A recent exchange between Claire and her grade five teacher (who is actually quite good)

Teacher: The world is jealous of America because of our freedoms.  Everything here is free!

Claire: Except health care...

Three high concept pictures

Source Code

Duncan Jones, US, 2011

Not quite the conceptual humdinger that Moon was (same director, of course), but this is still an intelligent, agile, and conscientious exploration of interesting ideas: time and space, will and fate, authority and independence, love and death and love, etc.  Cool, if not quite mind-blowing or world-shaking.  This isn’t a very big problem, since Source Code is finally a genre picture, in the most honest, honourable sense.  As such, the film's most important or most heart-felt ideas may actually be more cinematical than philosophical.  How can we stage this situation, how can we render our story through visual elaboration and evolution?  Of course their solution is the tried-and-true of theme and variations.  The strategy works very well.  

More, and better, is something that also relates in fundamental ways to the status of the genre film within film histories and film industries.  The challenge that seems to have been set here relates to how one might effectively and substantially engage, entertain and even edify an audience.  What a good goal, and they pull it off; this is a nice movie!  True, narratively speaking they’re dealing with terrorism and psychosis and stuff.  And they naturally expend a lot of energy in that direction.  The mystery is very ingeniously solved, but the actual solution is a bit disappointingly seen-that.  A techno-loony, eh?  A bit wan, but in the end it's not such a big problem.  That’s because of the more important, more heart-felt conclusion.  The destruction and death are actually real world but here they refuse nihilism or despair, opting instead for affirmation and optimism.  Speaking of sublime genre statements, that affirmation and optimism is ultimately Hawksian-romantic.  Smart men and women!  The leads are terrific, and not at all in a show biz way.  Also, excellent support from Farmiga and the fairly hilarious Jeffrey Wright. 

The Adjustment Bureau

George Nolfi, US, 2011

Hats are dumb...

There might be something in this spate of thrillers that not only have philosophical pretentions, but actually rise to a measure of philosophizing.  Here’s some good stuff about God and man, free will and determinism, and then the possibility and viability of personal determination over and above it all.  As Damon, who is developing a really interesting low affect acting style, runs around all over the place, we get kinesis and exegesis both.  

Themes, for instance: restriction may be, often is benevolent.  Dominoes fall, and devil take the hindmost.  We don’t deserve it.  Or, one importunate widow can actually make a difference.    Oh—and obviously, the temptations of paternalistic, deterministic despotism.  (It's Homeland Security, once again...)  It seems quite sincere, and quite viable, that in the face of all of the reasonably substantial political exploration it’s love that conquers all.  (Cf. the Archers' A Matter of Life and Death!)  The romance here is only somewhat and not exclusively immoral, and everyone involved really seem to believe in its importance.  If you don't deserve it, but you still get it, isn't that grace?  What does it say about my middle-aged self that I don’t buy it, or maybe just don’t like it?  These characters should fail!  Not much faith in the masses, it would seem, or a few too many wonderfully despairing works.

Limitless (√)

Neil Burger, US, 2011

For all the modern techno-accoutrements, for all of the media echoes and hyper macro-zooms, this is just another version of Half Magic, or The Five Children and It.  This is not at all to disparage, mind you; not only do the kids like the concept, but they like it because it reflects a basic, patterned human truth.  Beware of what you wish for. 

For instance...

The contemporary manifestations of this folkloric problem are familiar, and apt.  The film presents the problem in the form of a drug, which suggests substances, or dependencies generally.  Pornography could apply, and certainly our gluttonous appetite for social media and omni-technology.  Whatever the metaphor, the fact is that these days we’re voracious for sensation, desirous of multi-and omni-connectivity.  We want to be everywhere, aware at the same time that this may just leave us nowhere.  Our protagonist shuttles between these two extremes—he’s either an inert waster or a speed freak.  That would describe a lot of the university students I know these days.

