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Friday, February 15th, 2008
We're off to see them this evening, at the Yippie! Museum. Cool! A little vacation coming up; on Monday we're flying away to St. Thomas for a week. I'm going to try and stay away from computers while we're there, unless a work emergency intrudes; so not blogging. Also I think I will take a vacation from my music: not bring along an instrument or an iPod, and only listen to new sounds. Send me your address (by Sunday) and I will send you a postcard.  Hmm, no SLM for us this evening. We did not feel up to the journey into the city -- instead we had a very nice dinner at home and watched Time Bandits, which Ellen has never seen before. What a great film -- I think it is the best ... fantasy? movie -- I hesitate to call Time Bandits "fantasy" but I guess all the lesser movies I associate it with are in that genre.
posted evening of February 15th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, February 11th, 2008
The final pages of Blindness are very strong, I think everything that has been rough and disorganized in the novel is crystallizing here, coming into focus. (I have not gotten quite to the ending, though I think I will finish it tonight.) I opened the book to get some pull-quotes and realized that really everything starting from where I stopped yesterday shines with such clarity as to be difficult to exerpt. The scene in which they bury the neighbor of the girl with dark glasses; the wedding proposal of the one-eyed man; the church with the defaced artwork... Here: I have not yet quoted any passages featuring the dog of tears.
...It won't be long before we have outbreaks of epidemics, said the doctor again, nobody will escape, we have no defenses left, If it's not raining, it's blowing gales, said the woman, Not even that, the rain would at least quench our thirst, and the wind would blow away some of this stench. The dog of tears sniffs around restlessly, stops to investigate a particular heap of rubbish, perhaps there is a rare delicacy hidden underneath which it can no longer find, if it were alone it would not move an inch from this spot, but the woman who wept has already walked on, and it is his duty to follow her, one never knows when one might have to dry more tears. Well ok, and also the church -- this really seems to me like a little masterpiece, a visual impression worthy of Buñuel:
She raised her head to the slender pillars, to the high vaults, to confirm the security and stability of her blood circulation, then she said, I am feeling fine, but at that very moment she thought she had gone mad or that the lifting of the vertigo had given her hallucinations, it could not be true what her eyes revealed, that man nailed to the cross with a white bandage covering his eyes, and next to him a woman, her heart pierced by seven swords and her eyes also covered with a white bandage, and it was not only that man and that woman who were in that condition, all the images in the church had their eyes covered, statues with a white cloth tied around the head, paintings with a thick brushstroke of white paint, and there was a woman teaching her daughter how to read and both had their eyes covered, and a man with an open book on which a little child was sitting, and both had their eyes covered, and another man, his body spiked with arrows, and he had his eyes covered, and a woman with a lit lamp, and she had her eyes covered, and a man with wounds on his hands and feet and his chest, and he had his eyes covered, and another man with a lion, and both had their eyes covered, and another man with an eagle, and both had their eyes covered, and another man with a spear standing over a fallen man with horns and cloven feet, and both had their eyes covered, and another man carrying a set of scales, and he had his eyes covered, and an old bald man holding a white lily, and he had his eyes covered, and another old man leaning on an unsheathed sword, and he had his eyes covered, and a woman with a dove, and both had their eyes covered, and a man with two ravens, and all three had their eyes covered, there was only one woman who did not have her eyes covered, because she carried her gouged-out eyes on a silver tray.
 Update: the woman carrying her gouged-out eyes on a silver tray is Saint Lucy, the patron saint of the blind.
posted evening of February 11th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, January 4th, 2008
So who remembered that at the beginning of Peter Pan, before Peter ever comes and takes the children to visit Never-Never Land, he existed as a story that Wendy told to her brothers? That part of the story had totally vanished from my memory and from Ellen's. (Other things I did not remember include the in-your-face racism and sexism, pretty hard to miss -- I guess it's been a long time since I watched this.)
posted evening of January 4th, 2008: 2 responses
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Tuesday, January first, 2008
At the matinée today we watched The Water Horse and greatly enjoyed it. But it had this problem: nothing about it was original. The characters were all stock characters, the plot was such that you knew very well at every moment what would be happening in the next minute. The shots all had a very familiar feeling to them. What made it fun and enjoyable to watch (besides the skill and talent with which it was assembled, which were considerable), was sitting next to Sylvia and watching her take it all in. That same thing has saved worse movies for me. Like some of the corny, manipulative film tricks have worn off for me, but I can still experience the reaction to them at second hand. We saw previews for a couple of films that looked just hilarious, one about an adventure writer who is an agoraphobe until she is called on by a young fan whose island paradise is invaded by pirates, and her main character comes to life and helps her save the day -- so many confused bits of cheese pasted together -- and one about an American Girl (tm) doll who comes to life and seeks employment in the misogynistic world of mid-20th-Century journalism, if I've got that straight.
posted evening of January first, 2008: Respond
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Friday, December 28th, 2007
So I'm watching Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and thinking "Hm, all this shooting sure is getting confusing" and wander off. I bet there's a soundtrack record, now that'd be something to listen to. Worked out one of the songs (possibly the theme?) on fiddle, it sounds pretty good as a short melody and some nice variations as well.
