B12 Solipsism

A few top-of-mind thoughts re: the 2010 Oscars

• What the frak was Sean Penn babbling about? Said something like, “I’m not a member of the Academy, and don’t agree on the best actress nominations.” So vague as to be incomprehensible, why bother? And if he is not a member of the Academy, why was he chosen to present one of the most prestigious awards? (Best Actress)
• Cringeworthy interpretative dance number involving jazz hands and break dancing to Oscar scores, especially the Hurt Locker theme. 95% of the Best Score nominations are instantly forgettable anyway, but why not show film clips for context instead of Up With People, or whatever that was?
• Elinor Burkett interrupting Roger Ross Williams after he won Best Documentary Short for Music by Prudence, there’s a lawsuit between the two, why was she allowed to speak and not the actual winner?
• Horror film montage was a waste of time. What exactly qualified a film as being a horror film? Marathon Man was included, for instance, by what measure is that film in the horror genre? Such a random montage without meaning or depth.
• Sycophantic introduction of Best Actor and Best Actress by some other Hollywood luminary. A few were heartfelt, but most triggered rolled eyes in my viewing audience.
• Did Kathryn Bigelow win Best Director because she was a woman? or because she was the best director? Seriously, why was her gender hyped so much? Am glad that Avatar didn’t win¹ but did The Hurt Locker win on merit or on quota?
• Why a closeup of some random African American each time Precious won an award? Morgan Freeman and Samuel Jackson had absolutely nothing to do with Precious, why look for their expression?
• Sandra Bollock’s The Blind Side, which I have not seen, appears to be a little racially skeezy, plus is about football. I doubt I’ll ever sit through it, should I? Her acceptance speech was ok though.
• Jeff Bridges, on the other hand, should have thought a bit about his speech because it was a mess. I’m happy he finally won an Oscar, and Crazy Heart looks interesting, so it goes. I mean, groovy, man.

Whatever, I watch the damn things every year, despite how frequently lame both the winners and the ceremony are.

-update
youTubery of Sean Penn announcing something or other:

A few other points from various other, more astute critics:

Hamish Hamilton making the wrong choice at virtually every turn.

He gave us long shots when we needed something more intimate (for instance, when all the John Hughes movie alums first came on stage at the end of the Hughes tribute), random and confused edits, terrible choices on who to cut to in the audience (anytime “Precious” won, we of course had to see every notable African-American person in attendance, and after spending half the show cutting randomly to a surly George Clooney, nobody could bother when Sandra Bullock told a joke at his expense in her acceptance speech), etc., etc. After everyone screamed bloody murder about the framing of last year’s In Memoriam segment, which focused more on Queen Latifah than the images of the movie people who died, what excuse was there to make the exact same mistake for the first few entries in this year’s montage? (Unless you were squinting, you may not have even realized Patrick Swayze led things off.) And after giving us shot after shot after shot of former spouses/collaborators Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron every time one of “The Hurt Locker” or “Avatar” won, how in the world did Hamilton fail to show us their interaction when Bigelow beat Cameron for Best Director?

[Click to continue reading What's Alan Watching?: Oscars 2010: Can't anybody here make a good TV show?]

Salon explains the on-stage feud re Music by Prudence, and interviews both sides:

[Elinor Burkett] claims she found the movie’s story, that she brought it to you.

[Roger Ross] WILLIAMS: No, not at all. The truth is that she saw the band perform [in Zimbabwe], and told me about that, and then I opened up a dialogue with the [King George VI School & Centre for Children with Physical Disabilities] school and went on my own – which you would’ve heard about in my speech — and spent $6,000 going to Africa shooting myself. And when people expressed interest in the film, I asked her to come on board. And then I regretted that decision. Then she sued.

[Click to continue reading The story behind Oscar's "Kanye moment" - Oscar Nominations, Academy Awards 2010 - Salon.com]

1. even though I’ll probably eventually see it. Though maybe not, I’ve still never seen Titanic, Cameron’s other blockbuster smash [↩]

“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass” (Lewis Carroll)

Alice in Wonderland, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

a clearer photo of the billboard that peeks at me through my office window

Details visible if you embiggen:
decluttr

I probably will see this movie, but maybe not in the theatre. Sometimes my agoraphobia¹ is stronger than my desire to see films on large projection screens.

DVDs come out pretty soon these days

1. or whatever, agoraphobia is probably a little strong [↩]

“The Great Movies” (Roger Ebert)

An absolutely heart-rendingly poignant profile of Roger Ebert by Chris Jones of Esquire.

Afred Caldwell Lily Pond, from a few years ago. Apparently, Ebert and his wife, Chaz, live nearby, and frequently walk here. I’ve never seen them when we stroll around, but then what would I say?

University Club of Chicago, also from a few years ago.

After saying their goodbyes to his colleagues (and to Riccardo’s), Ebert and Chaz go out for dinner, to one of their favorite places, the University Club of Chicago. Hidden inside another skyscraper, there’s a great Gothic room, all stone arches and stained glass. The room is filled mostly with people with white hair — there has been a big push to find younger members to fill in the growing spaces in the membership ranks — and they nod and wave at him and Chaz. They’re given a table in the middle of the room.

