We’re rebooting. I mean, we barely booted the first time. But it feels like the right time to write a bit more publicly about various things. So, I’m going to try that.
Initially, look for thoughts about the football (no, not hand egg–proper football, currently the Under-20 World Cup and the Women’s World Cup), the writing process, and a large backlog of @TheMoviesWithPopPop to emerge over the next weeks.
Beyond that, who knows?
We saw Mr. Turner — and it far exceeded our expectations! It’s a biopic focusing on a couple of decades of the life of JMW Turner, the British landscapist who reached his pinnacle in the late 1800’s, the focus of the movie. The film has great acting, a wonderful color palate and a quite absorbing story; it’s perhaps 15 minutes longer than need be.
Turner was apparently quite an interesting dude. Though of lower class origins, he learned to get along with the academic art establishment of his time, and through a grunting, almost inarticulate exterior, shows a range of caring and empathy that is conveyed by Timothy Spall in a performance that is if not the best, is one of the best of the year.
Well worth seeing.
The Past is an excellent 2013 French-Iranian film written and directed by Asghar Farhadi (the auteur also of 2011’s A Separation).
An Iranian, Ahmad, married to a French woman, Marie, from whom he’s been separated for 4 years, returns to France to complete the couple’s divorce. His soon-to-be-ex-wife and her two daughters (Lucie, about 17 and Lea, 10) from an even earlier marriage, are now living with Samir (an Arab) whom she wishes to marry and his 5 year old son, Fouad. The story unwinds slowly and deeply, with wonderful acting from the adults and the children, and extraordinary capturing of the emotional realities.
Lucie is doggedly opposed to the new relationship, seemingly because Samir’s wife Celine remains alive in a deep coma following a suicide attempt that Lucie believes has been triggered by Marie and Samir’s relationship. Marie asks Ahmad, who has continuing positive relationships with Lucie and Lea, to try to negotiate what’s going on. There are complications…
The movie is totally absorbing, avoids becoming melodramatic, and reflects well the differing realities of all involved. Well worth it!
Mud is a film that I think should have gotten more attention than it did. It’s essentially a fable located on the Arkansas River. Two 14 year olds have discovered a boat in a tree — deposited on an island by a hurricane — and when they go to explore it, discover it’s being lived in by a man named Mud, played wonderfully by Matthew McConaughey.
Mud and the boys befriend each other, help each other, grow and learn some lessons of the adult world from each other. Mud has a girlfriend whom he worships — undeservedly so — and he’s killed a man because of her. He wants to fix up the boat so he can use it for an escape from the killed man’s relatives who are closing in on him. The families of the boys get enmeshed in the story. It’s a rural tale of decent folks with remarkable tenderness and freedom. At 14, in the waterland where they live, the boys drive boats and motorcycles, help sell fish and dig oysters. The ending is a bit over-fairy taleish, but the movie is well worth your time.
All is Lost, starring Robert Redford, a sinking sailboat and a life raft, is a remarkable movie. It has essentially one word of dialogue, a very loud fuck about 1/2 way through.
While the direction and cinematography are excellent, it is Redford’s performance that makes this remarkable — and not only in whatever the limited genre of solo films would be (Gravity let George and Sandra keep company). His character is his age, 76, and his age is an important part of the role. He, the character, is also someone who is calm, knows the water, knows his boat, can fix and manage — and that makes the increasing stress and approach of fate work even more powerfully.
See it; you’ll appreciate it!
Nebraska is a good if not great movie with a first rate starring role for Bruce Dern, an actor whom I’ve always liked (to say nothing of his daughter…). It’s a tale of a guy in his late 70’s or early 80’s who deludes himself into believing he’s won the million dollar prize from a Publishers Clearing House kind of thing, and wants to go to Nebraska from his home in Montana to collect his prize. He’s clearly beyond his prime, physically and mentally, a life long drinker. After he’s turned back by cops once, by family other times when trying to walk to Nebraska, one of his two sons — also with a somewhat problematical life — decides to drive him.
Eventually Dern’s wife and other son meet up with him in Hawthorne, NE where his brothers and their families live. Prize pick-up is in Lincoln. Film is in black and white. Various adventures, mainly problematical, but some not, occur and the difficult father-son relationship becomes better, and eventually enriched. The acting is uniformly first rate.
It would be difficult for those of us who’ve spent most of our lives in cosmopolitan urban settings not to see the Nebraskans as perfect stereotypes, creatures somewhat lower than ourselves. I was pleased to have had the experience I had working with various scientists and engineers from Nebraska while doing my AZ work, and so was able to escape that.
It’s a movie worth seeing and being reflective about, and it’s great to see the courage and complexity that Dern brings to a starring role.
Years ago, Al Pacino made a few films, sometimes directing as well as acting, that he never released for theatrical showing; some were shown to friends or at a festival or museum, but never generally released. A while ago, he released a DVD box with 2 or 3 of these. (The films are mentioned in an interesting piece on Pacino in September’s Smithsonian magazine; that’s where we learned of them.)
Last night we watched one of those, The Local Stigmatic, made in the late ’80’s. It’s just under an hour long and is essentially the filming of an enactment of a mid-60’s one act play by Heathcote Williams. It’s a play that Pacino had acted in from time to time over the 2 decades before filming it, and stars him, Paul Guilfoyle and Joseph Mayer.
The acting is wondrous; the language rich; the intensity extraordinary — the play’s not so pretty! A couple of very smart, very working class, very knowledgeable about both dog racing and stage and film stars, very violent Brits, talk, tell anecdotes, go out, drink and beat up a guy.
If you like Pacino, dark humor and great dialogue, you’ll relish the movie; similarly, if you like mid-’60’s working class, angry young man British drama!
If you get the DVD, there’s both a prologue and an epilogue of Pacino talking about the play and the film. Make sure to watch both.
This morning, I finished chapter two of In Time (working title only).
Finished is an odd word: the chapters are in what I call roughs, meaning they are barely fit for consumption, and I would suspect bear little resemblance to whatever their final product might be. Still. Roughly 35,000 words, from the first sentence of
The cold ground, crusted with snow, cut across Elliott’s cheek like gravel.
to the last of
The sound never left his throat and as his head fell away from his body, the rain puddled the blood and carried it away towards what was left of Markur’s front door.
Um. Yeah.
In between, I’ve met characters expected and not, and I look forward to figuring out what Elliott, Markur, Sara, Uzzi, Calyx, Ronnell, and Cabe have in their futures. Maybe not so much Ronnell.
This is really, though, just a marker In Time (heh), and a small hooray for me for getting this far.
From the Archives, July, 2013
Cloud Atlas is a very well made movie that attempts to adapt a very complicated novel that I assiduously avoided reading (though another novel by David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is among my favorite reads of the last few years). The novel (and film) deal with six distinct — though related by character, theme and impact — stories that take place over a several hundred year span from the mid-1800’s to an unidentified post-apocalyptic future. The movie is long, just under 3 hours, and has a curious cast — Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Susan Sarandon and many others — each playing multiple roles in the various stories, at multiple ages, with multiple layers of make-up.
Supposedly it’s an exploration of how acts of kindness or evil ripple through the ages with both intended and unintended consequences and how curiously things play out. The six stories interweave nicely and it’s far easier to follow than I’d anticipated. Whether it all makes sense in terms of action and consequence would take a far more careful rewatching.
In and of itself, it’s quite enjoyable, and certainly an ambitious attempt to adapt a quite complex novel to film.