Is this part on purpose?  There’s a Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, not Burgess), Fight Club component here.  The film is tempted toward and even kind of embodies the very thing that it is worried about.  The irony comes across as conscious, or on-purpose.  And as technology is more morally neutral or at least morally complicated than hyper/sexualized violence, I don't think there's any particular hypocrisy going on here.  Especially since, parable resonance or didactic opportunity aside, this is a commercial film.  You've got to think of your investors!  Since this is the case, this movie very nicely establishes and resolves its conflicts.  (It is also very successful and stylish in visualizing them.  Plus, violence!)  The further or final irony is that in the end our protagonist wins.  Just like in A Clockwork Orange!  Or maybe The Godfather II.  Or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Happy endings can leave a productive sour taste in your mouth.

Get it?

Two horror movies

The Thing from Another World

Christian Nyby, allegedly; US, 1951

It’s Ford’s My Darling Clementine!  As in that other towering monument of virtuous Americanness, the good guys here confront some pretty formidable malice, even evil.  And as in Ford’s film, standing up against evil carries a considerable cost.  There’s no perfunctory scriptsmanship here, and the intensity is such that the real world really stands at the doors.  But what an optimistic horror movie!  Good humour and modesty never falter, there’s a beautiful, organically developing romance right in the middle of the mounting jeopardy, and at the end of the film the world is not only saved but it’s a better place.  

There are so many felicities: fabulous dialogue and a faultless ensemble performance by a bunch of nobodies, the result being that this is a more effective, more socially progressive piece of collective protagonism than Eisenstein’s Strike; a propulsive pace that somehow, simultaneously feels like Henry Fonda leaning back on that chair; superb architecture, most especially in those three escalating Thing/Arness scenes; constant proto-Altman badinage that really constitute expressions of regard and love; philosophic interludes that have the dialectical clarity of a Platonic dialogue; a Renoirian undercurrent that concludes in a very moving statement of humanist solidarity.  Doctor Carrington made a terrible mistake and wore facial hair, and at the end they all cheerfully cover up for him.  This isn’t cold war paranoia or Nixonian xenophobia.  This is a great country.  Also, whatever the opening credits may say, there’s no way that Howard Hawks didn’t direct this. 

River Valley

The Host

Joon-ho Bong, South Korea, 2006

As the pundits say, the opening river sequence is pretty virtuosic.  But that monster is also pretty computery.  It's not that big of a deal, but the movie does depend upon the monster a lot.  Does this synthetic base keep it all from being completely top tier?  The details of the toxic event and its consequences, as well as the details of American oppression and Korean capitulation, are also kind of sketchy.  Since it’s a genre picture, and American unilateralism is so well documented, it may be that that shortcoming doesn’t matter as much.  Still, it would appear that one single tadpole drank all that formaldehyde.  

Anyway, there’s still some great stuff here, and it sure is a crowd pleaser.  I’m interested in the wild back and forth in tone, which seem quite intentional and maybe even quite reckless.  Director Bong pushes the limits four times, or maybe he’s establishing and then advancing a dramatic motif.  First in that community centre/mass wake sequence, when real tear-rimmed eyes poignancy gives way to hysterical grief and then to farce.  A similar transformation attends Grandpa’s explanation about Gang-Du’s formidable stupidity.  When they’re all chasing the thing there’s lots of silliness and knockabout.  Then, suddenly, Grandpa gets killed.  At this juncture no laughs are even attempted.  (Also of note is the funny/gross bit where the Americans medically experiment on Gang-Du.) 

Same director, different film...

This has been a successful horror/comedy, but the climactic sequence isn’t funny at all.  They’ve set it up well, through the phone call and a few judicious returns to the missing persons.   Actually these children give an ultimately prevailing gravity to the whole proceedings.  It’s not sentimentality at all, but a powerful, fairy tale sense of their vulnerability and their preciousness.  That agent yellow demonstration might be anti-American to the point of ridiculousness, but it also provides a suitably and heart-rendingly apocalyptic setting for the film's heart-breaking conclusion.  That little hand in that great, awful maw!  When the father reaches in and pulls them out, when we find them embracing and then discover that the little girl has given her life for the little boy, the knockabout nonsense resolves into plain, cathartic tragedy.  The sudden alignment of those siblings provides real emotional, narrative, even musical resolution.  (The film features a daring, very successful score.)  The arrow!  And the final, chivalric defeat of the dragon!  The coda is very nice. 