Ebert silently declines all entreaties from the fussy waiters. Food arrives only for Chaz and a friend who joins them. Ebert writes them notes, tearing pages from his spiral notepad, tapping his fingers together for his words to be read aloud. Everyone smiles and laughs about old stories. More and more, that’s how Ebert lives these days, through memories, of what things used to feel like and sound like and taste like. When his friend suddenly apologizes for eating in front of him, for talking about the buttered scallops and how the cream and the fish and the wine combine to make a kind of delicate smoke, Ebert shakes his head. He begins to write and tears a note from the spiral.

No, no, it reads. You’re eating for me.

[Click to continue reading Roger Ebert: The Essential Man]

somewhere in the University Club, I’ve only been there once, when some aunts came to visit

Another photo taken at the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pond…

And I’d read of CereProc previously, I hope Ebert is happily re-united with voice. When I used to live alone, I always turned on the Mac Text to Speech option so that the computer would talk to me¹

They head home and meet with the people from Comcast, who talk mostly to Chaz. Their Internet will be back soon, but probably not until tomorrow. Disaster. Ebert then takes the elevator upstairs and drops into his chair. As he reclines it slowly, the entire chair jumps somehow, one of its back legs thumping against the floor. It had been sitting on the charger for his iPhone, and now the charger is crushed. Ebert grabs his tray and laptop and taps out a few words before he presses a button and speakers come to life.

“What else can go wrong?” the voice says.

The voice is called Alex, a voice with a generic American accent and a generic tone and no emotion. At first Ebert spoke with a voice called Lawrence, which had an English accent. Ebert liked sounding English, because he is an Anglophile, and his English voice reminded him of those beautiful early summers when he would stop in London with Chaz on their way home after the annual chaos of Cannes. But the voice can be hard to decipher even without an English accent layered on top of it — it is given to eccentric pronunciations, especially of names and places — and so for the time being, Ebert has settled for generic instead.

Ebert is waiting for a Scottish company called CereProc to give him some of his former voice back. He found it on the Internet, where he spends a lot of his time. CereProc tailors text-to-speech software for voiceless customers so that they don’t all have to sound like Stephen Hawking. They have catalog voices — Heather, Katherine, Sarah, and Sue — with regional Scottish accents, but they will also custom-build software for clients who had the foresight to record their voices at length before they lost them. Ebert spent all those years on TV, and he also recorded four or five DVD commentaries in crystal-clear digital audio. The average English-speaking person will use about two thousand different words over the course of a given day. CereProc is mining Ebert’s TV tapes and DVD commentaries for those words, and the words it cannot find, it will piece together syllable by syllable. When CereProc finishes its work, Roger Ebert won’t sound exactly like Roger Ebert again, but he will sound more like him than Alex does. There might be moments, when he calls for Chaz from another room or tells her that he loves her and says goodnight — he’s a night owl; she prefers mornings — when they both might be able to close their eyes and pretend that everything is as it was.

[Click to continue reading Roger Ebert: The Essential Man]

His blog and Twitter feed are worth checking out, by the way.

Thanks to fellow-traveller, Marie Carnes for the link, via Twitter, where else?

–
update: Roger Ebert follows up

Christy Lemire wrote me: “So, everyone seems pretty moved by the Esquire piece on you, but I’m wondering what you thought about it. It’s so intimate, personal.”

Yeah, it was, wasn’t it? It was also well written, I thought. When I turned to it in the magazine, I got a jolt from the full-page photograph of my jaw drooping. Not a lovely sight. But then I am not a lovely sight, and in a moment I thought, well, what the hell. It’s just as well it’s out there. That’s how I look, after all.

[Click to continue reading Roger Ebert's Last Words, con't. - Roger Ebert's Journal]

1. for a while, I collected snappy sayings that I input into the Text-To-Speech control panel. These phrases prefaced any error message – the computer would randomly pick sentences to recite in its robotic voice before telling me “printer out of ink”, or whatever. Sometimes better than silence. [↩]

“Daytime Drinking (Naj sul)” (Noh Young-seok)

Korea is one of the countries I wish to visit before my life ends abruptly:

After his girlfriend dumps him, Hyuk-jin (Sam-dong Song) spends a night getting drunk with friends, who convince him to go to the distant town of Jeongseon. But when he wakes up at the Jeongseon bus stop in the morning, none of his friends are there. Walking along the road in his underwear, he finds himself on an unexpected journey as he becomes involved in a series of misadventures. Young-Seok Noh directs this Korean drama. [Click to Netflix Daytime Drinking]

Loneliness mixed with soju inebriation, a delicious combination. Lots of ennui, lots of silence, and a tale worthy of Holden Caulfield. Though accompanied with several gallons of soju, and some karaoke. And a lot more soju…and some healing booze with arrowroot, garlic, and ginseng…

Sort of a Korean version of Slacker.

20,000 Won is about $20 US dollars, if you didn’t know.

Rob Christopher of The Chicagoist compares the film to After Hours, which is apt enough, but not quite exact

A young man’s oafish buddies convince him to take a bus to the countryside and meet them at a college chum’s guest house, where “there’s lots of booze and delicious barbecue.” Of course when he arrives his friends are nowhere to be found; and getting back to Seoul proves to be an unexpectedly tall order. Among the problems he has to contend with are crappy cell phone reception, con artists, and the constant necessity of being polite by accepting drinks from strangers.