posted evening of December 28th, 2007: Respond
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Tuesday, December 25th, 2007
The rather silly Pied Piper of Hamelin video, with rhyming dialogue, was made worthwhile by the lovely actors and by Sylvia's observation that "If this were a play, Emma [the stage rat from Moominsummer Madness] would say 'It's all wrong.'"
posted evening of December 25th, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, December 22nd, 2007
Sylvia is over at a friend's for the night; Ellen and I went out to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (which I was thinking, it would be funny if the title were "Belle et le Papillon" -- but it's not, so y'know, ignore). Wow: that was a really good movie. For the first twenty minutes or so I was thinking it was going to be a drag and kind of tiring to sit through; but somewhere along in there I got pulled strongly into M. Bauby's story and once I was in it it did not lose me. I was identifying his experiences at the very beginning of the movie with my own experience coming out of a coma over the course of several days when I was 12 years old, after an auto accident -- it was nice to have something to connect it to, and I thought based on my memory of that time, that Schnabel did a pretty good job of communicating the confusion of it. (Except in retrospect, I think it would be truer to my own experience if his internal voice were not so quickly lucid.) But I didn't want that to be the whole movie, it didn't seem like enough. Well turns out that's not the whole movie, there is plenty of meat in there to fill up the time.
posted evening of December 22nd, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, December 15th, 2007
Another evening, another movie -- tonight we watched the first act of The Magic Flute, and were pretty pleased with it all in all. My experience with Bergman has been pretty mixed; I liked this a lot. It had the beautiful photography and lacked the slowness and storyless-ness that has turned me off to some of his movies. And it presented the opera in a way that allowed me, who am not much good at enjoying opera, to really dig it -- I especially liked the reaction shots of the audience. Sylvia was into it too, except for the part with Papageno and Pamina singing about the wonderfulness of love, which she found boring. ...Idly wondering whether Bergman's films had much influence on the creative process of Monty Python. There were a number shots in this film that made me think of The Holy Grail. The dragon at the beginning could easily have been a Gilliam design. Both movies came out in the same year so I guess there isn't much of a possibility of direct influence one way or the other; but it seems to me like they could be coming from similar places stylistically. And if this were so I would tend to think of Bergman as the source and Python as the derivative since Bergman had been around for a lot longer at that point -- or I guess it's also possible that the source was some third party from which both The Magic Flute and The Holy Grail are derivatives -- but the similarities were striking enough to make me want to think there is a closer point of connection.  (Note: if you are watching this movie with young kids, there are one or two scenes in Act II that you will want to skip over.)
posted evening of December 15th, 2007: Respond
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Thursday, December 13th, 2007
Tonight's family movie was Pippi Longstocking, poorly dubbed into English, a Hannukah gift from Sylvia's aunt Miriam, whose favorite movie it was in her youth. It is a (mostly) beautiful film visually which looks like it was made on a shoestring budget. The colors were enough to blow my mind, and to make me think of the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie. (Also the candy-store scene helped bring that association to mind.) It was hard to tell how well anybody was acting (besides Nilsson, who very obviously stole the show) because of the horrendous dubbing -- I would be trying to focus on an actor's face and see what they were doing when all of a sudden somebody else would start speaking. I haven't watched a dubbed movie in a really long time,* I don't think I've ever noticed this kind of thing before; I wonder whether this particular dubbing is just done really poorly or if this is a common attribute of dubbed films which I have not been perceptive enough to pick up on in the past. Here is a 7-minute clip of Pippi and her friends and her father, from near the end of the movie, in Swedish. One thing I get from that clip that I did not really get from the dubbed movie, is that the girl playing Annika seems to have a real gift for acting -- I see from IMDB that she did not play any other roles after this, which is a shame.
*Oh wait no, that's wrong; I watched Lamorisse's White Mane not long ago, dubbed into English, and did not have this complaint. But there was also very little dialog in that movie: most of the dubbing was of narration, where it's not a problem in this way.
posted evening of December 13th, 2007: 2 responses
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Monday, December 10th, 2007
The first time I watched this movie, I thought it was the best Almodóvar film I had seen. But after a couple of viewings, I am revising that -- I love the film but not as much as All About My Mother or Volver. (It has things in common with both of those films.) What I really like about the movie is the layering of different levels of meta-story -- this layering is more complex than in All About My Mother but not, I think, ultimately as successful. I mean the first time I watched it, the story told by Fr. Manolo at the end just blew me away. But on the second or third time, that seems a little forced. And the identity confusion is great, but again: it is more complicated than in Volver, but when you're watching a second or third time so you have the elements of the story more firmly in mind, you just don't (I just don't) buy that Angel can trick Enrique into thinking he's Ignacio, or that Enrique won't confront him once he figures it out; and no reason is given for Angel to turn on Manolo. Still, an excellent movie -- these are very minor quibbles.
posted afternoon of December 10th, 2007: Respond
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