Maybe it's top tier after all. 

Jordan Eberle, or does he?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIRV0ATzW8Q

Spring Break! (Sarah's Italian itinerary...)

Flights, obviously:

Delta Airlines: 1606 Mar 9, 2012 Salt Lake City (SLC) 08:30 New York JFK (JFK) 15:20
Delta Airlines: 70 Mar 9, 2012 New York JFK (JFK) 16:20 Amsterdam Schiphol (AMS) 06:00
KLM Airlines: 1601 Mar 10, 2012 Amsterdam Schiphol (AMS) 09:50 Rome Fiumicino (FCO) 12:05

KLM Airlines: 1618 Mar 18, 2012 Milan Malpensa 06:40 Amsterdam Schiphol (AMS) 08:50
KLM Airlines: 611 Mar 18, 2012 Amsterdam Schiphol (AMS) 12:40 Chicago O’Hare (ORD) 15:25
Delta Airlines: 4455 Mar 18, 2012 Chicago O’Hare (ORD) 18:30 Salt Lake City (SLC) 20:59

Lady Utes

Accommodations, obviously:

Holiday Inn Rome, Aurelia: Mar 10, 2012 Mar 12, 2012
Hotel Tuscany Inn, Montecatini: Mar 12, 2012 Mar 15, 2012
Hotel Leonardo da Vinci, Erba: Mar 15, 2012 Mar 18, 2012

Fitba!:

Team Training Session: Mar 10, 2012 6:30 PM
Serie A Game: Lazio vs. Bologna: Mar 11, 2012 3:00 PM
Italian Clinician Training @ Covericano: Mar 12, 2012 3:00 PM
Game 1 vs. ACF Firenze: Mar 13, 2012 8:00 PM
Cinque Terre Charity Tournament: Mar 14, 2012 3:30 PM
San Siro Stadium Guided Tour: Mar 16, 2012 10:00 AM
Game 2 vs. Real Meda Calcio Femminile: Mar 16, 2012 8:00 PM

Ron Lancaster to George Reed, Saskatchewan Roughriders

Also, three Italian films:

De Sica/Zavattini, Shoeshine, 1946

Visconti, La Terra Trema, 1948

Olmi, 1961

Film review: profanity/obscenity

Sweetgrass

Ilisa Barbash/Lucien Castaing-Taylor, US, 2009

  
Great first shot!  After a nearly agonizing long time, that sheep looks right at us.  

There might be a bit too much of Ricky Leacock’s snide characterization of observational documentary in this movie.  It was monkeys typing, wasn't it?  Observer doc-makers think that if you shoot and shoot and shoot something eventually is bound to happen.  And it either doesn’t, or your endless hovering manufactures the happening and compromises the record. 

Both things might be true here.  Audience members were in clear agonies about this insistent and extended exposition, and maybe the filmmakers could have cut a bit.  But to the film’s credit, it did exactly give us the pace and sense of a real rancher’s life, the patterns and travails and occasional satisfactions—knowing hands, understatedly affectionate relations—that rarely get aired.  Colin Low’s Corral does the same thing, rejecting the whole history of Western melodrama and character confrontation.  But Low's short film gives us the sense, or a taste, while this one gives us the thing itself.  It makes for a rigourous viewing experience, but it's true, isn't it?  There's life for you, and maybe if we don’t like that we should just have to lump it. 

Unlike this awful movie...

And isn’t it vivid?  There’s an absurd dialogue between the old guy and the young guy as they sit looking out of that open tent that couldn’t have been bettered by Nobel Prize winners.  The beauty and, then, simultaneous cruelty of the land that they’re crossing is powerfully present, and should more than compensate for any lack of conventional incident.  Plain traveling to stunning locales is more than enough for the person driving in his car.  Why should it be any different with movies?  Also, intended or not, there’s something powerful about the shepherd and fold echoes.  What’s really instructive is how Jesus is gentle and kind, and these guys get all resentful, even despairing, then get it done anyway.  Good Christians!