To really enjoy Young-seok Noh’s debut feature you need to know the basics of Korean drinking. First: over three billion bottles of soju, the national spirit, are consumed annually; second: soju is usually between 20-45% alcohol; and three, it’s considered rude to refuse a drink. That’s enough to addle anyone’s brain.

A hilarious and agreeably gentle comedy, Daytime Drinking plays like a Jim Jarmusch remake of After Hours. There’s even a Catherine O’Hara-like character, a flaky woman with the power to help our unfortunate hero but who only ends up tormenting him. Shot on a budget of only $20,000 this film puts to shame most indie American fare, let alone the drek coming out of the studios. It’s the funniest movie we’ve seen this year. The wry ending is particularly satisfying.

[Click to continue reading See These at the Siskel: Daytime Drinking and Objectified - Chicagoist]

Worth a rental

“Being John Malkovich” (Universal Studios)

I re-watched this Charlie Kaufman / Spike Jonze film after seeing it over ten years ago in a theatre, it still made me laugh with the sheer absurdity even on this second viewing.

When puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) discovers a door that’s, in fact, a portal into actor John Malkovich’s brain, he concocts a plot to sell 15-minute excursions into Malkovich’s mind — and the ultimate head trip — for $200 a pop. Spike Jonze directs this uncommon dramedy from writer Charlie Kaufman, co-starring Cameron Diaz as Craig’s wife, Catherine Keener as his co-worker and Malkovich as himself. [Click to Netflix Being John Malkovich]

Endlessly inventive film – if you missed it the first time around, or haven’t seen it in a while, give it a viewing. The scene with John Malkovich playing hundreds of dopplegangers is well worth a third or fourth viewing, it’s that much fun.

Apparently, the Steppenwolf Theatre building in Chicago has a half-floor used for storage.

Roger Ebert:

What an endlessly inventive movie this is! Charlie Kaufman, the writer of “Being John Malkovich,” supplies a stream of dazzling inventions, twists and wicked paradoxes. And the director, Spike Jonze, doesn’t pounce on each one like fresh prey, but unveils it slyly, as if there’s more where that came from. Rare is the movie where the last half hour surprises you just as much as the first, and in ways you’re not expecting. The movie has ideas enough for half a dozen films, but Jonze and his cast handle them so surely that we never feel hard-pressed; we’re enchanted by one development after the next.

[Click to continue reading Being John Malkovich :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews]

Scott Tobias:

Putting aside the fact that Charlie Kaufman’s insistently surreal script for Being John Malkovich was staked on the actor’s willingness to appear in a supporting role, it’s still a miracle that a film conceived with such brazen disregard for the marketplace ever got made. In description, Kaufman’s lunatic flourishes seem to have emerged from a haze of pot smoke: an ulcerous chimp with feelings of inadequacy, a building designed to accommodate miniature ladies, a production of The Belle Of Amherst featuring a 60-foot Emily Dickinson puppet. But there’s sturdy intelligence and depth behind the material—aided immeasurably by Spike Jonze’s ultra-realistic direction—that keeps it grounded in basic human desires

[Click to continue reading Being John Malkovich | DVD | Review | The A.V. Club ]

David Edelstein:

Being John Malkovich is everything I’ve ever dreamed of in a crazy comedy. It’s close to pure farce, yet its laughs are grounded in loneliness, impotence, self-loathing, and that most discomfiting of vices to dramatize: envy. The action is surreal, the emotions are violently real. The screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, is a genius at finding slapstick correlatives for people’s nebulous sense–or non-sense–of themselves. It’s possible that no one has ever come up with a more absurdly perfect metaphor for our longing to be someone–anyone–other than who we are than a portal into the head of John Malkovich.

[Click to continue reading Insiders and Way Insiders - By David Edelstein - Slate Magazine ]

yadda, yadda, you get the idea

A few interesting links collected January 24th through January 26th:

• The Lakers Meet President Obama at Lakers.com BasketBlog – “I do want to point out that six of them came with the Bulls,” said Obama, a big time Chicago fan. “You remember that, Magic?”

  That one had all in attendance cracking up, particularly after Obama turned towards Magic to pantomime Michael Jordan’s right-hand-to-left-hand layup in the 1991 Finals, when Jackson’s Bulls defeated Johnson’s Lakers 4-1.

  “It was really a special moment in time that I’m going to always remember that the President of the United States trash-talked Magic Johnson,” said Johnson. “And me restraining myself not to come back at him. He was the only man on earth that ever trash-talked me and I (didn’t) say anything … it was a great moment.”

• 

• Wal-Mart Using Fake Community Group to Manufacture Support – Chicagoist – While Wal-Mart certainly has the right make its case to Chicago, the way they’ve gone about this – creating a fake community group that purports to represent a community’s residents and interests – is sneaky and underhanded. If what they have to offer Chicago is such a great deal, why did they need to go through the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce to set up a bogus grassroots group? When I started asking questions around their tactics, they refused to talk to me

• 

• Love Story :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews – I was so put off by Erich Segal’s writing style, in fact, that I hardly wanted to see the movie at all. Segal’s prose style is so revoltingly coy — sort of a cross between a parody of Hemingway and the instructions on a soup can — that his story is fatally infected.

Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com interviews Terry Gilliam about his new film, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus:

I love the way you play with the idea of storytelling in this movie. When he’s the head of a monastery in Tibet, Doctor Parnassus claims he and his monks are keeping the universe going by telling their story. I felt like, on one hand that’s what you think — the universe keeps going on stories. And on the other hand you’re making fun of him, as Tom Waits’ devil does so well.

I suspect Parnassus may be a liar. Maybe everything he says in there is a lie. It’s about ego: He and his monks are telling the eternal story that keeps the universe going. It’s about him! And then he discovers, “Oh, other stories are just as important as my story.”

That’s all we live on, is story. What is 24-hour news? Most of it is story. It’s invented. You have to fill 24 hours of shit, and there just isn’t that much news. So you create stories, and they can be anything. That’s what I’m trying to say: We live on that. It gives form to our lives. It gives form to everything, whether it’s a good story or a bad story. People talk about journalism as factual. I think it’s fictional, or at least half of it is.

I think Parnassus is a terrible egotist and maybe a liar. When we were making the film, I always had this feeling about that opening shot, when the wagon comes into town and there’s this bum asleep in the foreground: It’s all his dream. He is Parnassus. Is he really all the things he claims to be? Is he lying to his daughter and everybody else, or does he really have these abilities and is a thousand years old? It’s a dodgy game to be playing with an audience who wants to know the truth. I’m not interested in the truth. Truth is a very amorphous thing, and you have to make your own truth out of your intelligence, your observations.

[Click to continue reading Andrew O'Hehir - Salon.com]

I look forward to seeing the film, just hope it is more watchable than Tideland¹

1. or Dark Knight, for that matter [↩]

“Almost Famous” (Cameron Crowe)

Held up better than expected on a second viewing, can this movie really be 10 years old?

Almost Famous is a 2000 comedy-drama film written and directed by Cameron Crowe and telling the fictional story of a teenage journalist writing for Rolling Stone magazine while covering a rock band Stillwater, and his efforts to get his first cover story published. The film is semi-autobiographical, as Crowe himself was a teenage writer for Rolling Stone.

The film is based on Crowe’s experiences touring with rock bands The Allman Brothers Band, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. In a Rolling Stone article, he talks about how he lost his virginity, fell in love, and met his heroes, experiences that are shared by William, the main character in the film. Kate Hudson earned an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of band groupie Penny Lane, while Crowe won the Oscar for his original script. Jason Lee and Billy Crudup co-star.

[Click to Netflix Almost Famous]

Speaking of the joys of vinyl records, this film’s poignancy partially based on nostalgia for a different era, an era where a suitcase full of records¹ can be a talisman. If the film were set in 2009, you could not hand off a loaded iPod with the same emotional resonance.

Some Cameron Crowe maudlin moments, but nothing that gets in the way of the film’s narrative flow. Helps, probably, if the lead character’s personality (outsider, unusual family life, passionate music lover) resonates with the viewer.

There is a director’s cut, called Untitled,² which adds some 34 minutes of footage, but as far as I can tell, this is unavailable in the US. Perhaps Dreamworks is working on a re-release?

Ebert raves:

Oh, what a lovely film. I was almost hugging myself while I watched it. “Almost Famous” is funny and touching in so many different ways. It’s the story of a 15-year-old kid, smart and terrifyingly earnest, who through luck and pluck gets assigned by Rolling Stone magazine to do a profile of a rising rock band. The magazine has no idea he’s 15. Clutching his pencil and his notebook like talismans, phoning a veteran critic for advice, he plunges into the experience that will make and shape him. It’s as if Huckleberry Finn came back to life in the 1970s, and instead of taking a raft down the Mississippi, got on the bus with the band.

[Click to continue reading Almost Famous :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews]

as does the anonymous NYT reviewer:

The power of popular music — its ability to give shape, meaning and intensity to the inexpressible emotions of daily life — is something of a motif in Cameron Crowe’s career as a director. Think of John Cusack hoisting his boombox aloft outside Ione Skye’s window in “Say Anything” or Tom Cruise hurtling down the highway in “Jerry Maguire,” spinning the radio dial in search of a song to suit his mood and happening upon Tom Petty’s “Free Falling.” Mr. Crowe has always used rock not merely as soundtrack decoration but also as a window into the souls of his characters.

In “Almost Famous,” a loose, affectionate look back on his earlier career as a teenage music journalist, Mr. Crowe has devoted a whole movie to the love of rock ‘n’ roll. The soul he lays open — a sweet, forgiving and generous one — is his own. The movie follows the adventures of William Miller (Patrick Fugit), a San Diego 15- year-old whose fairy-tale ascendance from nerdy schoolboy to Rolling Stone reporter mirrors Mr. Crowe’s own life story. But Mr. Crowe is less interested in biographical or historical literalism — he freely mixes real and fictional characters and prefers period atmosphere to period detail — than in evoking the joyful, reckless, earnest energy of rock in the years between 60’s idealism and punk nihilism.

