Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild is not realistic. It is most dreamlike, except when real things happen. One of these things is when the six year old girl named Hushpuppy sets the kitchen on fire. Until then, she had been careful enough to take out her flame proof helmet from her freezer in order to start the gas flame with a blow torch. But something bothered her enough to make her take a stand which involved burning her house down. Before that, she was just trying to cook herself some dinner.

This is just one of the scenes in the movie leaving the audience an emotional mess. You are torn between thinking logically when will an adult be a responsible parent to when will this brave little girl get to stop being seen as a child so that she can ditch the useless grown ups in her life. The logic is there, but it gets half way up your brain and then stops because logic is not operating in this movie.

Young children who are abandoned in one way or another must learn to take care of themselves. In this movie they learn not to feel sorry for themselves.

Among some of the questions I found myself asking were these. How can a boat made out of a pickup truck bed float? How did this girl of six learn to say her lines with such force and clarity that I went home reciting them in my own head?


If this is a reverie on children and people left behind to live in poverty, it has pretty brilliant visuals for the most part. For one thing it creates a place outside of the grid. The people here are independent, feral almost. They are the wild in the Southern wild. The beasts (that remind me a little of Maurice Sendak's in Where the Wild Things Are) come to claim the land that has been ruined by the hurricane. People can't live there anymore. As the actor who plays Wink, Hushpuppy's father, says:

"He's resilient," Henry said, explaining why audiences are so drawn to Wink. "He's a resilient person, and people love resilience -- and people love people that stand behind and stand for things that they love more than anything in the world. And this group of people (in 'Beasts'), they're standing behind the things they love, the people they love, their culture their beliefs that they won't leave under the worst circumstances in the world. These people won't abandon the things they love more than anything in life."

"The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece, the entire universe will get busted."

Still, it was hard watching Hushpuppy who never does anything wrong get beaten and abandoned by her father, and also watching a bunch of adults get sloppy drunk over and over again as if that is the only way to celebrate.

Lil Buck

Lil Buck: Aria on Nowness.com.

I love the editing of this movie, how movement in one scene is picked up in a completely different location and continued.

Sleepwalk with Me

The stand up comedian has a pretty bad act. He tends bar, and fills in when he’s needed, but he gets bad feedback. People don’t like his act.

What the stand up comedian has is a pretty great girlfriend. She is helpful, cheerful, undemanding, understanding, all the things we want in a really great friend, let alone lover and longstanding live in girlfriend.

Everything starts to change when the comedian’s sister gets married after living with her boyfriend for a much shorter time than the comedian has been living with his exemplary girlfriend.

Lauren Ambrose, who plays Abby, the comedian's girlfriend

People start to ask questions. When are you getting married? What’s the plan? These questions are sort of rude but somehow not unexpected, and the comedian realizes that he does not want to get married.

This leads to a rather startling turn of events, most of which involve his sleep walking. He begins to imagine that wild animals are going to kill him, or that he is under the gun, or that he is at the heart of the end of the world. His sleepwalking is not just a benign and humorous disruption. It results in serious injury and drastic emergency treatment.

I have never seen a movie like this, but then, when has This American Life ever been like any other entertainment that has grabbed you by the lapels and said sit down and listen to this? Ira Glass and Mike Birbiglia have created a unique type of movie, one that takes the audio of the stories told on This American Life and added brilliant actors like Lauren Ambrose.

I hope that many many people will see it. It is pretty great. In the process of the movie, the comedian learns what to write about in his act, and people end up really liking it. It is very funny.

Bicycling

This morning I decided to fix up my bike. It needed air in the tires, a mirror, and new lights. I thought of getting different handle bar wraps, but didn't. The book, Just Ride, a Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike by Grant Petersen convinced me that my three speed was a good thing, nothing to be sneered at by the men in bicycle pants and streamlined helmets whizzing past me on the bike paths. There is an inspired passage in the book about things that are worn out. I quote it here at length.

Beausage (byoo-sidj)

In 1992 or so, at the Interbike Trade Show in Las Vegas,there was a 1952 Bianchi that had been ridden by Fausto Coppi, a famous racer from the 40s and 50s. The bar tape was tattered, 20 percent of the paint was worn away, and the leather saddle was well worn and looked like it had been ridden by a guy who didn't want a new saddle because he hadn't completely worn out the old one. It was the best-looking bike at the show, and the only one with beausage.

Beausage is kind of like patina, but not exactly. Patina is environmental degradation of metal, or something hard, at least. Nobody has to use the Statue of Liberty for it to acquire patina. Beausage, though, comes only through use. It's not the same as worn out, though. Willie Nelson's guitar, Trigger, straddles the fence between beausage and just worn out.

Willie Nelson's guitar

You probably own a hatchet, chair, knife, guitar, camera, baseball glove, typewriter, or pair of blue jeans that have been well worn and look better for it.

Beausage can't happen to just anything. The object has to be well made with good durable materials in the first place, so that use makes it beautiful without making it dysfunctional. A plastic storage box that gets sunburnt and brittle won't acquire beausage.

Bikes should have beausage.

--Grant Petersen

So that's what my bike has, beausage.