A final word on that infamous blue streak on the mountain top.  We always hear from the pulpit that swearing is for people that don’t have the imagination or vocabulary or brains to say what they really want to.  This is good propaganda, of course—deride the undesired behaviour while inviting your charge to come to the smart and substantial and righteous side.  But actually, lots of smart people swear, and to considerable purpose, and with considerable insight and even gain: JD Salinger, Robert Towne, Richard Pryor, Billy Connolly, David Mamet, James Kelman, Roddy Doyle, on and on. We may not like it, we may not approve, but we can’t honestly just dismiss it either.  (No women?  We haven’t even touched upon hip-hop music.)

In addition, profanity can be and has been the last or best or maybe only weapon against tie-tightening, suit wearing, poor-evicting pillars of the community.  You know, the people whose outward deportment is perfect, and who’s very lives and deepest assumptions (economic Darwinism, or attorney savagery) are those of the ravening wolf.  Those guys should be sworn at.  Or finally, there’s anger, or sorrow, or choosing just the thing to say in the face of some obscenity.  Think René Levesque responding to Pierre Laporte’s murder (Action: The October Crisis of 1970, Canada, 1974).

Oh, and there’s a last last thing.  As this film kind of suggests, and as the preachers always tell us, sometimes the profane just aren’t very smart, or very educated, or very broadly experienced.  They may not be very principled.  But the fact that we don’t want our kids to turn out this way doesn’t really address a big moral remainder.  After hearing this cowboy’s sort of shocking, then sort of reasonable, kind of hilarious, eventually tiresome and finally poignant swearamiad you might be left with a realization.  Who cares if he swears!  He can’t be dismissed!  People like this are still worthy and deserving of our sympathetic attention, maybe even our ministrations.  They may respond thereto, or they may stubbornly hold their course.  We are still responsible.  It is not funny that immediately afterwards he got on the phone and cried to his mother.  There’s the culmination of that shepherd motif—things are tough, and people are silly, and they deserve to be gathered and cared for.  


Winter Soldier

Produced by a collective, US, 1972 

This is an extremely disturbing, upsetting movie.  It might be customary at this point to say that it’s an extremely disturbing, upsetting movie that everyone should see.  Actually, maybe not.  You don’t have to be an Israelite without guile or a snow white dove to get traumatically disturbed by this wrenching, nauseating assemblage.  But if it’s not appropriate for many audiences, that sure doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t have been made.  The simple assertion, or maybe the devastating fact, is that My Lai wasn’t an exception, but rather the logical extension and irreducible embodiment of the whole policy and direction of the war.  Of war itself?  

Lt. Calley

The no production value comes off as a virtue, not for any clever reason, but because sometimes production value doesn’t matter.  Does it ever?  The gradual introduction of photographs and footage is also, maybe, merely a consequence of how they were rushing things together, or creating this as a collective.  But it also comes off kind of triumphantly.  We might have disbelieved the testimony, wondered whether they weren’t either showing off or being too hard on themselves.  Then comes the visual confirmation.  Afraid not. 

Two other things.  This film is a pretty irrefutable demonstration that profanity and obscenity are not necessarily the same thing.  Obscenity is big, deep, an affront not only to the sacred, but to plain, ordinary life itself.  Which, as it turns out, is sacred.  Profanity can be coarse and cruel and punishing.  But it turns out that it can actually function as a moral corrective, an apt and exact expression of inner turmoil, inner terror, and general outrage.  Thumper’s mother is usually right, but the bureaucrats and p.r. men need to be vigourously countered when they say nice or say nothing about abominations like this. 

The second thing brings us to the very real possibility that this terrible material is actually quite appropriate.  The obvious reason is that this happened, and it was a result of government policies, budgetary appropriations and such.  Recreational R-rated movies are one thing.  The world, supported by your tax dollars, are quite another.  Less obvious and more affecting is that these shaggy, haunted young men are terrible sinners.  They have sinned by fulfilling orders and then, sometimes, by going above and beyond those orders.  Their victims will deplore their names, but they have also hurt themselves really terribly.  They need to repent.  And if you’ve been on the other side of a confession, or a lancing, or any other purgative act, you know that it’s not nearly as unpleasant as it is necessary.  This is the sins are as scarlet part.  White as snow comes after… 

Trans-mediation, pt. 2

Or, podcasts:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/thisll-take-a-while/id508966119

Trans-mediation

Dean has a radio show, which now has a radio show archive:

http://takingawhile.com/past-shows/

Approximately fifty things we like about Mum, because she is fifty

Asks that particular kind of question, all the time  

Broken fingers, on the growth plate

Came to every home game

Can stay awake

Cheerful nagger

Coffee problem

Creative speller

Design enthusiast

Designer

“Do you want ice cream with that?”