[Click to continue reading ´Almost Famous´: With Sympathy for the Devil, a Rock Writer Finds His Way - NYTimes.com]

1. IMDb: The old records William looks through at the beginning are actually Cameron Crowe’s, saved from his younger years. [↩]
2. Cameron Crowe wanted to call the movie this all along, but the studio balked [↩]

“Fela: The Life And Times Of An African Musical Icon” (Michael Veal)

Certainly looking forward to seeing this, whenever it gets released. Any sour mood can be alleviated by playing Fela Kuti¹ at high volume and dancing around, shaking one’s hips with abandon.

Focus Features has set Steve McQueen to direct “Fela,” a feature film based on the life of African musician and activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti — the subject of the recently opened Broadway musical “Fela!”

“Hunger (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]” (Steve McQueen)

McQueen, the British artist who made his feature directing debut last year on the Irish hunger strike drama “Hunger” will write the script with Biyi Bandele, based on the Michael Veal book “Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon.” Cine Mosaic’s Lydia Pilcher and Leigh Blake are producing. The musical has spurred a resurgence of interest in Fela, who died in 1997, and his Afrobeat musical style, which is a fusion of American jazz, funk and West African drums.

The musical is not connected to the film project: Focus is basing its pic on a rights package consisting of screen rights to Fela’s music and his life story, plus Veal’s book.

Fela lived large — with some 27 wives — and paid a high price for speaking out against oppression in Nigeria. In one attack on his home, Fela’s 78-year-old mother was killed after being thrown from a second-story window. Fela responded by placing her coffin on the steps of the Nigerian leader’s residence.

“Fela might be the most globally influential pop artist outside the Beatles in the last 50 years,” said Focus topper James Schamus.

[Click to continue reading Focus to film 'Fela' feature - Entertainment News, Film News, Media - Variety]

“Opposite People/Sorrow Tears and Blood” (Fela Kuti)

I’ve also heard rumors that all of Fela’s albums are going to be remastered and released, soon, but haven’t run across any details about the release schedule yet.

1. Sorrow Tears and Blood, for instance [↩]

“Gomorrah (The Criterion Collection)” (Criterion)

A non-glamourous look at the working class¹ of the Naples crime organization. Documentary feel, and based in reality, this isn’t a film celebrating the life of crime.

The intertwining tales of a delivery boy, a tailor, a businessman and two cocky teenagers form the fabric of this gritty and lyrical examination of the influential Neapolitan mob known as the Camorra. Peering into a multitude of social strata within present-day Naples, director Matteo Garrone’s film — a hybrid of melodrama, crime and art-film genres — was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Golden Globe and a Best Documentary Independent Spirit Award. [Click to Netflix Gomorrah]

“Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System” (Roberto Saviano)

I liked it a lot. I might even pick up a copy of the book, despite not usually veering into best seller territory

From Roger Ebert’s review:

Roberto Saviano, who wrote the best seller that inspired the movie, went undercover, used informants, even (I learn from John Powers on NPR) worked as a waiter at their weddings. His book named names and explained exactly how the Camorra operates. Now he lives under 24-hour guard, although as the Roman poet Juvenal asked, “Who will guard the guards?”

Matteo Garrone, the director, films in the cheerless housing projects around Naples. “See Naples and die” seems to be the inheritance of children born here. We follow five strands of the many that Saviano unraveled in his book, unread by me. There is an illegal business in the disposal of poisonous waste. A fashion industry that knocks off designer lines and works from sweatshops. Drugs, of course. And then we meet teenagers who think they’re tough and dream of taking over locally from the Camorra. And kids who want to be gangsters when they grow up.

None of these characters ever refer to “The Godfather.” The teenagers know De Palma’s “Scarface” by heart. Living a life of luxury, surrounded by drugs and women, is perhaps a bargain they are willing to make even if it costs their lives. The problem is that only death is guaranteed. No one in this movie at any time enjoys any luxury. One of them, who delivers stipends to the families of dead or jailed Camorra members, doesn’t even have a car and uses a bicycle. The families moan that they can’t make ends meet, just like Social Security beneficiaries.

[Click to continue reading Gomorrah :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews]

Terry Gross and John Powers piece on NPR from February, 2009:

“Gomorrah” is based on a powerful book by an ambitious, young Neapolitan journalist named Roberto Saviano who saw his own father badly beaten because he called an ambulance for one of the mob’s victims. Fueled by righteous anger, Saviano did undercover reporting on the docks at an illegal textile factory, and he even waited tables at Camorra weddings. The result was a passionate, highly personal expose whose visibility annoyed the mob’s bosses, who are evidently not avuncular old fellows like Marlon Brando. These dons issued their version of a fatwa back in 2006, and three years later, Saviano, just 29 years old, is still living a life of bodyguards, armored cars and safe houses.

While Saviano’s book burns hot, he’s implicitly his story’s crusading hero. Garrone’s approach is cool, detached and almost anthropological. He knows that in a movie, Saviano’s feverish style would make “Gomorrah” exciting in the wrong way, turn it into operatic melodrama or pulp fiction.

Featuring no heroes, Garrone’s movie is pointedly anti-mythological, never more so than in its treatment of murder. “Gomorrah” is actually far less violent than “The Godfather” or “Goodfellas,” but it seems more brutal for Garrone offers no cinematically cool deaths and nobody softens the blow with catchy lines about killing not being personal, only business.

