Looking at the parade of scrubs the Sox have run out there after Lester and company, it's no wonder they have been so bad. Last year's dregs - Andrew Miller, grampa Wakefield after his 80 good innings, Eric Bedard? - were, maybe - well, officially - the worst ever. This year's failures - from Daniel Bard (ruined, for no good reason) to Rockies cast offs Morales and Cook - may not match those depths, but god almighty. What a disaster.
So this deal - full of prospects, young arms, mostly, is what is needed here. The sox are still turning out decent hitters down on the farm - but they have been a while since they have brought up a pitcher who is worth having. The cupboard is bare - it needs to be restocked. The thing is - the team was scoring runs this year without Crawford, and with Ad-Gon hitting like James Loney - so they should keep right on scoring runs. They have some money again - they should be able to turn that into something after the season - pitchers, I hope (and I hope they do a better job of picking them than John Lackey), offense doesn't hurt... If not in free agents, then in those arbitration eligible types that mediocre teams like to get rid of while they can... r the Carlos Gonzalez', with their big contracts on losing teams. hey'll have more to offer anyway...
We'll see. On balance - I am sorry to see Gonzalez go, but if he can take the other two with him, then I guess I won't complain.
Friday, August 24, 2012
Friday Music and Whatnot
Mostly music... Though - Sight & Sound has the results of the directors' votes up... Speaking of lists - Jim Emerson offers up another long dissection, centered on the question of great films people didn't vote for... And, from another angle - Harry Tuttle has posted a Contemporary Contemplative Cinema top ten...
Beyond lists - I've been sort of following along with the latest round of Atheist factionalizing at Freethought Blogs - it started with an essay by Jen McCreight about the conflicts between atheism and feminism, and has moved on to discussions of something they are calling Atheism+ - I suppose that link is as good (there are a lot of them at the site) as any at defining it, by answering the critics (with links) ... I'm not sure I have anything to add, but I've been reading about it and thinking about it...
Anyway - it is Friday! here are some randomly selected songs for your enjoyment or interest or just to demonstrate how many CDs I've loaded into my computer!
1. Melt-Banana - Dog Song (live)
2. James Brown and the JBs - Get Up, Get Into it, Get Involved (live)
3. Meat Puppets - Why?
4. Gang Gang Dance - Nomad for Love (Cannibal)
5. Gomez - Ping One Down (live) - lots of live songs coming up today - you'd thing iTunes was planning this!
6. Blind Willie McTell - I Keep on Drinkin'
7. White Stripes - Fell in Love With a Girl
8. Bob Dylan - Like a Rolling Stone
9. Captain Beefheart - Sweet Sweet Bulbs
10. Sister Rosetta Tharp - All Alone
And a video? of course! It's hard not to post James Brown when you can find the song...
And combining a couple of the acts on the list - White Stripes covering Blind Willie McTell:
Have a good weekend, people!
Beyond lists - I've been sort of following along with the latest round of Atheist factionalizing at Freethought Blogs - it started with an essay by Jen McCreight about the conflicts between atheism and feminism, and has moved on to discussions of something they are calling Atheism+ - I suppose that link is as good (there are a lot of them at the site) as any at defining it, by answering the critics (with links) ... I'm not sure I have anything to add, but I've been reading about it and thinking about it...
Anyway - it is Friday! here are some randomly selected songs for your enjoyment or interest or just to demonstrate how many CDs I've loaded into my computer!
1. Melt-Banana - Dog Song (live)
2. James Brown and the JBs - Get Up, Get Into it, Get Involved (live)
3. Meat Puppets - Why?
4. Gang Gang Dance - Nomad for Love (Cannibal)
5. Gomez - Ping One Down (live) - lots of live songs coming up today - you'd thing iTunes was planning this!
6. Blind Willie McTell - I Keep on Drinkin'
7. White Stripes - Fell in Love With a Girl
8. Bob Dylan - Like a Rolling Stone
9. Captain Beefheart - Sweet Sweet Bulbs
10. Sister Rosetta Tharp - All Alone
And a video? of course! It's hard not to post James Brown when you can find the song...
And combining a couple of the acts on the list - White Stripes covering Blind Willie McTell:
Have a good weekend, people!
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Summer Film Updates
Another film roundup post. I haven't seen so many films this summer - it's been a busy one (not in a good way), and film watching - not to mention writing - has gone by the wayside. So - rather like the last time I did this - these will be quick hits. New films in theaters...
Keyhole - 10/15 - the joys of Guy Maddin - archaic looking surrealism, this time in an old house. While enjoyable in every way, I did find this one to be a bit routine - well - routine for Maddin. He's still one of my favorite filmmakers, so I'm hardly complaining.
Safety Not Guaranteed - 9/15 - this is one I wanted to write up at more length, but never got around to it... It's more interesting than good, I'm afraid, a bit frustrating. It starts very well, looking like something worth seeing - head on shots and 180 degree cuts and 90 degree angles and fairly precise timing. The opening builds a quick, deft and amusing characterization (or Aubrey Plaza's character), before shifting to the story. The story starts with similar edge and some funny bits, but loses its way, becoming more and more predictable, routine and watery - and looks more standard indie as it continues. Story of a writer and 2 interns tracking down a guy who advertises for a partner on a time travel mission - one of the interns (Plaza) wins the guy's trust, etc. The film gives you enough moments along the way to stay enjoyable, but it's not enough - the metaphors are heavy handed (everyone's after their lost youth - or represents someone else's lost youth), and the ending struck me as a lazy shift from the fantastic to the marvelous - and all of it stops looking like anything special after the first 10 or 15 minutes.
Your Sister's Sister - 10/15 - yet another low-budget looking indie (maybe even mumblecore!), starring - just like Safety Not Guaranteed! - the acting Duplass... This one is about a guy whose brother just died - his best friend (Emily Blunt) used to be the dead brother's lover, and the two of them pretty obviously are repressing a good deal of sexual tension... he's a mess, she sends him off to her father's cabin on some remote island to get his head together - where he runs into her lesbian sister. A bottle of tequila and a good deal of talk later, they are in bed, but in the morning sis turns up. Etc. All this is nicely done in the middle, the three actors playing off one another - but once the plot and its issues are properly established (lesbian sister wants a baby, rubber breaks, Duplass and Blunt characters love one another), the film resorts to a good deal of handwaving and montage sequences to pull off its ending. It's not bad though - the actors are sharp, the writing (however they arrived at the script - whatever parts were improvised or not) is pretty good... (Interestingly - the dialogue and interactions among the characters are the best elements - the structure seems a bit off.) Lynn Shelton's direction is fine - nothing special, but she chooses shots well and it all looks pretty good. A fine middle of the road indie film, I guess. I have to add that it bugged me, because it is another of those films where no one seems to have to think about money - doesn't anyone have a job in American films? a job they can't decide to ditch on a whim, like Blunt's character does? jeez...
To Rome With Love - 6/15 - I have to go back to my every seven years thing with Woody. Midnight in Paris was a fluke. This has 4 stories set in Rome - only one of which is worth a minute of your time, despite the superb cast in all four of them. Typical late Allen - bland looking, not all that funny, the jokes telegraphed and flat, a bunch of derivative stories - lame sex farce; lame Borgesian self-reflection, lame self-pity about the poor celebrity - and the one good joke, an opera singer who can only sing in the shower - so an impresario (the Woodster himself) put him onstage singing Pagliacci in the shower.
Beasts of the Southern Wild - 11/15 - a film I should give more attention to, but... it is a lovely film, set in southern Louisiana. A storm floods a town, the people try to cope - we see it through the eyes of a little girl, whose father is sick and whose mother is a memory... It is a bit twee at times, but more often wonderful - beautiful and clever and engaging.
Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai - 11/15 - Takashi Miike's surprisingly restrained remake of the Kobayashi film, starring a famous Kabuki actor in Tatsuya Nakadai's role. Basically the same story, told the same way - starts with the Samurai asking to kill himself in the house of Ii, sparking flashbacks to the last ronin to try it, from a couple perspectives. All of it is quite tasteful by Miike's standards, even with the bamboo sword suicide - and the second flashback devolves into plain melodrama, not the best either. It plays more like Yoji Yamada (in period samurai mode) than either Miike or Kobayashi. It's maybe a bit better looking, more painterly - a kind of murky smudged quality, that admittedly might be a result of the 3D, or maybe the digital production... The look has an odd affect, for it is both a bit disappointing, and very beautiful. Which I suppose is true of the film as a whole. All this plays less politically than the original - there's nothing about the record, erasing his exploits - and I think the ending is different - I don't think Nakudai used a bamboo sword. That change makes his death even more absurd and meaningless. Unfortunately, the rest of the film is too flat and polite to satisfy.