Just saw Premium Rush with Joseph Gordon Levitt.  He plays a free spirited messenger in Manhattan who must deliver a package quickly from Columbia University on the upper west side to Chinatown on the lower east side. The package has different meanings to three different people, a compulsive gambling cop, a worried mother, and a Chinese gambling house matron in Chinatown where the package is supposed to end up.   The movie is full of chase scenes that take place on bicycle.  There is joy in the riding.  Once you learn how to ride a bike as a kid, bicycling comes with a liberating spirit.   That feeling of childhood delight is what I came home with when the lights went down.

Some of the most amazing stunts were done by Danny Macaskill whose relationship with gravity is nebulous. 

I have moved to Tumblr for the summer

http://pmarkert.tumblr.com/

The blog I keep here is getting sort of frustrating.  Perhaps I am not keeping up with how to do things, but the last few times I tried to post, it didn't work exactly.  Anyone who reads my blog thank you!
Please join me at pmarkert.tumblr.com

It is a much simpler experience there.

George Stoney, a man who made a difference

George Stoney was 96 when he died this summer but he was still teaching at NYU in the spring. I think of his life as exemplary. New York Times

I audited his documentary film course at NYU. He said little during class, preferring to have visitors show what they were working on and take credit for their work directly in the viewing. Visitors included D. A. Pennebaker, director of Don't Look Back, the seminal Bob Dylan documentary, and many of his former students including Jim Brown, who had gone on to create important films.

Beginning in his twenties, Stoney worked on issues of social justice. He was with Gunnar Myrdal in the 1930s when Myrdal was conducting research on the "race" question which would grow into the civil rights movement. Stoney was on hand for the filming of the The Plow that Broke the Plains, a bit of propaganda to prevent further dust bowls in the 1930s. He studied the labor movement, midwives, and produced the movie about the Weavers, Wasn't that a Time.

One of my favorite movies he made is How the Myth Was Made, a probing, not irreverent look at Flaherty's Man of Aran. Flaherty is credited with beginning ethnographic documentaries (starting with Nanook of the North). Stoney went back to the places where the Man of Aran was made along the rugged coast of Ireland, and examined what was real and what was invented for the service of the story of these hardscrabble fishing farmers. This was a question Stoney brought up in class. What did the filmmaker owe to his subject? Here he is talking about the ethics of documentaries, and re-enactments, just three years ago.



I feel lucky to have known such a humble but great man.

Iron Lady

Meryl Streep is a brilliant voice actress. Consider the range of characters she has played, a Polish emigrant, a California actress with a drug problem, Karen von Blixen, Silkwood, French Lieutenant's Woman, an Irish peasant, an Australian mother, a fashion editor, and on and on. In this movie, she is Margaret Thatcher, that woman with the big hair and the steely voice. Streep's natural voice is there, in the center of an impersonation which has wrapped itself in the middle class accent of a British prime minister both reviled and adored by millions.

The writing of the screenplay centers on Thatcher's mental confusion, her grieving over the loss of her husband, Dennis, played brilliantly by Jim Broadbent. Streep and Broadbent together are very companionable. It looks as if they are having a good time together, as if they are truly married, truly crazy about each other, and driving each other crazy too.

The best scene in the movie takes place in a doctor's office when Thatcher is asked how she feels. She answers that people worry too much about feelings and not enough about ideas which lead to action and action leads to habit which forms character. Ask me what I think she demands. I feel fine.

Streep makes you forget about anything but the ideas being expressed at that moment. There is command in her voice, and something else, an embodiment of another person in another time.

The Fourth of July in Narrowsburg

It made the New York Times, the conflict between fireworks and fledgling eagles living on the Delaware River.


The parade went on as usual. At three o'clock you could hear the fire engines making their way down Main Street. The bridge was closed while the parade passed through. The eagles never knew they had it so good. No fireworks tonight. Just stars I hope.

Public Speaking, a conversation with Fran Lebowitz (2010)

Fran Lebowitz is a smart woman. She is known for being judgmental, witty, and for not producing too much writing. The two books that she did produce over thirty years ago are still in print. She refers to her writer's block as "writer's blockade." But her mouth makes up for what her pen fails to produce. It moves at full speed, and speaks with great feeling about among other things how an important, discerning audience for sophisticated culture was lost with the AIDS epidemic.

Martin Scorsese directed this film for HBO. He used Nino Rota music familiar to me from Fellini movies which provides a gentle comic background. Also to be heard is a bit of soundtrack from his own movie, Taxi Driver, when Lebowitz is seen driving her oversized car, the same model as the old yellow cabs, through Manhattan. Sometimes you can see Scorsese shaking with laughter as Lebowitz answers questions posed by a man sitting across from her in a restaurant, but who is never identified.

Especially telling are two clips from 1960s era William F. Buckley's debates, one with James Baldwin, the other with Gore Vidal, which display Buckley's vicious prejudices. Lebowitz never comments on them, though she does describe her first seduction into the intellectual life as watching James Baldwin talk, but the theme of homophobia and its damage run throughout the film. She clearly not only relates, she identifies as a person whose outsider status made her who she is, a woman worth listening to.

Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron has died.  This took me by surprise.  Last summer,the film club I advise had been trying to get her to come to our school and give an assembly.  It seemed only right at an all girls school to  have a woman director of stature come in.  We had heard nothing back from her all last summer.  We heard nothing during the fall during our follow up requests.  Finally we got someone else to come, a male filmmaker who was known for his action movies, a screenwriter and director whose new project was a heist film involving young bicycle messengers in Manhattan. It stars David Gordon Levitt.

Just as we were confirming that David Koepp, director of Premium Rush, could come, we heard back from Ephron.  It was November, around the time of Thanksgiving.  She said, was the date still open.  Or how about the club just come over to her house, which we did.

During the course of our  conversation, we learned that to write screenplays for movies, first you should learn something about life, and journalism is not a bad way to begin. She learned how to write a script  by typing out William Goldman's script for All the President's Men.  She and her then husband Carl Bernstein were trying to improve it because they were not quite happy with it.  Since she could type, she was delegated the role of creating the new typescript which entailed typing the old one.

Not a bad way to learn to write.

Ephron said that she knew someone who retyped all of Moby Dick he was so taken with it, and wanted to own the words of the great Melville.

So Ephron gave credit to William Goldman as the first screenwriter she learned from because she typed his screenplay.

She also said that her favorite movie was Casablanca.

When asked what type of cinematographer she preferred, she said that she had no use for cinematographers who use lots of helicopters to get the action shots.  She needed a cameraman who could make a middle aged woman not look like she needed a face lift.  The film club had coincidentally that same day attended the assembly with David Koepp who showed a preview of his new movie with David Gordon Levitt.  I think at least one helicopter was involved, and there were no middle aged women.

I love this clip of Ephron discussing the virtues of Meryl Streep's acting when Streep was being honored by the American Film Institute. Streep benefited greatly from Ephron's screenplays. So did countless others.

The Sky Is Pink, a short movie by Josh Fox

As we pack our bags to move to the upper Delaware River for several months, New York's Governor Cuomo is preparing to allow fracking in some distressed economic counties where there are deep seams of natural gas. I wish there were a cleaner way to satisfy our insatiable appetite for energy. Fracking transforms rural lands into industrial zones, and has been known to contaminate the drinking water of those who have signed leases with the companies engaged in the drilling.

Josh Fox has been fighting fracking with his films, most notably Gasland. Here is the latest.

THE SKY IS PINK from JFOX on Vimeo.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

I think that the reason this movie works so well is that the cast is pitch perfect. Maggie Smith is the least of them. Tom Wilkinson once again charms with his minimalist approach to acting. Judi Dench is radiant in her simple costumes and short white hair. Bill Nighy underplays as well. Imagine that we really could retire to a more joyful, spiritually rewarding place that serves delicious food. Wouldn't we all want to go there? AARP, please start working on this now. A discount residential hotel in a beautiful foreign country that sees the elderly as a business opportunity, not as unwanted castoffs.

Valerie Mendelson painting to be paired with my poem this weekend at a group show entitled "The Image and the Word" sponsored by the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.

The exhibition takes place from May 26-June 17 at Westbeth Gallery, 55 Bethune Street (between Jane & W. 12th Streets).
Gallery hours are Thursday - Sunday 1-6 PM.


Click on link for details or read below:

The painting and my poem were posted on this blog on March 23, 2010.

Thanks, Valerie, for including my work with yours at the group show.

The Avengers

Much as I love Robert Downey's sense of humor, and Scarlett Johansens' ability to look sexy while beating the tar out of villains, and I also was finally able to understand how Thor's hammer actually could be a secret weapon, I have a problem with action movies that treat Grand Central Station and the Chrysler Building as targets for giant snakey lizards bent on destroying them. Because eventually they do. Hey. I live here. Don't do that. It makes me sad, and anxious.

Bring back the Ghostbusters. You see, I am not mature enough to handle the fantasy behind the big battle royal when it comes to my home town.

First Position



Ballet competition gives this movie its story. The question is who will win, who will not? As a result, the ending is manipulative and feels more like Rocky than it should.
Art and athletics sometimes do overlap, as in ice dancing, gymnastics, even high diving. So it is not as if the narrative is facile. It is just a little less satisfying to me, a devoted ballet goer for many years, to see the photography of the choreography chopped up, as if we would not be interested in seeing a whole dance performed well, with the dancer's whole body in view the whole time.

But this is really quibbling. The movie features some winning personalities, beginning with Aran Bell, an eleven year old boy whose father is in the navy which means that the family travels from place to place. Aran becomes friends with an Israeli dancer, Gaya Bommer Yemini. This adds an unexpected development to the story line, that people who are going through the same ordeal as you can provide even more meaningful support than your parents and teachers.

The parents and teachers presented are a mix of hard edged Tiger moms and soft hearted adopters of war refugees. The structure follows that used in Spellbound, the documentary film about spelling bee contestants. We follow along with five or six families, getting to know them, then having our hearts in our throats as one after the other is eliminated. I like it best when the film veers away from the grisly competitive edge at the center. Mostly this movie does that. In Spellbound, the movie presented families whose outsider status is overcome with education. In First Position, when the movie concentrates on the dancers' inner ambition, and perseverance, it breaks through and wins over any non ballet fan.