[Click to continue reading The Gritty Gangsters Of 'Gomorrah' : NPR]

Manohla Dargis concludes the NYT review:

I don’t want to overplay the film’s violence — it has a lower body count than the average Hollywood action flick — or underplay Mr. Garrone’s artistry. But part of what’s bracing about “Gomorrah,” and makes it feel different from so many American crime movies, is both its deadly serious take on violence and its global understanding of how far and wide the mob’s tentacles reach, from high fashion to the very dirt. There’s a heaviness to the bloodletting here, which has pressed down on this world and emptied its faces, halls and apartments of life. This is a world in which no one laughs, populated by men who are so busy killing one another that they don’t realize they’re as good as dead already.

Though Mr. Garrone doesn’t point a finger at the audience, he doesn’t let anyone off the hook. Toward the end of the film, the tailor accidentally catches sight of Scarlett Johansson on television as she smilingly promenades on a red carpet in one of the gowns he helped to make. As the announcers chatter about the gown (“an apparent simplicity, but in reality, very elaborate”), and the paparazzi scream for the star, the tailor smiles wistfully at his creation, which he and a roomful of women painstakingly hand-sewed in a gloomy factory for too many hours and too little money. It’s a cream-colored dress with a nice drape and satiny sheen, and while you can’t see the blood that went into every stitch, it’s there.

[Click to continue reading Movie Review - Gomorrah - Lesser-Known Mobsters, as Brutal as the Old Ones - NYTimes.com]

1. for lack of a better term [↩]

A few interesting links collected November 26th through December 1st:

• Movie Review – Gomorrah – Lesser-Known Mobsters, as Brutal as the Old Ones – NYTimes.com – A snapshot of hell, the film takes its biblically inflected punning title from the Camorra, or Neapolitan Mafia, the largest of Italy’s crime gangs, with 100 barely organized, incessantly warring clans and some 7,000 members. Based in and around Naples, the Camorra (it means gang) smuggles cigarettes, drugs, guns and people, polluting the province with fear and worse. Unlike the better-known Sicilian Mafia, which took root in America in the late 19th century and in Hollywood thereafter, the Camorra has never had a significant presence in this country, pop cultural or otherwise. Until now, its reign of terror has been largely in reality and not on the screen, which explains why the world in this film can feel so alien: the movies haven’t yet imagined it.
• Gomorrah :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews – The film is a curative for the romanticism of “The Godfather” and “Scarface.” The characters are the foot soldiers of the Camorra, the crime syndicate based in Naples that is larger than the Mafia but less known. Its revenues in one year are said to be as much as $250 billion — five times as much as Bernard Madoff took years to steal. The final shot suggests that the Camorra is invested in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. The film is based on fact, not fiction.

• 

• This Progression of What – I’ve been writing
  These poems every day
  For many months now.
  Even though I haven’t been paid
  A single cent, I’d rather be remembered
  For this, these words,
  Over being recalled
  As an efficient
  Account executive
  Any day.

• 

  
  “Trouble in Paradise – Criterion Collection” (Criterion)

• Trouble in Paradise :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies – The sexual undertones are surprisingly frank in this pre-Code 1932 film, and we understand that none of the three characters is in any danger of mistaking sex for love. Both Lily and Mariette know what they want, and Gaston knows that he has it. His own feelings for them are masked beneath an impenetrable veneer of sophisticated banter.

  Herbert Marshall takes ordinary scenes and fills them with tension because of the way he seems to withhold himself from the obvious emotional scripting. He was 42 when he made the film, handsome in a subdued rather than an absurd way, every dark hair slicked close to his scalp, with a slight stoop to his shoulders that makes him seem to be leaning slightly toward his women, or bowing. His walk is deliberate and noticeably smooth; he lost a leg in World War I, had a wooden one fitted, and practiced so well at concealing his limp that he seems to float through a room.

“God Grew Tired of Us: A Memoir” (John Bul Dau, Michael S. Sweeney)

[the book version]

“God Grew Tired of Us” (Christopher Quinn)

[Film]

After raising themselves in the desert along with thousands of other “lost boys,” Sudanese refugees John, Daniel and Panther have found their way to America, where they experience electricity, running water and supermarkets for the first time. Capturing their wonder at things Westerners take for granted, this documentary, an award winner at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, paints an intimate portrait of strangers in a strange land.

[Click to Netflix Netflix: God Grew Tired of Us]

Wow, what a moving film. Not treacle, but still caused us to weep a few times. Don’t expect the film to fill in much of the historical backdrop of the Sudan war, nor the Darfur refugee crisis, that is not contained in the scope of the movie. Instead, just marvel at the resiliency of the human spirit.

Stephen Holden of the New York Times:

“God Grew Tired of Us,” a sober, uplifting documentary that follows the resettlement in the United States of three young men uprooted as children by the civil war in Sudan, is the softer, Hollywood-sanctioned version of an earlier documentary, “The Lost Boys of Sudan.”¹ A National Geographic production, directed by Christopher Quinn and narrated by Nicole Kidman in her loftiest A-student elocution, “God” won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. How could it not? Handsomely photographed and inspirational, but not cloyingly so, it is the rare contemporary documentary that doesn’t leave a residue of cynicism and outrage.