Brave - 10/15 - lovely film, but slight - a scottish princess with flaming red hair, a tom boy, raised by her mother to be a lady, but raised by herself as an archer. Time comes to marry - the clans gather and she chooses archery as their contest - since she too is the first born of a clan. She wins, causing trouble - but then the film swerves away from to something else, when she buys a spell to make her mother change. Those things never go well. Still, it works out in the end, though I think the magic plot is less interesting than what was promised when she won the contest. Oh well. Still, a very handsome production, with all of Pixar's usual virtues except a superior story and script.
The Campaign - 10/15 - a political farce pitting Will Farrell against Zach Galifianakis in a campaign for a North Carolina legislative seat. It takes the shotgun approach, blasting jokes about more or less everything that is wrong with American politics today, from sex scandals and attack ads to Citizens United and outsourcing to "hunting accidents" and owning the right kind of dog... In the end, of course, the winner Does The Right Thing, and the evil-doers are punished, which reminds you that it is a work of fiction. Not the deepest political satire you will ever see, but consistently funny and often clever, and that's a good start.
Dark Horse - 7/15 - new Todd Solondz film that somehow tricked me into the theater. I suppose because it looks like another Unlovable Loser Redeemed by X [here, X seems to be: the love of a woman more pathetic than himself] film - and I figured, that is a genre in need of some abuse and if anyone is going to be able to abuse it amusingly, it might be Solondz. Alas - he is not so clever. His idea of subverting the redemption of the unlovable loser story is to just invert it - unlovable loser ruined. It is true that the kinds of happy endings attached to these films are forced and unbelievable - but this kind of unhappy ending is equally forced and unbelievable. It's basically a one joke joke - perfect for Dinkle the Unlovable Loser, but not exactly suited to a feature film. Though to his credit, Solondz gets in and out of it in a hurry - under 90 minutes, I think. Heck, its almost as if he got to the third act, where the unlovable loser was finally going to be redeemed, and decided, fuck this, and killed him off. I think it might have been easier not to start in the first place. Though that would cost us some neat Christopher Walken moments.
Keyhole - 10/15 - the joys of Guy Maddin - archaic looking surrealism, this time in an old house. While enjoyable in every way, I did find this one to be a bit routine - well - routine for Maddin. He's still one of my favorite filmmakers, so I'm hardly complaining.
Safety Not Guaranteed - 9/15 - this is one I wanted to write up at more length, but never got around to it... It's more interesting than good, I'm afraid, a bit frustrating. It starts very well, looking like something worth seeing - head on shots and 180 degree cuts and 90 degree angles and fairly precise timing. The opening builds a quick, deft and amusing characterization (or Aubrey Plaza's character), before shifting to the story. The story starts with similar edge and some funny bits, but loses its way, becoming more and more predictable, routine and watery - and looks more standard indie as it continues. Story of a writer and 2 interns tracking down a guy who advertises for a partner on a time travel mission - one of the interns (Plaza) wins the guy's trust, etc. The film gives you enough moments along the way to stay enjoyable, but it's not enough - the metaphors are heavy handed (everyone's after their lost youth - or represents someone else's lost youth), and the ending struck me as a lazy shift from the fantastic to the marvelous - and all of it stops looking like anything special after the first 10 or 15 minutes.
Your Sister's Sister - 10/15 - yet another low-budget looking indie (maybe even mumblecore!), starring - just like Safety Not Guaranteed! - the acting Duplass... This one is about a guy whose brother just died - his best friend (Emily Blunt) used to be the dead brother's lover, and the two of them pretty obviously are repressing a good deal of sexual tension... he's a mess, she sends him off to her father's cabin on some remote island to get his head together - where he runs into her lesbian sister. A bottle of tequila and a good deal of talk later, they are in bed, but in the morning sis turns up. Etc. All this is nicely done in the middle, the three actors playing off one another - but once the plot and its issues are properly established (lesbian sister wants a baby, rubber breaks, Duplass and Blunt characters love one another), the film resorts to a good deal of handwaving and montage sequences to pull off its ending. It's not bad though - the actors are sharp, the writing (however they arrived at the script - whatever parts were improvised or not) is pretty good... (Interestingly - the dialogue and interactions among the characters are the best elements - the structure seems a bit off.) Lynn Shelton's direction is fine - nothing special, but she chooses shots well and it all looks pretty good. A fine middle of the road indie film, I guess. I have to add that it bugged me, because it is another of those films where no one seems to have to think about money - doesn't anyone have a job in American films? a job they can't decide to ditch on a whim, like Blunt's character does? jeez...
To Rome With Love - 6/15 - I have to go back to my every seven years thing with Woody. Midnight in Paris was a fluke. This has 4 stories set in Rome - only one of which is worth a minute of your time, despite the superb cast in all four of them. Typical late Allen - bland looking, not all that funny, the jokes telegraphed and flat, a bunch of derivative stories - lame sex farce; lame Borgesian self-reflection, lame self-pity about the poor celebrity - and the one good joke, an opera singer who can only sing in the shower - so an impresario (the Woodster himself) put him onstage singing Pagliacci in the shower.
Beasts of the Southern Wild - 11/15 - a film I should give more attention to, but... it is a lovely film, set in southern Louisiana. A storm floods a town, the people try to cope - we see it through the eyes of a little girl, whose father is sick and whose mother is a memory... It is a bit twee at times, but more often wonderful - beautiful and clever and engaging.
Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai - 11/15 - Takashi Miike's surprisingly restrained remake of the Kobayashi film, starring a famous Kabuki actor in Tatsuya Nakadai's role. Basically the same story, told the same way - starts with the Samurai asking to kill himself in the house of Ii, sparking flashbacks to the last ronin to try it, from a couple perspectives. All of it is quite tasteful by Miike's standards, even with the bamboo sword suicide - and the second flashback devolves into plain melodrama, not the best either. It plays more like Yoji Yamada (in period samurai mode) than either Miike or Kobayashi. It's maybe a bit better looking, more painterly - a kind of murky smudged quality, that admittedly might be a result of the 3D, or maybe the digital production... The look has an odd affect, for it is both a bit disappointing, and very beautiful. Which I suppose is true of the film as a whole. All this plays less politically than the original - there's nothing about the record, erasing his exploits - and I think the ending is different - I don't think Nakudai used a bamboo sword. That change makes his death even more absurd and meaningless. Unfortunately, the rest of the film is too flat and polite to satisfy.
Brave - 10/15 - lovely film, but slight - a scottish princess with flaming red hair, a tom boy, raised by her mother to be a lady, but raised by herself as an archer. Time comes to marry - the clans gather and she chooses archery as their contest - since she too is the first born of a clan. She wins, causing trouble - but then the film swerves away from to something else, when she buys a spell to make her mother change. Those things never go well. Still, it works out in the end, though I think the magic plot is less interesting than what was promised when she won the contest. Oh well. Still, a very handsome production, with all of Pixar's usual virtues except a superior story and script.
The Campaign - 10/15 - a political farce pitting Will Farrell against Zach Galifianakis in a campaign for a North Carolina legislative seat. It takes the shotgun approach, blasting jokes about more or less everything that is wrong with American politics today, from sex scandals and attack ads to Citizens United and outsourcing to "hunting accidents" and owning the right kind of dog... In the end, of course, the winner Does The Right Thing, and the evil-doers are punished, which reminds you that it is a work of fiction. Not the deepest political satire you will ever see, but consistently funny and often clever, and that's a good start.
Dark Horse - 7/15 - new Todd Solondz film that somehow tricked me into the theater. I suppose because it looks like another Unlovable Loser Redeemed by X [here, X seems to be: the love of a woman more pathetic than himself] film - and I figured, that is a genre in need of some abuse and if anyone is going to be able to abuse it amusingly, it might be Solondz. Alas - he is not so clever. His idea of subverting the redemption of the unlovable loser story is to just invert it - unlovable loser ruined. It is true that the kinds of happy endings attached to these films are forced and unbelievable - but this kind of unhappy ending is equally forced and unbelievable. It's basically a one joke joke - perfect for Dinkle the Unlovable Loser, but not exactly suited to a feature film. Though to his credit, Solondz gets in and out of it in a hurry - under 90 minutes, I think. Heck, its almost as if he got to the third act, where the unlovable loser was finally going to be redeemed, and decided, fuck this, and killed him off. I think it might have been easier not to start in the first place. Though that would cost us some neat Christopher Walken moments.
Friday, August 17, 2012
Friday Music and Grumbling
...and not about Paul Ryan, believe it or not! I've spent an awful lot of time this week moving stuff around on my computers. Since my iMac acted up, I have been using my laptop as the main computer - it's not the end of the world, the laptop is an upgrade anyway. And the iMac only seems to be having display issues - the hard drive mounted fine on this one, and I got all the data off. But that means, I have most of the content from both machines on this one - including 350GB of video. So - I've finally gotten around to trying to clean that up - back everything up, cull out the duplication, put it all in the programs I want to use. A tedious and time consuming process, and one I find myself compelled to stick with, once I start it. I live in hopes of a faster computer at the end of it...