Valerie Mendelson has painted my portrait. We spent a few sunny hours on the roof while she and I talked and she worked in oils. I am very grateful to her for this. I like the picture. It shows a certain gaze I think that is true to me.

Tom Cruise's Hair

Went to see Ghost Protocol in order not to have to think.  Tom Cruise has very good hair.  He looks pretty threatening in his hooded sweatshirt.  Something about the way the hood shadows his face makes it a sinister costume. Also you can't see his hair. Which is always perfect.

Cruise seems to take himself very seriously.  As I was watching the opening scene of a prison breakout in Russia, I kept thinking of those old Mad magazine parodies of action movies where people getting bonked would have stars float up above their heads.  The whole first half hour felt like a Mad magazine parody, and then slowly it settled down into something more resembling a conventional spy thriller.  When Jeremy Renner and Tom Wilkinson entered the scene, I breathed a sigh of relief because these two actors have nothing to prove.  They are simply good at what they do.

Paula Patton, where did she come from? The director has her take a long time getting changed in the car when she and Cruise are making their getaway.  It is not clear if she can act or not, but she had a more substantive role in Precious.  A token girl spy with a beautiful body, she is sort of the new Hallie Barry.

Nanni Moretti

from Palombella Rossa

Nanni Moretti is sometimes compared to Woody Allen.  He writes, directs, and often appears as a major character in his films.  Though his tone is humorous, Moretti considers politics, life and death, the future of cinema, and other less cursory things that make you not laugh so much as think very hard afterward about you just saw.

Otherwise, I don't think that the comparison between the two men is just.  Moretti is very athletic, for instance.  In his last movie, Habeas Papem, he plays a psychiatrist who coaches a team of cardinals in the Vatican in volleyball.  Moretti is quite capable of instructing how to spike the ball.  He is lean, and tall, and coordinated.  

Still, one of the first Moretti films I saw, Palombella Rossa, was about two things: communism and water polo. Moretti was the lead, and he spent most of the film dressed in one of those water polo helmets that are inherently funny to look at.   He was on the national Italian team when he was in his twenties, and was obviously very good at it.

The night I saw him in person, after the screening of Il Caimano (thanks to IFC which is running a retrospective of his work), he spoke with a translator about why he made the movie.  The movie is about a movie producer who up until a woman hands him a screenplay,  has only made grade B movies that are strictly genre pieces and sort of laughable, but cult hits.  The new screenplay is an open critique of Berlusconi's regime,  a very serious movie,  that shows how he has stripped Italy of its democracy and put himself above the law.

Moretti said that he wanted to show the Italian people what they were used to seeing but because they were so used to seeing it, it had lost all sense of its danger.  He wanted to show the dangerous side of Berlusconi.  He avoided  the bits about Berlusconi's cosmetic surgery and his fascination with young women.  The real danger was in how he subverted democracy by outwitting the judiciary who had prosecuted him for financial fraud and conflict of interest.

After Moretti spoke at length about the making of the movie about Berlusconi, through a charming translator who was able to keep up with his spirited and quick witted commentary in Italian, the director wanted to show us two minutes from an earlier film, the film about water polo and communism.  The reason was long in being explained.  The scene included an old friend of Moretti who had been cast as one o f the water polo players. In the scene, the coach wanted the slender, even slight of build teammate to act as point  guard to a big burly Hungarian.  At this point, the dialogue called for the man to object simply by saying "I am scared."

Which the actor/friend did.  But Moretti insisted on his saying the line twenty six more times, taking another two full minutes to do it, goading him on all the while.  The man is still playing water polo, Moretti explained, but I am no longer his friend.  He never spoke to me again after that. 

The point of the story was to demonstrate how obsessive he is as a director to be sure that everything is just right.  Each take that the young man made was better than the next, even though the first one was perfectly good.  I wonder where that man is now, and if it is true that they are no longer friends.

Monsieur Lazhar

The main character of this movie is a teacher who replaces mid-year a teacher who has died by her own hand.   Not only was the students' original teacher a suicide, but she killed herself in the classroom during recess when the door was locked, leaving a lone student sent to deliver milk the task of seeing her body swinging from a rope.

This sordid fact and horrific image leave a huge task for the next teacher.  His name and his origin are not of Montreal, Canada; Bachir Lazhar comes from Algeria.  He brings with him high expectations for the students, and an old school style that the students are not used to.

Equally alienating for Monsieur Lazhar is the compartmentalization of grief and its exclusive assignment for treatment to the psychologist.  Lazhar witnesses the students trying to cope with their confusion and messy feelings toward their dead teacher.  His instinct is to help them through, but the administration and the psychologist shut him out of the process.

  This movie touches the viewer very simply with the steps the students and the teacher take to work with each other.  In the course of the film, two students especially benefit from Lazhar's work.  Alice with her large eyes and plump mouth has also seen the corpse of her teacher, and must struggle largely alone at home since her mother works as a pilot and is often away.  Alice understands quickly the benefit of having Lazhar, with his strange yet demanding manners, as her teacher's replacement.  Their relationship forms the core of the story and shows how teachers and students learn from each other when there is mutual respect.