Does the bills

Does the taxes

Does the taxes on time

Doesn’t like loud music

Doesn’t like music at all, really

“Don’t do it, Carter!”

Enjoys practicing the piano with Claire

Even tempered

Flat waffles

Flowers!

Folds laundry really, really well

"Gargle with salt water..."

Gets annoyed when she cries

“Go, Speedy Gonzales!”

Good natured

Goes ahead and does major things without consulting or discussing them, because she figures you would have approved if you'd known

Goes ahead and does major things without consulting or discussing them, because she knows you wouldn't have approved if you'd known

Goes out and buys cats

Got called out when she was actually safe; yelled at ump

Had Sarah

Has a fun habit of answering your question by asking another question

Has a strange phobia concerning the placing of slightly soiled knives on a kitchen table that is going to be wiped off in a minute anyway

Has dent on the side of her nose, care of her 2^nd daughter’s noggin

Has an acutely artistic eye

“Have I got anything in my teeth?”

Helps spouses be prepared for all the hostile people out there in the world

Her dad

Her brothers and sisters

Her mother

Her mother's hot fudge sauce

Homemade soup

“I’m telling you, brown and black match!” 

Inexhaustibly industrious, unfailingly positive

"It's because you're not taking your vitamins!"

Jerry Lewis as those three female back-up singers

Keeps at it until the job is done

Keeps repeating the same thing over and over until she gets what she wants

Kept paying for Caitlin’s phone for years and years, which was really annoying

Kept paying for Caitlin's phone for years and years, which was really awesome [this item is the only remaining trace of a successfully fended off attack from a hostile computer virus, Ed.]

La Cañada, California

Level headed

Likes to talk out loud during the opening credits, at movie theatres

Loud laugher

Loud laugher when we show her something we have in our teeth

Loves being cuddled by kids

Made Spence go on that Trek, which not only did not increase his testimony but actually caused him considerable trauma

Made those flannel blankets for the boys

Morning person, squared

Netflix binger

Never has all 10 toenails at the same time

Not too fancy, thankfully

NPR listener/amoral liberal

Often asks this question: “is that…?”

Once watched 8 Mile while folding church laundry

Participated at the Special Olympics, where she was mistaken for a Special Olympian

Pig food

Practically killed that peach tree

Pretends to like that outfit you’re wearing, even though it’s extremely obvious that she doesn’t

Really loud laugher

Savage pruner

Scared of leaving phone messages

Sent her boys off to a Labour Camp

Strong backed

“Superstar,” in Tommy Boy

Sweet natured

Takes your arm in an affectionate way and accidentally/painfully zings your funny bone

Talks back to temple workers

That Mum and Caitlin and Drew and Sarah laugh

That photograph in her grade 12 yearbook

That time she thought her water broke, but it didn’t

Thinks that clapping over and over again will make kids want to get out of bed and work and all

“Tiramisu…” 

Tripped and bounced on that pregnant stomach that Matt was still living in

Two pushes, out comes Caitlin

Ultimately failed as an athlete because she has no killer instinct

Ultimately succeeded as a human being because she has no killer instinct

Unfailingly positive, inexhaustibly industrious

Used to actually be afraid of pulling into other people’s driveways

Volunteered so consistently and consecutively and effectively that the school district ended up throwing jobs at her

"Watch out!"

"Watch out!  I just ___."

“Well there you go.”

“What…would…Jesus…do?!”

Whenever she is thanked for something by her family, she responds with "Oookaayyy..!" 

(Sharon Anderson, born March 4, 1962)