Anyway - before I get to music (a very boring random ten, I'm afraid), a link or two. The biggie - Sight & Sound has their searchable sortable click through able Critics' Ballots online - a dangerous source of distraction, that. And Wonders in the Dark's Comedy poll countdown is in full swing, plowing through their (our, since I voted in it) top 100 comedies. Enjoy!
And Music:
1. Kate Bush - Cloudbusting
2. Bukka White - Fixin' to Die Blues
3. SunnO))) - Cry for the Weeper
4. Red Crayola - Free Form Freakout
5. The Cranberries - Sunday
6. fIREHOSE - More famous Quotes
7. Frank Sinatra - I've Got You Under My Skin (Live in Paris)
8. Les Paul - Steel Guitar Rag
9. Blue Oyster Cult - (Then Came the) Last of May (live)
10. The Meters - Hand Clapping Song
A nice song for a Friday, a good counter to any discontents...
And Les Paul on TV with Mary Ford, doing Steel Guitar Rag, and in the good old summertime...
Have a good weekend!
Anyway - before I get to music (a very boring random ten, I'm afraid), a link or two. The biggie - Sight & Sound has their searchable sortable click through able Critics' Ballots online - a dangerous source of distraction, that. And Wonders in the Dark's Comedy poll countdown is in full swing, plowing through their (our, since I voted in it) top 100 comedies. Enjoy!
And Music:
1. Kate Bush - Cloudbusting
2. Bukka White - Fixin' to Die Blues
3. SunnO))) - Cry for the Weeper
4. Red Crayola - Free Form Freakout
5. The Cranberries - Sunday
6. fIREHOSE - More famous Quotes
7. Frank Sinatra - I've Got You Under My Skin (Live in Paris)
8. Les Paul - Steel Guitar Rag
9. Blue Oyster Cult - (Then Came the) Last of May (live)
10. The Meters - Hand Clapping Song
A nice song for a Friday, a good counter to any discontents...
And Les Paul on TV with Mary Ford, doing Steel Guitar Rag, and in the good old summertime...
Have a good weekend!
Monday, August 13, 2012
Paul Ryan?
I haven't been writing a lot of political posts in a while. And it's an election year! I started this blog in an election year, 2004 - and that year, laid on the politics thick. Let's say, August 2004 - 7 of 12 posts about politics. By 2008, though, I was past all that - 1 of 9, in August that year. Back in 04, that was mostly what went on here - politics... but I think it burned me out after a while. The last few years - Obama's term, really, has been very hard to talk about rationally. The Republican party has plumbed depths hard to imagine - everything from all the birth certificate noise, to imbeciles like Sarah Palin being elevated to national prominence, and her fellow imbeciles who made up the primary pool this year. Cain? Bachmann? Ron Paul? Newt Gingrich? Rick Santorum? Rick Perry? I mean - as dumb, venal, vicious a lot as has ever been assembled on any stage...
All right... It's hard to write about. It's been hard for other reasons - what is there to say? the public conversation has not edified - I suppose I could have spent the last 3 years chanting Single Payer Health Care! Keynes Keynes Keynes! don't murder civilians with drones! - but what's the point? It's worse, of course, in the backwaters - on Facebook and the like - where all those crazy cousins and schoolmates feel like they have to post some new nonsense every couple days... I could argue with all of that, but it's arguing with a lump of rock. It's discouraging....
But - still. One has political opinions and one feels a need to air them now and again! So air I shall - and what better excuse than Mitt Romney naming his running mate, Wisconsin congressman, Paul Ryan? The Zombie Eyed Granny Starver himself - for there is no better source of writing on the man than the inimitable Charles Pierce. Yes indeed. It is, clearly enough, Mitt going all in - quoting Nate Silverman, "it suggests that he felt he held a losing position against President Obama" - seems like he's decided to run on ideology, to offer a clear choice between himself and Obama - in hopes - well, that's the thing...
Because if you ask me, this choice is a gift to the Obama campaign. The truth is, Romney doesn't have a lot going for him in this election - the one big thing he has in his favor is the rotten economy. He can run all day blaming the economy on the incumbent - what can the incumbent do? Well - find someone else to blame.And - well, even without Ryan, Romney had problems there. You can blame the president for the economy, sure - but you can find other likely culprits easily enough. Rapacious capitalists for example - and Mitt "I don't need to pay no stinking taxes" Romney, and Bain Capital are tailor made for that sort of campaign. And then there is Congress - especially the House - the democrats have been blaming them for the last two years (with good reason - they have done more harm than anyone else in that period), even before all this... But now? Ryan is the very face of the Republican House - author of its budget, the - what? brains of the outfit? Obama was running against him anyway, doing all it could to pin him to Romney - and now Romney has accepted the connection, reinforced it. It is going to be very easy for the democrats to run against them - it is going to make running on the economy very hard to Romney.
So what is he up to? shoring up the base? probably, though how far is that really able to go? Trying to run on a clear ideological alternative to Obama? I suppose so - though he represents an alternative that people hate worse than anything Obama does. And one that is, in fact, plain gibberish - lots of daydreaming about reducing the deficit and all, though in fact, there's not much there but tax cuts for the rich, and entitlement cuts for everyone else, though disguised to confuse the issue (like not applying medicare cuts to people currently over 55.) I mean - I know the voting public isn't very clear on what is good for the country (what is good for the country? significant government spending to create jobs - money and credit is dirt cheap - build a bunch of stuff, put people to work, get the economy going building stuff and selling it to people - Keynes Keynes Keynes!), but they seem to know that Ryan's ideas are disastrous. Granny starving. (Or more accurately, since Granny's benefits will be grandfathered in, you and me starving, when we get to be grannies...)
And - oh yeah, for good measure - Paul Ryan is also a right wing radical on social issues.
These guys are a horror show in the making. I admit, fi they are elected, I imagine they will act like every other republican in the last 30 years - cut taxes, increase the deficit, start little wars to create profit opportunities for their contractor contributors, move jobs overseas, and leave the country in a shambles in 4 years when they get the rush... forcing the next democratic president to bail out the banks again... But... they might actually try to govern like they run - which would be profoundly disastrous.
All right... It's hard to write about. It's been hard for other reasons - what is there to say? the public conversation has not edified - I suppose I could have spent the last 3 years chanting Single Payer Health Care! Keynes Keynes Keynes! don't murder civilians with drones! - but what's the point? It's worse, of course, in the backwaters - on Facebook and the like - where all those crazy cousins and schoolmates feel like they have to post some new nonsense every couple days... I could argue with all of that, but it's arguing with a lump of rock. It's discouraging....
But - still. One has political opinions and one feels a need to air them now and again! So air I shall - and what better excuse than Mitt Romney naming his running mate, Wisconsin congressman, Paul Ryan? The Zombie Eyed Granny Starver himself - for there is no better source of writing on the man than the inimitable Charles Pierce. Yes indeed. It is, clearly enough, Mitt going all in - quoting Nate Silverman, "it suggests that he felt he held a losing position against President Obama" - seems like he's decided to run on ideology, to offer a clear choice between himself and Obama - in hopes - well, that's the thing...
Because if you ask me, this choice is a gift to the Obama campaign. The truth is, Romney doesn't have a lot going for him in this election - the one big thing he has in his favor is the rotten economy. He can run all day blaming the economy on the incumbent - what can the incumbent do? Well - find someone else to blame.And - well, even without Ryan, Romney had problems there. You can blame the president for the economy, sure - but you can find other likely culprits easily enough. Rapacious capitalists for example - and Mitt "I don't need to pay no stinking taxes" Romney, and Bain Capital are tailor made for that sort of campaign. And then there is Congress - especially the House - the democrats have been blaming them for the last two years (with good reason - they have done more harm than anyone else in that period), even before all this... But now? Ryan is the very face of the Republican House - author of its budget, the - what? brains of the outfit? Obama was running against him anyway, doing all it could to pin him to Romney - and now Romney has accepted the connection, reinforced it. It is going to be very easy for the democrats to run against them - it is going to make running on the economy very hard to Romney.
So what is he up to? shoring up the base? probably, though how far is that really able to go? Trying to run on a clear ideological alternative to Obama? I suppose so - though he represents an alternative that people hate worse than anything Obama does. And one that is, in fact, plain gibberish - lots of daydreaming about reducing the deficit and all, though in fact, there's not much there but tax cuts for the rich, and entitlement cuts for everyone else, though disguised to confuse the issue (like not applying medicare cuts to people currently over 55.) I mean - I know the voting public isn't very clear on what is good for the country (what is good for the country? significant government spending to create jobs - money and credit is dirt cheap - build a bunch of stuff, put people to work, get the economy going building stuff and selling it to people - Keynes Keynes Keynes!), but they seem to know that Ryan's ideas are disastrous. Granny starving. (Or more accurately, since Granny's benefits will be grandfathered in, you and me starving, when we get to be grannies...)