Sophie Nelisse plays Alice

Simon, the boy doomed to deliver milk to the locked classroom (how haunting that image is, of the small square boxes of milk spilled on the floor) is angry and upset and unjustly accused of bearing some responsibility for the teacher's death.  Lazhar breaks through to him quietly and surely. The filming is gently paced.

I wonder what school psychologists think of this film.
Its treatment of loss and how untrained people are capable of helping each other through trauma makes a plea for less expertise and more humanism.

Super Moon

More here

Brooklyn Botanical Gardens

In Brooklyn April 14, the nature and human nature were on display.

 

so much green

 

 

Pirates

What a delight it was to see this witty movie today. It combines the science of Charles Darwin, the hegemony of Queen Victoria, and
the silliness of Pirate stereotypes. The Aardman studio claymation characters have always been finely textured. I think of Gromit's eyebrows rising up and down in an actorly way.

Now that the figures are digitally enhanced, the Pirate Captain's beard
is especially sumptuous. It is even capable of hiding a dodo bird in its thick curls.

Anyone who thinks that this movie is strictly for children is going to miss the wit of a pirate asking, when facing Darwin and his
trained monkey, "Are you two related?"

Le gamin au velo (The kid with a bike)

THE KID WITH A BIKE (Le gamin au vélo) movie... by MoviesCentralgr
I was leery of seeing another Dardennes brothers' movie since their  specialty is realistic portrayals of parents who don't know how to take care of children so they screw them up mercilessly.

The kid (Cyril played by Thomas Doret) with a bike is one of those.  But this time, the kid is eleven, and has a deep bond with his bike, which means that he can ride off his aggressive frustration at being abandoned. Cyril can make his bike heel like a dog, and rear like a horse.  The bike has a life of its own, and is his family, until he meets Samantha (played by Claire de France), a hair stylist who happens to be in a medical clinic at the moment Cyril is trying to escape from the authorities.  He hangs onto her and unlike all the other adults in his life, she does not shake him off.

This is the beginning of a complex relationship which has a clear eyed poignancy unusual in movies.  We cannot look away when Cyril falls under the spell of an older boy whose motives are unclear at first.  We only know that it will end badly.  But surprisingly, this movie does not end as badly as we suspect.  Every word of the screenplay is necessary, and every action of the boy digs into us with visceral urgency.  This is an unforgettable movie.

Windows

Windows Series

Paul Taylor

Paul Taylor's new dance, "The Uncommitted" has two distinct parts. First there is a series of solos where the single performer is led in by a group and then abandoned. These solo pieces seem to focus on submitting to pain and suffering, rising above it, facing it alone. Then come a series of couplings where no two people can stay together even when compelled to do so. There are ensemble pieces where dancers peel away one at a time, leaving a sense of loneliness.

But Taylor's dances are not in one tone. The first night I went to see his company at Lincoln Center, the program began with Cloven Kingdom, a comical piece with men performing many animal type movements in tuxedos that made my neighbor in the audience, a boy of five or so, giggle contagiously.

Following Cloven Kingdom was the Uncommitted, and then Beloved Renegade. This was like watching children in the playground, followed by young adults on social media, and then, a high mass in honor of Walt Whitman. In an interview, Taylor once explained that dance can illustrate the human condition which has both light and dark, and he puts together the ugly with the pretty.

What I love about Esplanade, one of his most ebullient pieces, is the exuberance, the spirit of play, and the sheer joy of it. There is a lot of running in it, not chasing, or racing, just running. There is not a single dance movement in it, just normal human movements that we all have done. Paul Taylor includes a child's athleticism in his dances, that sense of I can do this, and this, and then watch me do this. Even when the dances are dark and somber, a child of five can get it. As a writer, I love dance because there are no words, and it is visually wonderful to watch the human body express what it is to be human.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

I love Ewan McGregor, and Emily Blunt plays his leading lady with charm and grace. The whole movie is charming, but somehow too insistently a romance with swelling music telling us how to feel. Sometimes the director lets us figure out things for ourselves, but mostly he is forcing himself on us. He insists that the crowd be pleased. Of course we are pleased at the Scottish landscape and rivers, at the Yemeni desert coming to life with transplanted farmed fish, and the adults behaving graciously in the face of absurdity.

Thinking about my father, and how much he loved this song

Tree of Life

I don't need to know what is going on. I understand that this movie is a meditation on life, or even a form of prayer, with many probing questions. "If you aren't good, why should I be?" being the most touching and truthful.

The movie uses many images of boiling clouds, boiling lava, boiling seas, like a National Geographic special without the obvious statements of the voiceover narrator.

It is when the two paths are described-- grace vs nature-- that it seems debatable. Or did the word "nature" imply "human nature"? After watching so many scenes of trees, plants, mountains, skies, sun spots, eclipses, etc., you sort of assume the subject of the movie is more sweeping than just human nature.

Brad Pitt is superb.