As it balances excruciating images of hardship, suffering and starvation with wry observations of newly arrived immigrants learning to use electric appliances and visiting their first supermarket, you are won over by the charm, good manners and nobility of its three subjects, John Bul Dau, Panther Bior and Daniel Abul Pach. Each is a member of the Dinka, the Christian, animist, agricultural people in southern Sudan driven from their land by Islamic government forces from the north. Except for a couple of sentences about the hasty British partition of Sudan, the film offers no historical background.

[Click to continue reading Movie Review - God Grew Tired of Us - After a Struggle to Escape Comes an Effort to Adjust - NYTimes.com]

Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com:

“Does Santa appear in the Bible?” wonders a recent Sudanese refugee, confronting the bewildering spectacle of Christmas shopping at a mall in Syracuse, N.Y. He knows what Christmas is; it was celebrated with rituals and dancing every December in the Kenyan relief camp where he has lived for the previous 10 years. But what is the connection, he wonders, between this fat man in a red suit and the birth of Jesus Christ?

For American viewers, moments like those may be the most pungent in Christopher Quinn and Tommy Walker’s documentary “God Grew Tired of Us,” which follows a small group of Sudan’s “lost boys” into their new American lives. The young men in the film have never operated an electrical appliance or a water faucet, never been inside a building of more than one story. On their first plane voyage, they clownishly stumble on and off escalators, eat the margarine and salad dressing out of their little plastic pouches, wander through the vast corridors of airports in Nairobi, Brussels and New York in single-file amazement.

But the comedy of their journey from one world to another is not cruel. Instead it is wrenching, pathetic and noble, and along the way the three men at the heart of “God Grew Tired of Us” come to stand for more than themselves. Like all of humanity, they have come out of a pre-industrial age and into a postmodern one rapidly. For most of us in the West, the process began with the birth of our grandparents or even great-grandparents. The lost boys made the journey in two days instead of 100 years or more, but their dislocation in the world of swimming pools, supermarkets and Santa Claus is nonetheless familiar to us.

Why is it, as one of them wonders aloud, that using Palmolive dishwashing liquid does not turn everything in your kitchen green? Why is it green at all? During a tour of an enormous Pennsylvania grocery store, they commit the phrase “hoagie rolls” to memory as an important element of American culture. One man peers dubiously at a mountainous pile of waxy, green cucumbers and inquires, “Is this edible?” Another comes to understand that Americans prefer potatoes that have been cooked, sliced into fine slivers, heavily salted and stored in a colorful plastic bag.

So much history and geography is covered in “God Grew Tired of Us,” and the human story it conveys is so moving and so charged with ambiguous moral lessons, that it seems almost irresponsible to complain about it on formal or historical grounds. Let’s put it this way: This is an important film. It’s amazing that it exists, and the events it recounts are still more amazing. Everybody should see it.

[Click to continue reading Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com]

It isn’t relevant, really, but the Chicago Bulls starting small forward, Luol Deng, is also from the Dinka tribe of the Sudan. What a difference of circumstance from the Lost Boys of Sudan.

Wikipedia:

When he was young, his father Aldo, a member of the Sudanese parliament, moved the family to Egypt to escape the Second Sudanese Civil War. In Egypt, they met former NBA center Manute Bol, another Dinka, who taught Deng’s older brother, Ajou Deng, how to play basketball while also serving as a mentor for Luol himself. When they were granted political asylum, his family emigrated to South Norwood in London, England. Deng developed an interest in soccer and basketball, and was invited to join England’s 15-and-under teams in both sports. During this time, he began his career at Brixton Basketball Club. At the age of 13, he played for England’s squad in the European Junior Men’s Qualifying Tournament, averaging 40 points and 14 rebounds. He was named the MVP of the tournament. Next, he led England to the finals of the European Junior National Tournament, where he averaged 34 points and earned another MVP award.

…

Deng is involved in numerous charities. He has been noted for his work on behalf of the Lost Boys of Sudan and other refugees. During the summers of 2006 and 2007, Luol went to Africa, Asia and Europe with the NBA for their Basketball Without Borders Tour. He is also a spokesperson for the World Food Programme. “He really does epitomize everything I had hoped for as a person and a basketball player,” general manager John Paxson said. “I think it’s one of the reasons we’ve gotten to the level we’re at this year. I’m truly proud of him. I think the world of him as a person and as a player.”

[Click to continue reading Luol Deng - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

1. available at Netflix [↩]

Some additional reading November 22nd from 19:57 to 20:01:

• 
  “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (Peter Yates)

• The Friends of Eddie Coyle:They Were Expendable – From the Current – Politeness and bonhomie are strictly provisional, and everybody knows it, which is what gives this film its terrible sadness. In the miserable economy of power in Boston’s rumpled gray underworld, Eddie and his “friends” are all expendable, and the ones left standing play every side against the middle, their white-knuckle terror carefully concealed under several layers of nonchalance and resignation. There’s not a punch thrown, and only two fatal shots are fired, but this seemingly artless film leaves a deeper impression of dog-eat-dog brutality than many of the blood-soaked extravaganzas that preceded it and came in its wake.

  The Friends of Eddie Coyle is, in many ways, an inside job. Meaning that there’s not a minute spent orienting the view

• Movie Review – The Friends of Eddie Coyle – ‘ The Friends of Eddie Coyle’ Is a Good Tough Movie – NYTimes.com – Eddie is not very imaginative, and he’s not a tragic hero, but as played by Mitchum he has wit and a certain dignity. In the end, even the dignity is taken away from him.