And - oh yeah, for good measure - Paul Ryan is also a right wing radical on social issues.
These guys are a horror show in the making. I admit, fi they are elected, I imagine they will act like every other republican in the last 30 years - cut taxes, increase the deficit, start little wars to create profit opportunities for their contractor contributors, move jobs overseas, and leave the country in a shambles in 4 years when they get the rush... forcing the next democratic president to bail out the banks again... But... they might actually try to govern like they run - which would be profoundly disastrous.
Friday, August 10, 2012
Tuesday, August 07, 2012
Sight & Sound Poll Reflections
It's been a week or so since Sight & Sound released the attest iteration of their Greatest Films poll. The internets are full of commentary, and I can't help joining in - not that I have anything profound to say about it...
The big story, I guess, is that Vertigo replaced Citizen Kane at the top, a position Welles had held since 1962. I suppose that's a big deal, though it's not exactly surprising - Vertigo has been on the rise in the last couple decades, especially since its big restoration - it got to #2 last time out, and now is over the hump... It is a bit odd, I suppose - me, personally, I like Vertigo better (it's top 10 for me, too), but somehow, Citizen Kane seems a more likely film to top a list like this. But there you have it. Now Tokyo Story - well - hanging on to #3, and this time around, the directors put it at the top of their list - that's a choice I can endorse! Though, being a bit perverse, it's not the Ozu film I would put in the top 10...
There are other changes on these lists - the critics have added a third silent film to their top ten, replacing the musical, at that. And switched out the second silent film - Battleship Potemkin gone, Man With the Movie Camera in - an interesting change itself. Getting past the top 10, the top 50 films are reasonable enough. I suppose if you were of a mind you could find plenty to discuss, in perceived omissions and bad habits by the voters: not enough comedy; only one musical; the waxing and waning of reputations - one Bergman in that top 50? one Lang, and not the Lang(s) many of us Lang enthusiasts would pick? Chaplin reduced to clinging to the 50th spot; no Hawks? Rohmer? Altman? Griffith? Herzog? Or the positives - the newer, or more challenging films that did make it - Satantango, Jeanne Dielman, Mulholland Drive, In the Mood for Love, La Jetee, Close Up; the fact that Godard tops all directors with four, including Histoire(s) du Cinema. These last choices suggest that the expanded voting bloc might have had an affect - Jonathan Rosenbaum raises (or quotes Nicole Brenez raising) the point that the increased film teachers might have helped the more experimental films, and maybe pushed that third silent higher... could be.
Still - there remains a certain air of old hat about it all - I miss the days when a 2 year old film could get to #2, or a 4 year old film to #1. It is strange - you do hear people go on about new films as if they were the culmination of the promise of the medium - you can find plenty of hyperbolic praise for Tree of Life, to name one - but that kind of talk doesn't seem to translate into votes these days. I find this a bit fascinating - why has this list gotten so stuck?
I have theories... 1) film history is twice as long now as when this list started. There are that many more films to consider. The top 50 now is about the equivalent of the top 10 in 1952. 2) Technology - in 1952, it was very hit or miss what you could actually see; now, in 2012, you can see just about everything. And that means you are voting against the whole of film history, and you can vote against all of it fresh - you are able to see anything you would consider, rather than vote against your memory of something you saw 20 years ago. 3) And then - I think voters do put value on novelty - on being the first to do something. To do something new; to embody an emerging synthesis; to break with conventions - or all at once (like Citizen Kane). Later films fight against film history - it is harder all the time to break with film history, harder to seem new - harder, probably, to convince viewers that they are seeing something new. Voters vote for the first film(s) to do something - and they vote for the films that are accepted as being the first to do it. 4) And one more idea - that the film culture has changed - that viewers no longer expect to see anything new, and don't value it the same.
The upshot is that the culture is mature - that it is easier to view the sweep of history as one thing. And that there is no longer the pressures for novelty - no one is expected to reinvent the medium, viewers don't value innovation the way they used to. When films do things differently - Inland Empire, Uncle Boonmee, Tree of Life, say - critics find it easier to assimilate them to film history - even if that means, to a tradition of novelty, or something strange like that. I don't think this is as much as change in how films work as it seems - films like Citizen Kane were not really reinventing film, you could see its antecedents and influences then - but there is an assumption that films in the 30s and 40s were still inventing the medium, and films now are rearranging the elements of an established form. Taking voters back to the notion of being the first - reinventing the medium now is old hat - it's been done so many times before.
So to end - people come up with ideas about how to get fresher films on the list - one I like, practiced by Rosenbaum (per his post on the list), cited by Jim Emerson, suggested by Kristen Thompson, is to make the vote something like a hall of fame. You vote, you have a top 10 - and those films are no longer eligible to be voted for. That would be a cool list to see maintained - but the truth is, there's a reason people care about Sight and Sound's list. The history of the list making matters - it is great fun comparing this year's choices with all the past ones - watching tastes shift. It's also true, and less admirable, that the lists themselves condition subsequent lists - people vote for (or against) Citizen Kane because it has been number one (and isn't anymore.) But that too is part of the interest - you have to weigh this decade's choices against all those previous polls. I can't wait to see what's on 2022's list...
Finally - the lists - and mine. First the critics:
1) "Vertigo" (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
2) "Citizen Kane" (Orson Welles, 1941)
3) "Tokyo Story" (Yasujiro Ozo, 1953)
4) "Rules of the Game" (Jean Renoir, 1939)
5) "Sunrise" (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
6) "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
7) "The Searchers" (John Ford, 1956)
8) "Man with a Movie Camera" (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
9) "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
10) "8 1/2" (Federico Fellini, 1963)
The directors:
1) "Tokyo Story" (Ozu, 1953)
2) "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Kubrick, 1968), "Citizen Kane" (Welles, 1941) [tie]
4) "8 ½" (Fellini, 1963)
5) "Taxi Driver" (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
6) "Apocalypse Now" (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
7) "The Godfather" (Coppola, 1972), "Vertigo" (Hitchcock, 1958) [tie]
9) "Mirror" (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974)
10) "Bicycle Thieves" (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
And finally - all this poll talk, and all this comparing and considering, makes it impossible not to think about what I would have voted for. (The House Next Door, at Slant, is running just such a series with their writers...) And as I have not posted anything like a top ten of my own since 2007 - why not? and since I posted a list of my own (on AOL, where I did most of my film arguing back in the day) in 2002 - it is a chance to consider what might have changed.
2012:
1. M - Fritz Lang
2. It's a Wonderful Life - Frank Capra
3. Rules of the Game - Renoir
4. Early Summer - Yasujiro Ozu
5. McCabe and Mrs. Miller - Robert Altman
6. The General - Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
7. The Maltese Falcon - John Huston
8. Celine and Julie Go Boating - Jacques Rivette (as expected - seeing it again this weekend pushed it way up. Seeing it twice, actually - nothing else seemed necessary, so I went Saturday and Sunday.)
9. Late Spring - Ozu
10. Vertigo - Hitckcock
in 2002:
1 It’s a Wonderful Life
2 M
3 Rules of the Game
4 Mr Smith Goes to Washington
5 McCabe and Mrs Miller
6 Pierrot le Fou
7 The General
8 Early Summer
9 The Maltese Falcon
10 Vertigo
There are not a lot of changes - Godard and the second Capra are off, to Rivette and the second Ozu. Those are pretty arbitrary selections, though. That 2002 list lasted a long time, actually - most of it was there in 97 or 98; Early Summer got in somewhere in that period (about the time I saw it in a movie theater, which I think was around 2000), the Godard slot fluctuated for a long time between Pierrot and Vivre Sa Vie - but - I didn't play around with it much for a long time. When I did - I don't know... I am very much aware of how arbitrary and pointless such listings are. But it still - maps something, in what I value in films. What I am thinking about, my experiences. I think, at some level, letting your experiences, your momentary obsessions and what not turn up in things like this has a point. The differences are small - though I know that M's return to the top is a result of seeing a bunch of German films, and Lang, reading and writing about Lang and German films - Rivette's appearance reflects the absolute joy of discovering him in the last 5 years... and so on. So - there you have it.
The big story, I guess, is that Vertigo replaced Citizen Kane at the top, a position Welles had held since 1962. I suppose that's a big deal, though it's not exactly surprising - Vertigo has been on the rise in the last couple decades, especially since its big restoration - it got to #2 last time out, and now is over the hump... It is a bit odd, I suppose - me, personally, I like Vertigo better (it's top 10 for me, too), but somehow, Citizen Kane seems a more likely film to top a list like this. But there you have it. Now Tokyo Story - well - hanging on to #3, and this time around, the directors put it at the top of their list - that's a choice I can endorse! Though, being a bit perverse, it's not the Ozu film I would put in the top 10...