He plays a frustrated musician whose engineering patents don't get approved. His bitterness is palpable, along with his confused and confusing way of demonstrating his love for his children by alternately baiting and berating them.

I love the way Malick can tell a story when he wants to with economy and grace, for instance with young Jack watching the argument of his neighbors through the window. The boy actor McCracken is also superb. You can tell he doesn't want to witness the meltdown of his friend's parents, but he must. It informs his understanding of his own parents. None of this is said. We watch him watch,and understand.

Malick also loves shooting at dusk just as the sunlight is leaking out of the sky, leaving a neutral shadowless luminosity. The effect is to add meaning to any action because this point we are racing the clock until darkness descends.

I wish I knew why the middle son was killed (during the war? suicide?) or what it meant when Sean Penn and his wife were dressing formally -- for his mother's funeral? We know we are not watching a linear narrative where a connects to b. We are invited to jump from J to P, back to C. and so on. All letters of the alphabet are not supplied.

Still, I could have done without the dinosaurs.

Habemus Papam

Nanni Moretti, the Italian film director, is often compared to Woody Allen because he writes, directs, and acts in his films, and his films sometimes feature psychiatrists who explore the characters' inner lives. There is also a fair amount of humor in both filmmakers' work.

However, the tone of Moretti's movies is more philosophical and his scripts tend to wander around. Woody Allen carefully constructs screenplays that tell stories. His dialogue  propels the action. Moretti explores what happens inside of us in slow, more patient ways.

In We Have a Pope, we get a chance to explore the inner life of the pope. What would it be like to be elected to a position so overwhelming that once you had accepted it you realized you couldn't possibly live up to it. What if as a result a whole religion was put on hold, not to mention the body of cardinals who were stuck in house prison, in their unending conclave, until the situation was cleared up.

Nanni Moretti plays the psychiatrist who is brought in to help with the situation. Lest the movie seem like a cross between Runaway Bride and Waiting for Godot, the psychiatrist decides to organize the cardinals into teams (one for each continent) and coach them to play a volleyball tournament. The casting is excellent. Michel Piccoli looks like a pope. His surrogate, a Swiss Guard, hired to move the curtains about in the illusion that the pope is near at hand, is great fun to watch as he eats the pope's food and enjoys other perks of the job.

The cardinals all look like cardinals. The costumes and sets are gorgeous, but the Catholic Church has excelled at those things for hundreds of years.

There are moments of sublime surprise, many having to do with Chekhov's The Seagull. This play within a play helps us understand the melancholy of Moretti's vision almost more than anything else.

Automaton

Thought this was very enlightening to those of us who read The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, or saw Hugo, the movie.

Pina Bausch

 Words fail me.  Pina is electrifying with the boldness of its vision. I was ignorant of Bausch's importance and influence on modern dance.  Thanks to Wim Wenders, whose intimate knowledge of her oeuvre led him to film the key dances using her company indoors and out, now everyone can know about her.

The settings are crucial to the choreography.  They do not merely provide background or enhance a mood. They become as integral to the performances as the performers themselves.  In some cases, like when they are dancing in water, the water dances too.

PINA - Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost - International Trailer from neueroadmovies on Vimeo.

The Nervous Breakdown

The Nervous Breakdown, a literary magazine and much more, has published a poem of mine.
Thanks to Wendy Chin-Tanner for helping with the publication.

Here is the link:

My Old Calculator

Blue Nights

I read this in one day because I couldn't help myself. I have always been seduced by Didion's style. I wanted to be under the spell of her hypnotic use of repetitive phrases as she described the loss of her daughter at age 39.  I imagine I am not alone in this sad sorority of mothers who have experienced the death of a child in being eager to read the latest report from the front lines,especially coming from such a fine writer as Joan Didion. Her memoir about the death of her husband said so many things so well about the rather common event of widowhood that I was hoping for something extraordinary when it came time to describe that unnatural event of surviving your child. How much is left unsaid in this book!  We receive snippets of things Quintana Roo did and said when she was five, and fourteen, and how she prepared for her wedding when she was thirty seven.   I was hoping for more, a portrait of a beloved daughter, but it is all mixed up with the heartache of the bereaved. When it comes to those eerie feelings upon discovering all of the items saved for her child (now who will inherit this?!.) though she is quite splendid.

Five years had passed since she picked up her pen to write about it.  Is it that we have so much in common that I read her account?  My daughter also died five years ago.  No, her details are so different from my solidly middle class life. Didion exists in a class I never belonged to.  As a writer, she has lived with her husband as a significant player with all the accoutrements that go with that status. Her tone is not snobby, though.
Even though I read the book hungrily, in one or two big bites, the repetitions began to wear on me.  The mention of the exclusive make of China and linens, the names of the hotels in Paris and Honolulu-- these were not gratuitously given, but still, it is a bit much.  One can grow tired of a sad book in which all the places and people and things come with such an extremely high pedigree.

In the end, though what is saddest is the sound of Didion  losing her vitality, her willingness to go on, and who can blame her?  Her obituary will be full of accomplishments.  She doesn't need to do one more blessed thing to prove herself, and she has lost the two people most dear to her. />
Still, I wish she would return to her reporting of things other than herself.  She is capable of a great expose on medicine as it is practiced in hospitals, or the politics of the Republican Party. No matter how world weary Didion sounds, she is still very much among us.

