Saturday, April 23, 2011

Hazel Dickens














Hazel Dickens died yesterday.  Her obituary was in the New York Times today.  I always notice the women who rate an obit because there are not as many as for men.  Dickens sang about the hard lives of the coal miners.  Her voice was more mournful than Loretta Lynn, her songs had a harder edge than Dolly Parton.  She sang in the movies Harlan County and Matewan.  You can hear her sing here: Fire in the Hole.  Her voice goes right through me.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Source Code

Science fiction about time travel trips me up.  It depends on the belief that someone can be in two places at the same time.  Source Code would have us believe that the main character played by Jake Gyllenhaal is not traveling through time, he is just living in an alternate reality in order to discover  the criminal intending to wreak havoc on a major metropolis.  He can go back to the last eight minutes of an explosion when everyone on a train is about to be killed, an infinite number of times.  Each time our hero learns a little more about a crime about to take place, and Gyllenhaal's delivery of the lines he must repeat over and over again is one of the pleasures of this film.  He is the not the only one whose acting buoys up a rather baffling premise.  There is lovely Vera Fermiga as a sympathetic military official, and Jeffrey Wright chewing the scenery as an evil scientist, and Michelle Monaghan looking winsome as the love interest.

Even though it left me scratching my head, I enjoyed the movie's well edited suspense.




Monday, April 4, 2011

my mother's eye is scratched

This morning my eye feels itchy, as if there is a very fine hair that if I could just remove, all would be perfect. The little orb would go back to lying in its perfect solution of fluid.  But this is an illusion.  No matter how much I scratch at or poke at or try to tug the sleepers from the corner of my eye, it still feels as if something infinitesimally small is trying to work itself free and not succeeding.

Earlier this week my mother suffered a scratch on her eye.  She  is being treated for macular degeneration with laser therapy to reduce the errant blood vessels that are blocking her macula, that centerpiece of the eye that keeps things in focus.  When she went home, she was in pain, and the pain increased, and her eye was swollen.   She phoned the doctor who had her come back to his office, and learned that her eye had been scratched.  "This sometimes happens" was the doctor's explanation.  (Wouldn't you like to throttle him?)

Am I feeling sympathy pains, or worrying that I will soon suffer the same eye disorder as my mother since it is genetic.  Or maybe is it  just a case of itchy eyes.


Friday, April 1, 2011

Le Quattro Volte

You don't need to know how to speak Italian to watch this Italian movie, and it has no subtitles.  The movie is not purely visual though the photography is quite wonderful.  It has an important soundtrack which consists of the sounds of men tamping down charcoal beds with shovels, goats bleating before being milked, a woman sweeping the floor in a church, a sheep dog barking, the final block being put into place in a mausoleum to enclose a casket.  The action moves from a forest where a goatherd tends to his flock, then to the man's house where he tends to a nasty cough with a potion poured out in a folded up magazine page.

The potion is very important to the man whose cough does not improve.   A town performs a passion play complete with a christ figure carrying the cross up a hill to join two other crosses already in place.

The camera is never too close to people, with the exception of the goatherd.  Most of the shots are long shots.  The goats are shot close up and we get to know them pretty well.  The mountains, the trees, the dog, and especially one very tall pine tree, these are our familiars by the end of the picture.  The picture begins and ends with smoke.  We learn how charcoal is made in an ancient practice with an architectural form worthy of Stonehenge.

I remember in the preview the title was explained-- something about how man lives "four times" -- as mineral, vegetable, animal, and thinking being.  We watch the coal, the pine tree, the baby goat, and the old shepherd progress from beginning to inevitable end, as smoke.