There are other changes on these lists - the critics have added a third silent film to their top ten, replacing the musical, at that. And switched out the second silent film - Battleship Potemkin gone, Man With the Movie Camera in - an interesting change itself. Getting past the top 10, the top 50 films are reasonable enough. I suppose if you were of a mind you could find plenty to discuss, in perceived omissions and bad habits by the voters: not enough comedy; only one musical; the waxing and waning of reputations - one Bergman in that top 50? one Lang, and not the Lang(s) many of us Lang enthusiasts would pick? Chaplin reduced to clinging to the 50th spot; no Hawks? Rohmer? Altman? Griffith? Herzog? Or the positives - the newer, or more challenging films that did make it - Satantango, Jeanne Dielman, Mulholland Drive, In the Mood for Love, La Jetee, Close Up; the fact that Godard tops all directors with four, including Histoire(s) du Cinema. These last choices suggest that the expanded voting bloc might have had an affect - Jonathan Rosenbaum raises (or quotes Nicole Brenez raising) the point that the increased film teachers might have helped the more experimental films, and maybe pushed that third silent higher... could be.
Still - there remains a certain air of old hat about it all - I miss the days when a 2 year old film could get to #2, or a 4 year old film to #1. It is strange - you do hear people go on about new films as if they were the culmination of the promise of the medium - you can find plenty of hyperbolic praise for Tree of Life, to name one - but that kind of talk doesn't seem to translate into votes these days. I find this a bit fascinating - why has this list gotten so stuck?
I have theories... 1) film history is twice as long now as when this list started. There are that many more films to consider. The top 50 now is about the equivalent of the top 10 in 1952. 2) Technology - in 1952, it was very hit or miss what you could actually see; now, in 2012, you can see just about everything. And that means you are voting against the whole of film history, and you can vote against all of it fresh - you are able to see anything you would consider, rather than vote against your memory of something you saw 20 years ago. 3) And then - I think voters do put value on novelty - on being the first to do something. To do something new; to embody an emerging synthesis; to break with conventions - or all at once (like Citizen Kane). Later films fight against film history - it is harder all the time to break with film history, harder to seem new - harder, probably, to convince viewers that they are seeing something new. Voters vote for the first film(s) to do something - and they vote for the films that are accepted as being the first to do it. 4) And one more idea - that the film culture has changed - that viewers no longer expect to see anything new, and don't value it the same.
The upshot is that the culture is mature - that it is easier to view the sweep of history as one thing. And that there is no longer the pressures for novelty - no one is expected to reinvent the medium, viewers don't value innovation the way they used to. When films do things differently - Inland Empire, Uncle Boonmee, Tree of Life, say - critics find it easier to assimilate them to film history - even if that means, to a tradition of novelty, or something strange like that. I don't think this is as much as change in how films work as it seems - films like Citizen Kane were not really reinventing film, you could see its antecedents and influences then - but there is an assumption that films in the 30s and 40s were still inventing the medium, and films now are rearranging the elements of an established form. Taking voters back to the notion of being the first - reinventing the medium now is old hat - it's been done so many times before.
So to end - people come up with ideas about how to get fresher films on the list - one I like, practiced by Rosenbaum (per his post on the list), cited by Jim Emerson, suggested by Kristen Thompson, is to make the vote something like a hall of fame. You vote, you have a top 10 - and those films are no longer eligible to be voted for. That would be a cool list to see maintained - but the truth is, there's a reason people care about Sight and Sound's list. The history of the list making matters - it is great fun comparing this year's choices with all the past ones - watching tastes shift. It's also true, and less admirable, that the lists themselves condition subsequent lists - people vote for (or against) Citizen Kane because it has been number one (and isn't anymore.) But that too is part of the interest - you have to weigh this decade's choices against all those previous polls. I can't wait to see what's on 2022's list...
Finally - the lists - and mine. First the critics:
1) "Vertigo" (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
2) "Citizen Kane" (Orson Welles, 1941)
3) "Tokyo Story" (Yasujiro Ozo, 1953)
4) "Rules of the Game" (Jean Renoir, 1939)
5) "Sunrise" (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
6) "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
7) "The Searchers" (John Ford, 1956)
8) "Man with a Movie Camera" (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
9) "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
10) "8 1/2" (Federico Fellini, 1963)
The directors:
1) "Tokyo Story" (Ozu, 1953)
2) "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Kubrick, 1968), "Citizen Kane" (Welles, 1941) [tie]
4) "8 ½" (Fellini, 1963)
5) "Taxi Driver" (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
6) "Apocalypse Now" (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
7) "The Godfather" (Coppola, 1972), "Vertigo" (Hitchcock, 1958) [tie]
9) "Mirror" (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974)
10) "Bicycle Thieves" (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
And finally - all this poll talk, and all this comparing and considering, makes it impossible not to think about what I would have voted for. (The House Next Door, at Slant, is running just such a series with their writers...) And as I have not posted anything like a top ten of my own since 2007 - why not? and since I posted a list of my own (on AOL, where I did most of my film arguing back in the day) in 2002 - it is a chance to consider what might have changed.
2012:
1. M - Fritz Lang
2. It's a Wonderful Life - Frank Capra
3. Rules of the Game - Renoir
4. Early Summer - Yasujiro Ozu
5. McCabe and Mrs. Miller - Robert Altman
6. The General - Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
7. The Maltese Falcon - John Huston
8. Celine and Julie Go Boating - Jacques Rivette (as expected - seeing it again this weekend pushed it way up. Seeing it twice, actually - nothing else seemed necessary, so I went Saturday and Sunday.)
9. Late Spring - Ozu
10. Vertigo - Hitckcock
in 2002:
1 It’s a Wonderful Life
2 M
3 Rules of the Game
4 Mr Smith Goes to Washington
5 McCabe and Mrs Miller
6 Pierrot le Fou
7 The General
8 Early Summer
9 The Maltese Falcon
10 Vertigo
There are not a lot of changes - Godard and the second Capra are off, to Rivette and the second Ozu. Those are pretty arbitrary selections, though. That 2002 list lasted a long time, actually - most of it was there in 97 or 98; Early Summer got in somewhere in that period (about the time I saw it in a movie theater, which I think was around 2000), the Godard slot fluctuated for a long time between Pierrot and Vivre Sa Vie - but - I didn't play around with it much for a long time. When I did - I don't know... I am very much aware of how arbitrary and pointless such listings are. But it still - maps something, in what I value in films. What I am thinking about, my experiences. I think, at some level, letting your experiences, your momentary obsessions and what not turn up in things like this has a point. The differences are small - though I know that M's return to the top is a result of seeing a bunch of German films, and Lang, reading and writing about Lang and German films - Rivette's appearance reflects the absolute joy of discovering him in the last 5 years... and so on. So - there you have it.
Sunday, August 05, 2012
1940s Votes
Updating my votes, and extended lists, from the ongoing Yearly Polls at Wonders in the Dark. They are, currently, a couple years into the 1950s - a bit of a relief - the 40s are a softer decade for me than most. Not sure why, though I suppose my general obsession with Japanese film is one reason (the 40s being a bad decade for that film industry), though so are my tastes for comedy, musicals, and art films, the first two of which thrived in the 30s, and the art films start to really take off in the 50s and 60s - so...
The Decade as a whole:
PICTURE: It's a Wonderful Life
DIRECTOR: Ozu, Late Spring
LEAD ACTOR: Jimmy Stewart, Wonderful Life
LEAD ACTRESS: Setsuko Hara, Late Spring
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Walter Huston, Sierra Madre
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Anna Magnani, Open City
SHORT: Spider and Tulip
SCORE: Prokofiev, Ivan the Terrible I
CINEMATOGRAPHY: 47 Ronin
Plus bonus picks::
Script: Late Spring
Sound: Citizen Kane
Documentary: Battle of San Pietro
Musical: Cabin in the Sky
Animated: Pinocchio
1. It's a Wonderful Life
2. Maltese Falcon
3. Late Spring
4. His Girl Friday
5. Ivan the Terrible I
6. The Big Sleep
7. Citizen Kane
8. Fort Apache
9. Third Man
10. Stray Dog
11. Germany Year Zero
12. Bicycle Thieves
13. The Lady Eve
14. Day of Wrath
15. Treasure of the Sierra Madre
16. To Have and Have Not
17. Dead of Night
18. The Shop Around the Corner
19. The 47 Ronin
20. I Walked With a Zombie
1949:
There are a lot of good films this year, but no contest at the top - Late Spring is one of the very short list of great films...