In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue.  This period of the blue nights does not occur in subtropical California, where I lived for much of the time I will be talking about here and where the end of the daylight is fast and lost in the blaze of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where I now live.  You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact not at all a warming –yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise.  You pass a window, you walk to Central  Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors.  The French call this time of the day, “l’heure bleue.”  To the English it was the “gloaming.”  The very word “gloaming” reverberates,  echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows.  During the blue nights you think the end of the day will never come.  As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone. 

--from the opening page of Blue Nights

 

Nick Alciati on December 2

In New Paltz last Friday my nephew, Nick Alciati, exhibited ten photographs for his senior thesis show at SUNY New Paltz. Nick has been studying photography and education, and his work was beautifully mounted and hung in the museum on campus.  The "light and shadow" images were perfectly lit, an homage to male flesh, partial nudes, no faces, only  bodies.  The portraits on his website capture delicate and heavy faces,  an exquisite jaw line, a fulsome head of hair. 

The  art show included work by 16 other seniors.  There were crystals grown on human hair and small stick figures made from sticks by Melodia Molina.  Mitchell Saler paints natural landscapes -- Lake Placid seen from the air, a barn in New Hope, NY, a rainstorm over the water, a sunset.  His triptych shows three spiraling bodies of air mass-- a hurricane's eye, a whirlpool, and galaxies, all taking the same  forms, linked together in a mystical way.  I was taken with these meditations on nature.

The jewelry and digital designs and sculptures all lived in the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art side by side.  It was clear that a lot of discussion had to take place to fit so many works in such a finite space.  The more I looked at Nick's photographs, and the farther I got from them, the better I liked them, especially the nudes.  Congratulations to him for preparing such a thoughtful thesis statement, and for mastering the techniques of light and shadow, and portraits, with a narrative that was very personal.

It was poignant to see the photograph of Nick holding the small dinosaur from Lizzy's collection, which he had put on the table near the postcards and comments notebook.  The title was "Remembering Lizzy."  She loved photography and would have been proud of Nick's work.  The show took place on the fifth anniversary of her death at age eighteen.

The Artist

Like Hugo, another movie about movies, The Artist is also about the fading allure of has-beens in the moving picture business. Unlike Hugo, The Artist not only quotes from silent movies, it is a silent movie shot in black and white, with no dialogue until the very end of the movie.

The themes of silence, and powerlessness in the face of not being heard, make me want to go back and watch those old movies that depended on the power of the scenario, of the actors' ability to express the spirit of what the movie was about through movement, gesture, stillness, silence.

Hugo

Hugo Cabret's father found a discarded automaton in the museum where he was employed and was determined to repair it and make it work again. The automaton was the figure of a man holding a pen poised to write something. What could it be? Would it explain what kind of inventor made it?

When Hugo is orphaned, he continues to repair the automaton while working to maintain the clocks that his uncle abandoned when he disappeared. In a dream like train station in the middle of Paris, Hugo lives within a secret compartment where he can move furtively from one clock to another. The shots of the clocks and the gears, the repetition of the images of keys and locks, lead to a rapturous feeling toward simple mechanics. I will not say technology. That would be putting too extreme an edge on what we are looking at which is the works of things. The metaphor is work. How do things work. What work do we do to give our lives meaning. How do we fix what lies broken? Can a broken man be mended?

Scorsese's movie is a pleasure to watch, and at the end, there is an afterglow of images that stay in the mind's eye.

Margin Call

What a wonderful cast. Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons. To see one at a time in a film is to know the pleasures of fine acting. To see all three working together in a fast paced smartly written film takes away the sour taste that the movie left in my mouth of the plot. I had already seen this plot in a documentary film, Inside Job, from a different point of view, from the point of view of the muckrakers who were pointing the finger at the villains of the economic crisis of 2008.

Margin Call takes us inside the board room where the decision was made to begin unloading the worthless stocks that set off the mortgage crisis. Watching the process of large scale chicanery from the point of view of the villains may humanize them but nobody comes off unscathed.

American Ballet Theater

Lobby of City Center

Company B, choreography by Paul Taylor

 Besides the visual pleasure of watching the dancers of ABT perform works by Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, and Paul Taylor, going to the City Center today, I could actually see from my seat, which was not always the case in the past when the sight lines were flawed.  The seats themselves were comfortable, and the whole building has been restored to what I imagined the Shriners would see when they convened there, and were inspired by Hollywood and the Arabian Nights simultaneously. 

Drive

The thing about cars in Los Angeles is that they stand in for much more than transportation. As a New Yorker, I don't think I can understand the deep bond that forms between car and driver.  Drive strips down a character's identity to his action of operating the car. Even though the driver has scenes with human beings, and he looks genuinely fond of a boy and his mother, there is little real communication except for lots of meaningful smiles.