  “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” is so beautifully acted and so well set (in and around Boston’s pool halls, parking lots, side-streets, house trailers and barrooms) that it reminds me a good deal of John Huston’s “Fat City.” It also has that film’s ear for the way people talk—for sentences that begin one way and end another, or are stuffed with excess pronouns. “What you don’t know, it don’t bother you,” a friend might say to Eddie

• The Friends of Eddie Coyle :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews – The movie is as simple as that. It’s not a high-strung gangster film, it doesn’t have a lot of overt excitement in it, and it doesn’t go in for much violence. He gives us a man, invites our sympathy for him, and then watches almost sadly as his time runs out. And “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” works so well because Eddie is played by Robert Mitchum, and Mitchum has perhaps never been better.He has always been one of our best screen actors: sardonic, masculine, quick-witted, but slow to reveal himself.

A few interesting links collected November 15th through November 18th:

• Apocalypse Now /Redux :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews – In a note released with the film, Coppola emphasizes that this new material was not simply shoehorned into the original version of the film, but that “Redux” is “a new rendition of the movie from scratch.” He and his longtime editor Walter Murch “re-edited the film from the original unedited raw footage — the dailies,” he says, and so possibly even some of the shots that look familiar to us are different takes than the ones we saw before.

• 

• Smithsonian: Making Sense of Sustainable Seafood | Food & Think – Chilean seabass from Whole Foods, courtesy Flickr user swanksalot

• 

• I’m Belle de Jour – Times Online – Revealed: the woman behind the Belle de Jour blog

  She’s real, all right, and I’m sitting on the bed next to her. Her name is Dr Brooke Magnanti. Her specialist areas are developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology. She has a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science and is now working at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. She is part of a team researching the effects of exposure to the pesticide chlorpyrifos on foetuses and infants.

  From 2003 to late 2004, Brooke worked as a prostitute via a London escort agency; she started blogging as Belle de Jour — after the Buñuel film starring Catherine Deneuve as a well-to-do housewife who has sex for money because she’s bored — shortly into her career as a call girl, after an incident she thought funny enough to write down.

“The Dark Knight (Two-Disc Special Edition + Digital Copy)” (Warner Home Video)

Michael Nolan, brother of Dark Knight director, Christopher Nolan, planned escape from the Metropolitan Correctional Center – a downtown Chicago jail – using 31 feet of sheets knotted as rope, a harness, a razor, and a metal clip for picking locks.

[Metropolitan Correctional Center - a Harry Weese joint]

Costa Rican authorities charged Nolan three years ago with murder and kidnapping in the 2005 torture and slaying of Florida accountant Robert Cohen, who allegedly was blamed for losing $7 million of a Florida businessman’s money.

“This is not a movie, it is real, you cannot give this number to anyone or I am dead,” Cohen allegedly told his daughter in a desperate phone call before he died.

Luis Alonso Douglas Mejia, a bellboy seen driving Nolan’s rented car, was convicted in Costa Rica of aggravated homicide.

In charging papers that read like a Hollywood script, Costa Rican authorities alleged Nolan posed as a wealthy Paris jewel dealer named McCall-Oppenheimer to lure Cohen to a meeting in an attempt to recover the $7 million. There was evidence the two men spent time together, attending an Andrea Bocelli concert, and ate breakfast together the day Cohen vanished, but nothing showed Nolan was directly involved in the slaying, a U.S. federal judge found in August.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Mason said Nolan could be extradited to Costa Rica — but only for using a fake British passport.

Nolan’s attorney, Zachary Fardon, called the charges “pure bunk hyperbole” at a June hearing, according to a transcript. Fardon did not return a call or e-mail seeking comment Thursday.

Though charges were never filed, Chicago police were investigating Nolan and a check-kiting scam that allegedly brought in nearly $1 million, a police source said.

The scam allegedly unfolded in 2007 when his brother was in Chicago filming “The Dark Knight,” the source said. Nolan allegedly used the connection to the blockbuster movie to cozy up to Chicago banks, sometimes bringing champagne to meetings about loans, the source said. He also allegedly promised rides or pictures in the Batmobile.

The investigation halted, though, when police learned of the federal inquiry.

A trim man who dressed casually, Nolan sometimes talked about ear and sinus problems that were supposedly the result of underwater and parachute training he said he performed as part of an elite British commando unit, said Tom Sedlacek, a suburban businessman who lent Nolan $600,000. Nolan told Sedlacek he now used his military skills running an international bank collection service and needed the loans to finish a job in Costa Rica.

[Click to continue reading Batman-like plan: Brother of 'Dark Knight' director planned escape from a Chicago jail, officials say -- chicagotribune.com]

[another view of the Metropolitan Correctional Center]

Related note, Dark Knight is still a lame movie, plotwise. The mise en scène was interesting, especially since so much was filmed in Chicago, but the film itself was a bit boring. Especially considering Memento is such a good film [Netflix], as is The Prestige [Netflix]. Insomnia [Netflix], a remake of a much better 1997 Norwegian film of the same name [Netflix], was ok, but since I had seen the original first, the remake didn’t make much of an impact.