PICTURE: Late Spring
DIRECTOR: Ozu
LEAD ACTOR: Chishu Ryu
LEAD ACTRESS: Setsuko Hara
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Orson Welles, Third Man
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Haruko Sugimura
SHORT: Begone Dull Care, Norman McLaren
SCORE: Karas, Third Man
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Lasker, Third Man
Plus bonus picks::
Script: Late Spring
1. Late Spring
2. Third Man
3. Stray Dog
4. Jour de Fete
5. Le Plaisir
6. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
7. Orpheus
8. Battleground
9. Whiskey Galore
10. Kind Hearts and Coronets
1948:
PICTURE: Fort Apache
DIRECTOR: Rosselini, Germany Year Zero
LEAD ACTOR: Bogart, Sierra Madre
LEAD ACTRESS: Jean Arthur, Foreign Affair
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Walter Huston, Sierra Madre
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Jean Simmons, Hamlet
SHORT: Haredevil Hare
SCORE: Red Shoes
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Red Shoes
Plus bonus picks:
Script: Bicycle Thieves
1. Fort Apache
2. Germany Year Zero
3. Bicycle Thieves
4. Treasure of the Sierra Madre
5. Letter from an Unknown Woman
6. Hamlet
7. The Red Shoes
8. The Fallen Idol
9. Red River
10. Foreign Affair
1947:
PICTURE: Odd Man Out
DIRECTOR: Ozu, Record of a Tenement Gentleman
LEAD ACTOR: James Mason
LEAD ACTRESS: Kinuyo Tanaka, Love of Sumiko the Actress
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Kirk Douglas,Out of the Past
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Kathleen Ryan, Odd Man Out
SHORT: School for Postmen
SCORE: Webb, Out of the Past
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Krasker, Odd Man Out
Plus bonus picks::
Script: Out of the Past
1. Odd Man Out
2. Love of Sumiko the Actress
3. Spring River Flows East
4. Out of the Past
5. Record of a Tenement Gentleman
6. Quai de Orfevres
7. Lady from Shanghai
8. M. Verdoux
9. Dreams That Money Can Buy
10. Lured
1946:
PICTURE: It's a Wonderful Life
DIRECTOR: Capra
LEAD ACTOR: Jimmy Stewart
LEAD ACTRESS: Ingrid Bergman, Notorious
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Elisha Cook Jr., The Big Sleep
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Martha Vickers, The Big Sleep
SHORT: Can't vote for this one, I'm afraid
SCORE: Prokofiev
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Henri Alekan; La Belle et la Bête
Plus bonus picks:
Script: The Big Sleep
Music/Sound:
1. It's a Wonderful Life
2. The Big Sleep
3. Notorious
4. Paisan
5. Beauty and the Beast
6. Ivan Terrible II
7. My Darling Clementine
8. Bedlam
9. Murderers Among Us
10. Gilda
1945:
PICTURE: Dead of the Night
DIRECTOR: Rosselini, Open City
LEAD ACTOR: Boris Karloff, Body Snatcher
LEAD ACTRESS: Gene Tierney, Leave her to Heaven
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Michael Redgrave, Dead of Night
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Ana Magnani, Open City
SHORT: Battle of San Pietro
SCORE: Spellbound
Plus bonus picks:
Cinematography: Leave Her to Heaven
Script: Dead of Night
1. Dead of the Night
2. Open City
3. They Were Expendable
4. The Body Snatcher
5. Leave her to Heaven
6. A Walk in the Sun
7. The Southerner
8. The Clock
9. Children of Paradise
10. Isle of the Dead
1944:
PICTURE: Ivan the Terrible
DIRECTOR: Eisenstein
LEAD ACTOR: Nikolai Cherkasov
LEAD ACTRESS: Stanwyck, Double Indemnity
SUPPORTING ACTOR: William Demarest, Hail the Conquering Hero
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Ann Carter, Curse of the Cat People
SHORT: I guess Little Red Riding Rabbit
SCORE: Prokofiev
Plus bonus picks:
Cinematography: Meet Me in St. Louis (George Folsey - though it might be something of a combined award for photography and set design...)
Script: To Have and Have Not
Best Song: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
1. Ivan the Terrible
2. To Have and Have Not
3. Meet me in St. Louis
4. Double Indemnity
5. Hail the Conquering Hero
6. Miracle of Morgan Creek
7. The Woman in the Window
8. Henry V
9. Laura
10. Curse of the Cat People
1943:
PICTURE: Day of Wrath
DIRECTOR: Dreyer
LEAD ACTOR: Ferdinand Marian, Romance in a Minor Key
LEAD ACTRESS: Lisbeth Movin, Day of Wrath
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Charles Coburn, The More the Merrier
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Jean Brooks, Seventh Victim
SHORT: [here the source of the list comes into play: comment included]... Meshes of the Afternoon - a rather difficult choice though; this is (like Sam said) one of the all time greats - but I've seen Spider and Tulip, a beautiful little animated film from Japan. I will defer to the nominations, to resolve this difficulty.
...you'll note that Spider and Tulip, is my pick for the decade
SCORE: Webb, I Walked With a Zombie
Plus bonus picks:
Cinematography: Karl Anderson, Day of Wrath
Script: Cabin in the Sky, Joseph Shrank
Editing: Mark Robson, Zombie
Music/Sound: Cabin in the Sky again. I also lingered long over the actress categories - Ethel Waters in particular is awful close...
1. Day of Wrath
2. I Walked With a Zombie
3. Cabin in the Sky
4. The Leopard Man
5. Romance in a Minor Key
6. Hangmen Also Die
7. Seventh Victim
8. Agnes des Peches
9. Munchhausen
10. Song Lantern
1942:
PICTURE: Palm Beach Story
DIRECTOR: Ozu, There Was a Father
LEAD ACTOR: Chishu Ryu, There Was a Father
LEAD ACTRESS: Claudette Colbert, Palm Beach Story
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Laird Cregar, Black Swan
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Marie Lohr, Went the Day Well?
SHORT: Der Fuhrer's Face, I suppose, is a hard one to deny.
SCORE:Steiner, Casablanca
Plus bonus picks:
Cinematography: Ambersons (Cortez)
Script: Palm Beach Story
Editing/Sound: Cat People - superbly building atmosphere out of the most minimal resources. A feature of all those Lewton films...
1. Palm Beach Story
2. Went the Day Well
3. Aniki Bobo
4. There Was A Father
5. Cat People
6. Mrs. Miniver
7. In Which We Serve
8. To Be Or Not to Be
9. Magnificent Ambersons
10. The Road to Morocco
1941:
PICTURE: The Maltese Falcon
DIRECTOR: Mizoguchi, 47 Ronin
LEAD ACTOR: Welles, Kane
LEAD ACTRESS: Stanwyck, The Lady Eve
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Sydney Greenstreet
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: ?
SHORT: In the Sweet Pie and Pie
SCORE: Herrmann, Kane
Plus bonus picks:
Cinematography: Toland, Kane
Script: Huston, Maltese Falcon
Music/Sound: Kane - nice use of radio techniques, in a modern sound picture
1. Maltese Falcon
2. Ivan the Terrible, Part I
3. Citizen Kane
4. The Lady Eve
5. 47 Ronin
6. Sergeant York
7. Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Clan
8. Sullivan's Travels
9. Meet John Doe
10. Man Hunt
1940 Votes:
PICTURE: His Girl Friday
DIRECTOR: Hawks, His Girl Friday
LEAD ACTOR: James Stewart, Shop Around the Corner
LEAD ACTRESS: Rosalind Russell, His Girl Friday
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Basil Rathbone, Mark of Zorro
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Ida Lupino, They Drive by Night
SHORT: A Wild Hare
SCORE: Korngold, The Sea Hawk
Plus bonus picks:
Cinematography: Toland, in Grapes of Wrath
Script: His Girl Friday (Charles Lederer, from the play)
Documentary: London Can Take It - I need to mention it somewhere...
1. His Girl Friday
2. Shop Around the Corner
3. The Mortal Storm
4. Pinocchio
5. Fantasia
6. Philadelphia Story
7. The Bank Dick
8. Grapes of Wrath
9. Mark of Zorro
10. Travelling Actors
The Decade as a whole:
PICTURE: It's a Wonderful Life
DIRECTOR: Ozu, Late Spring
LEAD ACTOR: Jimmy Stewart, Wonderful Life
LEAD ACTRESS: Setsuko Hara, Late Spring
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Walter Huston, Sierra Madre
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Anna Magnani, Open City
SHORT: Spider and Tulip
SCORE: Prokofiev, Ivan the Terrible I
CINEMATOGRAPHY: 47 Ronin
Plus bonus picks::
Script: Late Spring
Sound: Citizen Kane
Documentary: Battle of San Pietro
Musical: Cabin in the Sky
Animated: Pinocchio
1. It's a Wonderful Life
2. Maltese Falcon
3. Late Spring
4. His Girl Friday
5. Ivan the Terrible I
6. The Big Sleep
7. Citizen Kane
8. Fort Apache
9. Third Man
10. Stray Dog
11. Germany Year Zero
12. Bicycle Thieves
13. The Lady Eve
14. Day of Wrath
15. Treasure of the Sierra Madre
16. To Have and Have Not
17. Dead of Night
18. The Shop Around the Corner
19. The 47 Ronin
20. I Walked With a Zombie
1949:
There are a lot of good films this year, but no contest at the top - Late Spring is one of the very short list of great films...