The driver likes LA basketball. He watches it, he listens to it, even when he is eavesdropping on the police radio so that he can tell how close he is to his final escape.The driver's identity in the opening scene when he drives a getaway car for a couple of robbers shifts quickly when the police home in on them and he coolly walks away in a basketball cap and jacket.

Next he wears a police uniform so we think oh a law enforcer escaping the law, but no, he is an actor in a film, no a body double for an actor in a film, no a stunt double for an actor in a film. So he is a character within a character within a character. It would take a lot of digging to find out who he really was.

After just watching Martha Marcy May Marlene, whose main character's identity is sketchy and finally unrevealed, watching this movie, with very slow takes on the actors, and lots of musical exposition, I wondered how much music videos have had an impact on filmmaking.  Screenplays for these two movies were were really stingy with talk for the main characters.

Do modern young directors think that we don't want meaningful dialogue any more? Do they think that music should stand in for words? Have we stopped speaking to each other in absorbing ways? Does language not count? Or is this just the feminist in me wondering what happened to the snappy actresses of old who had plenty of lines to say and said them with aplomb and were the reason to go to the movies.

As it is, we have Ryan Gosling, who is a pleasure to watch, and Carey Mulligan whose hair is always impeccably styled.  Albert Brooks as a singularly bad man has all the good lines.  

Poets Forum

Kay Ryan

Juan Felipe Herrera

Anne Waldman

Three chancellors of the Academy of American Poets had a conversation at the Poets Forum in late October.  The session was entitled  "Humans and Others."  Each poet gave an introductory statement, and then the conversation began.

Waldman has a titanic mind, making connections between protozoa, robotics, and animals of all stripes.  She made me want to read her book, Manatee Humanity.  Just listening to her say it over and over again, she drilled home the connection between the nonhuman and the human, the relationship between the large sea creatures, the sirens who drove men to crash into perilous rocks, and the puny humans who are a cancer on the planet.

Kay Ryan on the other hand is a woman of few words whose remark, "Well I looked at the title, "Humans and Others," and I said, yeah, I fit," made everyone laugh.  Ryan has the wit and charm of a woman comfortable in her own skin.    She seems to be a direct descendant of the sensibility of Emily Dickinson.  She quoted Emily Dickinson's poem number 724.

It's easy to invent a Life —
God does it — every Day —
Creation — but the Gambol
Of His Authority —

It's easy to efface it —
The thrifty Deity
Could scarce afford Eternity
To Spontaneity —

The Perished Patterns murmur —
But His Perturbless Plan
Proceed — inserting Here — a Sun —
There — leaving out a Man —

and number 1746

The most important population
Unnoticed dwell,
They have a heaven each instant
Not any hell.

Their names, unless you know them,
'Twere useless tell.
Of bumble-bees and other nations
The grass is full.

Juan Felipe Herrera patiently listened to Waldman as she drew connections at breakneck speed, then Kay Ryan's rendition of two of ED.  He was sketching a jeep the whole time, because he had been thinking of buying one.  When he did some research on the car, he learned that it had features like "lock and load," "camouflage" and other phrases that demonstrate the "weaponisation of the language."

Martha Marcy May Marlene

The main character is living in a cult with a satanic leader when she calls her sister to retrieve her. Little information is shared between any of the characters in this movie. It is as if they were all living underwater not just in the actual swimming scenes of which there are many, but in the murky exposition of the story.

It is frustrating to hear the older sister ask repeatedly "What the fuck is wrong with you?" and not really mean it. She does not wait for the answer. She does not get it, and neither do we. Poor Martha. She has no one to turn to. Her sister and her sister's husband seem like they want to take care of her, but there is something off in the tone of the direction that makes you doubt it. Poor audience who don't really know what the meaning of the movie is, except that at the heart of it is a sterling performance by the young actress, ...

Well photographed, with effective music, the movie's editing includes transitions that are out of a horror movie.

Who would you become if you had a sketchy childhood with no present parents and then joined a commune where you had to sublimate your better instincts to the abusive leader. What is most spooky perhaps is how Martha repeats the phrase, "I am a teacher and a leader" because it is what her guru told her she was. But we never learn who she really is, even with this string of names.

Occupy Wall Street

When I first visited the occupiers at Zuccotti Park, I was struck by the civilization that had been created, with tables for information, medicine, supplies, and clothes. Clusters of tourists made it hard to move as they snapped pictures of the occupiers. It felt like they were taking pictures of animals in a zoo. The police had erected a tall ominous tower and there were those stiff metal barricades that feel like an instant jail complete with bars to separate people from each other, and make it difficult to assemble. Overhead, a helicopter hovered.

Then the protesters came into my neighborhood. I heard them through my window. The sign says

The Solution:
Campaign Finance Reform
Public Option Health Care
Corporations are NOT People
End the Wars
Close Tax Loopholes
Tax the Rich
Regulate the banks
Pass the Jobs Bill
End corporate lobbying

These are all specific reforms that would reduce waste, garner income, and save lives.


They marched up West Broadway toward Washington Square and Times Square beyond. I walked with them a little, upset at the injustice of the economy.

There are so many police everywhere the marchers go it is as if they are fully expecting something to go wrong. I wonder what the ratio is of police to protesters. It seems greater than 1 to 1.