PICTURE: Late Spring
DIRECTOR: Ozu
LEAD ACTOR: Chishu Ryu
LEAD ACTRESS: Setsuko Hara
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Orson Welles, Third Man
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Haruko Sugimura
SHORT: Begone Dull Care, Norman McLaren
SCORE: Karas, Third Man
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Lasker, Third Man
Plus bonus picks::
Script: Late Spring
1. Late Spring
2. Third Man
3. Stray Dog
4. Jour de Fete
5. Le Plaisir
6. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
7. Orpheus
8. Battleground
9. Whiskey Galore
10. Kind Hearts and Coronets
1948:
PICTURE: Fort Apache
DIRECTOR: Rosselini, Germany Year Zero
LEAD ACTOR: Bogart, Sierra Madre
LEAD ACTRESS: Jean Arthur, Foreign Affair
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Walter Huston, Sierra Madre
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Jean Simmons, Hamlet
SHORT: Haredevil Hare
SCORE: Red Shoes
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Red Shoes
Plus bonus picks:
Script: Bicycle Thieves
1. Fort Apache
2. Germany Year Zero
3. Bicycle Thieves
4. Treasure of the Sierra Madre
5. Letter from an Unknown Woman
6. Hamlet
7. The Red Shoes
8. The Fallen Idol
9. Red River
10. Foreign Affair
1947:
PICTURE: Odd Man Out
DIRECTOR: Ozu, Record of a Tenement Gentleman
LEAD ACTOR: James Mason
LEAD ACTRESS: Kinuyo Tanaka, Love of Sumiko the Actress
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Kirk Douglas,Out of the Past
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Kathleen Ryan, Odd Man Out
SHORT: School for Postmen
SCORE: Webb, Out of the Past
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Krasker, Odd Man Out
Plus bonus picks::
Script: Out of the Past
1. Odd Man Out
2. Love of Sumiko the Actress
3. Spring River Flows East
4. Out of the Past
5. Record of a Tenement Gentleman
6. Quai de Orfevres
7. Lady from Shanghai
8. M. Verdoux
9. Dreams That Money Can Buy
10. Lured
1946:
PICTURE: It's a Wonderful Life
DIRECTOR: Capra
LEAD ACTOR: Jimmy Stewart
LEAD ACTRESS: Ingrid Bergman, Notorious
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Elisha Cook Jr., The Big Sleep
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Martha Vickers, The Big Sleep
SHORT: Can't vote for this one, I'm afraid
SCORE: Prokofiev
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Henri Alekan; La Belle et la Bête
Plus bonus picks:
Script: The Big Sleep
Music/Sound:
1. It's a Wonderful Life
2. The Big Sleep
3. Notorious
4. Paisan
5. Beauty and the Beast
6. Ivan Terrible II
7. My Darling Clementine
8. Bedlam
9. Murderers Among Us
10. Gilda
1945:
PICTURE: Dead of the Night
DIRECTOR: Rosselini, Open City
LEAD ACTOR: Boris Karloff, Body Snatcher
LEAD ACTRESS: Gene Tierney, Leave her to Heaven
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Michael Redgrave, Dead of Night
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Ana Magnani, Open City
SHORT: Battle of San Pietro
SCORE: Spellbound
Plus bonus picks:
Cinematography: Leave Her to Heaven
Script: Dead of Night
1. Dead of the Night
2. Open City
3. They Were Expendable
4. The Body Snatcher
5. Leave her to Heaven
6. A Walk in the Sun
7. The Southerner
8. The Clock
9. Children of Paradise
10. Isle of the Dead
1944:
PICTURE: Ivan the Terrible
DIRECTOR: Eisenstein
LEAD ACTOR: Nikolai Cherkasov
LEAD ACTRESS: Stanwyck, Double Indemnity
SUPPORTING ACTOR: William Demarest, Hail the Conquering Hero
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Ann Carter, Curse of the Cat People
SHORT: I guess Little Red Riding Rabbit
SCORE: Prokofiev
Plus bonus picks:
Cinematography: Meet Me in St. Louis (George Folsey - though it might be something of a combined award for photography and set design...)
Script: To Have and Have Not
Best Song: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
1. Ivan the Terrible
2. To Have and Have Not
3. Meet me in St. Louis
4. Double Indemnity
5. Hail the Conquering Hero
6. Miracle of Morgan Creek
7. The Woman in the Window
8. Henry V
9. Laura
10. Curse of the Cat People
1943:
PICTURE: Day of Wrath
DIRECTOR: Dreyer
LEAD ACTOR: Ferdinand Marian, Romance in a Minor Key
LEAD ACTRESS: Lisbeth Movin, Day of Wrath
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Charles Coburn, The More the Merrier
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Jean Brooks, Seventh Victim
SHORT: [here the source of the list comes into play: comment included]... Meshes of the Afternoon - a rather difficult choice though; this is (like Sam said) one of the all time greats - but I've seen Spider and Tulip, a beautiful little animated film from Japan. I will defer to the nominations, to resolve this difficulty.
...you'll note that Spider and Tulip, is my pick for the decade
SCORE: Webb, I Walked With a Zombie
Plus bonus picks:
Cinematography: Karl Anderson, Day of Wrath
Script: Cabin in the Sky, Joseph Shrank
Editing: Mark Robson, Zombie
Music/Sound: Cabin in the Sky again. I also lingered long over the actress categories - Ethel Waters in particular is awful close...
1. Day of Wrath
2. I Walked With a Zombie
3. Cabin in the Sky
4. The Leopard Man
5. Romance in a Minor Key
6. Hangmen Also Die
7. Seventh Victim
8. Agnes des Peches
9. Munchhausen
10. Song Lantern
1942:
PICTURE: Palm Beach Story
DIRECTOR: Ozu, There Was a Father
LEAD ACTOR: Chishu Ryu, There Was a Father
LEAD ACTRESS: Claudette Colbert, Palm Beach Story
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Laird Cregar, Black Swan
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Marie Lohr, Went the Day Well?
SHORT: Der Fuhrer's Face, I suppose, is a hard one to deny.
SCORE:Steiner, Casablanca
Plus bonus picks:
Cinematography: Ambersons (Cortez)
Script: Palm Beach Story
Editing/Sound: Cat People - superbly building atmosphere out of the most minimal resources. A feature of all those Lewton films...
1. Palm Beach Story
2. Went the Day Well
3. Aniki Bobo
4. There Was A Father
5. Cat People
6. Mrs. Miniver
7. In Which We Serve
8. To Be Or Not to Be
9. Magnificent Ambersons
10. The Road to Morocco
1941:
PICTURE: The Maltese Falcon
DIRECTOR: Mizoguchi, 47 Ronin
LEAD ACTOR: Welles, Kane
LEAD ACTRESS: Stanwyck, The Lady Eve
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Sydney Greenstreet
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: ?
SHORT: In the Sweet Pie and Pie
SCORE: Herrmann, Kane
Plus bonus picks:
Cinematography: Toland, Kane
Script: Huston, Maltese Falcon
Music/Sound: Kane - nice use of radio techniques, in a modern sound picture
1. Maltese Falcon
2. Ivan the Terrible, Part I
3. Citizen Kane
4. The Lady Eve
5. 47 Ronin
6. Sergeant York
7. Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Clan
8. Sullivan's Travels
9. Meet John Doe
10. Man Hunt
1940 Votes:
PICTURE: His Girl Friday
DIRECTOR: Hawks, His Girl Friday
LEAD ACTOR: James Stewart, Shop Around the Corner
LEAD ACTRESS: Rosalind Russell, His Girl Friday
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Basil Rathbone, Mark of Zorro
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Ida Lupino, They Drive by Night
SHORT: A Wild Hare
SCORE: Korngold, The Sea Hawk
Plus bonus picks:
Cinematography: Toland, in Grapes of Wrath
Script: His Girl Friday (Charles Lederer, from the play)
Documentary: London Can Take It - I need to mention it somewhere...
1. His Girl Friday
2. Shop Around the Corner
3. The Mortal Storm
4. Pinocchio
5. Fantasia
6. Philadelphia Story
7. The Bank Dick
8. Grapes of Wrath
9. Mark of Zorro
10. Travelling Actors
Friday, August 03, 2012
Random Tunage for Another Friday
Let us resume one of the rituals of the blogosphere, the Friday Music List - maybe even as a prelude to some actual movie blogging... With the results of the new Sight & Sound poll out, there is plenty to write about - those things always prove irresistible. I have been arguing about it a bit at Wonders in the Dark - defending Godard mostly, lately... it reminds me that it's been a while - 5 years since I posted a full Top X (100, at it happened) films... and I don't think I have ever posted a ranking of my favorite directors - I may have to address those oversights. Meanwhile - any temptation I might have to post my own Top 10 is going to have to wait - there is a very real chance it might be different by Monday - new print of Celine and Julie Go Boating is showing this weekend... I've seen it once - I am in awe of it and Rivette - seeing it again, might exalt it very far... I certainly am looking forward to it.
And so - random top ten - though first, another internet tradition - The Cat:
Thank you.
1. Wild Flag - Race Horse (damn! a new song!)
2. Terence Trent D'Arby - Wishing Well
3. Pylon - K
4. Mars Volta - Roulette Dares (The Haunt of)
5. The Flying Burrito Brothers - Do You Know HOw It Feels?
6. Young Marble Giants - Salad Days
7. Patti Smith - Seven Ways of Going
8. Fleet Foxes - Lorelai
9. Melvins - The Stupid Creep
10. Ian Dury and the Blockheads - Wake up and Make Love to Me
Can't avoid posting this - "Wishing Well" being one of those songs I only ever heard on TV, back when MTV had videos - and loved....
And - Wild Flag is a good choice here:
Have a great weekend, readers mine!
And so - random top ten - though first, another internet tradition - The Cat:
Thank you.
1. Wild Flag - Race Horse (damn! a new song!)
2. Terence Trent D'Arby - Wishing Well
3. Pylon - K
4. Mars Volta - Roulette Dares (The Haunt of)
5. The Flying Burrito Brothers - Do You Know HOw It Feels?
6. Young Marble Giants - Salad Days
7. Patti Smith - Seven Ways of Going
8. Fleet Foxes - Lorelai
9. Melvins - The Stupid Creep
10. Ian Dury and the Blockheads - Wake up and Make Love to Me
Can't avoid posting this - "Wishing Well" being one of those songs I only ever heard on TV, back when MTV had videos - and loved....
And - Wild Flag is a good choice here:
Have a great weekend, readers mine!
Monday, July 30, 2012
Chris Marker
From personal loss to artistic loss - Chris Marker has died. He was a very great filmmaker, one almost unique - the distillation of the essay film. Essay in content, exploring his subjects - and essayistic in form, trying on the technology, images, sounds, combinations, that make film. Film is montage - the blending of imagery, sound, words, signs - and he perfected it, within film, and beyond film, with his work with photography, video, computers... He was something.
And, you know - cats:
And, you know - cats:
Saturday, July 28, 2012
In Memory
The most recent lack of posting on this blog has sadder causes than usual. My father died, on the 13th. He had been having trouble breathing - maybe pneumonia, maybe something else - it started before the 4th, he got better for a week or so, then got worse again. He was old, 88 and a half, and I guess at that age you are vulnerable to things that don't seem much. He had been having heart problems this year, and we could see him wearing down - though it still came as a bit of a surprise. He had been quite healthy (for 88) up until this last winter - he drove, he got around on his own, he did things around the house, he still taught Sunday School - but this year the years did seem to start catching up with him.
Last summer we made it up to Canada, to visit his family. It was a good thing. It's a bit of a drive up there, and had been particularly hard to make the trip during the last few years of my mother's life. And as it turns out, in the year since that trip, my father and two of his brothers have died - so the timing was very good, as they got to see one another again.
I will miss him.
Last summer we made it up to Canada, to visit his family. It was a good thing. It's a bit of a drive up there, and had been particularly hard to make the trip during the last few years of my mother's life. And as it turns out, in the year since that trip, my father and two of his brothers have died - so the timing was very good, as they got to see one another again.
I will miss him.
Friday, July 13, 2012
Friday 13th Musical Interlude
I've been away, I am back - vacations always seem to make it hard to come up with any content for this blog. You would think otherwise, since I spent this one as much on the computer as ever - but that's how it goes. Anyway - I am back - and I think for today I shall keep it simple - yet another random ten:
1. Sonic Youth - Hey Joni
2. Jeff Beck - Blues De Luxe
3. G.O.N.G. - Inner Temple
4. Wilco - Shot in the Arm (live)
5. The Meters - Sophisticated Cissy
6. Of Montreal - Death of a Shade of Hue
7. Meat Puppets - Ice
8. Johnny Cash - Why Me Lord?
9. Pixies - Crackity Jones
10. Earth - Hell's Winter
But for video - we can celebrate the date a bit:
Pixies, doing No. 13 Baby seem right - I'm in a state...:
And Big Star:
That works. Stay cool, people.
1. Sonic Youth - Hey Joni
2. Jeff Beck - Blues De Luxe
3. G.O.N.G. - Inner Temple
4. Wilco - Shot in the Arm (live)
5. The Meters - Sophisticated Cissy
6. Of Montreal - Death of a Shade of Hue
7. Meat Puppets - Ice
8. Johnny Cash - Why Me Lord?
9. Pixies - Crackity Jones
10. Earth - Hell's Winter
But for video - we can celebrate the date a bit:
Pixies, doing No. 13 Baby seem right - I'm in a state...:
And Big Star:
That works. Stay cool, people.
Sunday, July 08, 2012
Halfway Through the Year - 2012
All right - I haven't done a very good job of keeping up with writing about films, but I've seen enough... rather unfortunate misadventure today - tried to see Beasts of the Southern Wild - the projector broke, so I ended up seeing To Rome With Love instead. That did not turn out well - I'm inclined to go back to seeing Woody Allen films every seven years... Anyway, that's not why I'm here - this is to sum up the Year So Far. So with no further ado - here is what I think - first, top 10 films released in the states so far in 2012:
1. Moonrise Kingdom - far and away... might be the best of the decade (though 2010 was an awful strong year)
2. The Kid With the Bike
3. This is Not a Film
4. Damsels in Distress
5. In Darkness
6. We Need to Talk About Kevin
7. The Deep Blue Sea
8. The Secret World of Arietty
9. Keyhole
10. Bernie
and - I'd do the best 10 made in 2012, but I don't think I have seen 10 films made this year yet. Specifically, 9:
1. Moonrise Kingdom
2. Bernie
3. The Five Year Engagement
4. Safety Not Guaranteed
5. Mirror Mirror
6. The Pirates in an Adventure with Scientists
7. Wanderlust
8. Dark Shadows
9. To Rome With Love
I know I haven't seen as many films new as some years, and I know I've seen a few of this years films multiple times.... but that's rather sad. I'd better do something about that.
Finally - with half a year gone, and the chance to see quite a few stragglers from last year - an updated list of the best of 2011 - with notes on when I saw them and where they came in at the beginning of the year, if they did...
1. Melancholia - #1 last year
2. A Separation (seen in 2012)
3. The Kid With the Bike (ditto)
4. This is Not a Film (ditto)
5. Meek's Cutoff - 3
6. Take Shelter - 4
7. Le Havre - 2 (seems like some meaningless shifting around these films...)
8. Damsels in Distress (released this year - though I think I might be underrating it - I enjoyed this as much as anything short of Moonrise Kingdom, this year and last year together.)
9. Martha Marcy May Marlene - 5
10. The Skin I Live In - 6
1. Moonrise Kingdom - far and away... might be the best of the decade (though 2010 was an awful strong year)
2. The Kid With the Bike
3. This is Not a Film
4. Damsels in Distress
5. In Darkness
6. We Need to Talk About Kevin
7. The Deep Blue Sea
8. The Secret World of Arietty
9. Keyhole
10. Bernie
and - I'd do the best 10 made in 2012, but I don't think I have seen 10 films made this year yet. Specifically, 9:
1. Moonrise Kingdom
2. Bernie
3. The Five Year Engagement
4. Safety Not Guaranteed
5. Mirror Mirror
6. The Pirates in an Adventure with Scientists
7. Wanderlust
8. Dark Shadows
9. To Rome With Love
I know I haven't seen as many films new as some years, and I know I've seen a few of this years films multiple times.... but that's rather sad. I'd better do something about that.
Finally - with half a year gone, and the chance to see quite a few stragglers from last year - an updated list of the best of 2011 - with notes on when I saw them and where they came in at the beginning of the year, if they did...
1. Melancholia - #1 last year
2. A Separation (seen in 2012)
3. The Kid With the Bike (ditto)
4. This is Not a Film (ditto)
5. Meek's Cutoff - 3
6. Take Shelter - 4
7. Le Havre - 2 (seems like some meaningless shifting around these films...)
8. Damsels in Distress (released this year - though I think I might be underrating it - I enjoyed this as much as anything short of Moonrise Kingdom, this year and last year together.)
9. Martha Marcy May Marlene - 5
10. The Skin I Live In - 6
Wednesday, July 04, 2012
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